Back in 2007, when the Arctic ice field experienced a dramatic reduction in extent, Global Warming Alarmists declared that the Arctic had reached a tipping point.    In the following August, even though the sea ice didn’t disappear as dramatically, Global Warming Alarmists declared that we were reaching the point of no return, that in the next five to ten years, the summer Arctic would be completely free of ice, and the polar bears would die. An AP article captured the dire warnings.

“We could very well be in that quick slide downward in terms of passing a tipping point,” said senior scientist Mark Serreze at the data center in Boulder, Colo. “It’s tipping now. We’re seeing it happen now.”

Within “five to less than 10 years,” the Arctic could be free of sea ice in the summer, said NASA ice scientist Jay Zwally.

Have these dire predictions come true?  No, in fact, the reverse seems to be happening.

NASA has speculated that the dramatic sea ice melt during  the summer of 2007 was due to  unusual wind conditions which caused the Arctic Ocean sea ice to get blown out into the warmer Atlantic and melt.

Nghiem said the rapid decline in winter perennial ice the past two years was caused by unusual winds. “Unusual atmospheric conditions set up wind patterns that compressed the sea ice, loaded it into the Transpolar Drift Stream and then sped its flow out of the Arctic,” he said. When that sea ice reached lower latitudes, it rapidly melted in the warmer waters.

This left an unusually small area of summer sea ice, that was the least amount since 1979, approximately a million square miles less.

The minimum sea ice extent in 2008 was more than a million square miles greater than in 2007 (nearly one third of the anomaly from the 1979 to 2000 average).  In 2009 that minimum was about one and a half million square miles less than in 2007.    How can this possibly be happening?

After the large melt off in 2007, the Arctic went back to normal deep freeze conditions.   The sea ice extent anomaly from average was back to fairly normal levels,  and large areas of the Arctic ocean were once again covered with ice.   From three million square miles of of ice in the summer of 2007 to nearly fourteen million square miles in the winter of 2008, the Arctic refroze.  But, much of this ice was newly formed ice.  And, newly formed ice melts easier in the spring, so again in 2008, sea ice extent dropped abruptly in the summer.  But not as much.   This pattern repeated itself for the next melt-freeze cycle with each melt being much less drastic as the previous years as more and more year old ice survived the summer melt.   The abrupt melting caused by the unusual wind conditions in 2007 is slowly being repaired.   The tipping point has un-tipped,  we have returned from the point of no return.

This graph is from The Cryosphere Today, and has been altered to just show the years 2007 to present. The complete graph can be found HERE.   The green line is a trend line showing the sea ice anomaly during the winter months, while the red line is a trend line during the summer when the extent is at it’s minimum.   Both show a trend towards the 1979 to 2000 year average anomaly.