Ars Technica: The rapidly warming Arctic isnt noteworthy only for its own sake. Changes there affect the rest of the planet in a number of ways. Recently, there has been a lot of interest in whether the dwindling Arctic summer sea ice could be weirding the weather in the mid-latitudes.
There have been a number of recent summer extremes--Russias hellish summer in 2010, the drought in the US last summer, a very wet 2011 in Korea and Japan, plus a streak of soggy summers in the UK. There have been suggestions...