Warming at the top of the world has gone into overdrive, happening twice as fast as the rest of the globe and extending unnatural heating into fall and winter, according to a new US federal report.
In its annual Arctic Report Card, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Tuesday tallied record after record of high temperatures, low sea ice, shrinking ice sheets and glaciers.
Study lead author Jeremy Mathis, the agency’s Arctic research chief, said it shows long-term Arctic warming trends deepening and becoming more obvious, with a disturbing creep into seasons beyond summer, when the Arctic usually rebuilds snow and ice.
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Scientists have long said that human-induced climate change would hit the Arctic fastest.
Mathis and others said the data is showing that is what is now happening.
“Personally, I would have to say that this last year has been the most extreme year for the Arctic that I have ever seen,” said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, who was not part of the 106-page report. “It’s crazy.”
The agency’s peer-reviewed report said air temperatures over the Arctic from October last year to September were “by far the highest in the observational record beginning in 1900.” The average Arctic air temperature at that time was 2°C warmer than the 1981 to 2010 average. It is 3.5°C warmer than 1900.
Other extremes the report detailed: Ocean temperatures were 5°C higher than the 30-year average off the coasts of Greenland.
Arctic sea ice did not set a record for the annual minimum, but in October and last month when sea ice normally starts growing back, it did not.
Sea ice from mid-October through last month was the lowest on record.
Dartmouth University professor Donald Perovich, author of the chapter on sea ice, said sea ice conditions have sunk from a B-plus grade 11 years ago to a D-minus grade “and that’s because I’m an easy grader.”
Snow cover in North America reached a record low for spring, falling below 3.9 million square kilometers in May for the first time since satellite observations began in 1967.
Though not a record, Greenland’s ice sheet continued to shrink, starting early, on April 10. It was the second-earliest start of the Greenland melt season on record.
What is happening is due to artificial warming and a large El Nino that just ended, Mathis said.
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