Sept 18th 2019 was the SECOND lowest SIE of the last 40 years, just a shade lower than 2007, now relegated to third place.. Only the minimum of 2012 was any lower.

In a couple of weeks NSIDC will publish the September SIE average, a much more robust and useful figure than smooths out a lot of the day-to-day variability.

Why is this important? It shows that not only is the sea ice at the North Pole is disappearing, but that the ice loss has been most severe in the last decade. Each September in the 21st century has been warmer than all the last 30 years of the 20th century for which ice data has been available. The trend is not only down, it is dropping faster. It is not a cyclical or oscillating process, the bottom is just dropping out of the curve.

There is no doubt in my mind we will have our first ice-free summer polar sea within the next decade, and that we will have our first ice-free Arctic year-round before the end of this century. I have no doubt this will have profound consequences for the rest of the world, even places that are nowhere near the Arctic.