By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM

Last month, reports about the Wilkins Ice Sheet break-up were exaggerated in the media with headlines like “Bye-Bye Antarctica”. We posted several blogs in a reality-check response here, here and here. This week we posted a story where Roger Pielke Sr. reported on Climate Science on a paper in EOS that showed the melting this past summer was 40% below the average for the past 20 years.

The plot of the total ice extent and anomaly (on the Cryosphere Today site of the Polar Research Group of the University of Illinois in Champaign Urbana) from the 1979-2000 mean over the last year showed there was hardly a blip in the big picture. It shows we continue to run well ahead of last year by about 2 million square kilometers.

See full size image here

Interestingly the anomaly is already second only to last year in the entire record going back to 1979. 

See full size image here

Since we are just 2 weeks into the fall season and over 5 months away from the peak, it would seem likely were going to at least challenge the record from last year. You can be sure although the media was quick to jump on the Wilkins break-up, they will conveniently ignore this fact just as they did last year’s record. See pdf of this post here.