Catching up on comments

I'm on my way back from break and catching up in general, not just on comments. It looks like several species of bizarreness chose to break loose while I was taking my break, and it'll be a while to catch up to those too.

Several comments in on summer reading.  My current summer reading is The Karamazov Brothers, by Fyodor Dostoevsky.  It's the Wordsworth Classics edition, which I picked up for about $4.50 in St. Petersburg, Russia.  Yes, there's a story involved, and I'll get to that in a later note.  There might even be a picture or two.

Two more comments on When will the ice be gone?.  Ecologists are a good group to try to get ideas from (per Hank's comment about how to get an idea of what levels of ice loss are particularly meaningful).  And I see that Belette and I have an area of interesting agreement, [update, that's disagreement] which suggests a later post to be made.  Our point of broader agreement is that neither of us takes my estimate in that post terribly seriously.  My aim being more to illustrate a way to approach the question.  The exact answer ... not so important.

Crandles has some thoughts about Sea ice estimations.  One quick response I'll make is that a reason for some of the variation, or lack thereof, is that the curves are for 14 day averages.  Consequently, you won't see much happening at shorter time scales.