Oh, that inconvenient growing polar ice cap

By Jerry Schmitt

Global warmists continue to circulate alarming warnings that the past winter was among the warmest on record. See, for example, Andrew Freeman's March 15 article in the Washington Post entitled " D.C.'s winter was cold, but the globe stayed toasty".

Somehow the Arctic Ocean did not get the memo. See here for an update on the rapidly growing extent of the polar ice cap throughout March 2010.

Remember, ice-water is used to calibrate thermometers (zero Celsius). Polar ice therefore a much more reliable, widespread indicator of global temperature than the geographically-limited, fallible, error-prone network--array of thermometers employed by the "Climate Research" community.

Indeed the March sea-ice extent is now well within two standard deviations of the "baseline" set in the period 1979-2000 -- outside of which is touted on this website as an indication for extreme alarm. It is clear from the official "commentary" here that the authors are in the warmist camp. They have not updated their comments for March so it will be interesting to see when they do how they explain their own data in the context of continued alarm over "Global Warming".

Actually, the entire premise of this data-plot is specious. Why is the time-period from 1979 to 2000 so significant? We have ten years of additional satellite data. If the entire 31 year period were averaged, and plotted, all it would show is that the data , by definition, fluctuates around a statistical mean in a way that is not nearly so "alarming".