For quite some time, climate scientists faced a conundrum: Even as the planet warmed, Antarctica's vast expanses of floating sea ice weren't shrinking. In fact, at times the ice was expanding, confounding common-sense and the predictions of sophisticated climate models.
Meanwhile, sea ice in the Arctic far to the north was shriveling dramatically, more or less as models predicted, and just as you'd expect in a warming world.
This stark discrepancy led climate change skeptics, and some media outlets, to proclaim that the Arctic and Antarctic were cancelling each other out — therefore, human-caused climate change was bunk.
For example, Andrew Montford, writing in the Daily Mail, noted that "for years, computer simulations have predicted that sea ice should be disappearing from the Poles." Growth of Antarctic sea ice at the time was a "mishap to tarnish the credibility of climate science." (Never mind that Montford, a registered accountant, had ...
