If you stumbled across an alarming chart about sea ice on Twitter last month and doomsday scenarios immediately leaped into your head, you’re not alone.

What the graph illustrates is true: There’s substantially less sea ice in the world than ever before. The Arctic ― and, for completely unrelated reasons, the Antarctic ― just closed out November with less ice than any other year in history.

But the real cause for alarm isn’t last month’s warming blip in the Arctic that temporarily stalled ice growth, an anomaly that happens from time to time. Nor is it the concurrent loss of ice in the Antarctic ― since, to the best of our knowledge, the behavior of sea ice in one hemisphere has nothing to do with the behavior of sea ice in the other.

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