NASA data show Arctic saw fastest August sea ice retreat on record

Its a lie! Ice doesnt melt, i have proof!

sea ice melted faster during that period than ever before.

I am shocked (SHOCKED!!!) to discover that the max melting rate this year exceeded that of any other year in our extensive 30-year data set.

I mean, really, it is utterly, totally, and without question inconceivable that our data - which, after all, covers approximately 0.000000667% of the Earth's 4.5 billion-year existence - doesn't indicate the set of all possible "normal" melting rates, so anything outside our baseline data must be extraordinary and cause for immediate concern.

This article is sloppy tripe, at best.

1. Assuming a human life-span of 100 years, 30 years of Earth's existence is the equivalent of roughly 21.04 seconds of a human's life. (For that matter, the 12000 years since the beginning of the Neolithic translate to around 2 hours and 20 minutes of a human lifetime).

2. The pretty picture and its associated graph look nice, but are uninformative at best and misleading at worst. The map shows the "long-term" (1979-2000) median minimum ice sheet (why stop in 2000? Why not 1999 or 2006 or 1985?), but tells us nothing about the variance, prior minimum and maximum, standard deviation, or even the mean. If I sample the net worth of 30 households in my neighborhood, where 20 are young, 1st-time homeowners and 10 are retired empty-nesters with no debt, what value does the median net worth have? Can it really tell you something useful about my neighborhood, let alone the entire state, country, or world? And how does charting the "average" (mean? median? mode?) daily sea ice retreat against 2 apparent outliers tell us anything useful without the afformentioned variance, standard deviation, etc? Of course, it doesn't.

3. With all we know about the geologic history of our planet, how we can possibly proceed with "science" that presumes a static environment is beyond my comprehension. Western society has developed an unfortunate and sickening arrogance regarding mankind's impact on the Earth. Basically, there is an implicit assumption that "natural" changes (a la evolution) ceased with the advent of "scientific man", and that all subsequent changes to our suddenly static planet were the result of man's "interference" with nature (as if we aren't PART of nature). This manifests itself everywhere from the dogma of climate change, to the introductory movie at Volcano National Park on Hawaii, where the narrator describes the "pristine" environment created when Polynesian explorers brought their domestic animals to the islands, as compared to the invasive and destructive results of Western explorers arriving in the 19th century. Strip away everything else, and you have two separate instances of the same event: human explorers introduce alien species into an isolated ecosystem. To paraphrase Hamlet, the only thing that makes either event "good" or "bad" is our perception. I'm not saying that man doesn't impact the world in ways large and small, but I am saying that we have a tendency to over-estimate our own importance.

And no, I'm sure none of this has to do with employing alarmist rhetoric to scare up research sponsors and grant money. That can't be why climate change has seen what is possibly the fastest formation of a "scientific consensus" ever for a question this complicated.

Please, try to think for yourselves just a little bit. It won't hurt much, I promise.

Anything coming out of Hansen and GSFC is suspect. (It hurts to say that but Hansen is anything but unbiased and runs GSFC as his personal fiefdom.) They couldn't have the lowest ice coverage so they've gone for a different 'most'. Even saying the ice coverage was the least after 2007 is misleading since satellite coverage of the poles happened AFTER the last low ice period in the 1920s through 1940s when the ice retreated to 85 degrees North latitude.

typical