Meltdown Shakedown

The following seems pretty straightforward:

Arctic sea ice is melting so fast most of it could be gone in 30 years.

So far so good, I guess, but notice the fudging "most" and "could". Already not bearing up well to even casual examination. It gets worse.

"Due to the recent loss of sea ice, the 2005-2008 autumn central Arctic surface air temperatures were greater than 5 C above" what would be expected, the new study reports.

That amount of temperature increase had been expected by the year 2070.

A jump of 5C is a MASSIVE increase in average temperature, and would have been noted before now. That's the sort of temperatures from the Holocene that had trees well above our current tree line although there is now reason to doubt that this high-latitude warming was uniform across the globe. Anyway, I digress.

They expect the area covered by summer sea ice to decline from about 7.2 million square kilometres normally to 1.6 million square kilometres within 30 years.

Last year's summer minimum was 4.6 million square kilometres in September, second lowest only to 2007 which had a minimum of 4.2 million square kilometres, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

The Center said Arctic sea ice reached its winter maximum for this year at 15 million square kilometres on Feb. 28. That was 720,000 square kilometres below the 1979-2000 average making it the fifth lowest on record. The six lowest maximums since 1979 have all occurred in the last six years.

"They expect"; who cares what these guys "expect", can you give me evidence for it? The bit below that was the attempt, but what does this actually tell us? Last summer suggests things are getting colder again, but a curve doesn't plot from one point. Also, if the six lowest maximums have come in the last six years, but last year's was the fifth lowest, what does that suggest to you?

I'd have to see the numbers, but this sounds to me like things are chilling again, and that is borne out by what has actually happened world-wide in the last year or so. The lack of raw data in a news post are hardly surprising, but red herrings like "The finding adds to concern about climate change caused by human activities such as burning fossil fuels" show that people have an agenda and that mere facts are not going to stand in the way.