Resurging Sea Ice: Antarctica Above Average Over Past 20 Years – Arctic Gaining Over Past 5 Years!

P. Gosselin:

Examining the hard data on sea ice extent at the Earth’s poles, it would be very tough to argue that the globe is warming.

Melting has stopped in the Arctic

In the Arctic sea ice extent has indeed on average dropped a million square kilometers. But a look at the plotted sea ice anomaly data we see that sea ice has in fact stabilized over the past 11 years. And when one looks at the past 5 years, we see a rising trend.

Arctic sea ice anomaly (click chart to enlarge): Source: arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/arctic.png

Today the Arctic sea ice anomaly is some 742,000 square kilometers below the satellite mean. This is well within the range of natural variability. The truth is that over the past 10 years Arctic sea ice anomaly was below the 2 million sq. km. negative deviation only for a few weeks, and these events were mostly weather related.

Antarctica solidly above normal last 20 years

For global warming alarmists, Antarctica has been the huge inconvenience. A look at the plotted data over the past 20 years tells us that the mean Antarctic sea ice has been solidly above the long-term mean:

Antarctic sea ice anomaly. Source: arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu.png

Two points are of great interest in Antarctica: 1) Sea ice recently stayed above normal for a period of more than 3 years, from 2012 to 2015. This is something that had never happened before during the satellite period. 2) The sea ice (long-term) trend in Antarctica over the past 30 years has undisputedly been one of steady rise. This has shocked a number of now very baffled climate scientists.

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