Water, water everywhere

And all the bergs did shrink ;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any left to shrink

The very caps did rot : O Christ !
That ever this should be !
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy land!

OK, Eli is getting carried away. Using Alastair's Criterion

"Since I get to choose I will propose this chart which is updated daily

When there is a clear passage in pink from the Beaufort Sea to the Baffin Bay then we declare the NW Passage open. Otherwise we may have to wait for ESA to produce a report which the Telegraph picks up and then four weeks later appears in Wikipedia."

We are a day or two away. However, for those who want to jump the gun, the AMSR picture from the University of Bremen shows there now does appear to be a way through the Northwest Passage although the path is a bit crooked (the microwave sounder based AMSR underestimates ice coverage a bit).

But enough of that obsession. You may remember certain commentators last year going on and on that the ice extent at the butt (aka Aussie) end of the Earth was growing. For example Roger Pielke Sr. said

Former Colorado State Climatologist Dr. Roger Pielke, Sr., presently senior scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, chastised the media’s Antarctic reporting as “typical of the bias that many journalists have.” Pielke wrote on March 25, “The media has ignored in their reporting the increase in Antarctic sea ice cover in recent years, with, at present, a coverage that is well one million square kilometers above average.” Pielke added, “Unfortunately, it appears that most journalists just parrot the perspective of the first news release on these climate issues, without doing any further investigation. If this is inadvertent, they need to be educated in climate science. If deliberate bias, they are clearly advocates and the reporters should be clearly and publically identified as having such a bias. In either case, the public is being misinformed!

and how this proved, well it's hard to say what it proved, but they did go on and on as our friend Steve McIntyre would say

Four of the past 5 months are “all-time” records for Southern Hemisphere sea ice anomalies, “unprecedented” since the data set began in 1979 . . .On a global basis, world sea ice in April 2008 reached levels that were “unprecedented” for the month of April in over 25 years. Levels are the third highest (for April) since the commencement of records in 1979, exceeded only by levels in 1979 and 1982. This continues a pattern established earlier in 2008, as global sea ice in March 2008 was also the third highest March on record, while January 2008 sea ice was the second highest January on record. It was also the second highest single month in the past 20 years (second only to Sept 1996).

and Eli does believe that a certain John S who graces the comment section here at RR had a pleasant word or two on the subject

Today's interesting news is that the Antarctic anomaly is now negative after having fallen off the cliff in the past few days. This, together with historically low ice extent in the Arctic (not a record yet) has pushed the total ice anomaly into negative numbers (figures from Cryosphere Today)

Click to enlarge the global sea ice area graph below

Something is happening. It is probably not a good thing