Its true that not all the sea ice is gone yet, but much of what remains is thin enough that the light passing through it is allowing algae blooms. In many places it is cracked and subject to being broken up by storms which due to the extremes of heat and cold confronting eachother in that region have extremes of wind and wave.
The Jacobshaven Glacier delivering 10% of the ice melt from Greenlands ice caps to the sea no longer flows at a glacial pace but rather is retreating at 10 km/yr with the rate of retreat increasing at an increasing rate just as with the sea ice.
Instead of climate changing over millennia we are now seeing it change in ways we can observe with our own eyes in the course of a season. Even as some scientists are still looking at what happened during the second half of the 20th century at a scale of change over decades others are beginning to address the significant acceleration of changes observed year by year.
A link to a number of papers since 2015 showing dramatic climate change globally and in particular with extremes at the poles is still controversial to some.
“Dramatic climate change is affecting both the Arctic and West Antarctica, yet the relative roles of local versus remote forcings in causing the changes are being debated.
As global climate change continues to unfold, the two-way links between the tropics and the poles will play key determining factors in the climatic evolution of these sensitive regions.
Thus, the time is ripe for a detailed look at how the tropics and the poles are coupled climatically.
This special collection of the Journal of Climate on “Connecting the Tropics to Polar Regions” grew out of a mini-conference on the same topic that was held at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in June 2014: http://www.ldgo.columbia.edu/~xyuan/Mini-Conference/Web.html“
Removal of the sea ice from over the ESAS allows storms to churn up the bottom sediments speeding the release of Methane. Methane releases speed up the melting of the permafrost. The permafrost stores huge amounts of methane and fresh water. We have known this since 2007.
The IPCC doesn't adequately address methane releases
“A policy briefing from the Woods Hole Research Center concludes that the IPCC doesn’t adequately account for a methane warming feedback
While most attention has been given to carbon dioxide, it isn’t the only greenhouse gas that scientists are worried about. Carbon dioxide is the most important human-emitted greenhouse gas, but methane has also increased in the atmosphere and it adds to our concerns….
As the Earth warms, and the Arctic warms especially fast, the permafrost melts and soil decomposition accelerates. Consequently, an initial warming leads to more emission, leading to more warming and more emission. It is a vicious cycle and there may be a tipping point where this self-reinforcing cycle takes over.
Recently, a policy briefing from the world-leading Woods Hole Research Center has moved our understanding of this risk further through a clearly-written summary. The briefing cites two recent papers (here and here) that study the so-called permafrost carbon feedback.
One of these studies makes use of projections from the most recent IPCC report to estimate that up to 205 gigatons equivalent of carbon dioxide could be released due to melting permafrost. This would cause up to 0.5°C (up to 0.9°F) extra warming.”
Arctic scientists warn that the release of the methane from the ESAS could happen with the same surprising acceleration we see with glaciers, sea ice and the polar ice caps melting and have a huge effect on the melt rate of the permafrost.
“Just as bad, the permafrost melting would continue after 2100 which would lock us into even more warming. Under this scenario, meeting a 2°C limit would be harder than anticipated. The current IPCC targets do not adequately account for this feedback.”
This is essentially what arctic scientists have been warning about for a decade now but pointing out that the time scale is no longer centuries but just years, and this is another reason why the IPCC is moving up their next report date