In her July 3rd “Obama to seek climate deal in Moscow” article, the Guardian’s Suzanne Goldenberg reported that, on his current trip, President Barack Obama is seeking to entice Russia into keeping the Kyoto process alive, in advance of talks on a successor to the five year plan that expires at the end of 2012.

In its story, the paper writes “‘I think there is a much more realistic appraisal about the potential pros and cons of climate change. It is hard for them to ignore what is happening in the Arctic [which is warming rapidly],’ said (Andrew Kuchins of the Russia programme at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies).”

The bracketed claim to Arctic melting was inserted by the author, a sensible quantification there if substantively warranted. Here, it isn’t.

In fact, just last week we learned that the average arctic temperature had remained below 32 degrees F/0 degrees C until the latest date in fifty years of modern instrumented record keeping. The summer of 2007 did see a large Arctic ice melt – though not in the Antarctic, though global warming theorists universally project warming as being a pronounced bi-polar phenomenon. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory attributed 2007 to strong Arctic winds – not any “warming” theory – and indeed the ice recovered to “normal” levels since satellite data begin in 1979, by the end of summer holding at a 9% increase over the previous year.

A melting Arctic remains a commonly invoked talking point among the media, activists and politicians. The problem for this is that the observational data simply do not support the claim.