[alpsgolden]

How do we square this statement from the article "In the past 30 years, the minimum coverage of summer ice has fallen by half; its volume has fallen by three-quarters. " with this chart of global sea ice -- http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.... From the chart, looks like sea ice is down a little bit, but not only by a few percent, not by half. So are there massive gains in sea ice elsewhere in the world, areas where sea ice has nearly doubled?

Also how do we square the statement about the decrease in volume with this statement from a year and a half ago? "However, very little ice thickness information actually exists." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015GL065704/full How do we actually know how much volume has fallen in the last 30 years if two years ago "very little information on thickness actually exists"?

I don't really understand the appeal of this article when it doesn't link to any sources. The article doesn't tell us what the actual new information prompted the article and where that new information came from.

[mehwoot]

http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-i...

When it's summer in the arctic, it is winter in the antarctic, whose area of ice is necessarily going to vastly outweigh the other when you add them together. So the trend will be less visible.

Just looking at arctic ice extent in summer, on that page, you can see the trend.

[idlewords]

Yes, sea ice has increased in the Antarctic. https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/antarctic-sea-ice-reach...

The coupling between climate and sea ice is more complex in the southern polar regions, and the increase in sea ice there is also likely to be an artifact of global warming. But this may explain why a global chart doesn't show the sharp decrease you'd expect.

[alpsgolden]

and the increase in sea ice there is also likely to be an artifact of global warming.

Was there anyone predicting in the 1980s or 1990s that with global warming arctic ice would decline while antarctic ice would increase? Was anyone predicting this before the observation occurred? How do I know that the idea that global warming causes an increase in southern ice is not just an after the fact rationalization?

[josho]

Yes, I got in a debate with a denier not so long ago and was quickly able to find papers and summaries of the predictions on growth of ice in the south and decline in the north.

What I find more alarming are folks like yourself that have so little respect for science that they think there is potentially some cover up of the truth.

[alpsgolden]

Define "science."