The ice extent waxes and wanes. What you look for are anomalies outside the expected norms.
What you need to understand about ice in the arctic is essentially the same principle as ice in your drinking glass. As long as you have at least some ice left in your glass then all of the heat energy goes to melting the ice and your drink stays relatively cool. However, once no more ice is left in your glass then all that heat energy turns to warming your drink very quickly.
In an ice free arctic with all that heat energy 24/7 beating down on dark blue water with no more ice to melt it will heat up so fast the jet stream will shut down as the jet stream is powered by the temperature differential between the pole and the equator, monsoon rains will sweep in over arctic tundra rapidly melting and unleashing torrents of CO2 and methane. There will be global crop failures as the planet adjusts to one arctic pole. Warm water will swarm into the shallow Eastern Siberian Arctic Shelf until it is destabilized enough to begin pulsing massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere.
The ESAS is 770,000 square miles and is the shallowest and largest oceanic shelf on earth. It holds a trillion tons of methane in its shallow depths. Waiting.
Watching the ignorant laughers and hooters in here guffawing away in their blissful ignorance is fine. History has always been that way. Let them go about their day as they are useless anyway. Might as well be plankton floating around lacking even a basic understanding of the world around them. They are of no importance and are merely biological drift wood beholden only the current that steers their pointless wasted stupid lives.
Imagine being the most complex being ever created in the universe but it is wasted on a dog's life spent in ignorance and intellectual squalor. They barely rise above "feed me" in their primal ball scratching. I feel like I am scraping them off my shoes.
