The summer meltback in the Arctic has ended and the ice is on the march, confounding the alarmists who were predicting in June that the Pole would be ice-free this year. Currently, the ice area is some 600,000 square kilometres greater than it was at its minimum extent last year.

According to Cryosphere Today, the median (1979-present) annual sea ice minimum occurs on September 8, but the dates have ranged by nearly a month from as early as August 26 to as late as September 24.

View full article here

"Winter 07/08 Arctic ice-cap gets within 3% of the average '79 - present"

Never saw that headline.
Wonder what the anomaly bottom graph looks like re-zeroed '90-present.

Doubtless the Al-Beeb are already chartering a plane to fly over the increasing Ice mass, to give us live reports, as it grows, during the 10-Oclock news.

Maybe this Winter, while Newsnight is a haveing one of its earnest discussions about Climate Change, just as Paxo turns to Tony Jupiter, from Friends of the Earth for his comments, the roof will cave in as tons of snow crashes into the studio...along with some poor chap who was trying to clear it, dressed like Scott of the Antarctic.

Though a global warming sceptic by nature, the information on the link provided to Cryosphere Today does indicate less ice year on year.

Indeed it does - but if you look at the last year, you see what could be a very sharp reversal of the trend.

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere ... t.anom.jpg

The point, of course, it that the doom mongers have been predicting a steady decline to zero summer ice, ignoring the probability that ice extent variations are cyclical. On the basis of what we are seeing, combined with sunspot data and global temperature data, we could very well be on the edge of an upswing in annual ice cover.

Is there any update (I can't remember when he was going to start - was it this year) on the intrepid North Pole canoeist? He presumably required ice free seas to get there.

That would be the great Lewis Pugh - a heroic failure if ever there was one.

Last seen in August swimming up the Thames. He has a little way to go.

http://www.zimbio.com/pictures/ZaO7zRVM ... ordon+Pugh

"The summer meltback in the Arctic has ended and the ice is on the march ..."

Eh?

I'm no fan of global warming alarmists but here is the latest snapshot of the Arctic Sea Ice Extent:

<http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png>

This year's minimum extent is unlikely to be smaller than last's but it probably won't be larger by much.

Mr North, you're a good man. Your blog is the tops. But your real beef with the climate alarmists should always be their alarmism. It's almost certainly true that Man is nudging globally averaged temperatures slightly upwards. So it shouldn't be vastly surprising that a 20- or 30-year average of sea-ice extents shows a decline. Beyond that, any claims by anyone to certainty and "consensus" are almost certainly hokum. Nobody nowhere knows what this slight mostly theoretical upwards trend will do on a regional or local level. Nobody. Really. Nobody at all. The models can't do that.

And nobody nowhere has ever proved that - or even convincingly hypothesized how - net climate feedbacks will convert a slight theoretical warming trend into a real-life runaway doom. The science can justify claims that Man is slightly warming the world. What that might mean in practice, nobody knows. (Am I repeating myself?) But the overwhelming probability (for all sorts of reasons, not all of them bearing the increasingly corrupted imprimatur of Science) is that things will change so slowly that nobody nowhere will, when looking back, ever be able to pick out the Global Warming signal from everything else that was going on.

No rational person who is prepared to think for themselves could believe that. It is impossible when CO2 lags behind global temperature for CO2 to be causing global temperature changes. It is impossible for Man to put more CO2 into the atmosphere than the oceans will allow, since any attempt to increase the CO2 will be dissolved by the oceans till the equilibrium for that temperature is reached.
Democracy has no place in science, Galileo Galilei was a minority but he was right.
By all means believe Man is causing this, that or the other, but remember it is a security blanket for those too scared to look in the mirror and face Our own insignificance.

Have a look at this – it’s really representative of the rubbish the MSM print about GW.

It was in today’s free London Metro.

It starts of by reporting that a photographer visiting an Arctic Ocean island has actually claimed that Polar Bears are thriving. He also stated that 'People say there's no ice up there and the animals will all be extinct. But we couldn't move around for all the ice”

However, them comes the reinforcement of the consensus. The article concludes with the photographer, who is also a conservationist, saying that “he is no global warming cynic” …… ”I think the situation's precarious. But you see the warming mainly in the glaciers – some of them are retreating 30 metres a year”.

Well I suppose we couldn’t expect them to print an article headlined “Polar Bears are 'not dying out'” without having some balance now could we!!!

I think your ice information is out of date - that is why I use Cryosphere Today, which gives the most recent, unfiltered information. At this time of year, even one day can make the difference and if, as CT indicates, we have reached the end of the meltback, then this is highly significant for two reasons. First, it marks the earliest time since records began in 1979 that the ice reached its annual minimum. Secondly, it confounds the pundits who have been forecasting a continuous decrease in ice extent, and who have failed to predict an increased minimum.

As to whether mans' activities are "nudging" the climate is anyone's guess but, with the current climate trends, any effect is easily buried by the macro-effects of natural variation. However, the preponderance of (undisputed) evidence is that we have entered a cooling period, the extent and duration of which we do not know. That was also not predicted by any of the models, which suggests (to no one's surprise) that our knowledge of climate systems is more sparce than even the most cynical of sceptics would suggest.

That is not to say that we need to be alarmed by cooling - per se. This is manageable. The problem is, as I pointed out, that in order to manage the consequences, we need appropriate policy responses. There, as long as policy is directed at reducing a warming effect that is no longer apparent, then those responses will be the wrong ones and will exacerbate rather than mitigate the effects of cooling. That really is something to worry about.

Given that Al Gore is going to share the stage with Obama on Thursday at Invesco Stadium, I'm predicting the event will be snowed out.

This isn't as far-fetched as it might seem... Loveland Pass in Colorado was snowed in a couple of weeks ago, a couple of days after our intrepid hosts escaped Aspen.

And snow seems to follow Gore around like that little black cloud over the head of the jinx guy in the old Lil' Abner cartoons.

The models can't predict global climate, either. It isn't possible for them to be accurate. The #1 greenhouse gas is water vapor, and NO ONE can predict where and when a cloud will appear outside a few days notice. Right now, we're watching Hurricane Gustav in the Carribean, and no one knows which way it will turn. Same thing for Tropical Storm Fay. Everyone was expecting it to go north on the Atlantic side of Florida, and instead it cut through the top of the state and rained all over us. The Wind and Rain Artist Formerly Known as Fay is 700 miles wide, and is still affecting us three days after the "storm system" passed beyond our radar scopes.

Virtually ALL of the nonsense coming from the global warming crowd is based upon computer models. I'm not a climatologist, but I AM a computer expert. I've been involved with them since "telecommunications" meant handing a computer tape to a courier to drive over to the satellite uplink (about 1966). I can PROMISE you that the machines can't do what the AGW crowd claims that they can.

You can't throw a half-baked hypothesis into a computer and expect a correct answer.

Excellent comment. What this is all about is straining to believe that we have some control over our environment. This is a security blanket, giving a false sense of security that we can "do something" about it. This is about psychology, not climate.

A million years from now, on Earth, I wonder what proof will be left that there was a species called Man that considered himself 'civilized'.