Humans are really bad at long-term thinking. As long as we are okay right here and right now we don't do anything differently.

The politics thread is full of discussion of the U.S. healthcare system and the U.S. budget deficit. Both are disasters waiting to happen, but until there is a disaster nothing meaningful will be done.

It will not be until climate change hits wealthier nations in their pocketbooks--and the hit is recognized as the result of climate change--that there will be an interest in making changes.

Three good graph animations showing how Arctic sea ice has declined in area, extent, and volume.

Of the three, volume is the most notable one because it includes thickness of ice, or multi-year ice. That is ice that stays around year after year because it is too thick to melt in the summer season. That multi-year ice is declining so increasingly the Arctic ice cap is made up of single year thin ice which melts every year (this leads to a drop in sea ice area in the summer season). Even though the area of the ice may look similar at the height of freeze-over in the winter, it is in reality much thinner and much less resistant to melting in the summer (hence, disappears faster).

You can read about the difference between extent and area here.

On the anecdotal side of things, I've spent the last 3 spring to fall seasons working up near the Hudson Bay coastline and in the lowlands. Consistently, the First Nation people who live there tell me about how the ice is very late forming (2 months or more), comes off early, and is bad ice even when it has formed. The winter roads are good for 3 weeks (if that) when it used to be six weeks. They're seeing birds they don't have any names for. The changes aren't subtle changes.

Sea ice extent now at fifth lowest of all time, and it still has another month of melting to go. As of now, it is 80% certain it will break the lowest extent record from 2007. Greenland ice sheet also has experienced unprecedented melt too.

Was sent a link to an article from the Economist in which the authors looked at the distribution of temperatures a decade at a time. The resulting graph was a series of overlapping normal curves with each subsequent decade being to the right (representing higher temps) than the one before.

Is that the Hansen et al. study? That's making headlines in a few places. Also the discussion paper.

Tamino (Grant Foster(?), who recently published with some of the RealClimate contributors) has some minor critiques of Hansen's study. He does some simple instructive analysis well worth reading.

Hm, just noticed sea ice area set a new record low and there is still a couple of weeks of melting time left.

It would appear that Hansen is indeed the source paper for the comments I was reading.

I would emphasize that the critique is indeed minor--I say this only because some have a tendency to dismiss a paper they don't like if there is any criticism of it. In this case the criticism is that the second statistical finding is probably correct, but a different analysis would be appropriate to demonstrate that conclusion more conclusively.

Yes, I should have mentioned the critique doesn't change the conclusions, especially considering how some are still strangely fixated on a 14-year old hockey stick study that has long since been reaffirmed by numerous other and independent studies using different proxies and methodologies.

Sea ice extent record now broken. Under 4 million sq km for first time in recorded history. Still more melting season to go.

And sea ice volume record broken. Three for three (extent, area, volume) and still with two weeks or so of melting to take place yet.

As usual, the IPCC again underestimated the decline, which isn't surprising because it is a very conservative document as it had to be signed off even by the very very conservative members.
http://scienceprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/SeaIceDecline_591.gif

July was the 329th consecutive month in which global temps were above the 20th century average. http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/

That is 27 years, 3 months, of months above average (probably 1950-1980 baseline???). Likely August will be the 330th month. Should make bets as to how long the streak will last. There is a 10,000 dollar bet for 2016 ice cover with one guy putting ice down around 3.1 and the other guy saying it will recover way up to nearly 5 (highly unlikely).