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The mammoth west Antarctic ice sheet, which contains enough water to lift the world's sea levels by almost seven metres (20 feet), isn't melting. Instead, it's thickening and Antarctica is getting cooler. A new study by researchers from the California Institute of Technology's (CIT) Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of California at Santa Cruz, published in the respected journal Science, found that the ice streams of Antarctica, "far from melting," actually are expanding by 27.3 billion tonnes of ice a year. The scientists, Ian Joughlin, a geologist at CIT, and Slawek Tulaczyk, a professor of Earth sciences at Santa Cruz, speculate the thickening ice streams are repeating a pattern that occurred from 1650 to 1850 when the Earth went through the Little Ice Age.

Another study, published in the current edition of the journal Nature, found that air temperatures measured in Antarctica's polar desert valleys actually declined by 0.7 degrees F from 1986 to 1999.

The study's lead author, University of Illinois at Chicago limnologist Peter Doran, an expert on the study of fresh water, is worried about the cooling's impact on the environment.

Doran says cooling temperature is reducing the amount of fresh water feeding into Antarctica's lakes and making the surface ice thicker so plankton that use sunlight for energy are getting less sunlight. And that, he says, is bad news for the life forms that depend on plankton for food.

"The ecosystem would continue to diminish, and eventually it would essentially go into a deep sleep like a freeze-dried ecosystem," Doran said in a Jan. 21 interview with Richard Harris, a science reporter for American National Public Radio.

Doran noted that only a few years ago, the National Science Foundation was seriously considering moving its campsites away from lakeshores to escape higher lake levels caused by the melting water.

"We went into this project with the idea that global warming was going to hit us any time now, and we kept waiting for the warm summers to come and they never came," Doran said. "It just kept getting colder and colder, and that's the story."

The new Antarctica studies show just how prescient the administration of American President George W. Bush was last year when it announced it would not send the 1997 Kyoto Treaty to the U.S. Senate for ratification, but would increase funding for scientific research into climate change.

Supporters of Kyoto, including most environmental groups and former presidential candidate Al Gore, have argued that the Earth's temperature will increase by up to 13 degrees Celsius over the next century and that this warming will unleash a chain reaction of environmental disasters.

A global warming fact sheet circulated by the U.S. National Resources Defense Council indulges in some particularly heated rhetoric, direly predicting that: "Sea levels will rise, flooding coastal areas. Glaciers and polar ice packs will melt. Heat waves will be more frequent and more intense. Droughts and wildfires will occur more often. And as habitat changes or is destroyed, species will be pushed to extinction."

Gore, ignoring the advice of several key officials of the former Bill Clinton administration, took a last-minute flight to Japan in November 1998 to sign the Kyoto Protocol even though the Energy Information Administration, the official forecasting arm of the U.S. Department of Energy, found that meeting the treaty's requirements would increase gasoline prices by 66 per cent and electricity prices by 86 per cent, and decrease the gross domestic product by 4.2 per cent.

The Clinton administration, however, never sent the treaty to Capitol Hill for ratification, in large part because the Senate unanimously passed a resolution urging the administration not to seek approval of any global warming treaty that "would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States."

The Bush administration, now struggling to move the country out of a recession, pretty much delivered the coup de grace to the Kyoto treaty last year. The new Antarctica studies ought to pound the final nails into Kyoto's coffin.

Many environmental groups championing the global warming theory were zealous proponents of a global freezing theory in the 1970s. These groups then warned that a barren, ice-bound Earth might be imminent, and urged the government to tackle the crisis of "global cooling."

Mark Twain once noted, "I'm from Missouri ... if I don't like the weather, I just wait a few minutes." We might say the same about predictions from environmentalists.

Amy Ridenour is president of the National Center for Public Policy Research. Readers may write to her at NCPPR, 777 N. Capitol St. NE, Suite 803, Washington, D.C., 20002, or e-mail her at aridenour@nationalcenter.org