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In this essay, I'd like to explain the science in the paper and give my answers to the most often asked questions.
In our paper, we examined the September Arctic sea ice cover in the 20th and 21st centuries in climate models, and found occasional decades of very rapid retreat. The most extreme case was a decrease from 6 to 2 million square kilometers in a decade (see Fig 1). This is about 4 times faster than the decline that has been observed in the past decade.
Dr. Cecilia Bitz, Assistant Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the Univ. of Washington, provides some detailed answers to some of the questions she has been asked about a recent journal paper [.pdf] she co-authored in this guest commentary at Real Climate. This piece, as well as her univ. page, is a good place to learn about some of the techniques that go into the modeling of the planet's climate.
