[joshuahedlund]

They're different by orders of magnitude. This spike is occurring in context of record low winter ice following a record low the previous winter following decades of a declining average. Yeah, the 25 number is a spike on the edge of the bell curve, but this bell curve is consistently shifting, and thus so are these spikes.

[nashashmi]

That's OP's point. It is only a spike, not an event that points to climate change. A climate change event example would be an average yearly temperature changing significantly.

[ianai]

As a lay person, I think the poles are much more symbolic of the total state of the weather/water system in the micro level than anywhere else on earth. An observation with several sigmas of difference from average at the poles probably translates to very widespread conditions.