No, I'm not confused.
>Sea ice as a whole is decreasing as expected
And no, it isn't.
While it is hard to obtain the number from NSIDC, since they've stopped reporting it since it doesn't fit the narrative:
"Why don’t you publish a global sea ice extent number?
The combined number, while easy to derive from our online posted data, is not useful as an analysis tool or indicator of climate trends." (http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/faq/#combined)
...you can still dig up some charts. Here's a few:
https://nsidc.org/sites/nsidc.org/files/images//arc_antarc_1...
Or here: http://www.cato.org/blog/spinning-global-sea-ice
As it turns out, I have been a bit hyperbolic I'll admit (I was going on memory). But the fact is combined sea ice isn't "decreasing as expected" as you say. It's above average. And the original post I was responding to that claimed "we have incredible sea ice lows" is also nonsense. We don't, we have some loss in the northern hemisphere and gains on a similar scale in the south.
> I easily imagine how this has been spun in certain circles
If you want to talk about "spinning in certain circles", you might want to ask why we hear endlessly about the decline in arctic ice, how it is seen as confirmation of the global warming hypothesis because it happens to fit the predictions, and yet at the other end of the globe we see large sea ice increases being ignored, dissembled and explained away with theories about ocean currents or wind patterns. That's not science, that's confirmation bias.