It's quite a shame that the major media won't even allow speculation that global warming might be related to the coming crop losses.

Drought is normal in California and tornado weather is normal in the Midwest but the weather this year if freaking weird. If people can't put 2 and 2 together by November in this weather there just isn't any hope.

Are people making the connection or are they just hoping the train to the big rock candy mountain makes one more run and they get a ticket?

Any ideas?

Put the Carbon Back

Mace,

The Arctic is an ocean surrounded by land. The Antarctic is a continent surrounded by an ocean and is circumnavigated by the massive Circumpolar Current. The climate dynamics are therefore quite different and we expect and are seeing very different trends.

Apparently there has been little or no significant trend in Sea Ice in the Antarctic taken as a whole and the sea ice extend is much more variable than that in the Arctic. But there are significant trends in particular regions, some toward more ice and some toward less.

This post on Ice Shelf Instability at the RealClimate website has lots of interesting information. Be sure to read through the comments - there is lots of interesting stuff there that relates directly to your question.

I did read a report recently suggesting that the melt effect was occuring at a slower rate in the Antartic due to...of all things...the hole in the ozone that's been caused by CFCs and other pollutants.

Turns out it may be causing a "shield" effect.

Well it's not really a shield, it's more of a "vent".
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=mending-ozone-worse-f ...

The catch-22 of course being that the CFCs which caused the Ozone hole, are themselves also tens of thousands of times more potent as GHGS than CO2.

It looks like the Antarctic is still having problems.

The west side of it is collapsing.
In winter.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080613104743 ...

NASA data shows the trend in S Hemisphere sea ice is up. This does not prove a future direction. This is a measure of the historical trend from 1979 to present.  

Set the Hemisphere to 'Southern', set the image to 'extent anamolies':

http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/archives/image_select. ...

The trend shows a  1.8% growth per decade but with a  variation of +/- 2.2%. As noted, there is wider variation in the Southern Hemisphere than in the north.

Here's the animation of the Ice shelf break

http://www.esa.int/esaEO/SEMG58VG3HF_planet_0.html

Keep in mind this 560 sq km shelf break is .1% of the total sea ice increase at present. That does not explain the increase in sea ice of 800,000 sq km.

Good news -- the Arctic ice is in fact more concentrated than this time last year. This should be a boon for the polar bears. This Univ of Il site shows the concentrations are still greater today than compared to the same day in 2007.  Also select 1980 for the left image and see that it looks comparable.

http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=06&a ...

Here's a current look at the Arctic ice extent: http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/

Here's a graph showing data of ice extent back to 2002: http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm

And finally a graph showing the rate of CO2 rise alongside the temperature trend since 2002: http://icecap.us/images/uploads/MSUCRUCO2.jpg