Arctic heating up twice as fast as other regions: climate report

The “State of the Climate” report, released Aug. 2 by the American Meteorological Society, provides more information about Arctic warming.

The Arctic — along with the rest of the world — is getting hotter.

And that increase in heat is most pronounced in the Arctic, said the “State of the Climate” report, released Aug. 2 by the American Meteorological Society.

“Over Arctic landmasses, the rate of warming is more than twice that of low and mid-latitude regions,” said the report, compiled by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s Center for Weather and Climate, which includes contributions from scientists from around the world and provides an update on global climate indicators.

The Arctic continued to warm and sea ice extent remained low, the report said in a chapter devoted to the Arctic.

The Arctic land surface temperature in 2015 was 1.2 C above the 1981 to 2010 average.

The Arctic, “continues to respond to long-term upward trends in air temperature,” the report states.

Meanwhile, the Greenland Ice Sheet, with the capacity to contribute about seven metres to sea level rise, experienced melting over more than 50 per cent of the ice sheet for the first time since the exceptional melting of 2012, while Arctic rivers discharged 10 per cent more water than during the 1980s.

Overall, the 26th report found many record-breakers:

• climate-warming greenhouse gases were the highest on record;

• global surface temperature was the highest on record;

• sea surface temperature was the highest on record;

• global upper ocean heat was the highest on record; and,

• global sea level rose to a new record high in 2015.

And 2016 looks to be even hotter.

Last month, agencies in the United States sounded an alarm about a 1.3 C increase in the global temperature recorded during the first six months of 2016, the hottest months on record since 1880, while in the Arctic you could find temperature increases of 2.5 C to 12 C from January 2016 to June 2016.