Ref. "hope": I think that - assuming we're more or less in nobody's land with arctic sea ice, with regards to the impacts of its relentless decline/disappearance on the NH and global climate - it's quite a bitter irony that its fate represents one of the last chances to bring back the attention of the more and more insouciant global community and boost the only real "hope". I.e., using the residual resources (money, but really energy and mineral resources) - currently being wasted at accelerated pace in search for an unlikely economic growth - to shift the energy paradigm towards renewable sources (associated with storage and electrification of energy end-uses). Otherwise, business as usual and pray for the gradual adjustment suggested by John Christensen.

james cobban, you've gone through a big problem of science communication, most important when dealing with formerly controversial issues and/or matters that could hit any consolidated economic interest. Moreover, we shouldn't think that decision makers (e.g. politicians, at least seemingly) are unaffected by the media show, which is even more serious. Here I can give for the sake of brevity a single example, hoping it's somehow representative. I listened to the live speech of a likely next E.U. commissioner (= ministry, moreover from center-left), saying: USA became energy self-sufficient by means of shale gas and thanks to environmental deregulation - first is bloody fake, second is tragedy. Installations for treatment of liquid natural gas (LNG) should be boosted in order to get cheaper energy, after that he stated that existing installations work around 20% of their capacity and... explaining (?) that this is due to lack of gas pipelines (in Europe!!!) - outrageous to average understanding. No mention at all of climate change, no mention of the outstanding growth of solar energy in EU and Italy in particular (almost 20 GW in very few years. That's not at all a minus habens, rather one of the most serious and respected politicians in Europe, quite inside the right rooms (Aspen Institute, Bilderberg, Trilateral Commission, asf). Likely, a perfect mix of bad faith and deep ignorance of basic facts and figures. Just to finish, most of reactions of commenters (hundreds) to my last article on a mainstream journal about the substantially underestimated climate impact of conventional natural gas (not just shale gas) mostly due to leakages from extraction to delivery and end use were something like "... and so what? should we use coal? should we pay more for natural gas? are you paid by solar lobbies?..." and so on. Only large regional or global catastrophes could (maybe) change this state of affairs. Ice-free arctic could be one of these.

Hi all! I might go a little OT - anyway I'd like to share with you an astonishing (should say inconvenient=? :) ) truth arising from a bulk of research about real climate forcing power of fossil fuels. Although I smelled something strange few years ago after few colleagues in my institute measured unexpected methane leaks from the grid of urban gas pipes - http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2012.01.019 and http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.egypro.2013.08.062 - a true atomic bomb on conventional methane, besides of course fracking one, was launched by Prof. Howarth from Cornell University with his recent paper on Energy Science & Engineering http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ese3.35/abstract It's worth pasting the abstract, while recommending a full reading: In April 2011, we published the first peer-reviewed analysis of the greenhouse gas footprint (GHG) of shale gas, concluding that the climate impact of shale gas may be worse than that of other fossil fuels such as coal and oil because of methane emissions. We noted the poor quality of publicly available data to support our analysis and called for further research. Our paper spurred a large increase in research and analysis, including several new studies that have better measured methane emissions from natural gas systems. Here, I review this new research in the context of our 2011 paper and the fifth assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released in 2013. The best data available now indicate that our estimates of methane emission from both shale gas and conventional natural gas were relatively robust. Using these new, best available data and a 20-year time period for comparing the warming potential of methane to carbon dioxide, the conclusion stands that both shale gas and conventional natural gas have a larger GHG than do coal or oil, for any possible use of natural gas and particularly for the primary uses of residential and commercial heating. The 20-year time period is appropriate because of the urgent need to reduce methane emissions over the coming 15–35 years. It looks like that while we're all concerned with leaks from permafrost as well as from submarine methane clathrates,the ordinary pipes are already doing a very good job against the climate - about double as good as coal... please read to believe. Hopes are quickly vanishing, isn't it?

Neven - congratulations for your huge effort and results! About the alleged benefits under the item Winners and losers, in particular "... Shorter journey times for commercial shipping thanks to access to Arctic waters may also cut emissions from ships, it adds. And oil and gas from the region is expected to contribute increasingly to the global economy, although the resources will be costly and difficult to access..." it's a full nonsense. About emissions cut from ships - it's long known that any increase in (energy) efficiency in an open large market leads to an increase in consumption of the relevant resource (oil in this case). That's known as the Jevons' paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox . In other words, the increase in shipping will fully obliterate and eventually greatly overcome any single oil saving. That's sure. About the alleged contribution of arctic oil and gas to the global economy - it's an obvous fake at the same time it states that such resources will be costly! It's all the same as shale oil&gas which can (maybe) survive as long as oil barrel costs not less than 90 US$ while gas is already sold below extraction cost. Eroi (Energy Return On Investment) rules and at least it cannot be below 10 for a primary energy source in order to contribute to society, economy and eventually civilization http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0301421513006447 It looks like the winner field is shrinking drastically.