Six weeks of climate data: Southern Polar Region #2, 30° to 60° East

There were a total of 540 seasonal readings from this slice of east Antarctica from 1955 to 2010 from only 9 stations.

The two black dots show that the bulk of the readings in this region were on the coast and there are no stations near the South Pole in this slice.

The summer trend is very simple. All three ways to measure the trend from interval to interval show that this region is cooling. The peak warm Summers are getting a little colder, while the median and coldest are getting much colder.
 

Falls are much the same, except that the peak high temperatures are bouncing up and down a little.

Winter tells the same story as Fall. This region is getting colder.

The only rebuttal to calling this a region experiencing a cooling trend in Springs were two freakishly cold seasons in the 1960s.

I usually put a scorecard of what time intervals showed the most warm records to most cold records in all three scales, but the count here is obvious. The region is cooling. The only counterargument is a few warm years last decade, but that warm spell appears to have snapped in Fall of 2010, which in the Southern Hemisphere starts in March.

Here's the thing. When I heard Richard Muller of Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature speak last year, he said he was certain about climate change, but his only proof of any human cause was the consensus of the papers he read in the climate journals. Muller is a physicist by trade and I was surprised to hear him make this argument that relied on authority.

This data gives the start of a hypothesis. Antarctica is as far from major human contact as any place on earth. It is cooling. Greenland is also fairly isolated from major population centers. It shows neither a clear warming or cooling trend.

We have only seen 14 of 72 regions so far. I do not know yet if the majority of slices are going to show warming, cooling or no trend at all. But if proximity to humanity has any correlation to the trends seen, that would be strong evidence that humans have an effect.

Tomorrow, two more slices of east Antarctica, including the first with major inlet, which means more readings of the ice sheets than we have seen so far.