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[andygates]

This year's seasonal Arctic melt is getting well underway.  The exact level is mostly guesswork unless you've been paying attention to the last year or so's weather up there - and even if you have, there's plenty of natural variability to season the pudding. 

To help choose your "extent o' doom" [tm] here's a pointer: so much ice melted last year that a lot of this year's ice is thin single-year stuff, more vulnerable to warm weather and storm breakup. 

To recover multi-year ice, we'll need the last couple of years to have been a blip and for a couple of years of better-than-the-scary-plunging-red-eyetrend.  If the coverage ends up below 4,000,000 sq km, the blip is strongly reinforced as a nose-dive trend.