Watts Up With That often has discussions about Sea Ice. Invariably this discussion centers around the fact that the Northern Hemisphere Sea Ice Extent and "Anomaly" are below the 1979-200x mean or average.
I'm still trying to figure out why we should care about the completely arbitrary mean, and whether current conditions are exactly on the mean. Are conditions EVER going to be right at the mean? I doubt it.
I know why 1979 is used as a starting point, because that's when satellites were first introduced to measure such things. The problem is, we're looking at such a short period of time. There is no possible way this tells us whether conditions now or over the last 33 years are unprecedented or completely normal. It's tantamount to waking up one morning, seeing that it's raining, and then, 5 minutes later when it's still raining, proclaiming a global flood is about to occur.
