Live by the anomaly, Die by the anomaly

Those who have watched Arctic sea ice extent fluctuate with an objective eye have noticed several things. Within each year, there are times when the extent seems to be the roughly the same each year. June for one, and a couple times in November and December. This means that, as one warmist blogger just pointed out, that it doesn't seem to matter a lot what the extent is in April. It will wind up the same in June and the minimum depends on the rate of loss in the following three months.

Quite true, although based on limited data, but the same could have been said when 2009 showed a brief streak last fall that was the lower than any other for the decade. Undeterred, Jeff Masters, alarmist-in-charge at wunderground.com, blogged that it was a foretaste of more record losses. It wasn't, as ice extent returned to the normal bundle soon thereafter.

It's also easy to see that the winter maximum does not correlate at all well with the summer minimum. So when people say that 2010 was "on track" to be as bad as 2007, because the winter data looked like 2007's, they are overlooking the obvious fact that earlier years were "on track" to be worse yet, but weren't. There is no winter track.

But while the correlation between winter and summer isn't robust, it's hard to believe that having more ice on April 2 than at any time in almost a decade isn't a material fact, likely to impact September's minimum. Other factors are probably more important, such as ocean currents and wind patterns, but there's a decent chance that the current anomaly will provide enough extra ice cover to put 2010 on the high side of recent years next September.

Which may be an anomaly but will be hard to explain by the warmists who were so urgent in their warnings about the other anomalies. I'd sympathize if they had been consistent, but what goes around, comes around.