But long-term doesn’t look so good:

Arctic sea ice is unlikely to shrink below a 2007 record low this year in a reprieve from the worst predictions of climate change even though new evidence confirms a long-term thaw is under way, experts said.

The 2007 record raised worries of a melt that could leave the North Pole ice-free this year, threaten indigenous hunters and thaw ice vital for creatures such as polar bears. It would also help open the Arctic to shipping and oil and gas firms.

“It’s looking rather unlikely that we will beat the record sea ice minimum of 2007,” said Mark Serreze, a senior research fellow at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), adding there could still be surprises.

“The North Pole is likely safe for at least this year,” he said. The NSIDC had suggested in May that it was “quite possible” that the pole could be ice-free this year.

[...] Johannessen gave Reuters a hitherto unpublished study showing there was a 90 percent match between rising greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from use of fossil fuels, in recent decades and observations of a retreat of the ice.

“Ninety percent … of the decreasing sea-ice extent is empirically ‘accounted for’ by the increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” he wrote in the study, to be published next month in a journal by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

If the match continues to hold true, the annual average ice extent would be several million km smaller by 2050 than predicted by the U.N. Climate Panel, which draws on the work of 2,500 scientists, it said.

Serreze said that he stood by a prediction that the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free in summer by 2030, decades before predictions by the Panel.