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Q&A: How is Arctic warming linked to the ‘polar vortex’ and other extreme weather?
Q&A: How is Arctic warming linked to the ‘polar vortex’ and other extreme weather?
The past week has seen some brutal weather hitting the US and Canada. With cold Arctic air plunging south down to the US midwest, six states have seen temperatures lower than the south pole and at least eight people have died due to the extreme cold.
The UK, too, is braced for snow this week, but nothing close to the scale seen in the US.
The very cold weather prompted President Trump to tweet: “What the hell is going on with Global Waming? [sic].” This followed an earlier tweet that it “wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!”
Trump’s comments received widespread derision from scientists and the media, with many articles pointing out that Trump is confusing short-term weather events with long-term climate, and that extreme cold weather still occurs in a warming world.
The cold, snowy weather has also been accompanied by a flurry of stories about the “polar vortex” and how it can bring extreme weather to the northern hemisphere mid-latitude regions of North America, Europe and Asia. But that is not the only way that the Arctic can affect conditions further south.
Over the past decade or so, a growing body of research has proposed ways in which rapid Arctic warming can lead to harsh winters, summer heatwaves and even floods and droughts across the mid-latitudes.
Some scientists say that climate change and Arctic sea ice loss are the root cause of these events, but others are more circumspect.
In this detailed Q&A, Carbon Brief speaks to scientists about the potential connections between Arctic warming and extreme weather across the mid-latitudes, what those theories look like, and how the evidence measures up.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Global warming to date could ‘obliterate’ a third of glacier ice
The warming the world has already experienced could be enough to melt more than a third of the world’s glaciers outside Antarctica and Greenland – regardless of current efforts to reduce emissions.
That is the stark conclusion of a new study, which analyses the lag between global temperature rise and the retreat of glaciers.
The relatively slow response of glaciers to global warming means it will take to the end of the century – and beyond – to see the benefits of mitigation efforts in the coming decades, the study says.
The “baked in” glacier loss from observed warming has largely been overlooked, another scientist tells Carbon Brief, meaning “we really are on course to obliterate many of these mountain landscapes”.
Ice cube
Glaciers are huge rivers of ice that ooze their way over land, powered by gravity and their own sheer weight. They accumulate ice from snowfall and lose it through melting.
As global temperatures have risen, many of the world’s glaciers have already started to shrink and retreat. Continued warming could see many iconic landscapes – from the Canadian Rockies to the Mount Everest region of the Himalayas – lose almost all their glaciers by the end of the century.
But glacier retreat does not happen overnight. So if global temperature rise stopped immediately, how much of the world’s glacier ice could be saved? And for how much is its fate already sealed?
This is what the new study, published in Nature Climate Change, aims to work out.
The study focuses on the lag between rising temperatures and how quickly glaciers adjust. An ice cube makes a suitable metaphor, as three of the authors – Prof Ben Marzeion, Dr Georg Kaser and Dr Fabien Maussion – explain to Carbon Brief over email:
“If you take an ice cube from the fridge – i.e. from one climate – to the kitchen table – i.e. a new climate – it will, finally, but not instantaneously, melt. The time it takes to fully melt the cube depends on: a) the size of the cube; and b) the temperature in your kitchen.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Carbon Brief Interview: Dr Katharine Hayhoe
Dr Katharine Hayhoe is a professor in the department of political science at Texas Tech University and director of its Climate Science Center. She was a lead author on the Climate Science Special Report, part of the fourth US National Climate Assessment, which was published in early November 2017. Hayhoe is also a science advisor on the US documentary series Years of Living Dangerouslyand was named as one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2014.
Together with her husband, Hayhoe wrote A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions. She also writes and produces an animated series on YouTube called “Global Weirding”.
- Hayhoe on her early research career: “I was looking around for an extra course that might be interesting and I saw a class on climate modelling over in the geography department.”
- On regional climate information: “I evaluate the downscaling methods we use to take the relatively coarse information from the big global models and downscale it to much higher spatial and sometimes even high temporal resolution at the local to regional scale.”
- On improving climate models: “The smaller the spatial grids and the smaller the time step we use in the model, the better we’re able to actually explicitly resolve the physical processes in the climate.”
- On the biggest unknowns of future climate change:“There are long-term processes in the climate system that we’re not yet incorporating in our models and when we do, the final outcome of this inadvertent experiment that we’ve been conducting with our planet is likely to be worse, not better, than we thought.”
- On Donald Trump’s presidency: “I know this sounds very strange – but I really believe that his election galvanised people into personal action in a way that never would have happened if Clinton had been elected.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
