And AMSRE sea ice extent is EQUAL to what it was in 2005. And 2009′s minimum (about Sept 16 apparently) is within 1% of it’s minimum in 2005 6-7 days later – and gaining rapidly, with Arctic temperatures now 10 degrees below freezing. (Also below average for this date! And below average for the date through the whole year actually.)

Gee. I wonder if they will notice that. Or will continue to pretend that (four years later), there has been no change in sea ice extents.

/sarchasm = the gaping whole between a liberal and reality.

http://www.livescience.com/environment/090917-artic-ice.html

Just a shame how these stories are put with complete biase and with no regard for the actual facts…

How the hell can you say that the trend is STILL going down…after two successive years of recovery…Must be nice to not care about facts?!

Hmmm… the last paragraph reads:
“Also, as noted last year, a much greater proportion of the cover consists of young, thin ice formed in a single winter that is much more prone to re-melting than the older, thicker ice that dominated in years gone by. ”

Well I just just looking at the images comparing 9/16/08 to 9/16/09 on The Cryosphere Today and to this layman there is a whole lot more dark purple:
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=09&fd=16&fy=2008&sm=09&sd=16&sy=2009

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8261953.stm

but with the usual warmist spin of course, and they put the figure at 5.1 million km2.

I’ts still a done deal as far as I am concerned , and I will read the final minimum figure out of curiosity when they have one.

And we still get that nonsense about the ice at present being x% below the 1979-2000 average. Well duh! it has to spend some time below average, or else you have the figure for the average wrong.

5,291,094 km2

Apologies for the pedantry. Your main point is entirely correct. Ice is an effective insulator.

Seawater has a maximum density at the freezing point which is why ice floats, the maximum(sic) density at 4ºC is for freshwater only. In both cases ice has a lower density than liquid water,

Abstract We reconstructed decadal to centennial variability of maximum sea ice extent in the Western Nordic Seas for A.D. 1200–1997 using a combination of a regional tree-ring chronology from the timberline area in Fennoscandia and δ18O from the Lomonosovfonna ice core in Svalbard. The reconstruction successfully explained 59% of the variance in sea ice extent based on the calibration period 1864–1997. The significance of the reconstruction statistics (reduction of error, coefficient of efficiency) is computed for the first time against a realistic noise background. The twentieth century sustained the lowest sea ice extent values since A.D. 1200: low sea ice extent also occurred before (mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries, early fifteenth and late thirteenth centuries), but these periods were in no case as persistent as in the twentieth century. Largest sea ice extent values occurred from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, during the Little Ice Age (LIA), with relatively smaller sea ice-covered area during the sixteenth century. Moderate sea ice extent occurred during thirteenth–fifteenth centuries. Reconstructed sea ice extent variability is dominated by decadal oscillations, frequently associated with decadal components of the North Atlantic Oscillation/Arctic Oscillation (NAO/AO), and multi-decadal lower frequency oscillations operating at ~50–120 year. Sea ice extent and NAO showed a non-stationary relationship during the observational period. The present low sea ice extent is unique over the last 800 years, and results from a decline started in late-nineteenth century after the LIA.

It’s no leg pull. A freshwater fish would have to be uncased in ice before it froze because the water would freeze before the fish. While ocean fish in subzero waters can be supercooled with their body fluids below their freezing point. Which means if the fish swallowed a single ice crystal, it would be at risk of instantly freezing solid. Like a scene out of sci-fi movie.

You live and learn :o)

As for ice forming from the top. It does, but this as much to do with the physical properties of ice and water as it does the fact oceans lose heat from the surface.
Indeed and I had meant to put a line into my original posting to that effect but forgot – tis remarkable stuff this H20. Without this physical property (in comparison to many other molecules) we’d be a bit stuffed I reckon.

Apologies for the pedantry. Your main point is entirely correct. Ice is an effective insulator.
No apologies needed – I may have called you a pedant if you’d corrected me on my original spelling of “creek” though ;o)

Cheers

Mark.