Scientists leave no doubt about the extreme rate of Arctic ice melting
From an Article by Jon Queally, Common Dreams, March 1, 2018
‘This is the biggest story of our lifetimes.’ No, not the impossible-to-ignore dysfunction within the current administration.
The arctic is experiencing the hottest winter since record-keeping began.
Sea ice is seen in this photo from NASA’s Operation IceBridge research aircraft off the northwest coast on March 30, 2017 above Greenland. With historically low sea ice extent and unprecedentedly high temperatures this winter, the Arctic has been one of the regions hardest hit by climate change.
“It’s never been this extreme,” said Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI), citing record temperatures in Greenland and elsewhere above the Arctic circle in recent weeks.
“This is an anomaly among anomalies. It is far enough outside the historical range that it is worrying – it is a suggestion that there are further surprises in store as we continue to poke the angry beast that is our climate,” Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, told the Guardian this week in reaction to the historically high temperatures.
“This is too short-term an excursion to say whether or not it changes the overall projections for Arctic warming,” says Mann. “But it suggests that we may be underestimating the tendency for short-term extreme warming events in the Arctic. And those initial warming events can trigger even greater warming because of the ‘feedback loops’ associated with the melting of ice and the potential release of methane (a very strong greenhouse gas).”
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See also: Arctic warming: scientists alarmed by ‘crazy’ temperature rises
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