Arctic Sea Ice is acting weird. Here's the volume as modeled by PIOMAS. {Really this is just an excuse for me to try datawrapper.de, because Excel charts have never looked good and by now look like something from the late 1900s.} But it is strange how the SIV has been basically flat for the last 15 years. (Arctic sea ice extent is just as unusual.)
Here is a conference presentation screen capture I captured from the leading PIOMAS modeler in Sept 2014:
I think this was from a Cliff Maas blog post or comment I read in 2017, but can't find it exactly. The screen capture looks like it's from a conference.
Anyway it's very wrong. Actually the decline, linearly regressed, is about 1/1.5, now 1/6.
Lesson?: beware of making climate predictions unless it's about mean global surface temperature, and even then ENSOs mess you up.
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So why is there a "pause" in Arctic melting? This paper on ESS Open Archive (?) goes into it. It's not peer reviewed, which is unfortunate. Given that, here's the abstract:
So it's maybe worse, going back 20 years (to 2005). Could last 5-10 more years. (Not convenient, given my lifespan.)
So, internal variability, which is nearly impossible to explain to deniers.