Warmer Arctic Spells Colder Winters

The Arctic is moving into "a new climate state" and a return to previous Arctic conditions is "unlikely," according to a new assessment from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). One consequence of a warmer Arctic could be colder winters in other parts of the Northern Hemisphere.

The basic facts have been reported widely and often:

    The area covered by sea ice hovered near its historic low this summer. In Greenland, record-high temperatures this year have helped accelerate the melting of the country's massive ice sheet. Throughout the Arctic, permafrost is warming and the blanket of snow is shrinking. Those changes appear to be long-lasting, said an international team of climate experts who wrote the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report. [...] "The Arctic is a system, and the system is changing," said Don Perovich, a sea ice expert with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who worked on the report. "It's not just that sea ice is being reduced. There's changes in Greenland, the atmosphere, the ecosystem, and these changes are affecting human activity."

What is increasingly apparent, as researchers have warned for years, is that "polar amplification" is causing many of these changes to feed on themselves, amplifying each other year after year. In this regard, what is happening to Arctic sea ice is in many ways key.

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