Now arctic ice is melting so fast will deniers stop linking to the NSIDC site?

Nothing will change. Sad to say.

Deniers don't pay attention to facts and figures. That just gets in the way of their erroneous arguments.

It requires official USA government policy to change. That seems unlikely.

Before his election Pres Obama said he would among other things do something about global warming.

He has done.

He has increased the number of new gas wells coming on line to the highest level for years.

It is the burning of fossil fuel that has got us into the global warming peril.

Fossil fuels contain carbon. It does not matter if it is coal oil or gas. They all contain carbon. When carbon burns it produces Carbon dioxide (CO2) gas.

So what you might say. CO2 is also produced if someone burns wood in a wood fire.

There is a difference.

The wood has grown in the last few years. As the tree grew it took CO2 out of the air and locked it up as carbon in its trunk and branches. In burning the tree, the Carbon is converted back to CO2. No overall change has occurred provided that a new tree is growing to replace the one burnt.

With fossils fuels there is a difference.

CO2 is produced when they burn. But there is no chance that that CO2 is going to be locked up in a new gas oil or coal deposit. That process takes ages of geologic time. And the carbon in fossil fuels has been locked up for ages. Lock up since the trees etc that grew that went to make that deposit. That is hundreds of thousands and often millions of years. And now, all at once, what has taken millions of years to accumulate is burnt (in our power stations and cars etc) releasing CO2 into the air.

That extra CO2 can't be extracted by trees that are growing. There is just too much of it. So CO2 is building up in concentration in our air.

That is the primary cause of global warming.

Sure, experts now tell us that arctic ice is melting. That does not take an expert. It really is melting. You only have to go to Greenland, Northern Canada and the Arctic Ocean and you can see where ice has melted. The real experts are the people who were warning of this over the past 10 years or more.

And the real experts are now telling us that the Arctic Ocean will be entirely free of its sea ice in summer in less than 30 years. They also say that Greenland will lose its glaciers and its ice sheet probably by the end of this century.

The result?

A 5 meter rise in sea level by the end of this century is likely.

Who is going to compensate millions of people when their houses and indeed whole cities are flooded.

They only developed the technology to measure the volume of Arctic ice in the 1970s. Since at that time they were panicking about global cooling, you'd expect the ice at that time would be thicker than it is now. The globe has indeed warmed and as you'd expect, that's melted some ice. The question is - will it continue to get warm as Al Gore's movie predicted or will it be more like the UN IPCC model or will it instead go into a cooling period? Of the three, I think we're looking at the third possibility, moderate to severe cooling lasting for decades and with much worse consequences than warming. I expect the chorus to pick up that tune in the next year or so if that's true, but I imagine they'll find the only solution is for the UN to go ahead and take over what you can and can't do on a daily basis, the same as with warming.

The deniers are as predictable as the long term trends. So the question is not particularly interesting.

However, sea ice area is only part of the picture. The other part is sea ice volume, which has received a lot of scientific attention recently. As mentioned by others, much of the recent rebound is very thin, new ice, so the total volume of Arctic ice is an important part of building a picture of what is happening.

I've been looking for some good statistics for some time on this and have recently come across the following site that tracks volume, not just area. Make sure you check out their graphs, especially the one in the second link.

Right now there is a glacier almost a mile thick covering most of Greenland, but many years ago, it was mostly forests and very green, but then global cooling happened and was covered by glaciers. Now the reversing of the global cooling (global warming) will turn Greenland from ice back to green forests again as it has done many times.

People, don't get caught up that global warming or cooling is a bad thing, it is a very natural thing for this planet to go through.

Everyone knows that there were ice ages, right? What happens between ice ages? Right, we get "warm" ages and we are not yet in the middle of the warm ages before the next ice age begins, so the planet WILL get warmer and then eventually WILL get cooler as the next ice age approaches.

The reason people won't believe that humans are not the cause, don't like to think that we have no control and in fact, insignificant to this planet.

We will never ever stop the next ice age from happening, just like we cannot let the last (recent) ice age from leaving right now.

The Arctic sea ice, yes. But no doubt they will continue to link to the Antarctic data, ignoring the reasons for the slow increase in Southern Hemisphere sea ice extent. Denial is a game of selectivity. You have to only reference the little bits of data which seem to bolster your case. Almost universally this involves focusing on short-term data, whether it be 5 years of global temperatures or 2 months of cold weather and snow, or 1 month of increasing ice extent.

This is no surprise - we knew it would happen. NSIDC in March said that the slight rebound in Arctic sea ice extent wouldn't make a difference by the end of the summer, because all that new ice was very thin and would melt rapidly. And guess what's happening? We're approaching summer, and all that new ice is melting rapidly. And deniers predictably say "oh that's just short-term data", despite the fact that they constantly harp on short-term data, and despite the fact that what's happening is exactly what "alarmists" predicted would happen. As usual deniers were wrong and AGW realists were right.

To answer your question...No. Deniers will probably have to wait until next winter to have any real chance of finding Arctic sea ice extent "near average". The downward trend in Arctic sea ice extent is most pronounced in the warmer months. In winter, ice refreezes over a large area. Because of the difference in seasonal trends, a larger percentage of winter ice extent is being made up of first-year ice, which easily melts. Ice volume is dropping rapidly.

Probably, I (probably) disagree with you when you write: 'I think the big question is how much of climate change is down to anything humans have done and how much is just a natural cycle which the earth goes through.'

I think the big question is how much humans CAN do to keep the planet hospitable to humans in the future? And the answer to that question is: (1) quite a lot! and (2) for reasons of economics and responsibility, the lead must come from the United States.

They will probably continue showing the old graphs when the ice wasn't declining and stating that it is proof that the globe is cooling while completely ignoring the trend past the point.

probablygraham: Outbound infrared radiation, as measured by the IRIS satellite and the IMG satellite, show both that the planet is retaining more heat and the wavelengths that heat is being retained at is carbon dioxide and methane absorption wavelengths (1). Carbon Dioxide concentration of the atmosphere has risen from roughly 280ppm in the pre-industrial era to over 390ppm today. To find hints on where that CO2 is coming from we have to look at the isotopes in Carbon. Fossil fuel is made of old plants. Plants consists of about 2% more carbon-12 than carbon-13 than that of the atmosphere because they descriminate against Carbon-13 due to differences in chemical and physical properties imparted by the difference in mass (2). The data, as measured from various places around the world, shows a 0.15% increase in the last 150 years (3).

"why are so many people all of a sudden so sure that the current climate changes are down to human causes?" asks Probably.

Suddenly in about 1900, Svante Arrhenius predicted anthropogenic global warming. With rash haste, the semi-official JASON study group, advisers to the US government on strategic matters, developed a model, published in 1979, and an estimate of warming trends, remarkably similar to what we have today. Extremely suddenly, a quarter century later, governments started talking about what to do about it.

The suddenness is breathtaking.

No. Deniers as a rule only refer to information that supports their own beliefs, while simultaneously charging that others do the same, while they don't.

It's important to remember that Deniers have a selective conclusion, and only use data which supports their own claim. They can claim that all the evidence they have supports their own conclusion, which is perfectly true, considering that they filter out everything that doesn't. In debates, they systematically dismiss anything that doesn't fit into their version of reality.

In a sense, this is the George W. Bush version of existence: substitute belief for facts, because it insulates you from self-doubt.