Arctic Ice-Free in Summer of 2013?

According to a Canadian expert who has spent the last ten summers on a remote island in the once-frozen north with his research team, the Arctic could be ice-free by the summer of 2013:

OTTAWA (Reuters) – The Arctic is warming up so quickly that the
region's sea ice cover in summer could vanish as early as 2013, decades
earlier than some had predicted, a leading polar expert said on
Thursday.

Warwick Vincent, director of the Center for Northern Studies at
Laval University in Quebec, said recent data on the ice cover "appear
to be tracking the most pessimistic of the models", which call for an
ice free summer in 2013.

The year "2013 is starting to look as though it is a lot more
reasonable as a prediction. But each year we've been wrong — each year
we're finding that it's a little bit faster than expected," he told
Reuters.

Vincent was interviewed by the wire service after giving a presentation to the Canadian parliament. He has been summering for ten years on Ward Hunt Island, 2500 miles north of Ottawa, where when he started ten years ago the maximum temperature in the summer was five degrees Celsius.

The high last summer?

20 degrees (equivalent to 68 Fahrenheit).

Over to you, George Will…