Ok i figured this out while studying for a competitive exam a few years ago. Here is the deal:

Scientists and environmentalists made a big mistake in early 2000s when they coined the term 'global warming'. This is because only some parts of the world were getting heated up and the others were getting cooled.

I live in India and here, the summers have become unbearable. As a child, I did not have to use the AC even during peak summers. It was manageable. Now the AC runs for 8 months in a year. One just cannot do without it.

In Europe, contrary to 'global warming' things have been cooling at a rapid pace leading scptics and the general population to believe that the 'climate change' affair is a scam. They don't realize that the cooling is happening because the polar ice caps are melting, thereby diluting the Atlantic ocean waters and preventing the warm current drift that generally keeps Europe warm during winters. Without this warm current drift, the waters of the ATlantic have gone cold and there is no regulatory mechanism.

I hope you get the picture. I have similar questions and posted a question here:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?...

Answer: Real

The problem is people don't realize there is a difference between the Volume of Ice and the Extent (or area) of sea ice or that they don't want you to know. The best suggestion would be to look at the volume change (Google PIOMAS from University of Washington).

The reason Extent or Area is not a good indicator (well it's ok for thick ice) is that when the ice becomes thin, waves and wind can cause the ice to spread out or bunch up. The thinner it gets, the larger this effect will become. This is not a good indicator of how 'much' ice there is but rather how much it has spread out. Current estimates of PIOMAS indicate that the majority of Arctic Sea ice will be gone around 2015/2016 (just following the trend-line).

Disaster effects ?

1) effect on the Jet Stream (greater variability in the weather)

2) the thawing of the permafrost (greater release of the methane - positive feedback mechanism)

3) once the ice is gone you should take into account that it takes 80x more energy to melt ice than it does to raise it's temperature by 1C. That means all that energy which used to go into melting the multi-year ice will now go into heating up the ocean (a warmer ocean around Greenland will result in accelerated melt rates).

None of this is good.

Well 2012 was a really bad year for Arctic ice extent, an extreme long lasting cyclone broke up the ice and record melting occurred, so I think everybody realizes that unless another cyclone comes along 2013 wont be a record melt, and in fact it is looking to be average for the last ten years.

Edit okay this how the last ten years look

http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/exte...

You can listen to these other answers, or you can look at the data. Here is the time series from 1979-2012 for September extent (approximately when the minimum occurs each year).