Tigerhawk:

Arctic sea ice, the melting of which has become one of the favorite bits of pop-sci “evidence” that the planet’s climate is warming, has recovered so quickly from its summer lows that it is just a hair below the “normal” range.

In recent years the press has covered every twitch in Arctic sea ice coverage with breathless headlines. Not now, though. Given that this manifestly good news would undercut those who have mocked Sarah Palin for her position on, well, the “endangerment” of polar bears, we should not expect any coverage of this story in the mainstream media until the second week in November.

In order to avoid biased ‘pop-sci “evidence”‘, Tigerhawk links to the internets weblog of “a former television meteorologist” who presents a graph which – if I’m reading it correctly – contains shocking new evidence that summer is warmer than winter.  I wonder what such a graph would look like over longer – dare I say “significant” – timescales?

I wonder how the NSIDC characterized this Palin-vindicating bit of good news:

Arctic sea ice extent during the 2008 melt season dropped to the second-lowest level since satellite measurements began in 1979, reaching the lowest point in its annual cycle of melt and growth on September 14, 2008. Average sea ice extent over the month of September, a standard measure in the scientific study of Arctic sea ice, was 4.67 million square kilometers (1.80 million square miles) (Figure 1). The record monthly low, set in 2007, was 4.28 million square kilometers (1.65 million square miles); the now-third-lowest monthly value, set in 2005, was 5.57 million square kilometers (2.15 million square miles).

The 2008 season strongly reinforces the thirty-year downward trend in Arctic ice extent. The 2008 September low was 34% below the long-term average from 1979 to 2000 and only 9% greater than the 2007 record (Figure 2). Because the 2008 low was so far below the September average, the negative trend in September extent has been pulled downward, from –10.7 % per decade to –11.7 % per decade (Figure 3). [...]

NSIDC Research Scientist Walt Meier said, “Warm ocean waters helped contribute to ice losses this year, pushing the already thin ice pack over the edge. In fact, preliminary data indicates that 2008 probably represents the lowest volume of Arctic sea ice on record, partly because less multiyear ice is surviving now, and the remaining ice is so thin.” (See Figure 4.)

Global warming: disproved!  Polar bears: thriving!  Strange the MSM won’t cover this awesomely good news!  Because they hate Republicans!

I suspect that somewhere, deep down beneath layers of ego-protecting horseshit, that Tigerhawk understands that it is pointless to track changes that happen over a timescale of decades by cherry-picking week-to-week or month-to-month data.  One suspects that if you replaced the label “Extent (million sq. km)” with one reading “Tigerhawk’s net worth (10,000’s of $)”, the fantastically persuasive argument that “you now have more money than the least you have ever had, almost as much as one standard deviation below the average of the last 30 years of accelerating annual decline!” would not be accepted as thorough vindication of his broker’s investment strategy.  One suspects that the problem here is not some kind of innate mental limitation which causes these bizarre spectacles, but a form of learned, protective idiocy – a cocoon, if you will – which seals out facts that could damage the ego.  (Now, one does have to wonder about the fragility of an ego which can be so seriously damaged by learning that Sarah freakin’ Palin does not, in fact, know more about climate science and polar bears than the USGS, but let’s avoid the darkest places.)  Unfortunately, in this case, the pain Tigerhawk and his co-cocoonists are sparing their egos is being borne by the planet, and those of us who – mentally as well as physically – live on it.  Dude: fucking give it up already. It’s pathetic.

If it makes you feel any better, Al Gore’s beard looked dumb.