No respite for the Arctic sea ice

(Sea ice off Greenland 2009)

In between discussing the role of the media in communicating climate change at the Global Media Forum here in Bonn and producing radio and online stories from my Arctic trip, I have just read a press release from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI)I’d like to mention here.
It doesn’t really surprise me, but it concerns me to read that the Arctic sea ice is expected to reach a critical minimum again this summer, although probably not the shock low of 2007.
AWI scientists and a team from Hamburg University’s “climate campus” have published figures in the Sea Ice Outlook looking at the forecasts for the ice cover in September (the month when it reaches its minimum) made by a dozen international research institutes. The Hamburg team and the AWI team come to different results, using different methods, but both agree there’s an 80% probability that the ice area will be between 4,7 und 5,7 million km2. Just for comparison, between 1980 and 1990, it always covered more than 7 million km2.