Me: “I don’t believe in global warming.”

Friend:  “but what about the melting Arctic sea ice?”

Me:  “What about the increasing Antarctic sea ice?  It makes no sense that the Arctic sea ice is melting but the Antarctic ice pack is growing.  There must be some other explanation for the melting of the Arctic ice…”

Maybe it’s all those volcanoes…

“Recent massive volcanoes have risen from the ocean floor deep under the Arctic ice cap, spewing plumes of fragmented magma into the sea, scientists who filmed the aftermath reported Wednesday.

The eruptions — as big as the one that buried Pompei — took place in 1999 along the Gakkel Ridge, an underwater mountain chain snaking 1,800 kilometres (1,100 miles) from the northern tip of Greenland to Siberia.

[…]

This earthquake swarm was the largest in recorded history along a spreading mid-ocean ridge and prompted researchers to return to the area for further investigation.

In 2007 Sohn and his team stumbled across the glassy pyroclastic rock deposits while searching for hydrothermal vent fields in the Gakkel Ridge.

Powerful eruptions sent a plume of carbon dioxide, helium, and liquid lava up into the Arctic waters. When the material cooled, rock debris fell to the ocean floor, he explained.”

“The dispersal of the particles does not necessarily indicate that the eruptions were highly energetic, only that the eruption heated the surrounding seawater and the rising plume of heated water carried the lava fragments upwards where currents could disperse them,” Clague said.

Hmmm.  And these volcanoes are directly under the areas where the Arctic sea ice has been the thinnest.  And the thinning began the year that the volcanoes occured…that’s interesting.