You hear it all around from global warming alarmists: Arctic Sea ice is melting at an “irreversible” rate due to global warming, and it won’t be able to recover. But it seems the reports of Arctic Sea ice disappearance have been greatly exaggerated:

In fact, Arctic sea ice extent as a whole seems to be stabilizing despite this year’s record low maximum in February. NSIDC data shows Arctic sea ice extent is currently within the normal range based on the 1981 to 2010 average extent.

“Global sea ice is at a record high, another key indicator that something is working in the opposite direction of what was predicted,” Dr. Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Forum, told the U.K. Express in January.

“Most people think the poles are melting… they’re not,” he said. “This is a huge inconvenience that reality is now catching up with climate alarmists, who were predicting that the poles would be melting fairly soon.”

The Arctic Sea ice trends are actually quite variable. About as variable as glacier melt, actually. Which means that the only way to create a compelling trend is to cherry-pick data. Which seems to be just about exactly what global warming alarmists have been doing.

This continues a much more predictable trend among global warming scientists. You can’t entirely blame them. The fact is that creating predictions for complex and highly variable natural phenomena is a bit of a crap shoot. Things seem to be going a certain direction until they’re not. And even when you are able to accurately graph certain trends, the causation for those trends is not necessarily any easier to ascertain. Even if there has been a warming or a melting trend, that doesn’t necessarily mean that human involvement or greenhouse gases are to blame.

And the vanishing point on these trends continues to fluctuate. Some climate scientists are saying that the Arctic Sea will be free of ice during summers as soon as 2040. They thought it might be earlier than that just a few years ago. But the change of things keeps changing, and coming up with accurate long-term predictions continues to be aiming at a moving target. The only thing that hasn’t changed is the agenda. And that’s what really concerns me.