In a guest post at ThinkProgress, Neven Acropolis outlines the bad news about Arctic ice:
If you want to mislead people into thinking that there is nothing weird going on in the Arctic, you have to do it during winter. In winter things almost look normal on some graphs, with gaps between trend lines and long-term averages not as ridiculously big as during spring and summer. …
Sea ice area has never been so low for this date in the satellite record, not even close to it. 2012 has over half a million of square kilometers less ice than record minimum years 2007 and 2011.
There was a distinct possibility this would happen, although I didn’t expect it to happen quite this early.
The post includes the chart below showing how the decline compares to other years. And plenty of satellite images that are like a bad Hair Club for Men ad, except instead of hair, it’s ice. And instead of getting better, it’s getting worse. And instead of there being a simple solution like taking hair (ice) from your butt (Antarctica) and putting it on top of the head (the Arctic) (which is what the Hair Club does, sort of), there’s no solution at all.
Depletion of summertime ice, year over year. Click to embiggen. (Image from ThinkProgress.)
