According to NASA, June through September 2007 brought record sea ice melt in the Arctic. The amount of ice was well below the previous record low, set in September 2005, 38 percent below average and 24 percent below the 2005 record. This particular agency operates the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer Instrument on the Aqua satellite, so--skeptics are reminded that most of the Global Warming supporters are scientists. A corollary would be that most of the skeptics are not.

It's hard for non-scientists to comprehend the tools of the researchers. It's harder still to understand how the results can be used to predict the future of anything so difficult as the temperature in future years. It's quite normal for anyone unfamiliar with scientists, their use of computer simulations or baffling equations to say "How can you possibly say that the temperature of the world will be so many degrees higher than now! We can't even predict the weather in Podunk next week!"

One major difference between predicting weather changes and predicting climate changes is that weather is a local phenomenon. A hurricane in Florida may mean that there will be rain in the Northeast (somewhere) and that it might be heavy (or light) and it may come in three days (or next week). Climate is another animal. The key word in Global Warming is "GLOBAL." Data from around the world is accumulated and fed into the many computer programs that provide the results that the atmospheric scientists use to come to their conclusions.

Well, why is the loss of ice in the Arctic so important?

What color is ice? White, of course. What happens to the sunlight that falls on white objects? It is reflected. What if it wasn't reflected? It would be absorbed. If we were talking about a white shirt, the wearer would not feel hot because of the reflection. If it is a dark shirt the heat from the sun would be absorbed by the shirt and the wearer would feel hot.

Then a loss of ice in the arctic would mean that less sunlight would be reflected into space and that it would be absorbed by the Earth instead.