Notice how you don't hear "record heat" anymore?

And yet 2007 is on track for hottest year ever.

Every forecasting model is being exceeded.

Forget any report mentioning 2050 or 2100.

We'll be there by 2015.

"One scientist came back from the North Pole and reported that it was raining there, said David Carlson, the director of International Polar Year, the effort to highlight the climate issues of the Arctic and Antarctic. "It makes you wonder whether anyone has ever reported rain at the North Pole before."

Arkansaw of Samuel L Clemens

Oh, look, swimming at the North Pole.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1szqfXouPOk

I concur on the 2015 estimate. They need to throw out the linear models...Gaia is non-linear and chaotic.

The U.S., Canada, Russia, and Denmark are not fiddling around in the Arctic for something that'll come to pass in a hundred years. We know ice extent from satellite photos but the total volume is key.

The ice pack used to have a 3m average thickness in the 1950s, then I saw a report of 2m in the nineties, and recently there was a link here indicating its down to 1m. That million square kilometer breakup wasn't melting exactly, it was ice too thin to stand wave action coming apart ...

We've had decades of the sea ice extent dropping 500,000 km^2/decade ... and the predictions of an ice free arctic in 2100 were based on a simple, linear forward assessment, starting with 5,000,000 km^2 in the 1990s. If we stick to this approach ... ice free in 2011.

No more polar bears :-( Will the end of this iconic species be the wakeup call we need, or will we have already descended into our own personal misery? I keep looking at that housing thing and I'm thinking "personal misery", but I'm kind of a doomer like that ...

Hi SacredCowTipper

This presumed climat change to a warmer climat, is just perfect for us living near the arctic circle. There is a silver lining everywere.

Then the fall out could be that a lot of useless eaters in the southern third world would die-off. Just as the illuminatis is planning with their biofuel production efforts, so that the food production will fall down.

Interesting times we live in indeed.

The silver lining of cheap energy is vanishing with little bias. Sweden is not entropy independent. Will your paradise welcome the millions of refugees less fortunate to the South/lowlands? Time to start building a wall. Overpopulation can quickly pillage your resources, too.

You're suggesting they do a whole lot of maintenance on the DaneVirke in short order, eh?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danevirke

No we will ceartainly not welcome millions of refugees, and so will no other northern countrys like Finland and Norway do.