Arctic Sea Ice changes mainly due to Geography & not accelerating

A letter to the editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel supporting an AGW-skeptical politician was signed by 8 prominent scientists including Harvard astrophysicist Willie Soon, and mentions a recent paper published in Geophysical Research Letters:

"For example, a paper published Aug. 19 in Geophysical Research Letters by a scientist from the California Institute of Technology shows that even the apparently drastic decrease of summer-autumn Arctic sea ice is not unprecedented but merely an effect of Arctic Ocean geography."

The paper, Geographic muting of changes in the Arctic sea ice cover, undermines the notion that AGW is a primary cause of decrease of Arctic sea ice in summer-autumn by showing that the actual mechanism is related to Arctic geography, which restricts the buildup of winter sea ice and thus shifts the semi-sinusoidal pattern of summer-autumn ice melt northward at a constant (not accelerating) rate of 8km/yr since the beginning of the satellite era in 1979. This explains why September Arctic sea ice extent has declined much more rapidly (1.1%/yr) than March sea ice extent (.26%/yr) since 1979.

March Arctic Sea Ice extent decreasing only 0.26%/yr

Over the past 3 years the summer-autumn Arctic sea ice extent has increased from the low in 2007:

The paper provides further evidence that changes in Arctic sea ice are part of natural patterns dependent upon Arctic winds, geography, solar variability, Milankovitch cycles, ocean oscillations, etc. rather than AGW. A prior post has also demonstrated that it is impossible for 'greenhouse warming' to melt the icecaps from below.



References:

Explanation of the paper (translated from Icelandic)

A paper by the same author finds we are nowhere near a "tipping point" regarding Arctic Sea Ice

Even Tamino thinks the paper is correct