New data reveals unusual global warming in the Arctic | climate crisis

New data reveal unusual rates of global warming in North Poleseven times faster than the world average.

Warming is occurring in the North Barents Sea, a region where rapid warming is suspected of causing increases in extreme weather in North America, Europe and Asia. The researchers said the warming in this region was an “early warning” of what could happen in the rest of the Arctic.

The new figures show that the region’s average annual temperatures rise throughout the year by as much as 2.7°C per decade, with particularly high rises in the autumn months reaching 4°C per decade. This makes the North Barents Sea and its islands the fastest known warming place on Earth.

Recent years have seen Temperatures well above average registered in the arctic, where seasoned observers described the situation as “crazy”, “weird” and “simply shocking”. Some climate scientists have warned of Unprecedented events can indicate faster And more sudden collapse of the climate.

It was already known that the climate crisis was causing temperatures to rise across the Arctic three times faster than the global average, but new research shows that the situation is more extreme in some places.

Sea ice is good at reflecting sunlight, but it is melting. This allows the dark ocean below to absorb more energy. The loss of sea ice also means that it no longer restricts the ability of warmer sea water to heat Arctic air. As more ice is lost, heat builds up, forming a feedback loop.

“We expected to see extreme warming, but not on the scale that we found,” said Ketil Isaksen, a senior researcher at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute who led the work. “We were all surprised. From all of the other observation points on the globe, these are the highest rates of warming we have observed so far.”

“The broader message is that feedback from melting sea ice is higher than previously shown,” he said. “This is an early warning of what is happening in the rest of the Arctic if this melt continues, and what is likely to happen in the coming decades.” World scientists said in April that Immediate and deep cuts in carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases to address the climate emergency.

“This study shows that even the best possible models were underestimating the rate of warming in the Barents Sea,” said Dr. Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute who is not part of the team. “We seem to be seeing it shift to a new system, as it becomes less Arctic and more North Atlantic. It is really on edge now and it seems unlikely that sea ice will persist in this region for much longer.”

search, Published in Scientific Reports, based on data from automated weather stations on the islands of Svalbard and Franz Josef Land. So far, this has not been done through a standard quality control process and has not been made public.

The result was a high-quality set of surface air temperature measurements from 1981 to 2020. The researchers concluded: “The rate of regional warming for the northern Barents Sea region is exceptional and corresponds to 2 to 2.5 times the Arctic warming averages and 5 to 7 times. global warming averages.”

There was a very strong correlation over time between air temperature, sea ice loss, and ocean temperature. The rapid rise in temperatures would have a very big impact on ecosystems, Isaksen said: “For example, here in Oslo, we have a temperature rise of 0.4 degrees Celsius every decade and people really feel the snow conditions disappear during the winter. But what happens In the far north is out of range.”

Isaacsen said the new information on heating rates in the region will aid research by other scientists on how changes in the Arctic affect weather extremes in densely populated areas at low latitudes. There is evidence that rapid heating is altering the jet stream winds that surround the pole and affect severe weather.

“Sea ice loss and warming in the Barents Sea in particular have been isolated in previous work as being particularly relevant to changes in winter atmospheric circulation associated with extreme winter weather events,” said Professor Michael Mann, from Penn State University. we. “If this mechanism is valid, and There is some controversy over thatThis is another way that climate change can lead to an increase in certain types of extreme weather events [and which] It’s not captured well by current models.”