Scientists say Arctic warming could be to blame for blasts of extreme cold
Research suggests that climate change is altering the jet stream, pushing frigid air down to southern climes more frequently. But the scientific jury is still out.
The data is clear: Rising global temperatures mean winters are getting milder, on average, and the sort of record-setting cold that spanned the country Friday is becoming rarer. But at the same time, global warming may be altering atmospheric patterns and pushing harsh outbreaks of polar air to normally moderate climates, according to scientists who are actively debating the link.
Drastic changes in the Arctic, which is warming faster than anywhere else on Earth, are at the center of the discussion. Shifts in Arctic ice and snow cover are triggering atmospheric patterns that allow polar air to spread southward more often, according to recent research.
Read more on The Washington Post.
Boston is losing its snow wicked fast
New England is warming more quickly than almost anywhere else on Earth.
My first winter in Boston, the last patches of snow on my street didn’t melt until late June. It was 2015, the year the city broke its all-time record for annual snowfall: 110.3 inches, more than twice the average. Public transportation morphed into a hellscape. Schools racked up so many snow days that some had to extend the academic year. Dogs began to summit snowbanks to break out of fenced-in yards; a homegrown Yeti appeared to help locals shovel. The city eventually ran out of places to dump the piles of snow—prompting then-Mayor Marty Walsh to consider throwing it all into the harbor like so much British tea.
Continue reading on The Atlantic.
TIL about winter storms
Winters are warming faster than any other season here in the U.S. So why are some winter storms getting even more intense? Today, we’re going to explore the connections between climate change and extreme winter weather. For this episode, we sat down with atmospheric science expert Dr. Jennifer Francis of the Woodwell Climate Research Center.
Read more and listen on TILclimate.
New abnormal: Climate disaster damage ‘down’ to $268 billion
This past year has seen a horrific flood that submerged one-third of Pakistan, one of the three costliest U.S. hurricanes on record, devastating droughts in Europe and China, a drought-triggered famine in Africa and deadly heat waves all over.
Yet this wasn’t climate change at its worst.
Read more on Associated Press News.
Fires to floods: ‘Weather whiplash’ defined my 2022, and maybe your 2023
This could be our disturbing new normal.
I’ve lived in the high desert of the southwestern US most of my life, primarily in New Mexico and Colorado. In those four decades, I’ve never seen it as dry here as in 2022. In all that time, I’ve also never seen it as wet as this year.
In northern New Mexico, the year began with months of unseasonal heat, dryness and extreme wind that fueled the largest wildfire of the year in the lower 48 states. It burned through 340,000 acres of the Sangre de Cristo mountains and destroyed or damaged over a thousand homes and other structures.
Then, in the middle of June, the annual monsoon rains thankfully arrived to douse the fires. But they stayed a couple months longer and dumped nearly twice as much moisture as the previous year (or the year before that). In fact, we were still seeing some monsoon pattern precipitation several weeks later than normal.
Amazon loses 10% of its vegetation in nearly four decades
Tanguro MPI Torres
June 2019
The Amazon region has lost 10% of its native vegetation, mostly tropical rainforest, in almost four decades, an area roughly the size of Texas, a new report says.
From 1985 to 2021, the deforested area surged from 490,000 square kilometers (190,000 square miles) to 1,250,000 square kilometers (482,000 square miles), unprecedented destruction in the Amazon, according to the Amazon Network of Georeferenced Socio-Environmental Information, or Raisg.
Read more on The Associated Press.
COP27 long on pledges, short on funds for forests — Congo Basin at risk
The first big news of the COP27 climate conference was a forest promise: UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced a 26-nation partnership to conserve woodland ecosystems as “one of the best ways of getting us back on track to 1.5 degrees” of warming.
This Forest and Climate Leaders Partnership is meant to martial efforts to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2030, as 145 countries pledged in the Glasgow forests declaration at COP26.
But one year on, countries are lagging behind the pace needed to reach the Glasgow goal, experts said. Most worryingly, the funding pledged to fight deforestation is far from enough and has often failed to arrive.
Soil moisture impacts the tundra carbon balance in a changing climate
There is growing recognition that soil moisture plays a crucial role in regulating the response of tundra carbon cycling to climate warming.
Arctic tundra is Earth’s coldest terrestrial biome after glaciers, yet this far northern biome is warming three to four times faster than the global average (Rantanen et al., 2022). Importantly, the Arctic tundra biome stores ~160 Pg C in the top 1 m of permafrost soils (Loranty et al., 2016), which is equivalent to ~17 years of humanity’s fossil fuel emissions at current levels. Continued warming could cause a significant portion of this carbon to be released into the atmosphere over the coming century (Schuur et al., 2022), therefore it is crucial to better understand the carbon balance of tundra ecosystems including climate change impacts.
Read more in Global Change Biology.