The Siberian town of Verkhoyansk reached the temperature during a prolonged heatwave in June last year.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has confirmed that a temperature of 38 degrees Celsius (100.4 degrees Fahrenheit) reached in a Siberian town last year was a record for the Arctic.
The United Nations’ agency said on Tuesday the temperature that hit Verkhoyansk on June 20, 2020, came during a prolonged heatwave amid conditions which averaged as much as 10C (50F) above normal for much of the summer over Arctic Siberia.
“This new Arctic record is one of a series of observations … that sound the alarm bells about our changing climate,” said Petteri Taalas, the WMO’s secretary-general.
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The Arctic has a new record high temperature, according to the U.N.
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The Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the world
An important climatic indicator has been misreported by a factor of two
“Everybody knows [the Arctic] is a canary when it comes to climate change,” says Peter Jacobs, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who presented the work on 13 December at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union. “Yet we’re misreporting it by a factor of two. Which is just bananas.”
Researchers have long known the world warms faster in the far north, because of a phenomenon known as Arctic amplification. The drivers of amplification include increased solar heating, as dark ocean water replaces reflective sea ice, along with occasional intrusions of tropical heat, carried to the Arctic by “atmospheric rivers,” narrow parades of dense clouds that drag water vapor northward.
Jacob’s co-authors include researchers who oversee several influential global temperature records, and they noted the faster Arctic warming as they prepared to release the global temperature average for 2020. NASA’s internal peer reviewer challenged the higher figure, suggesting the scientific literature didn’t support it. But the researchers have found the four times ratio holds in record sets from both NASA (3.9) and the United Kingdom’s Met Office (4.1), and they hope to soon include the Berkeley Earth record. (Their work also has company: In July, a team at the Finnish Meteorological Institute posted a preprint also arguing for the four times figure.)
The researchers found Arctic warming has been underestimated for a couple of reasons. One is climate scientists’ tendency to chop each hemisphere into thirds and label the area above 60°N as the “Arctic”—an area that would include, for example, most of Scandinavia. But the true definition of the Arctic is defined by Earth’s tilt. And, as has been known for centuries, the Arctic Circle is a line starting at 66.6°N. When researchers lump in the lower latitudes, “you’re diluting the amount of Arctic warming you’re getting,” Jacobs says. “That is not a trivial thing.”
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Wherever the exact ratio of amplification sits, its influence is undeniable, researchers say. Thawing permafrost is undermining Indigenous villages, summer sea ice is vanishing, and water is sluicing off Greenland’s ice sheet in record amounts.
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Climate-concerned donors should focus on helping to pass climate policy, not offset their emissions, an advisory group says. amp.theatlantic.com/...
Arctic temperatures continue to climb as Earth warms, NOAA says
The Arctic, which continues to warm at about twice the rate of the rest of the globe, had its seventh-warmest year on record and its warmest autumn since 1900 www.nbcnews.com/...
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