Hey Bill D Where is your direct response to the NOAA stats that show the last 3 winters in Maryland have been getting colder when you said "in Maryland just had a record Dec. snowfall.... now it is well above freezing again, and the snow will soon be gone. The last few years have been quite warm Winters."? Do you use the "fudge factor" in your calculations? I did see something about Alaska.

Gore: The "entire north polar ice cap, which has been there for most of the last 3 million years, is disappearing before our eyes. Forty percent is already gone. The rest is expected to go completely within the next decade."

The north polar ice cap is melting at rates that are certainly cause for concern. But it’s not going quite as fast as Gore says. Gore’s 40 percent figure is outdated. Arctic ice levels, as measured by the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, were 40 percent lower at the end of the summer of 2007 than the average observed from 1979 to 2000. But the totals have actually increased for two consecutive years since. According to a release from the group, the average ice cover was 5.36 million square kilometers for the month of September 2009, compared with the 1979 to 2000 September average of 7.04 million square kilometers. That’s a difference of about 24 percent, nearly half what Gore said.

And Gore was wildly off the mark when he predicted that all Arctic ice would "go completely within the next decade."

We should point out that ice levels in the Arctic region change seasonally. During the summer months some ice melts, and then waters freeze again in winter as the temperature goes down. The levels of summer melting have been going up for a number of years, and this could eventually lead to very minimal ice coverage during the summer.

One researcher, Wieslaw Maslowski of the Naval Post-Graduate School, made a projection in 2007 that a nearly ice-free arctic summer might occur as early as 2013, though he recently moved that back to 2020. But saying the north polar ice cap will be entirely gone is hyperbole. Even the most dramatic projections, such as Maslowski’s, do not say the ice would be gone during the winter months.