Does melting of Arctic Sea ice prove global warming is real?

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The ice isn't shrinking and even if it was, some ice melting somewhere is not proof that co2 released by man some how did it....Show more

We are able to see naturally now that the arctic shall be ice free in the summer within 10 or two decades, with unknown penalties for global climate. Glaciers on which billions depend for water are shrinking rapid. Ocean dead zones are increasing around the world. Fish stocks are at ancient lows. World grain reserves are at ancient lows. Ocean ph is increasing with unknown consequences. We've got so many concurrent world environmental problems it is intricate to indentify a precedence. The Goracle might have used actual science without resorting to theatrics. The actual penalties are certainly too scary to think about. If the ordinary man or woman understood what international ecologists fully grasp there could be panic, worldwide protests and needs for instantaneous change. Edit: Ice free in the summer approach precisely what it says it means. Men and women are ignorant of global ecology, and glib about environmental issues most likely, so it would not suprise me that they might arbitrarily to find quite a lot of factoids horrifying or no longer frightening. The factor is, they find these matters so in view that they're ignorant. And the less ignorant you get on these matters the more severe they grow to be to you. It can be no longer a topic of the veracity of those claims, that isn't altering. It can be a matter of the state of intellect of the audience. Environmentalists have found that neither strategy seems to be working. Try to scare with details? You get glibness. Try to ? You get yawns. As i've been pronouncing for a long time, it's going to take a global environmental give way, even worse than what is occuring now, to get peoples' awareness. The quandary is, we may go a point of no return on the best way there....Show more

Yes it was proof of global warming (through natural causes) the earth warmed quite a bit in the 80's and 90s due sunspot activity, and Arctic ice melted quite a lot especially in 2007, there were a lot of reports predicting no summer ice by 2013, but now they changed the date to the end of the century.
The fact is, the warming has stopped now, arctic ice is still reducing but at much smaller amounts, and since 2009 Antarctic ice has been growing ....Show more

There is no need to "prove global warming".

The International Panel on Climate Change has data over several hundred of years from several point of the plant, especially since 1850 which shows in most of the areas an increase of surface temperature. There are also measurements of glacier especially in the Alp mountains since 1864 (the maximum in glaciers) and measurement of precipitation (snow and rain).

Based on the data they have and additional data on greenhouse gases they state in the 2007: 4th report that is is very likely that the observed effects are based on this and also that a major driver of the increase of green house gases (especially CO 2) can be related to human activities since the industrial revolution. But there are additional influential factors.

Obviously there has to be a change in the Arctic (probably through an increase in surface temperature) as there is no other model known today which would lead to melting of ice, the long term observed pattern of build up of snow cover and ice creation and the melting during summer has obviously changed....Show more

The ice has been shrinking in the Arctic for quite a long time actually.

http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

5 years is too short a time period to find a long term trend when talking about climate though. 30 years is the minimum for establishing a long term climactic trend. This long term 30 year trend of Arctic sea ice, alone, does not indicate the entire globe is warming though. It does indicate the Arctic has been warming over that time period by a large margin. In order to find long term 'global' trends we need to look at the entire globe. Luckily this has been done for us.

Six decades of glacier mass-balance observations: a review of the
worldwide monitoring network - http://www.geo.uzh.ch/~mzemp/Docs/Zemp_etal_a50a018.pdf

As well we can look at the Greenland ice sheet and view it's long term trend as well.

http://nsidc.org/greenland-today/

Even Antarctica is losing ice mass - http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/envs501/downloads/Chen%20et%20al.%202009.pdf but it is increasing sea ice extent - http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/ - which is most likely caused by a number of variables including the southern ozone hole, which increases stratospheric wind speeds, as well as ocean cycles and tides.

Taking everything together we see that yes, indeed the world is warming. If you want to look at the cause of the warming, though, if it is due to CO2 increase and greater heat retention and feedbacks, you are going to have to look at it a lot more in depth than just looking at declining glaciers or ice sheets. You'll have to learn about things such as CO2 concentration, the greenhouse effect, longwave and shortwave radiation, the Earth's blackbody emission spectrum, what frequencies different greenhouse gases absorb at within that spectrum, current measurements of outbound vs inbound radiation, and so on....Show more