“Arctic Sea Ice about to hit ‘normal’ – what will the news say?” “Hah!” says Anthony Watts. The Arctic sea ice is about to recover all the way to “normal”. That’ll show those Catlin Arctic Survey folks with their tents and sleds!

Arctic sea ice extent on March 29, 2010. Anthony ignores that the variability is mostly in summer. Arctic Regional Ocean Observing System.

Actually it appears that Arctic sea ice is about to reach average extent, which has quite a different meaning. There is little mention of the fact that the meaningful changes are in the summer ice extent. They do bury this quote from Dr. Walter Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Center deep in their post though and then wave it away:

This has very little implication for what will happen this summer, or for the long-term trends, since the Bering Sea ice is thin and will melt completely well before the peak summer season.