Climate change infographic arctic ice9/26/2023 ![]() ![]() And projections of future climate impacts might need to be adjusted, said Mika Rantanen, a researcher at the Finnish Meteorological Institute in Helsinki. If the rate of warming in the Arctic continues to speed up, the influence on weather could worsen, one of the researchers said. And the McKinney wildfire continues to rage in Northern California, destroying 60,000 acres, killing four people and triggering a mass fish kill. The heaviest rainfall in decades inundated Seoul, South Korea, killing at least nine and damaging nearly 3,000 structures. Just weeks after a deadly heat wave clamped down on European capitals, shattering records in Britain, extreme temperatures are again engulfing western Europe this week. The two studies serve as a sharp reminder that humans continue to burn fossil fuels and pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at rates that are dangerously heating the planet and unleashing extreme weather. “One has to measure it much better, and all the time, because we are at the precipice of many tipping points,” like the complete loss of Arctic sea ice in summers, he said. Dubey, an atmospheric scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and an author of an earlier study with similar findings, said the faster rate of warming of the Arctic was worrisome, and points to the need to closely monitor the region. By altering the temperature difference between the North Pole and the Equator, the warming Arctic appears to have affected storm tracks and wind speed in North America. But the impacts extend far beyond the Arctic, reaching down to influence weather like extreme rainfall and heat waves in North America and elsewhere. One result of rapid Arctic warming is faster melting of the Greenland ice sheet, which adds to sea-level rise. And some parts of the region, notably the Barents Sea north of Norway and Russia, are warming up to seven times faster, they said. Over the past four decades the region has been heating up four times faster than the global average, not the two to three times that has commonly been reported. The rapid warming of the Arctic, a definitive sign of climate change, is occurring even faster than previously described, researchers in Finland said Thursday. ![]()
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