NOAA Arctic Report Card @ AGU: "It's Hard To See How Summer Ice Will Survive"

[hatrack]

The ill winds of climate change are irrevocably reshaping the Arctic, including massive declines in sea ice and snow and a record-late start to sea ice formation this fall. Those were the sobering conclusions of the 2016 Arctic Report Card released Tuesday. The report card is sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and co-authored by more than 50 scientists from Asia, North America and Europe. The data shows that the Arctic is warming at double the rate of the global average temperature. Between October 2015 and September 2016, temperatures over Arctic land areas were 2.0 degrees Celsius above the 1981-­2010 baseline, the warmest on record going back to 1900.

The report, released at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, clearly links the Arctic heatwave to a record-late start to formation of sea ice this fall, and to record high and low seasonal snow cover extent in the Northern Hemisphere. If the extreme warmth recorded in the Arctic this fall persists for the next few years, it may signal a completely new climate in the region, scientists said.

EDIT

Arctic ice doesn't care about politics, and what happens in the region now is critically important to the U.S., said Rafe Pomerance, chair of Arctic 21 and a member of the Polar Research Board of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. "What kind of Arctic do we want to have? It has to be one that maintains the stability of the climate system," he said. "The melting of Greenland is going to put an enormous hit on real estate values. The fate of Greenland is the fate of Miami. It's in the U.S. national interest to stop Greenland's ice sheet from melting. How are we going to bring it to a halt?"

The scientific report stands in stark contrast to the incoming administration's apparent intention to foster more fossil fuel development, he said. "This is a byproduct of the poison of denialism, a political issue that has taken hold so deeply so that this is the kind of stuff that can be contemplated," he said. "Evidence doesn't mean anything, science doesn't seem to mean anything. They ought to take what's going on in the Arctic really seriously. This is a crisis. The Arctic is unraveling."

EDIT

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/13122016/arctic-melting-climate-change-noaa-science

[GliderGuider]

1. "How are we going to bring it to a halt?"

Short answer? We're not.