New weekly feature: WUWT Sea Ice News

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And Antarctic Sea Ice Extent is currently slightly below “average”:
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_stddev_timeseries.png
These must be confusing days for the rapid sea ice decline crowd…”
Not really, take a look at the medium term picture.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.arctic.png

R. Gates “and more importantly, the very long and deep solar minimum” This is a completely contradiction of the AGW hypothesis that the sun has NO effect on climate or ice. Or have you/they changed your/their minds now? Thanks keep it up your really helping my skeptic agenda with such lucid info

Why are we stuck using the NSIDC graph’s 1979-2000 average? What would the 1989-2009 average look like in comparison to current ice levels? My guess is that we would now be far beyond the average.
But why stop there? Why are we stuck with the 1970-2000 average used virtually across the board for global temperature anomaly? How about 1980-2009? My guess is that such a graph would better reflect the lack of significant warming over the last decade.

latitude said:
“To suggest that the arctic sea ice is still not in peril is misleading”
Keeping in mind that the climate is never static, can’t be static, shouldn’t be static……..
….if it was, we would not be here.
Never in the history of man, that I’m aware of, has a good thing been portrayed as such a catastrophe.
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All quite true. Change is the only constant, and though I happen to think that AGWT is likely correct, I really haven’t even given thought to whether it would be good or bad to have an ice free arctic. Perhaps there would be positives and negatives for humans and other species. Taken as a whole, I think warmth is better than cold (agreeing with Willis et. al on this point at least).
When I say the arctic sea ice is “in peril”, I only mean the ice itself as existing. I didn’t say the arctic ecosystem, for if the ice is gone, the arctic ecosystem will change and adapt to the warmth, and like in all changes, some species will vanish and others will flourish. Most the species that have ever existed on this planet no longer exist– all mainly because of some form of climate change. The only difference this time of course could be that human activity will cause the change. Assuming we’re around 50,000 years from now, when the next Milankovitch cycle would bring about the advance of glaciers, we’d probably be glad for a every bit of CO2 that we could muster into the atmosphere…but by that time, we’d probably be so proficient at terraforming and geoengineering that we’d have no problem mitigating even the worst of the next glacial period.

With a reasonable knowledge that the data is not going to be any good, the best interval to average over would be the 60 year AMO cycle. If nothing else, it would rub people’s noses in the fact that it exists, and that it effects the northern polar ice extent.

Stephan said :
R. Gates “and more importantly, the very long and deep solar minimum” This is a completely contradiction of the AGW hypothesis that the sun has NO effect on climate or ice. Or have you/they changed your/their minds now? Thanks keep it up your really helping my skeptic agenda with such lucid info.
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Stephan, do you know anything at all about any of the AGW models, or are you just talking from what you’ve read on blogs or heard of Faux News? The effects of solar cycles has long been taken into account in AGW models, and even can be reflected quite nicely in graphs such as this, charting solar cycles versus global temps;
http://www.climate4you.com/Sun.htm#Global temperature and sunspot number
AGW models never have excluded the effects of the sun, either in the shorter term, such as the 11 year solar cycle, or the longer term, in such things as the Milankovitch cycles. The primary focus of the research has been to dissect out the signal of antropogenic green house gases from the rest of the climate influences, both long and short term. In addition to the solar cycles there are so many other natural variables such as ENSO, PDO, AMO, volcanic activity, GCR’s, and on and on. All these natural fluctuations, lasting over the longer term and the shorter term are put into the models, along with increasing GHG concentrations.
It is so naive and just plain misleading to think that something as obvious as solar cycles are not part of the models, and completely a mistatement to say that AGW models don’t account for any influence from solar cycles…they do, but treat it as noise on top of a much stronger influence from GHG concentrations.
Think of it this way:
Milankovitch cycles work over very long term (10,000-100,000 years with a very strong climate effect)
Green House gases work over the medium term (20-1000+ years with a strong climate effect)
PDO, AMO, etc. work over years to decades (10-20 years with moderate climate effect)
Solar cycles, volanoes, ENSO work over years (1-11 years with weak to moderate climate effect)

Well, I won’t claim to be a professional artist or Graphic Designer, but I tried something simple. Let me know if you like it, Anthony.
http://i40.tinypic.com/160y3vc.jpg

R. Gates, I find follwing this chart gives me about 5 days advance notice as to what the N. seaice will be like. It is starting to head “south” again, so I would expect the extent coverage to gain a bit once more.
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php

In the light of that big belch from iceland, any stabilization and improvement of ice extent this summer will be tagged as ” inspite the death spiral, there is a temporary relief due to the volcanic explosion “. So, the AGW crowd gets 1 or more years of reprieve…. atleast in the MSM and all these moronic Govt types