"But I feel an opening statement in the letter 'The Arctic Ocean may well be ice-free this summer', is unhelpful hyperbole"
I guess I'll take Professor Wadhams' judgment over yours, unless you happen to have more experience observing Arctic sea ice than Wadhams does. He of course makes no firm prediction here; he is just pointing out that we are essentially one summer with the right (wrong) weather away from an essentially ice-free Arctic. Given the state of much of the ice, I don't think that is such a wild conjecture. Of course, no on can no for sure what this summer's weather will be like in the Arctic.
It may indeed be 'unhelpful' though, in as much as it has no direct bearing on sea level rise. Thanks for bringing the letter to our attention. I think all of us have to be sounding the tocsin on slr and other GW-related issues. I used to be wary of putting too much emphasis on preparing for the results of GW because I thought we should be putting every effort into preventing it in the first place. But at this point, tipping points have been crossed, so making preparations is prudent. Perhaps the very making of those preparations will help wake people (and especially policy makers) up to the urgent need to dramatically reduce our use of fossil-death-fuels immediately.