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SoylentNews had a story last month about temperatures in the Arctic that were 20°C (36°F) warmer than usual. That was just a warm up.
Richard James, who holds a doctorate in meteorology, found November produced the most anomalously warm Arctic temperatures of any month on record after analyzing data from 19 weather stations.
In the middle of the month, the temperature averaged over the entire Arctic north of 80 degrees latitude spiked to 36 degrees [Fahrenheit] above normal.
Now, storm activity around Greenland has caused a warm spell in the vicinity of the North Pole, with temperatures 50°F (28°C) higher than usual.
As of the morning of Thursday, December 22 (3 a.m. EST), the International Arctic Buoy Programme (IABP), operated out of the University of Washington, recorded temperatures from these buoy[s] up to 0°C or slightly higher.
There was a similar pattern of unusually warm weather in the Arctic in November and December of 2015.
The warm spell [...] marks the second straight December of freakish warmth spreading across the Arctic due to weird weather patterns.
additional coverage:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28 2016, @11:15AM
>to gamble away our home planet.
The home planet saw a number of much warmer periods before, and will see yet more of them even if we, the humans, go and extinct ourselves this very day. Read up on geologic history, it helps filtering out crazy alarmism.
And BTW, arctic ice cap is a much more recent feature than the Homo genus. Have we really become *that* dumber than our naked ancestors, to now fear the very climate in which they thrived?
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Wednesday December 28 2016, @01:04PM
I for one would like to see human species and more than that human civilisation last a bit longer, and not see us go extinct or regress to Paleolithic technology and population levels, so I do not think that geologic history is of any help whatsoever in curbing crazy alarmism. The human species has built up a global civilisation that is dependent on the climate being one way and cannot quickly adapt to it swinging another way. We cannot so easily move our cities and farmlands to wherever the changing climate makes them viable. Climate change can and has destroyed human civilisations in the past (e.g. the 4.2 kiloyear event [wikipedia.org] which was said to have caused the collapse of the Old Kingdom of Egypt and the Akkadian Empire), and the kind of climate change we are talking about now has the potential to destroy all of modern human civilisation. This will probably not be enough to drive the human species completely extinct, but I don’t think the death of 90% to 99% of the human species and a reversion to barbarism among the survivors is a good thing.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 29 2016, @12:47AM
The human species has built up a global civilisation that is dependent on the climate being one way and cannot quickly adapt to it swinging another way.
The obvious rebuttal is that we see plenty of evidence that human civilization radically changes over the course of a single human lifespan. My view is that it would be hard for us to even notice the effects of climate change just due to how quickly we adapt to it.
Further, some of the proposed mitigation approaches (such as widespread, very selective use of Pascal's wager or redoing humanity's energy infrastructure to prevent modest climate change) would increase the fragility of human civilization.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28 2016, @01:58PM
”Thrived” is a relative term. To say our “naked ancestors thrived” is laughable compared to how we moderns have “thrived”. Human populations in the Paleolithic did not exceed 100,000 to 300,000 individuals. Today of course there are well over 7 billion humans on the planet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28 2016, @03:47PM
>Human populations in the Paleolithic did not exceed 100,000 to 300,000 individuals. Today of course there are well over 7 billion humans on the planet.
Religions forbidding ancient birth control practices are a relatively recent invention; humans have *not* evolved to breed like crazed rats, quite the reverse in fact.
Do read up on tribal reproductive practices; remedying one's ignorance is good for one's intellect.