I was reading this article on the Larsen Ice Shelf rift.
I came to this paragraph:
“The team say they have no evidence to link the growth of this rift, and the eventual calving, to climate change. However, it is widely accepted that warming ocean and atmospheric temperatures have been a factor in earlier disintegrations of ice shelves elsewhere on the Antarctic Peninsula, most notably Larsen A (1995) and Larsen B (2002).
They point out that this is one of the fastest warming places on Earth, a feature which will certainly not have hindered the development of the rift in Larsen C.”
And suddenly I remember this article.
The Antarctic Peninsula (AP) is often described as a region with one of the largest warming trends on Earth since the 1950s, based on the temperature trend of 0.54 °C/decade during 1951–2011 recorded at Faraday/Vernadsky station. Accordingly, most works describing the evolution of the natural systems in the AP region cite this extreme trend as the underlying cause of their observed changes. However, a recent analysis (Turner et al., 2016) has shown that the regionally stacked temperature record for the last three decades has shifted from a warming trend of 0.32 °C/decade during 1979–1997 to a cooling trend of − 0.47 °C/decade during 1999–2014.
It is not warming in the Antarctic Peninsula! It is cooling!
sunshine hours 
The idea that the Antarctic Peninsula is rapidly warming while the entire continent, on the average, is cooling sounds like an oddity to say the least.
The cooling of the AP makes sense in terms of the general trend for Antarctica in the last few decades and its starting in 1997 coincides with the point at which the “pause” in the warming trend of world temperatures began, which again makes lots of sense.
Reblogged this on Climate Collections.
Obviously anecdotal, but did the peninsula not have record high temperatures earlier this year (2017) during the antarctic summer?
The record was declared this year, but it was for March 24 2015.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2017/03/01/antarctica-new-record-high-temperature/98538084/
If you check WU it went from 4C at 7pm to 15C at 10pm to 12C at 1am the next day and then -2C at 10pm.
https://www.wunderground.com/history/station/88963/2015/3/24/DailyHistory.html?req_city=&req_state=&req_statename=&reqdb.zip=&reqdb.magic=&reqdb.wmo=
A freak occurance if you look at the monthly chart.
Monthly:
https://www.wunderground.com/history/station/88963/2015/3/25/MonthlyHistory.html?&reqdb.zip=&reqdb.magic=&reqdb.wmo=
Thank you for the references and the added data.
Longer term perspective did not get included in the reports I saw.
Reblogged this on Climatism and commented:
“last three decades has shifted from a warming trend of 0.32 °C/decade during 1979–1997 to a cooling trend of − 0.47 °C/decade during 1999–2014.”
Inconvenient!