The Polar see-saw or Antarctic climate anomaly is the phenomenon that temperature changes in Antarctica are usually of the opposite sign to temperature changes elsewhere in the rest of the world.

The most likely explanation is that the snow and ice in Antarctica is so clean that its albedo is higher than the cloud cover. Thus increased cloudiness over Antarctica causes more sunlight to be absorbed, hence warms the air, whereas the reverse happens elsewhere. Also, the air there is largely isolated from the rest of the atmosphere by vortices in the ocean and air.

Source is apparently a paper by Henrik Svensmark.

“Our study confirms many changes seen in upper Arctic Ocean circulation in the 1990s were mostly decadal in nature, rather than trends caused by global warming,” said Morison.

The team, led by James Morison of the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center Applied Physics Laboratory, Seattle, used data from an Earth-observing satellite and from deep-sea pressure gauges to monitor Arctic Ocean circulation from 2002 to 2006.

That darn ocean again.

I would ask the “experts” at RC if they didn’t spew such vitriol.

Thanks Bender, that was exactly my point. I was just eyeballing the graphs. There is a clear down trend starting in the early 2000′s, and no clear trend during the 90′s.

I guess it would be interesting to plot sea ice extent vs temperature for the different hemispheres. It seems that they do not correlate that well.

Also, Anthony Watts reports on a paper that sheds some light on the issue.

I don’t know where you get this from

From the data above. What FO says is true. Compute the trend stats from 1990-1998. What Phil is disagreeing with is FO’s choice of 1990 as a starting point. Which is a valid complaint. Nevertheless, FO’s point stands: ice melt did not keep pace with temp rise from 1990-98. Moreover, I think this is a good point in need of explanation.