There’s more than a few climate bloggers who have a dirty little secret. We like to excoriate those who can’t tell the difference between weather and climate, or herald every momentary drop in temperature as evidence that global warming has ended, or revel in each new report that suggests not every single square millimeter of the planet’s surface is experiencing dramatic climate shifts. As we should. But many of us take a peek, every morning, at the daily version of a graph from the National Snow and Ice Data Center depicting current sea-ice extent in the Arctic.
We know that what happens from day to day tells us nothing useful about global climate change. We know that the only things that supply meaningful information are measured on the scale of decades and even centuries, not days, weeks or months. And yet we still obsess on that damn graph. Why?
Continue reading “Obsessing over ice cover”