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But how about those ~5 GACs? Why do you think that? It strikes me as very unlikely.
Cyclones of the kind are born in temperate regions, strengthened there, and travel into Arctic to wreak havok and doom to sea ice (is my "french" too dramatic yet?
). So, one can look to temperate regions and estimate what is going on there to have an idea about what is likely regarding such cyclones. What i see is plenty places experiencing record _swings_ in temperature. Plenty strong winds, too. This points to likelyhood of more and stronger cyclones forming up, and some will probably head to the Arctic. This is the 1st over-simplified, generalized consideration pointing to the conclusion about multiple GACs likely.
The 2nd is what happens with peripheriral seas in the Arctic itself. It is well known that strongest storms have a tendency to rapidly weaken when they travel over lands (and by analogy, over ice, too) - while travelling over open water is often maintains their strength, at times even intensifying them. This general observation coupled with what we see happening to "low Arctic" seas right about now - like that 50k drop in ESS alone mentioned few posts above, etc, - plus cleaner air this season due to pandemic, and some other factors, - those point to the possibility that some time July / August we'll have plenty open water in "lower seas". Which can very much "feed" some moderate-strength cyclone going in and boost it to a GAC, or simply maintain strength of any "already GAC-scale" cyclone coming into the Arctic - for long enough for it to inflict GAC-scale damage to the ice.
Yet 3rd reason was also recently mentioned in this topic: overall general developments in the Arctic point to the likelyhood of GACs repeating themselves, but we did not see many since 2012 / 16. If any at all (opinions vary a bit). Thus, merely statistically, it's likely a year will come with not one, but few GACs striking in same season. Each passing year, statistically, considering said developments (ice state, temperatures' rise, GHGs rise, etc) - makes "multiple GACs a season" more likely. Personally, my opinion is that 2020, considering all circumstances, is indeed the 1st year when "more than one GAC a melting season" is becoming a big possibility. If it doesn't happen, i'd say we'd dodge not a "bullet", but rather something like a battleship's main caliber's shell. Something like this one:
Fuirther considerations / reasons would take much more space to describe and also would require me to bring serious analysis of certain publications, thus i apologize, but i am not going to do it. Hopefully above is sufficient.
P.S. Please consider the ullustration as a visualisation matherial intended to visually represent how dire things are in the Artic, Oren. That said, if you'd remove it, i'll respect your judgement, too.