It took me a while to get sufficiently irritated by another diary to toss out a response. And I will get right to it. The ice is still there. It has not collapsed. It will not collapse like the Larsen B ice shelf. The Polar Ice Cap is not an ice shelf. It's just a lot of floating ice and it's not continuous (at least not at this time of the year). Yes, it has melted more than ever before. But that was obvious back in May, June, July and now August. The Arctic Ice Cap has been melting faster than ever before since the start of the melt season. It has been tracked as such and even diaried as such. This kind of hysterical hyperbole is nice in the sense that it draws attention to a major problem, but frankly it lessens the credibility of those who oooo and ahhh over exageration.
If you want to check, the NOAA tracks this all the time. You can even do day to day, year to year comparisons. There is an NOAA web site and an ftp site ftp://polar.ncep.noaa.gov/pub/history/ice/nh. They show ice coverage from different perspectives based on different types of sensing parameters.
Yes, global warming is a problem. We're messing up our environment in more ways than one. The big problem is what we're doing about it. The government (and not just the US) response to the melting arctic ice so far has been...it's mine! Referring of course to the potential oil and gas. WTF. This complete lack of perspective is what we should all be worrying about.