NASA: No conclusions about melting sea ice

[Springer9]

Since the start of the satellite record, total Antarctic sea ice has increased by about 1 percent per decade. Whether the small overall increase in sea ice extent is a sign of meaningful change in the Antarctic is uncertain because ice extents in the Southern Hemisphere vary considerably from year to year and from place to place around the continent. Considered individually, only the Ross Sea sector had a significant positive trend, while sea ice extent has actually decreased in the Bellingshausen and Amundsen Seas. In short, Antarctic sea ice shows a small positive trend, but large scale variations make the trend very noisy.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/WorldOfChange/sea_ice_south.php?src=eoa-ann

[laconicsax]

1. Let's include the next two paragraphs.

The year-to-year and place-to-place variability is evident in the past decade. The winter maximum in the Weddell Sea, for example, is above the median in some years and below it others. In any given year, sea ice concentration may be below the median in one sector, but above the median in another; in September 2000, for example, ice concentrations in the Ross Sea were above the median extent, while those in the Pacific were below it.

At summer minimums, sea ice concentrations appear even more variable. In the Ross Sea, sea ice virtually disappears in some summers (2000, 2005, 2006, and 2009), but not all. The long-term decline in the sea ice in the Bellingshausen and Amundsen Seas is detectable in the past decade’s summer minimums: concentrations were below the median in all years.

[kestrel91316]

2. We can pretend that global warming won't have any effect on

Antarctica for hundreds of years. But it WILL require pretense, and blinders.

Anybody who thinks that Antarctic ice loss won't accelerate exponentially doesn't understand the nature of change.

[joshcryer]

3. Antarctic sea ice is growing because the shelfs are increasingly melting.

Put a cup of water in the freezer and next to it put a cup of water with some ice cubes in it. Tell me which freezes quicker and has "more floating ice" after X amount of time.

[hatrack]

4. There's also Pine Island Glacier, the "cork in the bottle" for WAIS, losing 30 cubic miles/yr now

West Antarctica’s biggest glacier is melting 50 percent faster than in 1994, adding to a global increase in sea levels, U.S. and U.K. scientists found.

The Pine Island glacier is losing about 78 cubic kilometers (30 cubic miles) of ice per year, the researchers at Columbia University in New York and the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, England, said today. That’s up from 53 cubic kilometers in 1994. The study in the journal Nature Geoscience is based on data from a 2009 expedition.

Scientists are grappling to understand how much Antarctica’s ice could contribute to higher sea-levels after the United Nations in 2007 predicted they’ll rise by 18 to 59 centimeters (7 to 23 inches) this century. Just how much of that will come from the southern continent remains uncertain.

“The glaciers from the Amundsen Sea region are contributing more to sea-level rise than any other part of Antarctica, so it’s imperative we understand the processes involved,” Adrian Jenkins, a glaciologist at the British Antarctic Survey and a co-author of the paper, said in an e- mailed statement. The Pine Island glacier and smaller glaciers that flow into it contain enough ice to boost sea levels by 24 centimeters, according to Columbia.

EDIT

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-26/antarctica-s-pine-glacier-melting-50-faster-study-indicates.html