With the world sweltering through one of the hottest years on record, some icy bastions have been getting frostier in defiance of global warming.
The rare cool spots, also from Canada to China, cause headaches for policy makers seeking to impose expensive measures to curb emissions from cars and factories blamed for blanketing the globe and driving up temperatures.
"We are disrupting the entire climate system," said Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the UN's main panel on climate change. "It's not as though there is going to be a uniform warming of the entire planet."
PHOTO: AP
He said that signs of global warming are overwhelming, from a heat wave in India this year with temperatures up to 49?C that killed 1,500 people, to prolonged drought in Australia.
"There are also many of these [cooling anomalies]. But merely to cite one as evidence that there is no warming is not rational," he said of lingering skepticism to the broad consensus that human pollution is warming the planet.
And experts say that apparent anomalies, such as the growth of glaciers in Norway in the 1990s, can often be explained by a wider picture of global warming because of increased snowfall.
"When the oceans get warmer, you get more evaporation so you create more clouds. Then you can have more precipitation and in some areas it can be in the form of snow," said Josefino Comiso, a senior scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre.
He said that his research, for instance, indicated that snow was getting deeper over higher parts of Greenland. Ice and snow in some regions of Antarctica was also getting thicker. "Some climate models suggest these effects," he said.
In other areas, global warming seems to be catching up with some of the icy exceptions.
The Briksdal glacier in west Norway, for instance, has receded about 130m since a peak in 2000 when it was splintering birch trees on ground that had been free of ice for decades.
"It's shrunk a lot, though in the middle of the 17th century is was 1.5km longer than now," said Frode Briksdal, a glacier guide whose family has long lived in the area.
Climate experts say that recent hotter summers are melting the ice despite more snowfall in winter that is adding to the overall mass of the glaciers.
The UN's World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) says that 1998 was the hottest year since records began in 1860, followed by last year and the previous. It says the rise in global average surface temperatures since 1900 exceeds 0.6?C.
So far this year, temperatures have also been high in many regions. The WMO says that average surface temperatures in May were the second highest on record.
But some question the view of Pachauri's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that human activity is driving global warming. Many sceptics point out experts were predicting a new Ice Age in the 1970s after a long cold spell.
"There is an idea among the public that the `science is settled,'" said James Schlesinger, a Republican and former US Energy Secretary. "We are in danger of prematurely embracing certitudes."
Schlesinger said in a recent speech that the IPCC focused too narrowly on factors like human emissions of gases such as carbon dioxide, volcanoes and an 11-year sunspot cycle.
Jon Ove Hagen, professor of glaciology at Oslo University, said most glaciers from Alaska to the Himalayas were melting.
"By contrast, in 100 years' time one expects that the Antarctic ice will increase in volume because of more snow," he said.
Lynn Rosentrater, Arctic climate scientist at the WWF environmental group, said sea levels were expected to rise this century more because water in the oceans would expand with higher temperatures. Secondarily, melting glaciers in Alaska, Canada and Scandinavia would add to water in the oceans.
Among anomalies in climate change, she said that a cooling over northeastern Canada in recent years also "now seems to be stabilizing and now looking more towards warming."
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese