Topics: Climate Change, Existentialism, Global Warming, Politics
Note: I participated in the Facebook boycott yesterday, and included Twitter and Google. I'll speak to that on my last post for the year Friday.
"Then I saw 'a new heaven and a new earth,' for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea." Revelation 21:1
The Arctic is continuing to warm twice as fast as the rest of the planet; air temperatures every year from 2014 to today have been warmer than all previous records since 1900.
The reasons for this trend include less snow and ice to reflect sunlight, warmer oceans releasing heat into the atmosphere later into the fall, and increasing winter cloudiness, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
NOAA released its 13th annual Arctic Report Card, synthesizing the peer-reviewed work of 81 scientists from 12 countries, on 11 December 2018 at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting in Washington, DC. The report sounded warnings about the current effects of Arctic warming in such diverse fields as caribou populations and poisoning of shellfish.
Emily Osborne, who heads NOAA’s Arctic research programme, told reporters at AGU that the higher air and water temperatures are pushing the Arctic into uncharted territory. The average temperature this past year was 1.7 °C above the long-term average, she said, and an unusually sluggish and wavy high-altitude jet stream coincided with a heat wave at the North Pole and a swarm of severe winter storms in the eastern US.
Arctic heads for ‘uncharted territory’, Harvey Leifert, Physics World
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