When you wake up in the morning. think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love. ~ Marcus Aurelius
Sapiens have received yet another blinking code red alert out of the Arctic that our biosphere is in a death spiral while the world’s leaders continue to look the other way and pound sunshine up our behinds with blah blah blah.
New data has found that temperatures in the northern Barents Sea are so high that they will negatively affect the extreme weather events in North America, Europe, and Asia. What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic.
But, first, some background on the atlantification of the Arctic ocean.
The current warning is not the first code red about the stability of the Barents Sea and the snow, ice, and, permafrost on land that scientists have issued to an uninformed and complacent world. The most significant influx of heated water into the Arctic ocean occurs in autumn and early winter, and the water is much warmer than it should be. Powerful pulses of warm water enter the Barents Sea from the Atlantic when sea ice should have already formed. The bitter cold air temperatures do not affect sea ice formation anymore. In recent years, the mechanism that keeps the warm salty water from the Atlantic below the insulating cold and fresh water layer of the Arctic has weakened, according to the Journal of the North Atlantic and Arctic.
Arild Sundfjord, an Oceanographer at the Norwegian Polar Institute, was quoted in the journal: "We see a similar atlantification of the sea to the north and east of Svalbard; less sea ice in the Arctic Ocean leads to less melt-water and thus the warm Atlantic water remains atop the water column for most of the year, staying entirely on the surface. It provides a larger ice-free area north of the Svalbard Archipelago and thinner ice further to the east,".
The influx of Atlantic water also brings nutrients and phytoplankton, changing the northern Barents ecosystem while forcing some marine species to migrate further north as specific food sources vanish.
The new study published in Nature confirms the rapid changes with startling satellite data on the intensity of the changes. The Barents region is heating up to seven times faster than the rest of the earth and two and a half times as the rest of the Arctic.
From The Guardian:
The new figures show annual average temperatures in the area are rising across the year by up to 2.7C a decade, with particularly high rises in the months of autumn of up to 4C a decade. This makes the North Barents Sea and its islands the fastest warming place known on Earth.
Recent years have seen temperatures far above average recorded in the Arctic, with seasoned observers describing the situation as “crazy”, “weird”, and “simply shocking”. Some climate scientists have warned the unprecedented events could signal faster and more abrupt climate breakdown.
It was already known that the climate crisis was driving heating across the Arctic three times faster than the global average, but the new research shows the situation is even more extreme in places.
We know that without sea ice, the reflectivity of the sun's rays back to space is lost and as a result, the ocean absorbs heat from the sun in a reinforcing feedback loop.
“We expected to see strong warming, but not on the scale we found,” said Ketil Isaksen, senior researched at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and who led the work. “We were all surprised. From what we know from all other observation points on the globe, these are the highest warming rates we have observed so far.”
“The broader message is that the feedback of melting sea ice is even higher than previously shown,” he said. “This is an early warning for what’s happening in the rest of the Arctic if this melting continues, and what is most likely to happen in the next decades.” The world’s scientists said in April that immediate and deep cuts to carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases are needed to tackle the climate emergency.
“This study shows that even the best possible models have been underestimating the rate of warming in the Barents Sea,” said Dr Ruth Mottram, climate scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute, and not part of the team. “We seem to be seeing it shifting to a new regime, as it becomes less like the Arctic and more like the North Atlantic. It’s really on the edge right now and it seems unlikely that sea ice will persist in this region for much longer.”
Meanwhile, in Greenland.
My goldilocks zone is in the dome next week.
Doomism is about paying attention.
In particular, it is paying attention to all of the sciences and evidence before us. Aiming for the best while preparing for the worst has always been complementary. Preparing for potential societal collapse does not mean we pay less attention to cutting and drawing down carbon. To consider that societies may collapse is not giving up, but opening up to a necessary agenda.
