“Open Water At The North Pole“. Anthony Watts wants his followers to hear this news from him first so he can frame it properly. He scours the internet for useful “there was less ice in the olde days” tales and finds photos of surfaced nuclear submarines and some old speculative newspaper articles.
Yes, there’s open water near the north pole now. No, it’s not uncommon at the height of Arctic summer. Big whup. This is called weather. The real story, as always, is the long-term trend. But Anthony’s anecdotes apparently trump that.
Arctic Sea Ice Anomaly, August 3, 2010. Trend is... down. Source: Cryosphere Today
Wait, what’s this? Anthony reports:
The UIUC [University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign] seems to have “lost” their archive of ice concentration maps. It has been offline for two weeks now, so we can’t use that valuable resource for the time being. I wonder what’s up with that?
Yes! Conspiracy and hiding of data! Back to work.
Wott's Up With That? 
Ben:
I take my hat off to you. Someone stated ol Anthony was a firehose with his comments — but he has number of confederates. You’re like the goalie knocking everything down that comes your way. Good job.
“Open Water At The North Pole” (WUWT, Aug 3, 2010)
“LOST” ICE CONCENTRATION MAPS……….Anthony is apparently referring to Cryosphere Today’s comparison images that are, on CT’s Home page, referred to as “sea ice extent” images.
They are less colorful than CT’s current “sea ice concentration” image, because they use a different color scale.
ENGLISH MAJOR NEEDED……….to review the rest of the article. With a specialized vocabulary to do it justice.
Watts’ site uses what UI [UIUC? – Ben] call an “older product” whereby you can compare this day’s ice with a day in the past. I found it to be inaccurate – today’s ice in the comparison never looked like the published day map on the site.
I think they just left it unsupported and now are about to ditch it altogether. No loss.
He & Goddard are certainly an unbeatable combination — From 9 Feb Prediction: Arctic Ice Will Continue to Recover This Summer
Posted on February 9, 2010 by Anthony Watts
Steven Goddard writes below that he agrees with the prediction I made in late 2009 that we’d see another 500,000 km2 of Arctic sea ice recovery in 2010.