Don't sell your skis or your alpine chalet just yet, and hold off that summer cruise to Japan via the Northwest passage. This year has seen a 60 percent increase in Artic sea ice and the seas have been blocked by pack-ice all summer. Currently a cruise ship and twenty yachts are blocked by ice in the Artic ocean before the winter freeze even starts.
A report, leaked to the Mail on Sunday, from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has led to some leading scientists claiming we are heading for a period of cooling that may last until the middle of the century. In 2007 the BBC reported “conservative” forecasts that the Artic would be ice-free from this summer. Major research centers now accept what many visitors to the alps have witnessed with their own eyes, that global warming has paused since 1997. It seems that long term climate cycles have more influence than was previously thought and the computer models are too sensitive to carbon dioxide levels.
Over in the Guardian they put the sea ice levels down to regression toward the mean, that is, if there is an extreme value such as in 2012 then the next value will be close to average.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2415191/Global-cooling-Arctic-ice-caps-grows-60-global-warming-predictions.html
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2013/sep/09/climate-change-arctic-sea-ice-delusions
