Language in the article is quite similar to the language in the OP of this thread: "[L]ast year Prof Wadhams said such predictions failed to spot how quickly climate change is causing the ice to thin" vs. "NASA scientists suggest we've been underestimating..."
Climate science uses the West Antarctic as its poster child of global warming. Here's a scientific study that finds "an absence of regional warming since the late 1990s", and that instead "The annual mean temperature has decreased at a statistically significant rate... These circulation changes have also increased the advection of sea ice towards the east coast of the peninsula, amplifying their effects":
Of course, we don't call it "global warming" anymore since we're not really sure that's what's happening. Now we just call it "climate change", because if there's one thing climates do, they change, and we don't even have to make specific predictions for that. If the temperature goes up, it's proof of anthropogenic climate change (global warming). If the temperature goes down, that's also proof of anthropogenic climate change (humans messing with nature makes world temperatures more unpredictible). If the temperature stays the same, it's just the calm before the storm, and nature will be back to mess us up in a big way to make up for lost time next year or next decade.
Most of our researchers are too savvy to make testable predictions based on this, at least not any closer than 50 or 100 years out. By the time it'd be time to test these, they'll be dead or retired. Meantime it's easy to excuse by saying "climate science is an inexact science." Then you can call it science and you don't even need testable predictions! But you get quicker tenure and better pay than you would with a degree in phrenology, parapsychology, or cryptozoology.
I'll close by saying priests and shaman have traditionally held similar sway over the masses to what our climate scientists do today by predicting things like solar and lunar eclipses (although, to their credit, their predictions were a bit more on-the-money than our climate scientists have mustered yet. Our moderns rely on confirmation bias and rejiggered data from NOAA instead). It's nice to know our old ways haven't left us.
That's a gross mischaracterization of "climate change". The reason we say "climate change" is because there are many things happening and not all of them are just increased temperatures. So, global warming is a part of climate change. Go back in the 1970s and the term was "inadvertent climate modification".
Global warming is very real, and still happening, and the "climate change" models predict that we will continue get global warming as we have been. You ask for testable predictions, yes, there are testable predictions but climates are notoriously difficult to model accurately, but even with disagreements over models and problems with accuracy global warming still emerges as a clear prediction.
If you want to look for confirmation bias and "rejiggered data", then what you do is you cherry-pick specific time frames and regions where you can find cooling. That's always possible. Pick a hundred regions in the world and pick a hundred spans of time for each, and then take the few combinations that show cooling and you can paint a picture that hides the truth.
I went digging for the paper that was the source for your first case, which I believe is "The Future of Arctic Sea Ice", finally published in 2012 [0].
Looking online for other media reports I found this [1], which includes the choice quote from the original paper (which you can find here [2]):
"Given the estimated trend and the volume estimate for October–November of 2007 at less than 9,000 km3 (Kwok et al. 2009), one can project that at this rate it would take only 9 more years or until 2016 ± 3 years to reach a nearly ice-free Arctic Ocean in summer. Regardless of high uncertainty associated with such an estimate, it does provide a lower bound of the time range for projections of seasonal sea ice cover."
As expected, the paper describes a central estimate, an interval describing the uncertainty, and then provides further hedging ("nearly ice-free Arctic Ocean in summer", and the whole second sentence). I must further emphasise that the paper, and Peter Wadhams, were saying that the Arctic ice would be melted during summer, rather than year-round - I don't feel that the phrase "Arctic sea ice may be completely melted as soon as 2015" captures that important distinction.
That serious consequences are found to be possible by some predictive model, is something worth paying attention to. Both you and tjic seem to by trying to imply that climate research has produced a range of models that are wildly inconsistent with reality, but that simply isn't the case (and certainly isn't here - yet).
If you have an interest in the subject then read the literature and understand the nuance of the claims being made. The are often large uncertainties involved, both because of difficult dynamics and poor observational coverage, and no-one in the field I have ever met has ever said otherwise.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/globalwarm...
Language in the article is quite similar to the language in the OP of this thread: "[L]ast year Prof Wadhams said such predictions failed to spot how quickly climate change is causing the ice to thin" vs. "NASA scientists suggest we've been underestimating..."
Climate science uses the West Antarctic as its poster child of global warming. Here's a scientific study that finds "an absence of regional warming since the late 1990s", and that instead "The annual mean temperature has decreased at a statistically significant rate... These circulation changes have also increased the advection of sea ice towards the east coast of the peninsula, amplifying their effects":
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v535/n7612/full/nature1...
Of course, we don't call it "global warming" anymore since we're not really sure that's what's happening. Now we just call it "climate change", because if there's one thing climates do, they change, and we don't even have to make specific predictions for that. If the temperature goes up, it's proof of anthropogenic climate change (global warming). If the temperature goes down, that's also proof of anthropogenic climate change (humans messing with nature makes world temperatures more unpredictible). If the temperature stays the same, it's just the calm before the storm, and nature will be back to mess us up in a big way to make up for lost time next year or next decade.
Most of our researchers are too savvy to make testable predictions based on this, at least not any closer than 50 or 100 years out. By the time it'd be time to test these, they'll be dead or retired. Meantime it's easy to excuse by saying "climate science is an inexact science." Then you can call it science and you don't even need testable predictions! But you get quicker tenure and better pay than you would with a degree in phrenology, parapsychology, or cryptozoology.
I'll close by saying priests and shaman have traditionally held similar sway over the masses to what our climate scientists do today by predicting things like solar and lunar eclipses (although, to their credit, their predictions were a bit more on-the-money than our climate scientists have mustered yet. Our moderns rely on confirmation bias and rejiggered data from NOAA instead). It's nice to know our old ways haven't left us.