Sad news out of the Arctic.
The Arctic is the fastest warming area on the Earth. This year has been marked by repeated heat waves that have increased the melt of sea ice and softened glacial ice causing melt to be abnormally higher once the summer melt season begins.
In the Bering and Chukchi seas, open water is seen where only sea ice should be at this time of year.
"The sea ice has been in a very poor shape for a number of years now," said Brettschneider. "But specifically this year in the Bering Sea, the ice values for the cold season have really been substantially lower. Not just lower than normal, but substantially lower than has ever been observed before. There are satellite records that go back 40 years, but there are actually records that go back into the 1850s from whaling logs and other observations that were taken by boat."
Jason Samenow writes in the Washington Post:
In four of the past five winters, the North Pole has witnessed dramatic temperatures spikes, which previously were rare. Now, in the lead up to summer, the temperature has again shot up to unusually high levels at the tip of the planet.
Scientists say this warming could hasten the melt of Arctic sea ice, which is already near record low levels.
In just the past few days, the temperature at the North Pole has soared to the melting point of 32 degrees, which is about 30-35 degrees (17-19 Celsius) above normal.
Much of the entire Arctic north of 80 degrees latitude is abnormally warm. The temperature averaged over the whole region appears to be the warmest on record for the time of year, dating back to at least 1958. It is about 18 degrees (10 Celsius) above the normal of 4 degrees (minus 16 Celsius).
The Arctic is unravelling before our very eyes. We need to vote the GOP out in November and stop the bleeding from their war on the environment, climate mitigation and adaption. Once we catch our breath, we will need to immediately focus on how to adapt to the inevitable scary world that awaits us. We have big and painful decisions to make with zero time to waste in implementing them.