What a wonderful parable of our time has been the expedition to the North Pole for measuring the thickness of the ice to show how fast it is declining

The only problem with a project to prove that Arctic ice is disappearing, says Christopher Booker in the Daily Telegraph, is the fact that… it is actually getting thicker (cheers to J. H. Colter).

With perfect timing, the setting out from Britain of the “Global Warming Three” last month was hampered by “an unusually heavy snowfall”. When they were airlifted to the start of their trek by a twin-engine Otter (one hopes a whole forest has been planted to offset its “carbon footprint”), they were startled to find how cold it was. The BBC dutifully reported how, in temperatures of minus 40 degrees, they were “battered by wind, bitten by frost and bruised by falls on the ice”. …They were [later] disconcerted to see one of those polar bears, threatened with extinction by global warming, wandering around, doubtless eyeing them for its dinner.

…Professor Wieslaw Maslowski, whose team, according to the BBC, “is well known for producing results that show much faster ice-loss than other modelling teams” … predicts that summer ice could be completely gone as early as next year. It took the Watts Up With That? science blog to point out that there is little point in measuring ice thickness unless you do it several years running, and that, anyway, Arctic ice is being constantly monitored by US Army buoys. The latest reading given by a typical sensor shows that since last March the ice has thickened by “at least half a metre”.

“In most fields of science,” comments WUWT drily, “that is considered an 'increase’ rather than a 'decline’.”

Commentator Allan adds:

I work for a government agency. We are about to get a pile of money to study carbon neutral fuels that will reduce the AGW, so of course all the scientists “support” AGW on a professional level, yet we all doubt AGW is real, why, the claims of are unreal. The variations in the measurement coupled with the uncertainty make no sense.

Allan goes on to "ask some simple questions" while Tony B, who also says he works for a government agency, states that he is

equally aghast at the precision given to sea level rises. There is little real world evidence of any noticeable increase let alone one on the scale imagined by the IPCC.

I frequently complain in this forum of the reliance we place on the concept of global temperatures, let alone our believing we have enough objective evidence to parse it to fractions of a degree back to 1850.