One thing I might remind Eugene, Megan, Katie and the rest of the "follow the ice caps" folks, is that there are two poles on the planet and two polar ice caps: a north one and a south one. And only one has been shrinking. Also, our records of them go back only 30 years, a relative blip in time when talking global climate change.
When temperatures get cooler over a decade or few, alarmists blame it on ocean currents or something temporary we should ignore. The BBC, in its article Next decade 'may see no warming', explains it for us.
"The key to the new prediction is the natural cycle of ocean temperatures called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), which is closely related to the warm currents that bring heat from the tropics to the shores of Europe.
"The cause of the oscillation is not well understood, but the cycle appears to come round about every 60 to 70 years.
"'One message from our study is that in the short term, you can see changes in the global mean temperature that you might not expect given the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),' said Noel Keenlyside from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University."
So you see, there are 60-70 year cycles that (a) are "not well understood" and (b) "you might not expect" to see in global mean temperature, given that the models the IPCC uses do not include them.
But in spite of all that, what happens with the north polar ice cap (2% of the earth's surface) in a 30 year period trumps everything, trust us. (The arctic ice sheet averages about 10 million square kilometers, varying between about 4 and 16 million each year. The area of the entire globe is about 510 million square kilometers. So the arctic ice cap represents less than 2% of the earth's surface.)
What these people are doing is taking only one of the two ice caps, the north one, and the difference in its extent over the most recent 30 years. That proves nothing about "global" anything. It is one tiny part of the planet over one relatively short time span.
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