At the beginning of July JAXA/ViSHOP Arctic sea ice extent is still “lowest for the date” in their record going back to 1979:
The PIOMAS sea ice thickness map for June 30th reveals that the previously thick ice in the Chukchi Sea has been noticeably thinning:
The associated volume graph shows that the 2025 curve has entered the pack of other recent years. and is now 4th lowest for the date:
Continue reading Facts About the Arctic in July 2025I mentioned the start of Ella Hibbert‘s long voyage in her yacht Yeva over on this year’s Northwest Passage thread. Ella and Yeva have now crossed north of the Arctic Circle near Iceland and have begun their attempt to circumnavigate the Arctic in a single summer by sailing past the north of Iceland in a westerly direction:
According to yesterday evening’s update from Ella’s shore team:
Ella’s had a tough time of it today, which is why she hasn’t posted her daily vlog. After days of drifting, she has wind and lots of it.
“35-40 knots, but the wind’s not the issue, it’s the sea state. Massive waves, breaking crests and spray.”
She’s having to run north to take the waves on Yeva’s stern as it was getting too dangerous to sail with them coming over the beam (side-on).
“Having the weight of the Norwegian Sea dumped on me in the cockpit was pretty miserable. The cockpit literally filled like a bathtub with me in it.”
The tracking map above suggests that conditions have moderated and Yeva is back on course for Cape Farewell
Continue reading Ella and Yeva Start Circumnavigating the ArcticI’ve been away on a “road trip” during the first part of June, so this month’s initial update is a trifle tardy.
After a 100k “break” yesterday JAXA/ViSHOP extent is currently in a tie with 2024 for 4th lowest for the date, and still slightly below 2012.
The PIOMAS sea ice thickness map for May 31st continues to show plenty of thick ice in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas:
However, the associated volume graph shows the 2025 curve only slightly above the previous low for the date in 2017:
I have recently received a disturbing email from the NSIDC, which reads as follows:
Continue reading Facts About the Arctic in June 2025I’m opening the 2025 Northwest Passage thread earlier than usual, because of some news you can read if you scroll down. However, let’s first of all get our bearings with the help of this map of the area:
and another map detailing the routes through Canadian Arctic Archipelago that have previously been successfully traversed:
The news I was referring to is that at lunchtime today Ella Hibbert is setting off in her yacht Yeva from Haslar Marina near Portsmouth in southern England for a rather unusual voyage through the Northwest Passage this summer. Here is Ella’s current route plan:
You will note some unusual features. Apparently Ella is intent on taking Route 1 into the Beaufort Sea via McClure Strait. After that she is not heading for the Bering Strait, but is instead taking the route less travelled back to Haslar via the Northern Sea Route. Perhaps even more surprising in this day and age is that Ella has received permission to sail through Russian waters without an ice pilot. She is aiming to complete an entire circumnavigation of the Arctic in a single summer single handed! As Ella puts it, this is “A voyage that should not be possible”:
Continue reading The Northwest Passage in 2025Ella is hoping to overcome terrifying challenges including icebergs, freezing water and polar bears.
Her journey – which has only recently become possible due to melting polar ice caps – aims to showcase the devastating environmental impact of sea ice decline, both in the Arctic and across the world.
Ella’s voyage also aims to support two charities working tirelessly to protect the Arctic: Polar Bears International and the Ocean Conservancy.
At the end of her voyage, Ella will auction her ship Yeva with proceeds to go to these two charities.
Fresh from his enlightening “debate” with Peter Hadfield about the numerous errors in Climate: The Movie, skeptical superstar Tom Nelson has produced another movie directed by Martin Durkin. The duo’s second cinematic masterpiece is entitled “The Graph That Lied”, and this time around Tom is the star of the show!
Allegedly its subject is:
The graph they built on a lie. The iconic ‘climate’ graph that’s undermining industrial capitalism and taking our freedom…and it’s 100 percent garbage.
Watch this film, and learn the shocking truth.
But as we will see:
This is the shocking truth:
If you want a good laugh, the shocking truth about the Gorilla Science team’s Ig Nobel contender for the climate science prize can be found on their YouTube channel.
Here is the latest such graph produced by the current team at Richard Muller‘s (initially!) Koch Brothers funded Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project:
To be continued…
World renowned climate scientist Roger Pielke Jr. has just published an interesting paper in the highly respected academic journal the New York Post. It is entitled:
“Surprise! Ice is rebounding at BOTH poles — climate is more complex than we know“
According to Roger’s op-ed:
When it comes to climate change, to invoke one of Al Gore’s favorite sayings, the biggest challenge is not what we don’t know, but what we know for sure but just isn’t so.
Two new studies show that the Earth’s climate is far more complex than often acknowledged, reminding us of the importance of pragmatic energy and climate policies.
One of them, led by researchers at China’s Tongji University, finds that after years of ice sheet decline, Antarctica has seen a “surprising shift”: a record-breaking accumulation of ice…
Roger then heads for the far north, where he assures his learned readers that:
A second new paper, a preprint now going through peer review, finds a similar change at the opposite end of the planet.
“The loss of Arctic sea ice cover has undergone a pronounced slowdown over the past two decades, across all months of the year,” the paper’s US and UK authors write.
They suggest that the “pause” in Arctic sea ice decline could persist for several more decades.
Together, the two studies remind us that the global climate system remains unpredictable, defying simplistic expectations that change moves only in one direction.
I feel compelled to point out to Roger that apart from the fact that they both include the word “ice”, Arctic sea ice and the Antarctic ice sheet are approximately as similar as chalk and cheese.
Roger neglects to provide NY Post readers with a reference or helpful link to the preprint he is referring to. However luckily for my own reader(s) I have already done so. Hence I am able to quote the authors’ own words, which read as follows:
According to these climate model simulations, this pause in the loss of Arctic sea ice could plausibly continue for the next 5-10 years.
I have already emailed the authors of the preprint asking them to justify their use of the term “pause”. I’ll let you know what they have to say on the matter in due course. In the meantime I suggest that Dr. Pielke consults an English dictionary. In pseudo code:"pause" != "rebound"
I also suggest that he directs Post readers to more recent activity of yours truly’s virtual pen:
This year’s maximum extent is 1.31 million square kilometers below the 1981 to 2010 average maximum of 15.64 million square kilometers and 80,000 square kilometers below the previous lowest maximum that occurred on March 7, 2017:
Perhaps he also wouldn’t mind asking the Post’s online editor(s) to reveal this explanatory video to their viewers?
Q.E.D?
I frequently post a summary of the Arctic section of the United States’ National Snow and Ice Data Center’s monthly review of the current state of the cryosphere. Here is the most recent edition.
However, this month I have some additional bad news to report. According to a May 6th “Level of Service Update for Data Products” from the NSIDC:
Effective May 5, 2025, NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) will decommission its snow and ice data products from the Coasts, Oceans, and Geophysics Science Division (COGS).
As a result, the level of services for affected products below will be reduced to Basic—meaning they will remain accessible but may not be actively maintained, updated, or fully supported.
- Sea Ice Index
- Snow Data Assimilation System (SNODAS) Data Products
- Glacier Photograph Collection
- U.S. National Ice Center Arctic Sea Ice Charts and Climatologies in Gridded Format
- Gridded Monthly Sea Ice Extent and Concentration, 1850 Onward
- World Glacier Inventory
If you rely on these products in your work, research, education, or planning, we invite you to share your story at [email protected]. Your input can help us demonstrate the importance of these data sets and advocate for future support.
I will certainly share my story with the NSIDC. If you are a resident of the US you may also wish to contact your local friendly neighbourhood politician(s) about the matter?
[Update – May 9th]Mark Serreze, Director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, replied to my email and told me that:
We are acutely aware of the importance of the SII and Sea Ice Today. Millions of visits per year. High priority. We’re in the middle of discussions about to make sure that we have continuity.
Thanks for your support. Everything helps.
One of the less well known data products provided by the NSIDC is EASE-Grid Sea Ice Age.
I recently used that particular mine of essential cryospheric information to produce this educational YouTube video:
The video reveals the underlying reason for the “fast transition” of Arctic sea ice cover from thick multi-year ice to a reduced area of much more mobile young ice.
To be continued…
This article not directly related to Arctic sea ice, but instead is one of our (very!) occasional series on the psychology of anthropogenic global warming “skepticism”.
Peter Hadfield is better known as the man behind Buster Keaton’s face on the “Potholer54” channel on YouTube. Tom Nelson is the “producer” of Martin Durkin’s “Climate: The Movie”. Peter produced a video criticising that movie. Many months later Peter and Tom have just recorded a “long-form, man-to-man debate” via Zoom about those criticisms. Here is episode 1 of Potholer’s version of events:
Here is “Snow White’s” hot take on the first 10 minutes of Tom Nelson’s version of events on X (formerly Twitter):
6:37 "You've referenced this as (Ljungqvist, 2000). It's not actually, it's 2010. But that's a minor mistake"
— Snow White (@GreatWhiteCon) May 4, 2025
6:46 "It's also not global temperatures, as it says in the title. These are NH temperatures, above the Tropic of Cancer… But that's just another mistake"
In brief, Tom seems to be incapable of providing a straight answer to a straight question, and instead loudly rails against what he continually refers to as the instrumental temperature “spike of doom”.
Can you spot the difference between these two graphs? The first is from Ljungqvist (2010):
The second is from Climate: The Movie (The Cold Truth):
Note that at 2:18 in the video above Tom says:
I want to make sure that my audience hears everything that you have to say, so I’d hope that we don’t filibuster and try to keep our answers short and snappy.
Here’s the second episode of the Peter v Tom “debate”:
Would anybody here care to run a stopwatch past the time spent “filibustering” by each of the two participants?
In the video description Peter has this to say:
During the debate, Tom asked me a gish-gallop of questions, including whether I ‘believe’ CO2 is the control knob of global temperature, and about the Medieval Warm Period, and the weather, etc. He did not choose any of these as topics for the debate…
So why didn’t I simply answer all his questions and explain this? Because I have had 40 years experience interviewing politicians and government officials, whose strategy is always to divert attention onto another subject whenever you are homing in on a contradiction or a mistake. Even if I had taken the bait and explained what the science actually shows regarding the weather, or the control knob, or the MWP, as soon as I got close to busting another of Tom’s fallacies, he would have interrupted me mid-sentence to try to divert onto another subject. The trick is to always keep them on the topic.
Here’s are Peter’s subsequent musings on the “debate”:
Here’s an excerpt from Peter’s conclusion at ~ 13:40:
People who lobby for industry and vested interests don’t want to discuss the science, they want to support their beliefs. If you agree with their beliefs you’re on their side. If you don’t agree with their beliefs you’re on the other side.
If changing graphs, airbrushing out contradictory information, hiding sources and misrepresenting studies is what it takes to support those beliefs, then it’s perfectly OK.
If the other person is trying to make a point that gets to the facts and the reality, then do everything you can to interrupt, filibuster and deflect. What matters outside the world of science is not getting to “the truth”, but what they call “winning”.
Unfortunately for Tom Nelson, Martin Durkin and the CO2 Coalition, the internet keeps receipts of airbrushing:
JAXA/ViSHOP extent is no longer “lowest for the date”! After “flatlining” for most of April the metric is now in the midst of a close knit group of the other years in the 2020s:
The high pressure area over the Central Arctic persisted through the second half of April, and so did the consequent drift of ice from the Pacific side of the Arctic to the Atlantic periphery:
AWI’s sea ice area for the Greenland Sea is currently “highest for the date” in the AMSR2 record that started in July 2012:
The offshore winds along the Laptev Sea coast have continued, and sea ice area is now “lowest for the date”:
The first signs of a break in the high pressure dominance are appearing. GFS currently forecasts that a low pressure area will enter the Central Arctic, bring above zero temperatures over the Kara Sea on Sunday:
Continue reading Facts About the Arctic in May 2025JAXA/ViSHOP extent finished the month of March “lowest for the date” once again:
However, since then the graph has been “flatlining” and extent is now above 2019 and rapidly approaching the rest of the recent pack.
At the end of March PIOMAS Arctic sea ice volume had increased to 21.21 thousand km³, still 2nd lowest for the date in the PIOMAS record:
Here is the corresponding PIOMAS sea ice thickness map for March 31st 2025:
For comparison purposes, here is the “near real time” CryoSat-2/SMOS merged thickness data from the Alfred Wegener Institute:
Continue reading Facts About the Arctic in April 2025