The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released its annual Arctic Report Card for 2016 Tuesday. As anyone who has followed the headlines this past year would guess, the news was not good: Many signals of warming in the region are accelerating. For example, from October 2015 to September 2016, temperatures over land in the Arctic were 2 degrees Celsius above the 1981-2010 baseline. That is the warmest measurement in the records, which date back to 1900. The report card ties the rise in temperature to this year’s latest-ever formation of autumn sea ice.
Not only is the Arctic warming twice as fast as the global average temperature, but Arctic Ocean acidification due to absorption of carbon dioxide also continued increasing, melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet lasted 30-40 days longer in the northeast and 15-20 days longer along the west coast when compared to the 1981-2010 average, and thawing of the permafrost is showing a net release of carbon dioxide and methane from tundra into the atmosphere.
The report card, which was initiated in 2006 and is the product of some 50 scientists, was presented at American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.
Bob Berwyn at InsideClimate News notes that Rafe Pomerance—the chairman of Arctic 21 and a member of the Polar Research Board of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine—contrasts the report card to the fossil fuel aggressiveness of the incoming Trump administration:
"This is a byproduct of the poison of denialism, a political issue that has taken hold so deeply so that this is the kind of stuff that can be contemplated," he said. "Evidence doesn't mean anything, science doesn't seem to mean anything. They ought to take what's going on in the Arctic really seriously. This is a crisis. The Arctic is unraveling."
As reported by Oliver Milman in The Guardian three weeks ago, the poisonous nature of that denialism may well extend in a Trump administration to cuts in NASA’s Earth Science Division budget, which would hamper programs begun 25 years ago that provide extensive data on climate. A former congressman, Bob Walker—who served as chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology two decades ago—is an adviser on the Trump transition team. He said “half the climatologists in the world” are skeptical that human activity is causing climate change. That claim is, depending on how charitably one chooses to describe it, profoundly mistaken or an outright lie.
Trump has called climate research “politicized science.” The Earth science program is about a lot more than climate—providing data about everything from forecasts of floods and hurricanes to expected electrical load needs. But it’s the climate portion, which includes gauging the extent of sea ice in the Arctic, that has Republicans upset. They tried to whack $300 million out of the division’s $1.8 billion budget last April, but the bill went nowhere because President Obama wouldn’t sign it.
Walker says some Earth science programs should be transferred to other agencies, with NOAA being the obvious choice. But it’s not clear that he is including climate programs among them. The problems, as noted by Brad Plumer at Vox is that NOAA may be ill-suited for running some of the programs and, quite tellingly, when cuts for NASA’s science division are discussed, there’s been no proposal to increase NOAA’s budget to cover the cost.