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Thanks for the welcome. My background is risk analysis (first in power stations then in finance) and one thing I learnt is that probability of an event that hasn't yet occured tends to be a lot higher than what people initially calculate. This has caught us in major plant failures and all of the financial crashes.
In short I'd bet that the first ice free year will take everybody by surprise or conversely a large recovery.
I agree with this, except the "everybody" word. Instead of "everybody", i'd say "vast majority". There are few folks who are well expecting ice free year very soon, even possibly this year. For example, Dr. Wieslaw Maslovski modelled blue ocean event in Arctic by 2016 +-3 years some five years ago, see
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-13002706 . His PHD is from univercity of Fairbanks, Alaska, - same univercity which has Igor Semiletov, Natalia Shakhova and many other "let's get there and measure things directly" scientists working in the Arctic.
Personally, i do agree with Wieslaw on this prediction. That is, as long as Arctic climate would not be experiencing massive geo-engineering effort made by humans with the goal to cool it down much. 2012 had minimum sea ice volume being ~20% of the "normal" amount, which means in terms of extra heat which melted that extra ice, 2012 "almost made it" to ice-free state. Because it takes much less forcing to melt "last remaining" 20% of sea ice than to melt "initial extra 20%" of it - albedo feedbacks, higher temperatures around when it's "last 20% remaining", the massively powerful mixing effect (storms vs thin remaining ice - breaks ice, mixes it with water, faster melt), etc.
Frankly, i feel 2012 was in large part such a dramatic loss exactly because of that "melt acceleration" which happens when volume of sea ice gets below ~30...40% of the "norm". You just wait till the next year like 2012 which forces melt just some ~5% stronger, and it quite possibly will be the thing - ice free Septemper in the Arctic ocean. And with present and strong higher average temperature trend for Arctic, this is indeed a question of years - not decades, IMHO.
P.S. I say "norm" and "normal" with ""s because figures usually considered as normal annual minimum sea ice volume/extent/area are likely to be significantly lower than true normal values for last ~100+ years, in my opinion.
append:
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The trend is your friend.....and for the ice....that trend is DOWN, and there are no scientific reasons that will turn around for the long term......
Yes, it is DOWN indeed. But, depends on how you define "long term". Thousands of years? Yep. CO2. Hundreds? Yep, CO2 and CH4. Decades? Not so sure. Years? Possibly not. Even reversal of the current DOWN trend is in fact technically possible - geo-engineering the Arctic, i mean, is not proven impossible.
Now, assume for a moment that some party (let's say, UN or US state department, whatever) decides to go and try cooling the Arctic artificially. I mean they decide to _do_ it, - not to tell us they are doing it, of course. Telling public and even scientific community about some massive planetary-scale affair is not in the interest of an entity who does such affair for its own interest. They didn't tell people about Manhattan project when it was going on, for example. And i think it is quite easier to "classify" exact composition of the athmosphere in the Arctic than to deny facts of nuclear explosions on US soil, for example.
I am not saying there
is geo-engineering in the Arctic right now. I am not saying geo-engineering of some kind is guaranteed to be practically effective if attempted, neither; hard to say if it would be effective. But looking to Arctic ice 2013 and 2014, especially August week+ "pauses" in melt process (total ASI area nubmbers), my intuition sometimes tells me that may be there was/is an attempt, started 2013. Something short-lived sprayed in CAB in July/August which significantly reduces/slows melt process, some kind of Welsbach seeding? If something like this is happening there (without us knowing or at least without anyone reliably admitting it in public), then i have a feeling it only slowed this trend DOWN for Arctic sea ice, but in its "would be" current implementation, - i think such geo-engineering won't be able to stop or reverse the trend we are talking about. Will "they" try something "stronger" some time later if "the plan A" won't work to stop/reverse this DOWN trend for ASI? Who knows. I would, if i would be them. But for how long such desperate measures could be of any much help? Probably not more than for a few decades, after which still growing GHG effect from CO2, and most likely massive CH4 outburst on top of it - would overpower even best geo-engineering "solutions", which "developed" countries could fathom. Hence the above distinction between hundreds and decades for the "long term". Still, since business operates primarily on few years into the future perspective, it is obvious that powerful financial structures could in fact be very interested in such "this can buy us few more years of relatively stable climate" projects, and in fact even perform some without public knowledge. After all, Arctic is a place FAR away from "us", isn't it.
Of course, this all is purely hypothetical.
append #2:
F.Tnioli,
I don't know if this is helpful, ...
It sure is. It seems NH has less than 250Gt of snow left now. I always liked the Finn way to do things, and once again i do -
http://globalcryospherewatch.org/state_of_cryo/snow/fmi_swe_tracker.jpg, which i found via your link. Thank you.
