According a chart published on Sept. 9 by the National Snow and Ice Data Center, the sea ice covering the Arctic for August 2013 was nearly 60 percent higher than the same time last year. However, both climate change skeptics and advocates can hold back their comments, because the issues around climate change have just gotten more complex.

When it comes to climate change and global temperatures, it’s all about looking at the long-term. The name of the game here is climate, which is the measure of conditions over a long period of time (decades) and a way to determine if the changes are persistent. The NSIC center reports that sea ice extent for August 2013 averaged 2.35 million square miles, which was well above the level recorded last year—the lowest September extent in the satellite record—but 398,000 square miles below the 1981 to 2010 average for August.

What these annual contrasts show is the year-to-year variability in sea ice covering the Arctic. Look at the overall picture, and you’ll find that the pattern is still tending toward the long-term decline in sea ice extent. This year’s August extent was the sixth lowest in the 1979 to 2013 satellite record. It was similar to the years 2008 to 2010, with 2007 being the second lowest and 2011 as the third lowest.

Many scientists have agreed that global warming has slowed in the last decade, and have offered various explanations for it. For example, scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California in San Diego have found that cooling in the eastern Pacific Ocean has slowed down earth’s warming, a natural phenomenon.

Most scientists recognize climate change’s extreme complexity, whereas journalists on both sides have jumped at each new discovery as a way to disprove or bolster the gloom-and-doom stories. A 2007 BBC report stated the Arctic could be free of ice in the summers by 2013, while Fox News in posted yesterday that Earth in fact may be in a “global cooling” stage. Meanwhile, both

While August 2013 has come and gone, NASA still holds firmly to the prediction of ice-free Arctic summers. “[An ice-free Arctic is] definitely coming, and coming sooner than we previously expected,“ Walt Meier, a glaciologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md, told LiveScience last month. “We’re looking at when as opposed to if.”

Whether that time will come, and come soon, is to remain a prediction made and tested by time. In the meantime, one thing is certain: journalists will fight over who was right and who was wrong.