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TOUGH TIMES AT the North Pole: The Arctic is undergoing a heatwave, with temperatures possibly reaching up to 20 degrees higher than its average for December.
Average arctic temperatures in November and December were 5 degrees higher than average, according to an investigation into whether man-made global warming is causing the Arctic to warm.
The report, published on Wednesday, found that the probability of such warm temperatures happening before industrialisation was “so small it is hard to estimate”.
The BBC and New York Times are reporting that Arctic temperatures could rise to just 0 degrees today, a record.
As the area around the North Pole is made up completely of sea ice, it may mean that Santa Claus will have to transfer his centre of operations elsewhere.
Rare
Dr Friederike Otto, a senior researcher at Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute told the BBC that in pre-industrial times “a heatwave like this would have been extremely rare – we would expect it to occur about every 1,000 years”.
She added that scientists are “very confident” that the weather patterns were linked to man-made climate change.
There were also temperatures of close to 0 degrees in the North Pole last year, while the Arctic sea ice reached its second-lowest extent ever recorded by satellites last summer.
Report card
Last week, the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration, a US federal agency, released its 11th Arctic report card. The rapidly thinning ice shocked researchers.
Among its findings, the average surface air temperature for the year ending September 2016 is by far the highest since 1900. New highs were recorded in November 2016.
Jeremy Mathis, director of Noaa’s Arctic research programme, said:
Rarely have we seen the Arctic show a clearer, stronger or more pronounced signal of persistent warming and its cascading effects on the environment than this year.
Spring snow cover extent in the North American Arctic, meanwhile, was the lowest in the satellite record, which started in 1967.
The Greenland ice sheet continued to lose mass over 2016, meanwhile.
Images show the contraction of Arctic Sea ice, even over the last few days.
Zack Labe / TwitterA look at the melt/compaction of #Arctic sea ice over the last few days esp near Franz Joseph Islands (JAXA AMSR2: https://t.co/wT7jqTjTNh) pic.twitter.com/rnAZegxk1V
— Zack Labe (@ZLabe) December 23, 2016
Reindeer
In recent years Santa has been spending more and more time on terra firma in Lapland, in Scandanavia.
Yet, there, lower temperatures caused by global warming have led to smaller reindeer, as they cannot get at their favourite food – lichen.
It’s also warming up on the South Pole, with Antarctic sea ice at record low levels.
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Donald has appointed the very man to tackle this global warming issue.
@Adolf Adams: Daffy Duck?
Reality is hitting home that global warming is man made. How else could this data be interpreted? Burning fossil fuels, modern industrial farming practices and deforestation are making their mark. We must all take individual and collective responsibility to reverse this trend.
We, Homo sapiens find ourselves consciously immersed in the anthropogenic extinction event. We are the sole cause of biomass depletion and in this we will cause our own extinction. Global warming is but a byproduct of our practices. More is to come…….money cannot save us.
@mippinperry: precisely
So why does Ireland not plant loads of trees eg alongside motorways like other countries?
@gregory, because it would increase the death toll on Irish roads even more, since no-one is taught how to drive on them in the first place
Not good news for the Polar bears.I read somewhere that they could be extinct by the end of the century.
That’s frightening
And the governments answer to save the ice .. tax the people nothing but a scam
Eeer is English failing me?
“The Arctic is undergoing a heatwave, with temperatures possibly reaching up to 20 degrees lower than its average for December.” A heatwave with temps up to 20 degrees lower….!!!! should it be “higher”?
Of course the warmer weather means more snow in the Antarctic, and there is a question of the melting Greenland ice sheets exposing civilisations from 1000 years ago – when it was warmer. In fact is was warmer in the Greenland Ice Sheet for about 95% of the time in the last 10,000 years – with the last 1000 years being known as a period of a mini ice age…. from which we are currently emerging. The worrying factors are the source of the triggers for the global warming and how far they will progress.
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/lappi/gisp-last-10000-new.png
I was reading the other day in the Independent that it has made drilling possible for the vast of amount of oil and gas that is located under the shelf…..I guess the billions of money that was invested in weather modification technology is going to pay off and then some.
There’s about 8 conspiracy theory’s going on there
I love it. I think we should have an annual conspiracy theory awards ceremony. We could base it off-season in Kerry, it’d be a great tourism gig.
Do you know much about weather modification technology? ??… Judging by your answer and dismissing it as the aul “conspiracy theory” bull kinda shows me your level of intelligence….Really hope someone buys you a book for Xmas, even if it just has pictures for you.
Its not a conspiracy theory… its a conspiracy!!
You know what I know nothing about weather modification technology but if it’s true surly it’s the answer to this global warming theory (if you believe that kind of thing)
Oh,won’t somebody please think of the children!
No. No I won’t….
I’d love to see an article discussing global climate change from a perspective which looks at a much larger time scale than the last few hundred years. Pre-industrial revolution, Renaissance, Medieval era, Roman, Ice Age, Pre-Ice Age, All the other Ice Ages and inbetween them, Etc.
Problem is Humans are consuming unprecedented amounts of energy (1) Asia/China all driving cars now (2) all world using smart phones/computers/laptops/ipads (need charging+env manufacturing cost.
That article would certainly be welcome – it might finally put the “Earth has been warmer than this in the past which proves that climate change is due to natural cycles” argument to bed by highlighting that these cycles take place over thousands of years but the present rate of change (over decades) is unprecedented to the best of our scientific knowledge.
World is getting overpopulated elephant in the room
But what did the scientists say 1000 yrs ago when it hit 0 degrees then? It’s post truth Neanderthal made global warming??
Post truth such a stupid term, sole purpose to wind people up
@Eugene Walsh: Interesting the number of red thumbs from people who do not know that in the last 1000 years we had what is known as a “little ice age” and current Greenland Ice sheet melting is exposing the Viking settlements there from over 1,000 years ago. In fact in the last 10,000 years about 9,000 were warmer then we are now. This is not the say that the cause of the current warming should not be of concern, just that there is so much looking at the last 10 or 100 or even 1000 years without understanding that this is just a fraction of the time of Earth’s existence.
“In the last 10,000 years about 9,000 were warmer than we are now”
Citation needed!
@Niall O. Agreed with all you said there. But these are some of the truths that most don’t want to hear. This time a few Xmas back we were enjoying nice -10. This particular year, it’s +10. That’s a 20 degree swing in a few yrs. OMG it must be ………NORMAL !
Pity you don’t seem to have grasped the concept that there’s a difference between climate and weather Eugene.
@Niall Ó Cofaigh: “In fact in the last 10,000 years about 9,000 were warmer then we are now.”
That’s completely false. Where do you read this absurd nonsense?
Skeptical Science refuted Niall’s claim btw for anyone who is curious: https://www.skepticalscience.com/10000-years-warmer.htm
No one knows for sure but we do know methane and co2 do cause global warming. What we know for sure is Humans have never consumed such huge amounts of energy caused by modernization/increasexin living standards in China & Asia
@Seán Ó Briain:
But is skepticalscience.com (the most ridiculously named site based on its bias) a reliable source. It is an alarmist reservoir.
The difference is Joe, skeptical science references peer reviewed scientific papers to provide it’s evidence, whereas most denialist websites use blogs, opinion pieces, big oil funded pseudo-science and downright lies to drive their agenda.
ps. that’s precisely why I stressed the need for a citation before making a claim that flies in the face of the vast majority of scientific evidence.
@Avina Laaf: Sorry, you are right here is the link and the data I used – which I had left in a comment elsewhere – but forgot to post here.
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/lappi/gisp-last-10000-new.png
Of course the data is only as good as the source and I wonder about Ireland’s ice Age ending about 15,000 years ago – but the page below shows the last 18,000 years with the warming post Ice age. It is interesting to note that this article states that the poles have been ice free for most of Earth’s History – but in truth the real danger to human society is abrupt climate change which can be caused by tipping the balance of some of the systems over a particular threshold.
http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~legneref/bronze/climate.htm
I am in no way denying climate change I should stress, nor the influences that human kind is having on the climate, but rather thinking that we can use past experiences to prepare for the future, maybe, with a realisation that just because it was this way in the last 50 years it is “normal” on the larger time scales. It is hard to imagine that 10,000 years ago (according to current thinking) Ireland and the UK and Europe were all one big land mass and the Irish Sea as we know it today did not exist but that climate change can bring about changes as big as this.
Fair enough Niall
Why do so many people not accept that the hole in the ozone layer has been caused by carbon emissions?
Funnily enough, the Donald has done a u-turn on the issue of climate change since he was elected. He said that “there might be something to it”.
Err… because it wasn’t? CFCs aren’t CO2.
Hole in earth’s ozone layer is mostly gone now Banning CFC’S expecially in fridges stopped it getting larger and over several years it has now become very small
It’s amazing how many people think global warming is linked to the ozone layer. They are completely different issues.
Scientists discovered there was holes in the Ozone layer in the eighties. Around that time scientists and the media began to really talk about global warming. I recon that’s where the confusion stemmed from.
@Ciarán Masterson: Elevated global temperatures are a result of increased atmospheric CO2 levels. CO2 traps heat. The more in the atmosphere, the more heat is trapped. The issue of the ozone layer was resolved once we banned CFCs. It showed that the damage we cause as humans can be corrected if we put in the effort to fix it.
@Ciarán Masterson: No u-turn. Just piecemeal.
Methane leaks from U.S. fracking wells have tens of times the effect on ozone hole than co2 emmissions ie methane is way way more detrimental and the thousands of U.S. fracking wells leak out huge amounts of methane. still we should do all we can to reduce co2 emmissions
Looking forward to the day we can walk to the North Pole in shorts and sandals.
*swim
Another Christmas present.
If the Earth’s daily rotation is subtracted, the entire surface of the Earth (not just the North and South poles) would turn once to the Sun and to the circle of illumination unlike our moon which always keeps the same side to the Earth as it runs its monthly circuit.
The appearance and disappearance of 15,000,000 KM or Arctic sea ice depends on that surface rotation in response to the Earth’s orbital motion yet there isn’t a single explanation out there, apart from this one here, that matches actual observations -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFrP6QfbC2g&t=29s
It is like how frost develops overnight at a local level due to daily rotation as a location turns away from the Sun and solar radiation but this is writ large at the North pole where there is a single polar day/night cycle which takes a year to accomplish so large swathes of the Arctic Ocean are in complete darkness for extended periods from September to March.
This temperature anomaly is a local weather phenomena and not a global event by virtue that the South pole, even though it is Polar noon and Midsummer , is
-26 C right now -
https://www.usap.gov/videoclipsandmaps/spwebcam.cfm
The difference between the inspirational/spiritual and the doom laden chanting of the uninspirational is pretty much obvious right now on Christmas eve.
The morons who deny it and corporations will be out in force to claim its nothing to do with mans influence
We can have a minimal effect on climate. What is one area’s disaster is an other area’s advantage. Different areas of the earth were under sea water for aeons. For example the “empty sector ” of Saudi Arabia was once under the sea. The ancient mariners had charts to show that the South Pole has two islands. No doubt global warming would greatly benefit Russia.
More green inspired climate change propaganda. President Trump will soon end the nonsense.
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