I've been reading about this for a few days in various locations, then I ran across this essay by Bob Henson at Weather Underground that covers most of it. Lots of images and links, well worth a read.

Crazy Cryosphere: Record Low Sea Ice, An Overheated Arctic, and a Snowbound Eurasia
https://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/crazy-cryosphere-record-lo...

Sea ice extent and area have both plummeted to record lows for this time of year in both the Arctic and Antarctic. Such dramatic losses rarely occur at the same time, which means that the global total of sea ice coverage is phenomenally low for this time of year.

A common denialist talking point is that while we may be losing ice in the Arctic, we're gaining it in the Antarctic, so no problem. That diagram illustrates that we've got a large departure from the normal range of the combined total.

The normalized value of global sea ice area as of November 17, 2016, was so far from any other total in the 37-year record that it represented a departure of about 8 standard deviations below the average!

...

For the five-day average ending November 17, the difference in Arctic sea ice extent between this year and the next-lowest year (2012) was 582,000 square kilometers, an area about a third larger than California.

This next image is not from that essay, but from the National Snow and Ice Data Center website:
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

[UPDATE] That diagram is for November 18th. (they put the current one at the top of the page where I would never think to look).
The takeaway is that the curves for previous years are all the same shape, but this year is exhibiting new behavior - the air and water temperatures are too hot for ice to form at normal rates. For a couple of weeks in early October, the freeze nearly stopped.
[UPDATE] After resuming a normal rate of freezing for the rest of October, it stalled again briefly, resumed the normal rate, and now has stalled again. I don't expect that it can "catch up" for lost time, that the overall freeze cycle will have a few weeks of delay resulting in reduced maximum ice extent when the thaw cycle starts in March. I think we're setting up for a new minimum extent in 2017, this time due to melting in place rather than remarkable ice transfer as in 2012. I further expect to see this "too warm to freeze" phenomenon to become the new normal leading rapidly to an ice-free Arctic.

Temperatures north of 80°N smashed records for warmth throughout the winter of 2015-16. Now they’re on an even more torrid pace. In mid-November, temperatures across the high Arctic spiked to readings more typical of September, about 40°F above average for this time of year...
The only place in the middle and high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere that’s been consistently cold and snowy this autumn is Eurasia (see Figure 4 above). It’s as if the hemisphere’s entire allotment of chilly, snowy weather has been rounded up and consigned to one area, albeit a big one. For this, we can credit or blame what’s called a “wave one” pattern, where the upper-level circulation around the North Pole is dominated by a single elongated loop, shunted in this case toward the Eurasian side. Although the cold in Eurasia hasn’t been enough to balance the warmth elsewhere, it’s been quite dramatic on its own terms. On November 9, Stockholm, Sweden, experienced its heaviest one-day November snowfall (39 cm or 15.4 inches) in records going back to 1904. Across Siberia, October produced what appears to be the greatest snow extent for the time of year since 1998, and some areas got record totals for so early in the season, according to a weather.com report. In central China’s Hubei province, hundreds of homes were damaged and thousands of power poles were brought down by heavy snow during the second week of November, according to Xinhua.

By comparison, the snows over North America have been paltry indeed. On November 15, only 0.2% of the entire contiguous U.S. was covered by snow, the lowest coverage for mid-November in at least 14 years.

Looks like Eurasia won the snow and cold lottery for this year.

TL;DR - Ice? We don't need no stinking ice. Think of the pineapple farming opportunities in the Yukon!