Arctic sea ice: The Long View

Arctic sea ice extent will probably be the six-lowest in the modern records, the NSIDC's Mark Serreze told USA Today. "He adds that the seven summers with the lowest amount of ice have all been in the past seven years. 'The overall trend is downward, and it will continue to do so,' Serreze says.... 'The Arctic will be ice-free in the summer in a few decades,' Serreze says. 'All we'll have is winter ice.'"[*]

Here's the long-term view that shows how large this year's minimum is in comparision to the last 34 years. The daily anomaly is with respect to the entire record's daily average:

Data via JAXA.

* Cue up Serreze's earlier bad prognostication. Here responded to that here: “In hindsight, probably too much was read into 2007, and I would take some blame for that...There were so many of us that were astounded by what happened, and maybe we read too much into it.” But then, some people find it expedient to focus on a few bad predictions than the Arctic falling apart. Whether the ice vanishes for the next 220,000 years or the next 221,960 years doesn't matter much in the long view.