I clicked on your "comparison" link and got Arctic sea ice for January (and 2008 missing). The Arctic always freezes up in the winter and will for a long time. After 2 months of darkness it gets cold up there. Did you switch to September when the yearly minimum sea ice occurs and compare? Compare any September since 2007 to any September before 2000 and you see a marked difference.
My intent was to direct you to the search function itself, not those particular results. That's why I suggested you plug in your own parameters. You just got my last search results before I cut & pasted the address.
So anyway, yes, ice certainly freezes in the winter time. I didn't check September, just January and June, hot and cold six months apart, right? That gives a pretty good spread. And yes, 2007 was a hot year up North! In fact, it is the year most quoted on the web in comparative models, and I can see why that is if somebody is trying to make a strong point. The problem is that this is quite typical of the AGW hysteria. We don't get honest representations. Showing only 2007 provides a misleading representation, and that kind of reporting is half the problem.
It also makes me wonder if 1979 was an atypically cold year and what 1978 was like..?
But in spite of all that, there's no doubt in my mind; according to this particular data set, the Northern Ice caps are certainly showing a strong retreating trend to the tune of a couple million square kilometers over the last thirty years.
On a technical note it's important to get the terminology right so you don't confuse your audience. Ice sheets are the ice on Greenland and Antarctica (and a few smaller areas). Ice shelves are the tongues of glaciers floating on the ocean. What we're talking about is sea ice which is the ice that forms when the ocean itself freezes.
Noted.
As far as Antarctica, it is losing ice as well from the ice sheets and ice shelves.
Really? I'm having a difficult time verifying that one way or the other.
Antarctic sea ice has grown. There are a couple of factors that lead to that. The ozone hole over Antarctica causes stronger circumpolar winds that open more polynyas in the existing sea ice exposing more open water to the cold air. Increasing rain, snow and glacial run-off freshen the surface water reducing its density so it floats on top of the denser warmer water below so less heat is transmitted to the surface from below allowing the surface to get colder.
That's a lovely rationalization, but it doesn't answer my original question; Why only in Antarctica? Do fluid and saline dynamics only work south of the equator?
I'm not sure the satellites that the sea ice scientists use take actual photographs.
Then be sure. Weak assumptions of that sort are worse than useless. A flimsy excuse to stop asking important questions is in fact dangerous.
In any case, specifying, "Sea Ice Scientists" rather than, "Climate Change Scientists" is a little evasive. Please remember that the media tells us that thousands of scientists have come forward to assure us that Global Warming is a crisis issue requiring immediate government intervention. For changes of that magnitude, I do in fact think that we deserve all the evidence we can get, and that satellite photo-evidence would go a long way to supporting the claim. While you appear to be satisfied in coming up with weak, (and frankly, ignorant) assumptions for why obvious blank spots are not being addressed, I am not.
[...]They've got plenty of data to download without doing photos. [...] How do you want to pay for all of the effort it would take to put together the collection you want? There's no money for it in the grants for research they get. Their regular jobs aren't paying them to do that. What you want is not necessary to the science they do or it would already exist.
That's a huge evasion built on more totally unfounded assumptions, but that seems to be the chosen mode of thinking among people who refuse to question the official narrative.
What I'm hearing from you is, "Stop asking questions. Just accept the 'truth' being handed down."
Look. We have the satellites. They take thousands of pictures. Those pictures are in databanks. We know this. We've seen them. We just haven't seen enough of them on a large enough cross section of time to be able to form a useful picture. There is no good excuse for this, and by "good", I don't mean, "Because scientists don't have the need or time or budget," as you suggest.
If I can update the php function in a wordpress blog in ten minutes, then a NASA engineer can make their data bases provide the images necessary. It's easy, as in "before I finish my cup of coffee" easy. That you suggest it being some kind of budget-breaking impossibility goes against everything we know about computer and image processing technology. NASA is, believe it or not, plugged into the modern computer age.
Moreover, the images I want are highly useful to anybody exploring climate change. You presented yourself pictures of a withdrawing glacier as evidence of global warming, but at the same time tell me that bird's eye view photographic data of where that same ice begins and ends along an entire geographic area is worthless?
What that tells me about the way you think does not encourage trust.
-FL