A chilly Arctic summer has left 533,000 more square miles of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year – an increase of 29 per cent.
The rebound from 2012's record low comes six years after the BBC reported that global warming would leave the Arctic ice-free in summer by 2013.
Instead, days before the annual autumn re-freeze is due to begin, an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia's northern shores.
HOW NSIDC GOT ITS FIGURES WRONG AND THEN KEPT QUIET
Since publication of the original version of this article, the US source of the figures – the NASA-funded National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) - was discovered to have made a huge error and then quietly corrected the figure without mentioning it.
On September 4, NSIDC, based at the University of Colorado, stated on its website that in August 2013 the Arctic ice cover recovered by a record 2.38 million sq km – 919,000 sq miles – from its 2012 low.
News of this figure was widely reported – including by Mailonline - on September 8. But on September 10, the NSIDC quietly changed it to 1.38 million sq km (533,000 sq miles) – and replaced the original document so the old figure no longer shows up on a main Google search. It can now only be found on an old 'cached' page.
The figures in this article have now been corrected.
Prompted by an inquiry from 'green' blogger Bob Ward, the NSIDC's spokeswoman Natasha Vizcarra said the mistake was a 'typographical error', telling him: 'There are no plans to make a statement on the change because it was not an error in the data.'
The Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific has remained blocked by pack-ice all year. More than 20 yachts that had planned to sail it have been left ice-bound and a cruise ship attempting the route was forced to turn back.
Some eminent scientists now believe the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century – a process that would expose computer forecasts of imminent catastrophic warming as dangerously misleading.
The disclosure comes 11 months after The Mail on Sunday triggered intense political and scientific debate by revealing that global warming has 'paused' since the beginning of 1997 – an event that the computer models used by climate experts failed to predict.
In March, this newspaper further revealed that temperatures are about to drop below the level that the models forecast with '90 per cent certainty'.
The pause – which has now been accepted as real by every major climate research centre – is important, because the models' predictions of ever-increasing global temperatures have made many of the world's economies divert billions of pounds into 'green' measures to counter climate change.
Those predictions now appear gravely flawed.
The continuing furore caused by The Mail on Sunday's revelations – which will now be amplified by the return of the Arctic ice sheet – has forced the UN's climate change body to reconsider its position.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was due in October to start publishing its Fifth Assessment Report – a huge three-volume study issued every six or seven years. It will hold a pre-summit in Stockholm later this month.