U. Copenhagen Study - Only Worst-Case Models Predicted Arctic Sea Ice Loss Now Underway
Temperatures in the Arctic Ocean between Canada, Russia, and Europe are warming faster than climate models have been able to predict, according to a new study that shows Arctic sea ice is melting more quickly than once assumed.
The researchers found that, over the past 40 years, temperatures have risen by one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees F) every decade, and even more so over the Barents Sea and around Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, where they have increased by 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) per decade throughout the period.
“Our analyses of Arctic Ocean conditions demonstrate that we have been clearly underestimating the rate of temperature increases in the atmosphere nearest to the sea level, which has ultimately caused sea ice to disappear faster than we had anticipated,” says researcher Jens Hesselbjerg Christensen, a professor at the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institutet (NBI) and coauthor of the study in Nature Climate Change.
Researchers compared current temperature changes in the Arctic with climate fluctuations that we know from, for example, Greenland during the ice age between 120,000–11,000 years ago. “The abrupt rise in temperature now being experienced in the Arctic has only been observed during the last ice age. During that time, analyses of ice cores revealed that temperatures over the Greenland Ice Sheet increased several times, between 10 to 12 degrees [18 to 21.6 degrees F], over a 40 to 100-year period,” says Christensen.
EDIT
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/08/arctic-sea-ice-global-warming-climate-change-predictions
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k&r for visibility.
-Laelth
