What North Pole ice chart is Glenn Beck looking at here?

Question

Transcript of his recent show: http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/11943/

Glenn is talking about the possibility of no ice at the N. Pole for first time in recorded history.

"No ice this summer at the North Pole. Okay. Then if you click on through it, you will see a chart. Now, maybe I'm reading this wrong, Stu, and you're our in-house global warming expert.... And today for some reason everybody's freaking out that it is melting faster than ever before when their own chart shows that it's not melting faster than ever before. It's melting less than it did last year. And just slightly under the average. It's incredible. "

Is this guy for real?!?!? Anyone know what chart he is looking at? I'm looking at this chart:

http://environment.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/cms/dn13779/dn13779-2_800.jpg

How is it possible for people like Glenn to be amazed that people are amazed that the N. Pole ice may be gone this year?

Answer 1

There is actually more sea ice in the arctic regions right now than there was at this same point last year...

http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test...

Answer 2

Take a look at this site. You can do your own comparison of the Arctic Sea Ice. Funny thing is Feb of 2008 is MUCH more cast than the three or 4 earlier years I compared it to.

Also, this would not be the first time the North pole passage was open. This article is a complete NON-event.

Answer 3

Amazing!

Answer 4

With Beck who knows.  Our gelatinous friend tried to make a similar argument the other day.  He linked the an annual anomalies graph:

http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/image...

And used it to try and argue that the sea ice extent is way above last year.  Of course, if you look at the daily data from the same site (National Snow and Ice Data Center):

http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/image...

You can see that the sea ice extent is currently almost identical to its level last year at this time - last year being a record melt, of course.  And it's way below average.

The deniers are very good at cherrypicking data to try and distort the truth.

Answer 5

It just makes you mad that Glenn Beck is smarter than you and has his own TV and radio show. If you said things people actually believed and cared about, maybe someday you'll be successful too.