Tony Bennett

Clippo, as a 'contrarian'/global warming denier, I visited your two links.

I have to say I was less than impressed with the answer as to why there is more Arctic ice this year than last - which your source readily concedes by the way:

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Question: If Arctic sea ice is declining, why does the data show that this year has more ice than previous years?

Answer: For details concerning why summer of 2008 is shaping up differently than previous summers, please see our ongoing analysis updates.

A more general question might be, if sea ice is declining, how can it be that a single day or month decades ago could actually have had less ice than the same day or month in recent years? For more accurate results, scientists avoid comparing a historical single day or month (for example, May 1980) with a recent single day or month (for example, May 2008). Comparing longer trends and averages is more appropriate because natural variability, or natural shifts in the climate system, cause changes from one day or month to the next. Scientists remove the influence of this noise in a data record by gathering many points of data over a longer time period to understand the statistical significance of trends. This is true not just in studying sea ice, but also in many areas of scientific study.

As an analogy, consider statistics from sports. One game during a winning season when the home football team lost badly wouldn’t be indicative of their season as a whole. And comparing that one bad game years ago with a really good game this year, when the team managed to win 28-0 during a terrible losing season, wouldn’t be a fair comparison, either. However, plotting all of the games on a line graph would give an accurate indication of how the team did that year. And taking the scores and plotting them over several decades, would indicate whether the team has a significant trend over its history.

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Comparing a gain of thousands of square miles of ice in 2008 as against 2007 with Derby County having beaten Manchester United 28-0 last season certainly doesn't do it for me.

Can't your side, given that you brand us global warming sceptics as heretics, find better arguments than that?!

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P.S. The world has been getting warmer over the last 50 years, but only through natural cycles and flucuations since the end of the Ice Age

P.P.S. According to this extract from a Wikipedia article, the polar bear population of the world has at least doubled [10,000 to 20,000] or possibly quintupled [5,000 to 25,000] during the past 30 years -exposing another global warming lie:

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Controversy over species protection

Warnings about the future of the polar bear are often contrasted with the fact that worldwide population estimates have increased over the past 50 years and are relatively stable today. [93][105] Some estimates of the global population are around 5,000–10,000 in the early 1970s; [106] other estimates were 20,000–40,000 during the 1980s. [26][36] Current estimates put the global population at between 20,000 and 25,000. [5]

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