Some good news for the Arctic...?

Believe it or not, it's September already. Tree leaves are turning brownishreddishyellowish gold; blackberries are appearing on bramble hedgerows and in fridges/lunchboxes up and down the country; and yes, no matter how much you hate it and how completely unnecessary it seems, the first of the Christmas adverts will appear on TV, probably around teatime on ITV.
Something else that happens at around this time of year, one which tends not to grab our attention in the same way that that overplayed Slade Christmas song might, is that Arctic ice stops retreating and starts replenishing itself. (er, what? I hear you mumble...). It goes something like this. The Arctic pole consists entirely of ice. Every summer, that ice melts, or retreats, due to the (comparatively) warmer weather. Every winter, this ice replenishes itself. This thawing-and-freezing pattern is completely natural in itself as different seasons bring different temperatures, even to the Arctic, etc etc.

What is not natural is the extent to which Arctic ice has been melting in the last few years. Boffins in white lab coats (not me, honest) have been measuring Arctic ice since forever, (well, 1950 or something), including its extent in the middle of each annual summer and its extent in the middle of each annual winter. So, when these boffins say that in recent years, the extent (the amount of ocean the ice covers) of Arctic sea ice in the middle of summer has decreased, there's a pretty sure chance they're right. However, this year, according to the boffins from the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre, the ice in the Arctic didn't melt as much over the summer of 2009 as it had done in the previous two years. According to a BBC news article, this is due to two reasons: firstly, temperatures have been cooler this year, and secondly, it's been windier, meaning a lot of ice got blown about over a larger area than normal.

Aha, I hear you say. So the Arctic didn't melt as much this year because temperatures have been cooler? What happened to this so-called global warming thing that everyone's got their knickers in a twist over? Well, on the surface it does seem a bit confusing. Two things to bear in mind are that, firstly, 2007 and 2008 were reeeeeeeeeeeeeeally bad years for Arctic ice melting, so it wouldn't take much for things to get better, and secondly that even though the ice didn't melt as much this year, at its minimum the ice covered 24% less ocean than the 1979-2000 average. So, things aren't as bad, but they're still bad. What will be interesting to see is how much the ice melts next year. This will show us whether or not this year was a fluke cold year and the ice-melting trend is still rapidly downward, or whether in fact things aren't getting as bad as quickly as 2007 and 2008 suggested and Arctic ice is not melting as fast as first thought.

But it's still melting.

xx