Antarctica completes the set

It's official: there's no place left on earth to hide from global warming.

Until today it had been thought that a large part of the Antarctic continent - the East Antarctic Ice Sheet - had actually been cooling while the rest of the planet warmed up - bucking the trend of climate change.

That view was given the official stamp of scientific opinion in 2007 when the IPCC (the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change) concluded there had been "significant anthropogenic warming over the past 50 years averaged over each continent....except Antarctica".

But it seems this caveat had more to do with a lack of data than a lack of warming. A paper published in the journal Nature today argues that overall the continent has been warming at a rate comparable to the rest of the world.

The confusion stems from the fact that the majority of weather stations on Antarctica are based along the coast. In fact, there are only two stations in the continent's vast, inhospitable interior (an area bigger than western Europe) that have been supplying reliable data over the last 50 years.

It was the results from these two stations that - although statistically insignificant - had given rise to the idea that the central continental mass was cooling.

The latest study, led by professor Eric Steig at the University of Washington in Seattle, uses a combination of ground based measurements and satellite data to construct a new, and - he argues - more robust picture of temperature trends.

The researchers found that temperatures had risen dramatically along the Antarctic Peninsular and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, but much more modestly across East Antarctica. Overall average temperature had risen 0.5 degrees in the last 50 years, correlating closely with the global average of 0.6 degrees.

It's bad news for climate change sceptics who have highlighted the anomaly of the world's coldest continent apparently getting even colder as a significant flaw in the global warming narrative. But of course it would also be bad news for everyone else.

A warming Antarctica completes the set. The evidence from all seven of the continental land masses now seems to point in the same direction.