Good News Wednesday XXII: More Ice Than Last Year

Good news. The artic melted less this summer than last summer. Take that! Al Gore.

"The annual summer retreat of the sea ice cloaking the Arctic Ocean appears to have ended with the ice not quite matching last year’s extraordinary recession, polar scientists said Tuesday." (nytimes)

Which sounds great... until you read the next paragraph:

Still, the scientists, at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., said that the ice in the Arctic this summer was 33 percent below the average extent tracked since satellites started monitoring the region in 1979 and that the trend continued toward an ice-free Arctic Ocean within a few decades.

I think I'm going to put my head under the ice water and just pretend I didn't read that part, or the rest of the article. Yeah good news!


(image from ilovemybaby.org) [wtf? really? -ed]