Global warming forecast (libtard version)

[miketx]

 

[waltky]

El Nino warm front pushes up to Arctic...

Freak winter heat wave hits North Pole
Fri, Jan 01, 2016 - Temperatures at the North Pole rose above freezing on Wednesday — 20oC above the mid-winter norm and the latest abnormality in a season of extreme weather events.

Canadian weather authorities blamed the temperature spike on a freak depression which has already brought record Christmas temperatures to North America and lashed the UK with winds and floods. The deep low pressure area is currently looming over Iceland and churning up hurricane force 138kph winds and 9m waves in the North Atlantic Ocean, while dragging warm air northwards. “It’s a very violent and extremely powerful depression, so it’s not surprising that hot temperatures have been pushed so far north,” Canadian government meteorologist Nathalie Hasell said. “This deep depression has pushed hot air as far as the North Pole, where temperatures are at least 20 degrees above normal, at around freezing point, between zero and two degrees.” US scientists from the North Pole Environmental Observatory said that the temperatures had climbed suddenly.

An Arctic monitoring point 300km from the Pole that had been recording minus-37oC on Monday had shot up to minus-8oC by Wednesday, senior researcher James Morison said. The polar region is the area of the world that has seen the most profound effects of climate change in recent decades. Average year-round temperatures in the Arctic are 3oC higher than they were in the pre-industrial era, snowfall is heavier, winds are stronger and the ice sheet has been shrinking for 30 years. However, it would be hasty to pin this week’s extreme weather directly on the human-induced climate change phenomenon, rather than on a discreet anomaly.

Ice chunks float in the Northwest Passage​

Hasell said that Canada has not kept complete records of North Pole weather, but that it was nonetheless “bizarre” to see such high temperatures on the ice pack in the middle of its long night. After tormenting the North Atlantic, the depression is expected to head towards Russia’s Siberia, where the inhabitants can expect a heatwave of sorts. In Canada, the capital of the Nunavut territory of the native Inuit, Iqaluit, celebrated a relatively balmy Christmas when temperatures rose to minus-4.6oC — up from an average of minus-21oC.

Baffin Island, better known for its snow and ice, experienced unheard of rainfall in December, Canadian Ministry of the Environment spokesman David Phillips said. “It’s doubtless the El Nino effect, venturing further north,” he said, referring to a tropical Pacific weather phenomenon that reoccurs every four to seven years in more southerly climes. Last year’s El Nino is regarded as perhaps the most powerful in a century and, combined with the effects of climate change, it has generated storms, floods and droughts in Central America and beyond. Dozens of Americans were killed in rare, late season tornados in the southern US before Christmas, and then the hot El Nino air was dragged north along the Atlantic coast bringing T-shirt weather to normally frigid cities.

Freak winter heat wave hits North Pole - Taipei Times

 

[miketx]

We're doomed! Doomed! Yaaaaarrrgghhhhhhhhh! Call Al Gore, hurry!

 

[waltky]

Arctic ice wedges are melting fast...

Melting of Ice Wedges Adds to Arctic Warming
March 16, 2016 - Ice wedges are a particularly cool surface feature in the Arctic tundra. And new research suggests they are melting fast, which is bad news for the ecosystem at the top of the world — and the planet in general.

Ice wedges are formed when groundwater freezes, then — when the air gets cold enough at minus 17 degrees Celsius or lower — the ice begins to expand and contract, with more ice filling the cracks. Eventually the wedge gets big enough to reach the surface, where it splits the earth like cracks in a sidewalk. These ice wedges look like giant honeycombs on the frozen landscape. In the spring, the Arctic tundra looks like a jigsaw puzzle of small ponds with the ice wedges acting as the border between each little pond.

Ice throughout the Arctic is vanishing due to a rapidly warming climate.​

More carbon, more runoff

But new research published in this week's journal Nature Geoscience suggests these wedges play a significant role in maintaining huge stores of carbon dioxide held captive in the permafrost. "The unique structure of ice wedge polygon landscapes promotes ponding of water and the accumulation of vast stores of soil carbon as wetland vegetation dies off seasonally and is buried and frozen over thousands of years" said Cathy Wilson, the Los Alamos National Laboratory geomorphologist who co-authored the paper. While researchers have seen the collapse of ice wedges before, Wilson's study is the first to find that the rapid melting of ground ice has become widespread, with a ripple effect across the entire Arctic.

Ice wedges turn the Arctic tundra into a mosaic of images.​

These collapses are called thermokarsts, and Wilson says they can change the area's hydrology by "creating a lot of new ponds, or by draining and drying polygon-shaped ponds by connecting them into a continuous drainage network." The researchers also found that the melting ice wedges are speeding up the rate at which permafrost is thawing. Permafrost is ground that has stayed frozen for at least two years. Most of the northern permafrost has been frozen for tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of years. It locks away season after season of plant life on ice, nearly 1,700 gigatons of organic carbon. That's a whole lot more than all the greenhouse gas floating around our atmosphere in the form of methane and carbon dioxide, and it is released into the atmosphere as the permafrost thaws.

Tipping point

 

[miketx]

Ice wedges huh? Bullshit.

 

[blastoff]

They've got computer models to prove it though!

And we're talking Al Gore's bailiwick, not Al Bundy's!