To test this idea, Dr Hebets turned to her make-up bag and brought out two shades of nail varnish (NailSlicks, midnight metal and bronze ice, as her paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences quite properly describes in its materials and methods section, in case any other researcher wishes to replicate the experiment).

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In addition to findings of lower ice volumes in Autumn and Winter, a new paper from researchers at the University of Washington has confirmed that Arctic ice melts during the summer is also accelerating.

FORBES: Move up http://i.forbesimg.com t Move down

Think of all the energy expended in pumping that water, treating it, spraying it on crops, heating it for your shower, making it into ice, Coca-Cola, paper, and on and on.

FORBES: To Conserve Energy - Conserve Water

Rival sports paper AS is also predicting that Pellegrini is on thin ice: "One more defeat will cost Pellegrini his job, " it claimed.

CNN: Real coach Pellegrini feels heat

They seem to have won the argument: a paper long promised by Mr de Silguy has been put on ice.

ECONOMIST: European Union

In their Nature paper, the authors comment that their "findings suggest that the Antarctic Ice Sheet may be a neglected but important component of the global methane budget".

BBC: Antarctic may host methane stores

So we have a paper merely claiming that two out of three global temperature stations report the Little Ice Age is over.

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"Seymour's work provided evidence with which to propose and eventually launch the Cryosat mission, which is now - as his last paper describes - providing the first observations of the annual cycle of sea-ice growth and decay throughout the Arctic Ocean, " Dr Giles said.

BBC: Cryosat spots Arctic sea-ice loss in autumn