About 5 years ago most scientists thought Arctic sea ice would melt almost completely by the end of this century. That was so serious and scary NASA made videos showing how serious and scary the model results were. Pretty much no one else cared.
About 3 years ago they said it looks more like 2030-2040 or so, within the lifetimes of people alive today. A few scientists said it could be more like 2013 to 2016. Big gulp, check and recheck the math, try real hard to have faith in the models that even today are not capturing the speed with which the Arctic is melting.
A year or so ago they realized the acceleration was seriously screwing with the weather. The jet stream doesn't work like it used to. It's slower now, wavier. It stalls out, causing all manner of extremes as systems that used to pass on through sit there and build.
Now more and more scientists are saying the 2013-2016 guys are maybe right. It's pretty obvious: if you look at the amount of ice actually in the Arctic Ocean, it's falling off a cliff. From here:
That red dot is this year's minimum to date, as of late August. We still have a few weeks of ice loss left. But you can see already that the end of year-round sea ice is upon us.
No one knows exactly what that means, but chances are it will be pretty severe.
Fundamentally the way the Arctic screws up the rest of the Northern Hemisphere's weather is that it stores huge amounts of heat during the summer and releases it during the winter. All that heat makes the atmosphere circulate differently.
So we can expect more extreme weather. Possibly much more extreme weather.
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