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No Winter For the Arctic in 2016 — NASA Marks Hottest January Ever Recorded
18
February, 2016
The
Scientists are floored and we should be too.
The global heat and especially the extremely high temperature
departures we’ve seen in the Arctic over the past month are
flat-out unprecedented. It’s freakish-strange. And what it
looks like, to this particular observer, is that the seasonality of
our world is changing. What we’re witnessing, at this time — it
looks like the beginning of the end for Winter as we know it.
Hottest
January on Record — But the Arctic is Just Outlandish
Anyone
who observes the Arctic — from
scientists, to environmentalists, to emerging threats specialists, to
weather and climate enthusiasts, to just regular people unsettled by
the rapidly unraveling state of our global climate system —
should be very, very concerned. The human greenhouse gas emission —
now pushing CO2 levels to above 405 parts per million and adding in a
host of additional heat trapping gasses — appears to be rapidly
forcing our world to warm. To warm most swiftly in one of the
absolute worst places imaginable — the Arctic.
Not
only was January of 2016 the hottest such month ever recorded in the
136 year NASA global climate record.
Not only did January show the highest temperature departure from
average for a single month — at +1.13 C above NASA’s 20th Century
base-line and about +1.38 C above 1880s averages (just 0.12 C shy of
the dangerous 1.5 C mark). But what we observed in the global
distribution of those record hot temperatures was both odd and
disturbing.
(A
record warm world in January shows extreme Arctic heat. NASA’s
global temperature anomaly map above hints that tropical heat —
spiked by a record El Nino — traveled northward and into the Arctic
through weaknesses in the Jet Stream over Western North America and
Western Europe. Image source — NASA
GISS.)
Though
the world was hot as a whole — with El Nino heat dominating the
tropical zones — the furthest above average temperature extremes
concentrated at the very roof of our world. There, in the Arctic
lands of now-thawing glacial ice and permafrost — over Siberia,
over Northern Canada, over Northern Greenland and all throughout the
Arctic Ocean zone above 70 North Latitude — temperatures averaged
between 4 and 13 degrees Celsius above normal. That’s between 7 and
23 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than usual for the extraordinary period
of an entire month.
And
the further north you went, the more heat you ended up with. Above
the 80 North Latitude line, temperature averages for the entire
region spiked to around 7.4 degrees C (13 degrees F) warmer than
normal.
For this area of the Arctic, that’s about equal to the typical
difference between January and April (April
is about 8 C warmer than January during a normal year).
So what we’ve seen is absolutely unprecedented — for the entire
month of January of 2016, temperatures were those of Springtime in
the Arctic.
(For
January through February of 2016, the region of 80 North Latitude and
northward has experienced its warmest conditions ever recorded.
Temperatures have remained in a range of -25 to -15 C for the zone —
a set of temperatures more typical to those of mid to late April.
Image source: NOAA.)
And
for the Winter of 2016 it’s possible that the Arctic may never
experience typical conditions. For, according
to NOAA,
the first half of February saw this record, Spring-like, warmth
extend on through today. It’s
as if these coldest zones in the Northern Hemisphere haven’t yet
experienced Winter — as
if the freak storm that drove Arctic temperatures to record levels
during late December has,
ever since, jammed the thermometer into typical April levels and left
it stuck there.
El
Nino Heat Teleconnects to Pole
Why
is this all so ominous?
It
would be bad if it were only a case that warmth in the Arctic just
resulted in the ever-more-rapid melting of glaciers — forcing seas
to rise by centimeters, inches and feet. It would be rather bad if
polar warming amplified as white ice on land and over the ocean
withdrew — turning
a heat-reflecting surface into dark blue, green, and brown
heat-absorbing feature.
It would be pretty amazingly bad if such heat also resulted in
permafrost thaw — again
worsening human-forced warming by unlocking up to 1,300 billion tons
of carbon and eventually transferring about half of that into our
atmosphere.
And it would be rather bad if all that extra heat in the Arctic
started to meddle with the Northern Hemisphere’s weather — by
altering the flow of the Jet Stream.
By resulting in very persistent drought-producing ridges and
storm-producing troughs.
(High
amplitude waves in the Jet Stream — one over Western North America
and a second over Europe — transfer lower-Latitude heat into the
Arctic during an El Nino year on February 7, 2016. As polar
amplification cranked up to new extremes during the record hot months
of December and January, it appeared that El Nino’s ability to
strengthen the Jet Stream and thus separate Equatorial heat from the
colder Pole had been compromised. Image source: Earth
Nullschool.)
Sadly,
these events are no longer just hypothetical. The sea ice is
retreating. The permafrost is thawing. The glaciers are melting. And
the flow of the Jet Stream appears to be weakening.
But
what if all that building polar warmth due to human fossil fuel
burning had yet one more added effect? What if that hot stone tossed
into the river of atmospheric circulation that we call El Nino could
somehow transfer its build-up of tropical heat all the way to the
Pole? What if the Jet Stream flow in the Northern Hemisphere had
grown so weak that even a warm-up in the tropics due to a
record-strong El Nino couldn’t significantly (through increasing
Equator to Pole heat differential) speed it up. What if those new
ridge zones stretched all the way into the Arctic — shoving
tropical heat into the far north during El Nino events? During times
when the globe, as a whole was at its hottest? During a period when
heat and moisture at the surface of the Pacific Ocean was exploring a
new peak due to a combination of human-forced warming and El Nino
hitting the top of the natural variability cycle?
What
if, somehow, that peak in tropical heat could run from the Equator
all the way to the Pole?
What
we would see then is an acceleration of the dangerous Arctic changes
described above. What we would see is a coupling of the global
warming related polar amplification signal with the top of the
natural variability warm scale that is El Nino. And for the
non-Winter in the Arctic that was the first month and a half of 2016
that’s what it appears we’ve just experienced.
The
scientists are floored. Well, they should be. We should all be.
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