The NSIDC graphs published here every month documenting Sea Ice Extent (SIE) in the Arctic Ocean all look pretty much the same: a depressing decline of about 20 degrees in the time series of SIE values over the last forty years in each month.

This is potentially misleading, since the decline in SIE varies substantially depending on the season, that is, drop in SIE values is much more extreme in the summer months than it is in the winter season. The graph publishers stretch or compress the y-axis (SIE) so that all the graphs have approximately the same visual impact. In other words, the Arctic is losing ice much faster at the height of the melt season than it is in the middle of the freeze.

By looking in the NSIDC archives, I have extracted the drop in SIE levels for each month and published these values in a table for the last year to date. Starting with the latest released figures, for April 2020, the decline in Sea Ice Extent was 2.65% per decade. Note how this loss (represented by the slope of the blue regression line in each graph) varies from month to month. The loss increases dramatically in the summer, but it is always, consistently, unequivocally negative.

04/19…2.64 %/decade
05/19…2.74
06/19…4.08
07/19…7.32
08/19…10.52
09/19…12.90
10/19…9.80
11/19…5.02
12/19…3.60
01/20…3.15
02/20…2.91
03/20…2.6
04/20…2.65

Or to put it another way, over the last forty years, winter Sea Ice Extent has been declining at about 3 percent per decade. Summer SIE has been declining at about 13 percent per decade.

Just a reminder, that while the Corona virus ravages the people of earth, the planet itself continues suffering from a fever all its own.