Arctic ice has maxed out for the year and is starting its slow melt into summer in much worse shape than normal, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Centre.

If you look only at the extent of Arctic sea ice, things are not as bad as they have been in recent years. Ice cover is five per cent higher this year than in the record low 2006, even if it is four per cent lower than the 1979 to 2000 average.

But ice thickness is another story, and that seems to be all bad news.

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.

Good News! Climate change is all a big mistake! This remarkable finding was revealed by Michael Asher in Daily Tech – a publication more focused on iPhones than atmospheric science.

Asher’s piece Sea Ice Ends Year at Same Level as 1979 confidently states that “Thanks to a rapid rebound in recent months, global sea ice levels now equal those seen 29 years ago…”

Strange. That’s not what scientists are saying. Just last month NASA released a chilling report showing that between 1.5 trillion and 2 trillion tons of ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted at an accelerating rate since 2003 – enough to fill Chesapeake Bay 21 times.

The party’s over, we had us a time..
We burned all the kindling...
Watched the last coals dwindling
And the ice melting down...

-- Eliza Gilkyson

Is the party over?

According to a new study by scientists at the NSICD (National Snow and Ice Data Centre), there's a good chance that Arctic sea ice has melted beyond the point of no return.

Joseph Romm points us to a story in today's edition of the UK's Independent.  The news is not good:

Scientists have found the first unequivocal evidence that the Arctic region is warming at a faster rate than the rest of the world at least a decade before it was predicted to happen.

Climate-change researchers have found that air temperatures in the region are higher than would be normally expected during the autumn because the increased melting of the summer Arctic sea ice is accumulating heat in the ocean. The phenomenon, known as Arctic amplification, was not expected to be seen for at least another 10 or 15 years and the findings will further raise concerns that the Arctic has already passed the climatic tipping-point towards ice-free summers, beyond which it may not recover.

There is a warm air of celebration in the DenierSphere because the statistical mavens at Climate Audit and WattsUpWithThat have discovered an error in the October global temperatures as reported by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).

"The ice thickness was fairly constant for the five winters before this, but it plummeted in the winter after the 2007 minimum."

- lead author Dr. Katharine Giles

A new study, conducted by academics from University College London, published in Geophysical Research Letters and reported by the BBC, shows that the total mass of Arctic ice has dropped to the lowest level ever recorded by satellite.