Arctic Sea Ice (part 2)

A bracing analysis of the poster child of globalist alarmism: what you always wanted to know about Arctic sea ice but were afraid to ask

In this article I’d like to introduce folk to sea ice as a seasonal phenomenon and I shall once again rely on the NSIDC error-laden passive microwave satellite data (SII) that may be found here. To do this I’m going to convert daily estimates of ice extent into monthly minima, maxima, mean and standard deviations.

We ought to start straight in with mean monthly sea ice extent for the period November 1978 – December 2022 with a red crayoned linear trendline and black crayoned locally estimated scatterplot smoothing function (LOESS):

Now that is a rather tasty bake even if I may say so myself because it gives an impression of overall ice loss over the years when set against the backdrop of seasonal ice gain and loss. If we were to extract some numbers in a rather crude fashion we could say that the maximum mean winter ice extent has generally been up at 15 million square kilometres, this dropping to 6 million square kilometres during the summer months. All in all, then, we find that the Arctic loses some 9 million square kilometres of ice in the seasonal melt each year, this representing an overall loss of 60%. If nothing else what I’d like readers to take home from this article is just how much Arctic ice is lost in the natural melt cycle each and every year!

Back in 1980 we observe the mean annual ice extent to be up at around 13 million square kilometres, this dropping to around 10 million square kilometres by 2022, representing a 3 million square kilometre loss in 42 years, which amounts to a net loss in the region of 23%. We can be pretty rough about this and state that the Arctic has lost around one fifth of its ice mass over the last four decades, with seasonal loss up at 60%. This is the sort of perspective I like to cogitate on!