“What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic,” Jeremy Mathis, NOAA’s Arctic research chief, told the Associated Press, according to Weather.com. And this statement applies to countries around the globe.
And while most of us think of ice as something that keeps our iced tea cold in the summer, we forget that the ice covering the North Pole does almost the same thing when it comes to global temperatures. The Arctic’s ice cover reflects the Sun’s heat away, keeping our ocean waters from overheating.
But as Engadget so eloquently puts it, “thanks to our steadfast refusal to address climate change, there’s going to be a lot less ice in the Arctic next year.”
Jennifer Francis, an Arctic climate expert at Rutgers University, says the world is in “uncharted territory,” and the rapid changes going on right now in the Arctic are affecting weather patterns around the world. “In the past, you have had natural variations like El Niño, but they have never happened before in combination with this very warm Arctic, so it is a whole new ball game.”
NOAA issued its annual Arctic Report Card, a peer-reviewed report that combines the work of 61 scientists from 11 nations who report on air, ocean, land and ecosystem changes. In the report was a tally of record high temperatures, low sea ice and shrinking ice sheets and glaciers.
On Thursday, just three days before Christmas, computer models are predicting a dangerous melting point will be reached, by temperatures tipping above 0°C (32°F). NOAA has documented a “persistent warming trend and loss of sea ice,” which is triggering “extensive Arctic changes,” reports the U.K.’s Daily Mail.
Here are just a few of the findings documented in the Arctic Report Card-2016:
Average surface air temperature for the year ending September 2016 is by far the highest since 1900. Sea ice extent was tied with 2007 as being the lowest on record, and spring snow extent was the lowest on record.
Sea ice reflects 50 percent of solar radiation back into space, while water reflects less than 10 percent. Less sea ice means that we end up with more absorbed heat, and in a vicious cycle, there is less ice formation. Thawing permafrost releases carbon into the atmosphere, while a greening tundra absorbs the carbon. But the cycle is happening so fast that more carbon is being released than can be absorbed.
Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at the University of Cambridge and former director of the Scott Polar Institute, says these effects could increase by 50 percent the effects of global warming due to carbon emissions.
Will the Arctic’s temperatures affect people living in lower latitudes?
The weather loop described above is in some ways, vicious. It shows that differences between Arctic and lower latitude temperatures are becoming blurred, or not as distinct as they should be. But these temperature gradients are also what drives the jet stream, basically a barrier between colder northern and warmer lower latitude air.
But a narrower temperature difference means the winds are weaker, allowing the jet stream to wander, almost aimlessly, with big loops that reach down toward the Equator and up toward the North Pole. Remember the “Polar Vortex” we experienced last week? That was a case in point where the jet stream took a sweep to the south.
Dim Coumou at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, told the Guardian, according to Weather.com, “There have been recent studies showing very plausible physical mechanisms of how rapid warming in the Arctic can influence weather in the mid-latitudes, both in summer and winter.”
And sometimes, that southerly loop in the jet stream can remain for days, if not weeks, something we didn’t see in past years. It is safe to say that as long as we ignore anthropogenic climate change, we will be seeing even more extreme weather events and a much warmer world.
“Rarely have we seen the Arctic show a clearer, stronger or more pronounced signal of persistent warming and its cascading effects on the environment than this year,” said Jeremy Mathis, director of NOAA’s Arctic Research Program.
