"It’s not a question of 'if' there will be nearly ice-free summers, but 'when,' say two NOAA scientists. James Overland of NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory and Muyin Wang of the NOAA Joint Institute for the Study of Atmosphere and Ocean at the University of Washington, consider that the Arctic summers will be ice free before 2050 and possibly within the next decade or two. The two scientists looked at three methods of predicting when the Arctic will be nearly ice free in the summer in a work that was published recently online in the American Geophysical Union publication Geophysical Research Letters. “Rapid Arctic sea ice loss is probably the most visible indicator of global climate change…