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A fishing boat in
the Arctic, where temperatures climbed to 1.2C this week Getty
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North
Pole above freezing in sign of 'sudden' and 'very serious' climate
change
‘It
is very serious…it is an increasing concern that this is happening
rapidly on so many fronts’
Ian Johnston
Environment Correspondent Friday 18 November 2016
Temperatures near
the North Pole have risen above freezing in the latest sign of the
“sudden” and “very serious” changes to the Earth’s climate.
The US Weather
Channel reported that at least five buoys near the pole had recorded
temperatures between zero and 1.2C on Tuesday this week.
At the same time,
parts of central Russia have seen temperatures of -40C.
Professor Peter
Wadhams, head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at Cambridge
University, told The Independent that such warmth in the Arctic at
this time of year was once virtually unheard of.
“Temperatures of
more than zero are really exceptional for this time of year. It’s
remarkable in terms of the way the climate used to be, but over the
past six years this is what’s developed,” he said.
It was, he said, the
result of a “sudden” change in the jet stream – high altitude
winds that circle the globe and have a major effect on the weather.
“When the sea ice
retreated in the Arctic Ocean, in summer it led to much warmer air
over the Arctic,” Professor Wadhams said.
“That reduced the
temperature difference between the Arctic and the tropics and that
caused the jet stream to slow down and adopt these big lobes.
“Each of these
lobes brings warm air up to the Arctic and takes cold air down to
other places.
“It is a trend
that’s giving us a [relatively] fast rise in sea level, which will
become apparent in nasty effects on coastal zones pretty soon.
“It is very
serious. It is an increasing concern that this is happening rapidly
on so many fronts.”
Zack Labe, a PhD
student studying climatology at University of California, Irvine,
tweeted a graph showing the average temperature across the Arctic
falling towards the end of this year, but then starting to move back
up again with “quite an anomalous spike”.
The amount of Arctic
sea ice this year has been significantly below the average for 1981
to 2010.
Professor Wadham
believes the North Pole could be effectively ice-free within the next
few years – even suggesting previously that it could have happened
this year.
But most researchers
believe this will happen sometime between 2030 and 2050.
This would be the
first time the Arctic was free of ice for more than 100,000 years.
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