Scientists (Yilgan and Jónsdóttir, 2026) report annual mean sea ice extent in the Greenland Sea was 8.4 times greater in 2023 (2,403.6 km²) than in 2019 (287.6 km²).
In the month of January, the sea ice extent was 6.4 times larger in 2024 (20,308 km²) than in 2017 (312 km²).
Hand-in-hand with the recent sea ice expansion, the region has experienced a short-term 1°C cooling from 2016 to 2024.
Image Source: Yilgan and Jónsdóttir, 2026
The recent trend for the Greenland Sea appears to be consistent with the trajectory enveloping much of the Arctic since the mid-2000s as reported by England et al., 2025.
“Over the past two decades, Arctic sea ice loss has slowed considerably, with no statistically significant decline in September sea ice area since 2005.”
A sure sign of climate change.
All changes are due to climate change.
Not really as it still classifies as POLAR, thus no climate change.
Climate change is the leading cause of me reading WUWT.
All hail Climate Change!
Must be that blocking jet stream? If it keeps the warmer air south of it….
Yes, and the air temperatures have cooled by about 0.5C since early 2024. See the UAH chart in the sidebar.
Maybe we have a trend.
Wouldn’t you love to see another 1.5C of cooling?! That would be equivalent to the cooling that took place from the 1930’s to the 1970’s, when climate scientists were starting to worry about another ice age coming.
That would sure shut the climate alarmists up! WUWT could shut its doors!
And if we were to get another 1.5C of cooling, don’t worry about it. The 1970’s were a pleasant period of time weather-wise, even though the temperatures had cooled. The cooling looked potentially scary on paper, but if you were not paying attention, you would not notice any big changes in the weather. You might get a strong snow storm out of it, but that would be the extent of it.
Yes! I would love to hear the climate alarmists when the trend turns down. I’m patiently waiting. 🙂
Actually, no it wouldn’t. The climate alarmists would just conveniently shift back to the meme of “the coming Ice Age” that they fronted in the early 1970’s. They would find a way to assert that the “global warming” from the late 1970s until the 2020s was just a precursor to catastrophic global cooling, albeit not truly recognized as such at the time.
WUWT would still have ample cause to exist.
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”
— Democratic Party politician Rahm Emanuel, November 2008
“That would sure shut the climate alarmists up”
Unfortunately not. Nothing will shut them up as they are impervious to rational discussion. Had a community dinner last night, one of the attendants was a lady who is mid way through a PhD (tangentially related to the climate change industry). Discussion of anything with her was not even contemplated as she outright declared at the outset that anything that didn’t agree with her alarmist world view was “populist right wing misinformation and disinformation”. This statement was not elicited by making any controversial claim, it was proffered in response to a discussion of a pending grid scale battery installation in the area that is opposed by basically everyone except the one land owner they found to agree to put it on.
No evidence will convince these people. They are not even open to hearing (and disagreeing) with evidence in good faith. Their sphere of information is almost totally disconnected from ours, they are effectively living in a different world that just happens to be in the same spatial and temporal location.
At the dinner, there were several reasonably educated people. Engineers and the like. There were probably two people there who didn’t buy into the nonsense other than myself, but we all kept quiet and communicated in veiled language that the alarmists are not triggered by (such as discussing longer timescale climate cycles). Openly discussing such things was not possible in that forum as it would have guaranteed an aggressive response (and likely permanent ostracisation by the alarmists, once they conclude that you’re a “nutter” or “denier”, they cut you off).
“No evidence will convince these people.”
The closed loops of perception they have imprisoned themselves in resemble Faraday cages. No amount of empirical evidence can penetrate the profound ignorance they embody.
Me too. It was colder than shit up to the middle ’70s; I await with baited breath whatever is coming next. BTW, its time to put up some wood here, just in case the alarmists are right about El Super Nino…or whatever.
But, but, but declining ice was the basis of so much policy and taxation. How will the bloated budgets survive?
But whatever this study says….NSIDC doesn’t seem to show…
click on the years for about the last decade…
https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today/sea-ice-tools/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph
NSIDC and DMI don’t seem to correlate ….
Almost as if someone, or something, were tampering with the data. Imagine that.
Wow! . . . talk about a real Inconvenient Truth!
To Al Gore and his ardent followers . . . you guys out there somewhere and care to peak up your heads a bit over this news*? And you too Dr. Wieslaw Maslowski, wherever you are.
*N.B.: the Greenland Sea is located almost entirely within the Arctic Circle.
Hear it in Gore’s own words starting at about the 1m45s time hack into this linked YouTube video, taken from Al Gore’s speech at the COP15 Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in 2009:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsioIw4bvzI
The Nobel Prize committee must be “oh so proud” of naming Gore a co-recipient of its 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. I suspect that the associated 18-carat gold medal stays polished quite nicely.
Well, that’s ‘polar amplification’ for you. Only in the wrong direction.
Story tip
BP turns to Venezuela as it rejects Burnham’s Britain
Energy giant signs deal with Latin country after windfall tax raid adds nearly £400m to its bill
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/08/14/bp-turns-to-venezuela-as-it-rejects-burnhams-britain/
Well done, Labour.
BP should quit the UK and move its headquarters to Houston. Chevron was founded in 1880 in California. Due to draconian emission and climate laws passed by Gov. Gavin N. which were very damaging to Chevron’s profitability, the company threw in the towel and moved its headquarters to Houston.
Didn’t Standard Oil of New Jersey, now EXXON-MOBIL, just do the same thing?
The natural Arctic sea ice cycle is showing up in many places. As I discussed in this thread, it is also the most likely driver of the AMO 60+ year cycle.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/08/09/open-thread-202/#comment-4227386
I fully expect a higher summer minimum this year and trending higher for the next decade as this natural cycle continues. The changes will likely lead to global cooling of around 0.5 C due to the effect on clouds.
Arctic sea ice extent is influenced by winds, ocean currents, and atmospheric circulation patterns, including the Arctic Oscillation, North Atlantic Oscillation, jet stream behavior, and export of ice through Fram Strait. The paper discusses factors such as sea-surface temperature, salinity, currents, and ice transport, and concludes that the 2023-2024 increase in that Greenland Sea region was likely due to multiple interacting factors rather than a single cause. [sciencedirect.com]
The mainstream view is generally:
Weather and circulation determine where and when ice accumulates or disperses on short time scales and that any evidence that does not fit FF induced climate change is like the Medieval Warm, just “regional” . They will likewise at least dismiss this paper as regionally isolated or call for its retraction.
A skeptic like me argues that circulation pattern change dominates: Arctic extent is more about wind direction, intensity and duration controlled by cyclical ocean currents and the Jetstream not FF induced global warming; and that those who claim otherwise confuse cause and effect.
The causality question is exactly what researchers are trying to disentangle (or suppress), and there is active scientific debate about the relative contributions of ocean cycles, atmospheric dynamics, and anthropogenic forcing in specific regions and periods.
In the end, the GOAT “climate denier” will turn out to be climate itself.
Ooops!
I will be more convinced if it is a real new trend, but it is too short at this time I am waiting for the AMO to begin its downward slope into a cooling phase before such trend is more likely to develop.
More CO2 is obviously causing Global Cooling now.
You know what? The sea ice is going to expand and contract and the temperature is going to go up and down and there isn’t a damn thing humans can do about it. We are pretty much just along for the ride. Get used to it.
Adapt or die, just as it has always been.
This just can’t be true! AlGore:The Goreacle told us there is no more ice in the Arctic and that’s the end of it! 😉