The Clean Industrial Revolution

One of the big surprises over the last few years since the publication of the IPCC has been the acceleration in summer-time melting of the Arctic sea-ice (see the NSIDC for more).  The issue of having sea-ice free Arctic summer due to high Northern Hemisphere warming isn’t new, but the timing of which this is projected to occur has been considerably underestimated by most climate models.  Since the record melting of the summer 2007 and then the second highest melting in summer 2008, there is much anticipation and hope of a recovery during the current summer in 2009.  Unfortunately, real-time data suggest although the 2009 data isn’t at the record 2007 levels, they are tracking worse than 2008 levels – see below.