Meanwhile, antarctic sea ice is at a record high... for some reason.

The ice decided to move south for the winter?

https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/nasa-study-shows-global-sea-ice-diminishing-despite-antarctic-gains

This: “One of the reasons people care about sea ice decreases is that sea ice is highly reflective whereas the liquid ocean is very absorptive,” Parkinson said. “So when the area of sea ice coverage is reduced, there is a smaller sea ice area reflecting the sun’s radiation back to space. This means more retention of the sun’s radiation within the Earth system and further heating.”

Parkinson doesn’t find it likely that the Antarctic sea ice expansion will accelerate and overturn the global sea ice negative trend in the future.

“I think that the expectation is that, if anything, in the long-term the Antarctic sea ice growth is more likely to slow down or even reverse,” she said.

Parkinson calculated and published the global results after witnessing the public’s confusion about whether Antarctic sea ice gain might be cancelling out Arctic sea ice loss.

“When I give public lectures or talk with random people interested in the topic, often somebody will say something in the order of ‘well, the ice is decreasing in the Arctic but it’s increasing in the Antarctic, so don’t they cancel out?’” Parkinson said. “The answer is no, they don’t cancel out.”

Well that's unfortunate. Isn't the Arctic 36 degrees hotter right now than it should be?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/11/17/the-north-pole-is-an-insane-36-degrees-warmer-than-normal-as-winter-descends/

Geege is there an article that accompanies this chart?

Much debate:

http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/17/13667630/global-sea-ice-concentration-graph-science-twitter

Here's an article from the agency that provided the chart:

NSIDChttp://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

Cool. So what have we learned?

Dis: 

As noted in our post last month, the Arctic is losing it’s oldest and thickest ice. A new animation from NASA Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio shows this loss over the past 30 years. 

October 2016 compared to previous years

What frightens me is that there's no way for humans to restore the ice once it has melted. 

So it's not just trickle-down ice-o-nomics??

Haha, no. They don't seem related. 

And yet Trump is getting rid of NASA climate change research.

http://pandawhale.com/post/73972/donald-trump-will-scrap-nasas-climate-change-research-because-it-is-too-politicized