The article is actually very good, without being alarmist, giving the facts: the arctic will be ice free within many of our lifetimes there are two main fee

The article is actually very good, without being alarmist, giving the facts: the arctic will be ice free within many of our lifetimes there are two main feedback effects from an ice-free Arctic that we know will be bad, but there is uncertainty in how bad they will be: (1) the albedo effect means less of the suns energy will be reflected back into space by white ice and warming will accelerate due to darker water absorbing more energy (2) the clathrate gun hypothesis - how much of the methane in the Arctic basin that is trapped as ice clathrates will be released into the atmosphere (methane is about 8 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2). The other main point of the article is that the Arctic sea ice melting is unambiguously bad. Ignore the opening of the NE-passage. It's all-round bad news for us and our progeny.