Right now the best modeler
available with possession of meaningful facts has put the final demise of the Arctic
Summer Ice at 2015.
Using a rougher model, devoid of
any field data except the clear observation that the ice was been attacked
pretty well at the same rate every year, I predicted in June 2007 that the
collapse could come as early as 2012. I
even likely hedged at the time and put it at 2012 to 2015. This was even before it was obvious 2007
would break records.
I noted at the time that you can
not extract a fixed amount every year without entering a non linear death
spiral in which all the ice suddenly breaks up and is flushed away. Since sixty percent had already been lost
prior to 2000, it was merely a matter of estimating the rate of change and
however one played with it, worst case got us in 2012 and the best case got us
long before 2020.
Predictions by others at the time
were hopelessly wrong and ridiculously optimistic, or more correctly, no more
than one expects from the mathematically challenged.
At the time I spent some change
to put this on the public record and I was gratified when NASA slipped in a
news release a few weeks later saying the same thing. I am sure the researcher had been waiting for
someone else to say it before his bosses would let him open his mouth.
