jharkin
Minister of Fire
Sure it does, but the old growth ice that was miles thick took 10s and 100s of thousands of years to form and kept the surrounding ocean water cooler. This new growth ice is only 10s of feet thick in places and melts a lot faster. So one year of greater extent in no way means that the long term trend suddenly reversed as much as the deniers want to think it has.
The effect is that with all that thick ice melted, the upper north atlantic floods with cold melt water but also the overall net temperature of the oceans increases ever so slightly. It takes only a fraction of a degree temperature change in the North Atlantic to have large changes on the formation of atmospheric storms, change habitats or eventually do weird things like change the route of ocean currents. Some of the effects can be the opposite of what we expect - for instance if the temperature change moves the gulf stream the waters around the British isles could cool significantly causing them to have colder not warmer winters (Britain would be as cold as Canada without the warming effect of ocean currents). Also can paradoxically cause snowier winters in North America like we have seen. And other odd changes like that.
Changing the mean temperature of the Ocean also has a very very slight effect on sea levels, but i believe this is negligible compared to the effect of melting of land ice from the Greenland ice sheet (As we know, North pole ice is floating ice and doesn't change sea level significantly when it melts)
I have that and looking for two more right now.
