Arctic Ice Melting at Record Pace

There are several articles out there on the record melting of the polar ice cap. You can see a revealing map here, and a nice summary here, an older article here, and another summary here. The parts that stood out to me, and which should get the attention of even the most die hard skeptic, were this:

"The Arctic ice cap is melting much faster than expected and is now about 30 years ahead of predictions made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.S. ice expert said on Tuesday.

This means the ocean at the top of the world could be free or nearly free of summer ice by 2020, three decades sooner than the global panel's gloomiest forecast of 2050."

Generally with trendy, alarmist bullshit, as some claim anthropocentric global warming is, the predictions tend to get further away, or stay distant. Con artists have to do this to prevent themselves from being disproven. The scientists' behavior is the polar opposite of what we'd expect if it were just a bunch of treehugging BS. Then there is the Ward Hunt ice shelf:

"...the largest single block of ice in the Arctic, the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, had been around for 3,000 years before it started cracking in 2000. Within two years it had split all the way through and is now breaking into pieces."

3,000 years. That thing has been frozen for 3,000 years, virtually all of recorded human history, and now it's melting away. That has got to get your attention.