If you think it’s been a rough spell for the universal-health-care crowd, imagine what the global warmists have been going through this summer. We just had our single coldest July on record in six U.S. states, second-coldest in four others, and so on. I know, I know—one month isn’t statistically significant unless it’s a hot month. But if you loathe—er, love mankind, don’t despair. With a little negative . . . I mean positive . . . thinking, the sky may yet fall:

In July, “we saw acceleration in loss of ice,” the U.S. [National Snow and Ice Data] center’s Walt Meier told The Associated Press. In recent days the pace has slowed, making a record-breaking final minimum “less likely but still possible,” he said.

This guy sounds kind of crestfallen. If only his beloved planet would stop playing around and boil already! People can continue to call climatology a science if they wish, but just imagine a cancer researcher reading the latest cancer stats, seeing that incidents of the most fatal types have fallen from a recent high, then flopping into his chair with his head in his hands.

But the best part of the story comes next:

“We need some warm temperatures with easterly or southeasterly winds to break up and move this ice to the north,” Mark Schrader, skipper of the sailboat “Ocean Watch,” e-mailed The Associated Press from the west entrance to the passage.

The steel-hulled sailboat, with scientists joining it at stops along the way, is on a 25,000-mile (40,232-kilometer), foundation-financed circumnavigation of the Americas, to view and demonstrate the impact of climate change on the continents’ environments.

In other words, researchers hoping to assess the dire ice loss are being obstructed by . . . too much ice.