How cold? Anthony Watts reports that the drop from January 2007 to January 2008 "appears to be the largest single year to year January drop for the entire GISS data set."

Of course, we're not likely to hear much about record breaking cold, but Watts goes on:

This is yet one more indication of the intensity of planet-wide cooler temperatures seen in January 2008, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere, which has seen record amounts of snow coverage extent as well as new record low surface temperatures in many places.

Which has had the not surprising effect of restoring much of the sea ice lost last summer. The CBC reports:

Satellite images are showing that the cold spell is helping the sea ice expand in coverage by about 2 million square kilometres, compared to the average winter coverage in the previous three years.

"It's nice to know that the ice is recovering," Josefino Comiso, a senior research scientist with the Cryospheric Sciences Branch of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, told CBC News on Thursday.

"That means that maybe the perennial ice would not go down as low as last year."

So what, Al Gore might say. The problem isn't the extent of the ice, but the thickness. Well...

The cold is also making the ice thicker in some areas, compared to recorded thicknesses last year, Lagnis added.

"The ice is about 10 to 20 centimetres thicker than last year, so that's a significant increase," he said.

I'm starting to think that the left only pays attention to the Arctic in the summer--when it's supposed to melt.