...L.O.L.
@6roucho So you affirm that people feel exposed by picking outliers . . . when more than half of the people are voting at or below 2012, which is the mother-of-all-outliers?
Seaicesailor, I replied to this glibly before but it deserves a more considered response!
I suggest we're dealing with two kinds of outlier: outliers in the set of possible outcomes, based on a reasonable analysis of trends, and outliers in the set of predictions of outcomes, based on opinions about discontinuities. An outlier in the first set is 2012. An outlier in the second set is an ice-free Arctic.
The transition to an ice-free Arctic (and of course, the 'transition' to < 1m sq km is only a step on that path) is a new event to us, and we're not good at predicting the timing of possible discontinuities in new events. Indeed we're not good at predicting the timing of discontinuities we've seen before!
But, we're somewhat better at identifying the kinds of systems that exhibit such discontinuities. One important property is interconnectedness. Interconnected systems can often be stable, until some trigger event causes them to all move at once, and then they can collapse into chaos.
To my untrained eye, as a theoretician with no knowledge of sea ice physics beyond what I read on here, the Arctic sea ice looks like such an interconnected system.
Thus, I expect to see a discontinuity, but can't predict when. However I
can see multiple attractors moving at once. Temperature has been rising blindingly fast in climate terms, and now we have concerns (that might be unfounded) about the structural integrity of the ice pack itself.
The mother of all black swan events would be a substantial part of it simply flowing out the Fram. I see no reason in physics why this, or else some other rapid change, can't happen any time. It might only require a combination of current conditions and weather.
So, I shilly-shallied round by predicting a new record low. What I should've done is either predict an ice-free state, to demonstrate my opinion, as Peter Wadhams has effectively done, or made a prediction based on a reasonable analysis of trends, as you did.
Of course there's no 'reason' why a rapid decline should happen this year, or any year soon, or at all. At least none we can compute. We could still be watching the Arctic approaching an ice-free state, from our retirement villages on the beach in what used to be sunlit uplands, in 2046.