Thank you for your time and effort. And enjoy your sabbatical.

To freeze more ice, the heat of freezing must go someplace, namely into the frigid air. Snow insulates, reducing heat loss from the sea into the colder air above. However, there is also a sunlight issue.

While we are focused on the Arctic, it is perhaps worth a mention that the Antarctic, on the Bremen graphs, is not doing a very good job of freezing this year. Of course, it has a while to go, but on current trends may be another spike in the denialist coffin.

A new James Hansen Analysis I have not seen this mentioned before, but apologize if I missed it. There is only press reporting, not the article. http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/07/20/sea_level_study_james_hansen_issues_dire_climate_warning.html The assertion is that the sea level rise for the next 50 years is likely to be ten feet or more, not one foot. Your mileage may vary.

A new James Hansen Analysis I have not seen this mentioned before, but apologize if I missed it. There is only press reporting, not the article. http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/07/20/sea_level_study_james_hansen_issues_dire_climate_warning.html The assertion is that the sea level rise for the next 50 years is likely to be ten feet or more, not one foot. Your mileage may vary.

For those of you not watching the Point Barrow camera feed, over the last few days the ice in front of the camera http://feeder.gina.alaska.edu/webcam-uaf-barrow-seaice-images/current/image mostly went away. There is now some ice right at the shore, and liquid water out to what appears to be the horizon. The change was very dramatic.

"the winter maximum has not been going down" Yes, Lake Erie still freezes. Until the winter in the Arctic is uniformly warmer than around -2C, there will still be a local skim coating of ice in places.

I am so not amused to note that I received in the mail a piece of agitprop from the Heartland Institute claiming that lead global warming deniers are scientists, and lead global warming advocates are only politicians.

Meanwhile in the recent half year temperatures in Antarctica have in some areas been running 20 not 2.0 20 degrees C above historical average. Also, on the scale of the Bremen map -- but perhaps not if you put a boat in the water -- the southernmost northwest passage appears to be open.

I said: "Now down to 50% over impressively large areas." Readers can clearly see the *impressively large area*on the pretty color picture. Looking at the picture, the area is from slightly above 9 o'clock much of the way to 12 o'clock and (if the circles are 5 degrees of latitude each) roughly from 73 to 77 N. That is a huge area of green and yellow (close to 50% coverage) relative to some other periods. Whether the area in question goes below 15% remains to be seen. The open Northeast and close northwest passages are both clearly visible.

The 8/7/2014 and 8/8/2014 Bremen AMSR2 figures for the area north of Alaska and Khamchatka are suddenly showing a remarkable reduction in the ice extent, now down to 50% over impressively large areas. YMMV.

And now the end-of-July PSC graph shows we are still more or less at the long term declining trend, while today's (8/5) Bremen picture shows extensive areas of partial coverage. On the scale of the Bremen image, the Northeast passage is now open, though at one point the opening is really narrow and close to shore. The Northwest passage is still closed on the scale of the Bremen map.

There was indeed telephone in that period. Returning to a century ago, my late grandfather had just finished the local equivalent of High School, near Pecs, Hungary, and was about to enroll as an undergraduate in the Royal Hungarian Polytechnic Institute in Budapest. (He finished in 1919 in Mechanical Engineering, exactly 50 years before I completed my undergraduate degrees). He was on vacation with relatives someplace near the Serbian border. The day after the assassination of the Archduke, my greatgrandfather telephoned him to report that the assassination had occurred, there would surely be war, so he should come home as soon as possible.

Antarctic ice cap volume is declining markedly. When the fresh water of the melt hits the Antarctic Sea, which is very cold, it tends to freeze, and about half the volume outflow shows up in winter as extra sea area...that will melt next summer. The exact details of the process have not been completely modelled...it mostly goes away in the summer...but the increase in antarctic winter ice volume is about a tenth the arctic volume loss. The proposal that there is a simple cycle between the two hemispheres, or that Antarctic ice is progressively increasing in the last two decades, is dramatically rejected by the 2012 data, where ice coverage was remarkably low in both hemispheres.

The 6/23 AQUA setting on the Kane block at http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/kane.uk.php appears to show a very substantial number of blocks of ice that have broken free and are moving equatorward at the Nares Ice Bridge.

6/22 evening Nares is now hiding under cloud. However, the IJIS SIE is showing a marked steepening in the last couple of days.

Once again, having been wrong several times before, I shall propose that I see a chunk of ice breaking off from the Nares ice bridge and heading equatorward, visible in the 6/21 images at DMI as a white triangle. Once again I expect that I will not be convincing in my report.

Based on a casual reading, an obvious question becomes: What is the North Atlantic Oscillation doing this year?

If you look hard at the picture of the Nares ice bridge for 5/22, as seen at the dmi site, you note at the northeasternmost part of the polyna a long very pointy trail of what appears to be ice fragments headed off into the polyna in about the 8 o'clock direction...a trail not there in the past, and advancing into the ice in about the two-o'clock direction a rumpled appearance. It might be proposed that the Nares ice bridge is contemplating letting go.

Readers interested in seeing melt ponds, open water, floating ice, landfast ice, and melting frozen soil, all in one picture in which you can see small details, may find the Barrow webcam http://feeder.gina.alaska.edu/webcam-uaf-barrow-seaice-images/current/image to be of some interest.

Depending on whose algorithm you trust, sea ice are is now approximately as low as it has ever been for this date, more or less tied with a couple of years ago. Note the IJIS graph in particular.

Looking at the Bremen map, there appears to be a larger than typical for this season polyna south of the Nares strait. But perhaps I misremember. Is the ice bridge still in place?

The film The Deadly Mantis used encapsulation in a glacier that finally calved. The plot assumed that there has been continuous ice in the Arctic for the last 60 million years. Minor technical issues with the laws of aerodynamics might also be queried. The center of Greenland two miles up, was in the year 1800 challenging to reach, and might have been viewed as a good choice for hiding that which man was not meant to know.

The hard part is the 'gets there in the year 1800', with 2 points for creativity to the 1800 hours interpretation. Without knowing the type of novel, one notes as transport methods 'dedicated traveller, plans trip as one way to deliver box, return certainly not', Frankenstein, witch with broomstick. I believe period hydrogen balloons were not up to free ballooning trips of that length, even assuming freakish winds. However, given that the author has a solution,with extreme luck the object might make a few cycles through the ice and appear in -- your mileage may vary -- 1830.

It is perhaps noteworthy that the Bremen map is showing incomplete ice cover almost up to the pole, in late February. That strikes me as being a bit radical relative to years past, but perhaps I misremember.