Well, it has been an eventful year so far as the unfolding of the year’s data takes us on yet another playful turn but, really, that is not so unusual for this time of the year, as the sea ice re-forms after the summer melt season. To illustrate this I have chosen, in the chart below, to show just the raw data for the first four years, 2021-2024, of the current decade together with the four worst years, 2012, 2016, 2019 and 2020, of the previous decade. You can identify them by the colours and the bold font in the legend at right.
2024 is certainly among those previous decade years but this has not unduly effected the current decade average level of sea ice coverage, so far, and that decadal average stands marginally higher (as it has for most of the year) than for the previous decade. And this is why we mainly rely, for the long-term view, on decadal averages – which remove those ‘playful’ turns in the raw data.
For clarity, I have removed the data for those previous decade years in the image below, instead including the decadal average lines for the previous 2 decades – 2011-2020 and 2001-2010 – which leaves 2024 to stick out like a sore thumb over the last month or so. Allowing us to label it as the worst performing year of the decade, so far, at least over this final quarter. But in spite of that untimely divergence, the average ice coverage for the four years of this current decade is still, at 8.27 million Km2, a little higher than that of the previous decade, which was 8.11 million Km2.
Also allowing us to keep believing that when this decade has run its course, it will have done so mainly between the average lines for the previous two decades, not beyond them and into potentially dangerous conditions. Or to put it another way, that a halt has been called to the rapidly increasing ice melt in the Arctic region viewed over the past several decades. Thus heralding a period of ice growth on the waters of our planet’s Northern pole, spreading further as temperatures reduce to the ‘Ice-Age’ levels from which our first recorded human civilisations emerged between ten and twenty thousand years ago. As recorded in the natural history of our planet.
A planet which long term records indicate has been cooling now for more than 50 million years. And a planet which can easily shrug off the puny efforts its errant, ignorant, and self-absorbed primate species to alter the natural course of events (from a position of engineered misunderstanding) for better or worse.
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