“Cryo-sat launch successful“. Anthony Watts posts a press release from the European Space Agency about the launch of CryoSat-2, a satellite that will be monitoring polar sea ice thickness.
Whoosh! Beep... Beep...
Anthony’s readers will now presumably discount all sea ice reports and predictions until this satellite has gathered, say, ten year’s worth of new data…
Wott's Up With That? 
Going by past behaviour, they will never accept the satellite observations, saying they are ‘manipulated by scientists’ who have dastardly adjusted the ‘raw readings’.
If photographs were taken of an ice free arctic, they’d ignore the effect on the climate and say it helps the economy because ships can sail a shorter route.
It’s called ‘denial’.
Now that he’s posted the press release from the launch…
“The issue with this is that unless they begin with a fresh starting point there is no way to analyse anything. I would therefore presume that the intention is to monitor the ice as of now and any changes that occur subsequently, or are they just going to hide/exaggerate the decline?”
“And as soon as the first real reports come in, a host of “synthetic” ice measurements for the past 150 years will be released, all of which will purport to show just how much thinner the ice is now than it has *ever* been before! But at least this will establish a verifiable baseline for the future.”
Seems like a pretty good prediction to me.
[I’d bet on it. – Ben]