AM, the answer is pretty clearly "yes."
The Arctic is going to be essentially ice free if not this summer then in the next very few.
The last year gave us a taste of what a more-than-half ice-free Arctic does to the weather patterns:
--stalled high over North America causing flash droughts and record-smashing heat in summer,
--stalled lows over Britain and other areas causing endless rains and flooding;
--and all that evaporation from a newly-opened Arctic Ocean in the early fall causing heavy snows and cold deep into the continental interiors while the jet stream looped high to the north over the Atlantic causing extreme warm anomalies over Greenland.
Best guess is that the even deeper minimums of sea ice extent we will see this summer and fall will cause these extremes to go into hyper-drive--More fires and crop failures around the world followed by a very bitterly cold and snowy winter for most continental interiors--too wet for ag elsewhere.
An El Nino may change some of the distribution of rainfall patterns, but, given what we have learned about the huge amount of warming going on in the deep oceans, it would likely unload huge amounts of that stored energy into the atmosphere leading to even more extreme extremes.
I will be very surprised (though certainly not disappointed!) if within the next two years we don't see widespread famine spreading to most of the earth's population, especially in the Northern Hemisphere.
Perhaps there is some "unknown unknown" mega-negative feedback that will come along and save our butts in spite of ourselves for a while, but that will likely just postpone what certainly looks like the inevitable.
None of this means we shouldn't stop fighting the good fights on various fronts. (Not all are frozen by depression from confronting the likely realities facing us.)
But a realistic assessment of the facts on the ground (and in the oceans) must lead one to rather grim conclusions about prospects for most of us in the not-at-all distant future.
(And of course the distant future looks utterly horrific at this point.)
Thusly resultantly hence we strong apes must all face our humanoid history, avoid flailure, grab sticks, and found a Yukonian paradise eating aureate spuds.
