There remains a lot of messaging and spin running rampant online over Washington Post colmunist George Will’s misguided and baseless claims that sea ice coverage is similar to 1979.

DeSmog writer Mitchell Anderson has been covering this baffling story for us and doing a great job, but I wanted to provide a few of the sources that have done a particularly good job at highlighting just how much sea ice we have lost since the 1970’s when we first started recording such things. 

These source easily and compellingly explain away George Will’s incorrect claim that sea ice coverage is the same today as it was in 1979.

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1. You can watch the extent of Arctic Ice melt decreasing over time. Here’s a great satellite image time series video done by NASA that shows the year-to-year melting of sea ice in the Arctic. I don’t know how anyone could argue that sea ice in the Arctic is the same as it was in 1979 after watching this video:

As Canadian delegates to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change conference in Poznan, Poland struggle to prevent any progress toward a international agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol, Canadian scientist David Barber announces that climate change is coming faster and more furiously than even the most pessimistic modellers could have imagined.

Barber, speaking at the International Arctic Change 2008 conference this week in Quebec City, said sea ice in the Canadian Arctic, which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said could melt as early as 2100, is now in danger of melting in 2015, nearly a century ahead of schedule.

The North Pole could be free of sea ice for the first time in recorded history this summer, according to National Geographic News.

And that would have the effect of speeding global warming, as highly reflective ice gives way to heat absorbing water in the high Arctic.

As NatGeo reports, scientists were shocked last year when the high Arctic lost 65 per cent of its ice cover in one year, an unprecedented loss over a time scale they previously thought was impossible. And, perversely, that generates more of the Deniers' favorite commodity: doubt.

We can all now doubt that things were as bad as we might have feared. As it turns out: they're worse.

Here's new NASA satellite video showing the astounding loss of Arctic sea ice.