Arctic – Page 2 – Desdemona Despair

Global annual mean temperature anomalies with respect to pre-industrial conditions (1850-1900) for six global temperature data sets (1850-2022). Graphic: WMO

April 30, 2023

WMO annual report highlights continuous advance of climate change – “While greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise and the climate continues to change, populations worldwide continue to be gravely impacted by extreme weather and climate events”

Geneva, 21 April 2023 (WMO) – From mountain peaks to ocean depths, climate change continued its advance in 2022, according to the annual report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Droughts, floods, and heatwaves affected communities on every continent and cost many billions of dollars. Antarctic sea ice fell to its lowest extent on record […]

World map showing surface air temperature anomaly for March 2023 relative to the March average for the period 1991-2020. Data source: ERA5. Graphic: Copernicus Climate Change Service / ECMWF

April 15, 2023

Earth has second-warmest March in 2023 even before arrival of planet-heating El Niño – It was the 529th consecutive month to feature temperatures above the 20th-century average – “What I still find shocking is that the last eight years were the eight warmest years on record”

By Matthew Cappucci 7 April 2023 (The Washington Post) – March 2023 will go down in the books as tying for the second warmest March on record. That’s according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service of the European Union. Temperatures globally were several degrees above average in most places outside the western U.S., where a […]

Map showing significant economic loss events in 2022. Direct economic losses resulting from natural disasters in 2022 are estimated at $313 billion. This is close to the 21st century average, after adjusting actual incurred damage to today’s dollars using the U.S. Consumer Price Index. Though 2022 was far from record-breaking in terms of overall losses, it saw many impactful and costly events across the globe. Visualizing the geographic distribution of 2022 events allows for distinguishing certain patterns, including higher frequency of medium-sized Severe Convective Storm (SCS) events in the U.S. and Europe, and the prevalence of flooding events in Africa, Southeast Asia and Oceania. The map primarily shows the economic impact, which to some extent correlates with concentration of wealth — this is not a result of a reporting bias. What this map does not highlight is the humanitarian crises and displaced communities, as many events with significant human impacts do not necessarily translate into a high financial toll in terms of direct damage. Note that significant price inflation throughout the year already resulted in notable increases of per-event losses. Graphic: Aon

January 25, 2023

Aon: Global insured losses from natural disasters exceeded $130 billion In 2022, driven by second-costliest event on record – More than 19,000 heat-related deaths in Europe

CHICAGO, 25 January 2023 (PRNewswire) – Aon plc (NYSE: AON), a leading global professional services firm, today published its 2023 Weather, Climate and Catastrophe Insight report, which identifies global natural disaster and climate trends to help make better decisions to manage volatility and enhance global resilience. The report reveals that natural disasters caused a $313 billion global economic loss […]

The effect of Arctic wildfires on carbon release: Arctic wildfires accelerate the release of organic carbon from the soil into the atmosphere, which can strengthen the feedback to warming. Graphic: V. Altounian / Science

December 23, 2022

Unprecedented Arctic wildfires fuel climate warming cycle – “Larger and more intense wildfires could substantially accelerate the release of permafrost carbon into the atmosphere”

By Kat Kerlin 8 November 2022 (UC Davis) – From Sierra Nevada forests to Arctic peatlands, climate warming is turning some long-held carbon sinks into carbon sources as wildfires increasingly send stored carbon up in smoke. In the Arctic, vast amounts of carbon have been locked beneath frozen soil, much of it in peatlands. Climate warming dries […]

Map showing GFS 2m Temperature Anomaly for 20 December 2022. Much of the Arctic in December 2022 experienced a burst of freak warming. Graphic: Climate Reanalyzer

December 20, 2022

December 2022 serving up baked Alaska and warming most of Arctic – “Record-setting weather like we’re seeing plenty of examples of in recent years does tell a real story of climate heating”

By Seth Borenstein 5 December 2022 (AP) – Much of the Arctic is in a burst of freak December warming. In Utqiagvik, Alaska’s northernmost community formerly known as Barrow, it hit 40 degrees (4.4 degrees Celsius) Monday morning. That’s not only a record by six degrees (3.3 degrees Celsius) but it’s the warmest that region has seen […]

Arctic annual air surface temperatures from October 2021 to September 2022 were the sixth warmest dating back to 1900. The image on the left depicts the departure from the average near-surface temperature across the Arctic during this period, with redder colors showing areas of greater than average warmth. The graphic on the right shows how the rate of Arctic air temperature warming has outpaced the rate of global warming. Data: ERA5 and NASA. Graphic: NOAA / Climate.gov

December 17, 2022

NOAA: Human-caused climate change fuels warmer, wetter, stormier Arctic

13 December 2022 (NOAA) – A typhoon, smoke from wildfires, and increasing rain are not what most imagine when thinking of the Arctic. Yet these are some of the climate-driven events included in NOAA’s 2022 Arctic Report Card, which provides a detailed picture of how warming is reshaping the once reliably frozen, snow-covered region which […]

Landsat images from 21 February 2000 (left) and 27 July 2019 (right) illustrating glacier retreat on top of Mount Kilimanjaro (United Republic of Tanzania). Photo: U.S. Geological Survey

November 19, 2022

Kilimanjaro’s and Africa’s last glaciers to go by 2050, says UN – “What is quite unprecedented in the historical record is how quickly this is happening”

By Patrick Hughes 3 November 2022 (BBC News) – Glaciers across the globe – including the last ones in Africa – will be unavoidably lost by 2050 due to climate change, the UN says in a report [UNESCO finds that some iconic World Heritage glaciers will disappear by 2050 –Des]. Glaciers in a third of […]

Near-surface temperature differences relative to the 1981–2010 average for 2022 to September. The map shows the median anomaly calculated from six data sets: HadCRUT5, ERA5, JRA-55, GISTEMP, NOAAGlobalTemp, and Berkeley Earth. Graphic: WMO

November 7, 2022

State of the Global Climate 2022: Sea level rise accelerates, European glacier melt shatters records, extreme weather causes devastation – “What climate scientists have warned about for decades is upon us”

By Seth Borenstein 6 November 2022 SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt (AP) – Earth’s warming weather and rising seas are getting worse and doing so faster than before, the World Meteorological Organization warned Sunday in a somber note as world leaders started gathering for international climate negotiations. [Eight warmest years on record witness upsurge in climate change impacts –Des] […]

Predicted (left) and observed (right) sea levels caused by melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS). A statistically significant correlation between the two fields (P < 0.001) provides an unambiguous observational detection of the near-field sea level fingerprint of recent GrIS melting in our warming world. Graphic: Coulson, et al., 2022 / Science

October 22, 2022

Discovery of “fingerprint” confirms alarming predictions of Greenland ice sheet melt – “How fast the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica will respond to warming is a really big unknown, and frankly a very scary unknown”

By Sarah Sloat 29 September 2022 (NBC News) – Scientists now have unambiguous proof that a phenomenon critical to predicting the impact of climate change exists. Researchers announced Thursday that they had detected the sea level “fingerprint” of the Greenland ice sheet melt, pinpointing the unique pattern of sea level change linked to the melting ice. It’s the […]

(a) Ocean thermal forcing (shaded areas) at the ocean bottom or 1000 m (whichever is shallower) and annual submarine melt rate (filled squares) at Greenland’s marine-terminating glaciers. The black dotted line shows the 1,000 m isobath and delineates the extent of the continental shelf. The black dashed regions on the ice sheet delineate the hydrological catchments for three large example glaciers: Jakobshavn Isbrae (JI), Helheim (HH) and Kangerdlugssuaq (KG). The five ice sheet regions considered throughout the paper—south (SO), central-west (CW), northwest (NW), northeast (NE) and north (NO)—are delineated by the black ticks. Other labels are the Irminger Sea (Irm), Davis Strait (Dav) and Denmark Strait (Den). Bathymetry is from ref. 42 and ref. 43. (b) Subglacial discharge (x axis, note logarithmic scale) and ocean thermal forcing (y axis) for each marine-terminating glacier. The background shading shows the resulting submarine melt rate. Glaciers are coloured by their regional grouping. The larger squares and error bars show the median and interquartile range for each region, respectively. (c) Submarine melt rate versus grounding line depth by region with fitted linear trends (all significant at the 5% level) as dashed lines. All the results shown in these plots are annually averaged over 1979–2018. Graphic: Slater and Straneo, 2022 / Nature Geoscience

October 21, 2022

Warmer air and warmer water are combining to melt Greenland ice sheet – “This unfortunately adds to the overwhelming body of evidence showing the sensitivity of the Greenland ice sheet to climate change”

By Rachel Koning Beals 17 October 2022 (MarketWatch) – The Greenland ice sheet — one of the two most important glaciers of its kind on Earth — may be even more sensitive to the warming climate than scientists previously thought. The findings, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, shed fresh light on the forces driving ice […]