Arctic Sea Ice

This year Arctic sea ice has contracted to essentially the same level as last year's dramatic and poorly understood record low. Read about it at Dot Earth but sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words:



This picture of the area of floating ice is stolen from the Dot Earth blog and was prepared by William Chapman at the University of Illinois.

Now Poneke describes this as "good news". Call me a pessimist but that may be overstating the case.