Quoting myself (10 May 2016):
“I’m going for a ’10 year. Terrible for volume. Almost ’12 for extent. Disaster for who is initiated in Arctic Fate. Business as usual for the innocent.”
And from 25 April 2016:
“I remain with my point of view December ’14: a ’17 black swan-event putting extent < 1 Mkm2 initiating a bifurcation in the state of the Arctic Ocean, a series of ‘on/off’ summers, a first < 1Mkm3 volume year around ’23 and a 10 year decline into a perennial ice-free Arctic Ocean. And mind, some FYI will form even then in Hudson Bay, Foxe Basin, the CAA and other sheltered nooks.”
And:
“Next winter will set the hazards. Will the Arctic experience a strong La Nina atmospheric set-up or will neutral/slightly positive ONI-circumstances prevail?
Anyway, positive PDO conditions will remain, so there’s a big chance atmospheric winter-warming will continue.
After that, during ’17, odds for a combination of high-impact melt events will be very high.”
I watch it all pass, feeling weary. It seems completely foreseeable. I don’t think the models are flawed. But as I sensed for years now, they are based on trends and data from the past. That’s probably part of the reason why the models can’t handle sudden feedback-loops and the lagging buffering in the biospheric system.
Meanwhile, on top of an extreme lack of ‘winter power’, the same config that was so repetitive December-February last winter is showing up again:
On ‘winter power’; compared to last year, which was already quite anomalously warm by this date, the situation now is off the charts. ECMWF seems to indicate that this will continue right up to the end of this year.