Is the Earth Cooling or Warming?

The New York Times published a new article on January 7th written by Henry Fountain about the existence  of global warming. 52 scientists were stuck in the ice last month in a large outcropping of ice in Antarctica. This created a large debate over the internet of whether or not the ice is really melting in Antarctica. Later, scientists discovered that a change in winds had moved a roaming ice chunks to the boat and they became trapped.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/science/earth/still-stuck-in-a-climate-argument.html?ref=globalwarming

    In the Arctic ice continues to melt and more of the land begins to show every year. This is one of the largest concerns global warming brings, but surprisingly this ice melting isn't happening everywhere. In Antarctica ice is actually increasing  at about 1% per decade. This growth though is increasing in only some parts of the continent and there are even areas where ice is  decreasing .Specifically only about a third of the continent is either growing or shrinking. This changing of ice is believed to be from north-south winds that bring warmer air due to lower-pressure air. This has increased ice in the Ross Sea, but in Bellingshausen  ice has decreased.

 Scientists are now baffled by the lowering of air pressure which is thought to be caused by the increase of greenhouse gas in our atmosphere. Air pressure has gotten considerable lower in the seas than in the past which causes some alarm to scientists and also strengthens the idea of global warming if a correlation is proven.  This subject is still under debate though and is another argument in the bunch.


I found this article very interesting because I did not expect to have Antarctica's ice to be becoming larger in size. Usually, global warming articles give more evidence of melting or increases of temperature, but this article gave some unexpected observations of Antarctica. I also enjoyed how the author included both the skeptics   and the supporters of global warming in the article. As written  in the article “Global warming idiots out of danger,” this was a noted after the scientists were helicoptered away from the ice. In addition, I never would have thought that global warming would have any affect on air pressure or wind currents to be honest.

The article reminded me of when we learned about global warming and how carbon gets trapped in our atmosphere and traps the heat from the sun. It also made me think of middle school because we learned about ocean and wind currents and that they form lots of circles around the earth. Overall, I think that the article did a great job of presenting global warming and the changes that our poles are going through.