According to NOAA data, all time Antarctic sea ice extent record was set on Sept 22nd, 2012

Eugene Wr Gallum: “If a blind man throws enough darts eventually he will hit the bull’s-eye”
And yet, if you think of climate models as darts, the IPCC’s models are all hitting off the dart board way too high … except for Antarctic Sea Ice … the models are off the bottom of the dart board.
(That would make a good Josh cartoon … the IPCC as blind dart thrower).

ALARM! HORROR!!! THE OCEANS ARE ICING OVER!!!!!
Overdone? Well, isn’t that about the same degree of stupid as “The oceans are turning acid”? And the alarmists don’t have a problem with that one.

Interesting point made above. in fact there are cruise ships that go to Antarctica every summer on global warming tours. Hmmmm

Curious:
While the near-Antarctic sea ice figure is interesting to report, sometimes some skeptics do interpret it in unjustified manners.
A thought experiment, oversimplified and exaggerated yet illustrative:
Have two buckets. Bucket #1 is full of water, with no land (little land nearby). Bucket #2 in contrast has an internal shelf which represents land, slightly above its water level. Suppose we start bucket #2 by placing a pile of ice cubes on the shelf while having none in the water. If we warm bucket #2, we can get more ice in the water if some of the melting and sliding ice stack has pieces fall in the water. Thus warming can cause more ice in the water in in bucket #2. That is contrast to bucket #1, in which warming just causes less ice in the water.
Thus, if we warm both buckets, depending on the details and starting conditions, it is possible for bucket #1 to decrease in ice in the water while bucket #2 simultaneously increases in ice in the water. It is also possible to get those waterborne ice trends by instead warming bucket #1 and cooling bucket #2 if bucket #2 is cooled so much as to make its liquid water start to freeze. In other words, an increase in waterborne ice in bucket #2 does not in itself tell whether the bucket is warming or cooling without further analysis.
(The preceding is not meant to argue against such as Philip Bradley’s recent point but just to illustrate why I don’t think skeptics should present antarctic sea ice in isolation as an argument; with further analysis, background, and support, it can be a better argument).
With that said, however, here’s part of the real overall picture:
Arctic temperature over an entire century:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/ArcticIce/Images/arctic_temp_trends_rt.gif
The preceding shows arctic temperatures were warmer in the late 1930s than in the 1990s.
Then, keeping that in mind, compare recent arctic ice area to the extent in the 1990s by looking at
http://www.webcitation.org/6AKKakUIo
Observe, in annual averages (not cherry-picking a single month after a storm), arctic ice extent in recent years is actually comparable to in the 1990s. But, as just illustrated, the 1990s are comparable to or rather less than the 1930s in arctic temperature. So much for grand warming of the arctic! That is despite the arctic being the spot of the greatest warming from global warming.
And there is no need to limit ourselves to looking back one century alone. See the graph, second from the top, of the past 200 to 11000 years within:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/11/does-co2-correlate-with-temperature-history-a-look-at-multiple-timescales-in-the-context-of-the-shakun-et-al-paper/
Utter lack of correlation of temperature with CO2 trends is illustrated.
There are all sorts of data showing warmer past temperatures. For instance, in a study on northern Europe-Asia, the biomass of vegetation there was reconstructed to be 20% higher than now during the Holocene Climate Optimum 6000 years ago (warmer than now) and 55% higher than now during the Eem Interglacial Optimum of 125000 years ago (warmer still): http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0009254199000297
Returning to the topic of more recent arctic temperature variation, there are ocean cycles in effect as well, but http://www.appinsys.com/globalwarming/GW_Part6_SolarEvidence_files/image023.gif has far more correlation than http://www.appinsys.com/globalwarming/GW_Part6_SolarEvidence_files/image024.gif
The misleadingly-named TSI (“total solar irradiance”) labeled in the prior graph is far from the only factor changing. See:
http://www.sciencebits.com/CosmicRaysClimate
and
http://www.space.dtu.dk/upload/institutter/space/forskning/05_afdelinger/sun-climate/full_text_publications/svensmark_2007cosmoclimatology.pdf
(Bonus: The above link explains why temperatures in Antarctica can go even the opposite direction of Arctic temperatures).
In the direction of contributing to terrestrial warming (via reduction in cloud seeding), there was about a 3% change in average cosmic ray flux between solar cycle 20 (1964-1976) at the height of the global cooling scare versus solar cycles 21 and 22 from 1976 to 1996 (the heart of the global warming scare).
In the late 1990s, global temperatures peaked with the 1998 El Nino. Since then, there has been a semi-high plateau of temperature (substantially cooler than prior warm periods like the Holocene Climate Optimum yet mildly warm by modern standards), but global average temperatures have been flat to declining from 1998 through 2012 (now). That is seen, for example, in http://woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1998/plot/rss/from:1998/trend
There are all sorts of claims contrary to the preceding, contrary to what is seen in the satellite temperature data when unskewed by urban heat island effects and when unskewed by messed-up interpolation/”adjustments.” But there are all sorts of false claims in general. For example, a 1 foot sea level rise in California in 10 years is predicted (i.e. http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-06/study-says-california-sea-levels-will-rise-more-five-feet-century ), yet one can quite readily compare to reality in a few years to see how much such is fallacious junk. (Rather, during prolonged recovery from the Little Ice Age, albeit with the Modern Maximum in solar activity recently starting to plateau and taper off, global sea level rose more slowly on average in the second half of the 20th century, about 1.4 mm/year on average, than in the first half of the century, as seen in http://meteo.lcd.lu/globalwarming/Holgate/sealevel_change_poster_holgate.pdf ).
In the case of cosmic rays, also see, regarding a common false claim about recent-year cloud trends which has found its way into CAGW-movement graphs and papers:
http://calderup.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/further-attempt-to-falsify-the-svensmark-hypothesis/
Curious says:
September 29, 2012 at 6:06 pm
“If anyone can point me to some good, foundational reading on climate science (without AGW bias),. I would be very grateful.”
I slipped into essentially arguing in the above rather than having the style of unbiased objective education covering everything, partially since the former was far faster to write. Unfortunately, although you have a very reasonable and good question, there is currently no single unbiased source which educates comprehensively in a time-efficient manner. There should be. But there is not. It takes many tens of hours, in practice easily hundreds of hours, to find and compile what in theory could be learned in a few hours if better organized.
Sites like drroyspencer.com , sciencebits.com , co2science.org , nipccreport.org , appinsys.com , and others are far from exactly what one would want for such but can be worthwhile reading. So is, for example:
http://www.meteor.iastate.edu/gccourse/history/paleoclimate/climates.html
Incidentally, while far from unbiased in style and while anti-CAGW rather than about general education, still one of the better concise summaries of some aspects is the 12-page article here:
http://www.petitionproject.org/review_article.php
While utterly biased, sometimes probably wrong, and actually too overboard, iceagenow.info can be fun variety.
In principle I could do a far better job at giving references here, having many links and references saved over time in a compilation elsewhere, but I think I’ll go to sleep now.
Even amongst scientific papers, just about all implicitly falsely treat as 0% effect one or more of the major climate influences, not even having best-guess values, by just ignoring such entirely (such as ignoring GCRs, ocean cycles like the AMO, or both depending on the paper). About the only organization large enough that they have the resources and enough pages of writing to cover everything in theory if they tried is the IPCC, but they are terribly biased and do not really try. (For instance, page 1 of chapter 7 of the NIPCC report in contrast describes the IPCC’s blatant bias in one example: http://nipccreport.org/reports/2009/pdf/Chapter%207.pdf )
Anything published anywhere prior to the 1980s is usually not intentionally biased, though, being prior to the political era. (Most of what was published in the 1980s and a lot in the 1990s is trustworthy too but not so guaranteed). Also, what is published in Russia even now is usually relatively good. For instance, the following, in English, provides a relatively accurate picture of the past century of arctic ice:
http://nwpi.krc.karelia.ru/e/climas/Ice/Ice_no_sat/XX_Arctic.htm
which includes, for example, this graph of Siberian Basin ice extent in August from the 1920s through the rest of 20th century:
http://nwpi.krc.karelia.ru/e/climas/Ice/Ice_no_sat/fig2.gif