I get that, which is why I said you should be able to tell if it was a possibility, not necessarily whether or not it happened.  Surely there is a minimum high temperature at which local weather conditions could cause melting at the pole. 

Ice cores are over land, like Greenland or Antarctica.  There is no such thing over the North Pole which sits on the Arctic Ocean.  This is sea ice -- meaning if it melts, it does not raise global sea-levels.  The climate impacts are conjecture at this point since the ice-free areas will re-freeze in the autumn, just like it does every year. 

The shorter trade route was the opening of the NW passage, which does not include the north pole, as far as I understand.  You could have gotten from ocean to ocean and still had ice at the pole, right?

As both the news story and NatGeo article stated, melting at the pole is not meaningful in and of itself.  They actually think that even if it melts this year there will still be ice to the south-- it's just a matter of local weather conditions.  It's a symbolic change because it is something none of the models had predicted happening for another 20 years at least.

Anyway, they are giving it a fifty-fifty chance of happening this year.  It might not.

Wouldn't that be a barbeque? Not that I would recommend crude oil as a dipping sauce, but to each their own...

Giles

The resolution of the vostok data is quite low, with each data point representing an average of some 1000 years. As pointed out by Monnin et al (2001):

"CO2 records from Vostok and Taylor Dome are thought to be the most accurate. However, the time resolution of these two records is too low to provide a history of CO2 changes that shows the detailed evolution of atmospheric CO2 over the last glacial termination."

In other words, your graph is nothing but a data point every 1000 years. No less. Not accurate enough to support present claims of the reason for climate change. After all, if we can go from inpending iceage, (70's), to burning up, (90's), inside of 20 years, what good is a data set that only shows every 1000 years to push you short term climate change theory? Much less that CO2 is the cause. The thing that I notice most about the your graph is that over the time period shown, the climate is constantly changing. Even without our influence.

How you can say:

"But the core also appears to call into question previous research suggesting a 500- to 1,000-year lag time between the post-ice age temperature increase and the CO2 increase."

Is beyond me, and dishonest. According to the Vostok and Taylor Dome researchers themselves, the data set was set at every 1000 years, and perhaps a little more. Climateark seems to be a bit misleading, to say the least. They tend to slip in their little lies when they can. That spells bias. They are pushing the global warming agenda with falsified data sets and lies.

Save a SeAL, club a liberal!!

"Yet the fact that we have been the agents of changeadd since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution."

Nice little spin there, but there's a fact that you seem to be missing. If different cores are giving different result to the same tests over the same periods of history, and those cores are from the same general location (Antarctica), then there can be no consensus as to the results of those two tests. To form a consensus, the data must match relatively closely and the data from the two different studies do not do this. This leads me to believe that, contrary to what some people believe, all we have are guesses as to the cause and effect of climate change now and in the past. If we’re only guessing about the past and present, it is impossible to offer anything other than guesses as to the future.

Also, there’s something else you’re missing. The data my link provides allows for a longer historical sample that the core data your link provides as my core sample represents a longer time period than the core samples that your study used is using. More data over a longer period of time means more accurate results, wouldn’t you agree? So which core data is more accurate, yours or mine?

In addition, the core study in your link was 5 years OLDER than my core study (1999 for your link and 2004 for mine). A newer sample and testing date equals better and more accurate testing procedures and more accurate results as testing equipment and methods has improved GREATLY between 1999 and 2004, wouldn’t you agree? Yet you still use older and less accurate data in your arguments that Mankind is increasing the natural process to a great extent than otherwise would occur. I believe that this is an incorrect assessment of the power of Man over the natural world. You, on the other hand, may believe otherwise. The fact remains that nether one of us has any real PROOF, nor does anyone else.

Here’s what I believe: Global warming and cooling is a NATURAL process and, since the energies involved in warming (and cooling) 5 quadrillion metric tons of atmospheric gasses far exceed ANYTHING we, or “our” CO2, can produce over any given perioud of time, it is rather unlikely that we‘re having much of an effect on the global climate in ether the long term or the short term. Even if we detonated all the nuclear devices in the world simultaneously, it would equal only a fraction of the required energies involved in causing a change in short term global temperatures, let alone long term changes, yet you seem to think that we puny little Humans are increasing the total energy content of the atmosphere simply by burning fossil fuels. That‘s outrageous! It’s obvious that we have very little to do with it. Therefore, it’s better to prepare for the inevitable climate change that will occur than to waste trillions of dollars in a futile attempt to try to control the uncontrollable as only the first approach will succeed while the latter will fail. Look to New Orleans as an example: When the levies break, we have no place to stay.

180 years of atmospheric CO2 gas analysis by chemical methods
(Energy & Environment, Volume 18, Number 2, pp. 259-282(24), March 2007)
- Beck, Ernst-Georg

Atmospheric CO2 Concentrations over the Last Glacial Termination
(Science, Vol. 291. no. 5501, 5 January 2001)
- Eric Monnin, Andreas Indermühle, André Dällenbach, Jacqueline Flückiger, Bernhard Stauffer, Thomas F. Stocker, Dominique Raynaud, Jean-Marc Barnola

Ice core records of atmospheric CO2 around the last three glacial terminations
(Science, Vol. 283. no. 5408, pp. 1712 - 1714, 12 March 1999)
- Hubertus Fischer, Martin Wahlen, Jesse Smith, Derek Mastroianni, Bruce Deck

"High-resolution records from Antarctic ice cores show that carbon dioxide concentrations increased by 80 to 100 parts per million by volume 600 ± 400 years after the warming of the last three deglaciations."

Southern Hemisphere and Deep-Sea Warming Led Deglacial Atmospheric CO2 Rise and Tropical Warming
(Science, September 27, 2007)
- Lowell Stott, Axel Timmermann, Robert Thunell

The phase relations among atmospheric CO2 content, temperature and global ice volume over the past 420 ka
(Quaternary Science Reviews, Volume 20, Issue 4, Pages 583-589, February 2001)
- Manfred Mudelsee

Timing of Atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic Temperature Changes Across Termination III
(Science 14, Vol. 299. no. 5613, March 2003)
- Nicolas Caillon, Jeffrey P. Severinghaus, Jean Jouzel, Jean-Marc Barnola, Jiancheng Kang, Volodya Y. Lipenkov

"The sequence of events during Termination III suggests that the CO2 increase lagged Antarctic deglacial warming by 800 ± 200 years and preceded the Northern Hemisphere deglaciation."

Carbon Dioxide Did Not End The Last Ice Age, Study Says (Science Daily)

The Sun still drives the Climate Giles, I know you wish it were not so but that is the reality:

The persistent role of the Sun in climate forcing (The Danish National Space Center)

"...over the past 20 years the solar cycle remains fully apparent in variations both of tropospheric air temperature and of ocean subsurface water temperature. [...]

The continuing rapid increase in carbon dioxide concentrations during the past 10-15 years has apparently been unable to overrule the °attening of the temperature trend as a result of the Sun settling at a high, but no longer increasing, level of magnetic activity. Contrary to the argument of Lockwood and FrÄohlich, the Sun still appears to be the main forcing agent in global climate change."

The Anti 'Man-Made' Global Warming Resource

Well, the first problem with your analysis would be that the slope you are using to extrapolate is clearly not holding steady.  It is increasingly negative.  2 million sq km / month is true only for the month of May.  June already looks steeper.  You can figure out how the slope is changing on that curve, but that involves more math than I am willing to do on my weekend!

However, I wouldn't hold out hope for ice at the end of August matching your predictions based on a loss of 2 million sq km/month.  It looks just based on that one year like we're in about the same place we were June of last year.