‘Beast from the East' sweeps across Europe as Arctic warming brings freak weather

A freak warming around the North Pole is sending a blast of Arctic cold over Europe in a sign of "wacky" weather that may happen more often with man-made global warming.

Global warming could be causing the Arctic to warm
and cold blasts to be pushed over Europe.

Scientists say the northern tip of Greenland has had a record-smashing 61 hours of temperatures above freezing so far this year, linked to a rare retreat of sea ice in the Arctic winter darkness.

Arctic Ocean sea ice is at a record low for late February, at 14.1 million square kilometres. That is about a million square kilometres less than normal, or roughly the size of Egypt.

Around the entire Arctic region, temperatures are now about 20C above normal, at minus 8C.

Read the ABC News story - “‘Beast from the East' sweeps across Europe as Arctic warming brings freak weather.”

North Pole Forecast To Be 50 Degrees Warmer Than Normal This Week

Temperatures soar in the Artic.

Temperatures in the Arctic are predicted to soar nearly 50 degrees above normal on Thursday in a pre-Christmas heat wave that will bring the frozen tundra scarily close to the melting point.

It’s the second year in a row the North Pole ― now in perpetual darkness after saying goodbye to the sun in late October ― has seen abnormally high temperatures around the Christmas holiday. It’s also the second time this year. In November, temperatures in the region skyrocketed 36 degrees above normal.

Read The Huffington Post story - “North Pole Forecast To Be 50 Degrees Warmer Than Normal This Week.”

Weird weather 2016: Year of melting ice, monster storms and Australia's big wet

At risk: shrinking Arctic ice is bad news
 for polar bears - and the planet.

If Santa really lived at the North Pole his sleigh would run the risk of falling through the ice this week, empty or fully laden.

Temperatures in the high Arctic will approach melting point on Thursday, including near the North Pole, a massive 30 degrees or more above average for this time of the year.

Wide departures from temperature norms – usually on the warm side – have been a feature for a long while in the Arctic but this year's extremes qualify the region as home to probably this year's world's weirdest weather.

The polar extremes are part of what is highly likely to be declared as the hottest year in records going back to the 1880s. And so, with 2016 eclipsing both 2015 and 2014, the world would have set a new high mark for three years in a row.

Read Peter Hannam’s story in the Melbourne Age - “Weird weather 2016: Year of melting ice, monster storms and Australia's big wet.”

As Arctic Ocean Ice Disappears, The Global Climate Impacts Intensify

(The top of the world is turning from white to blue in summer as the ice that has long covered the north polar seas melt away. This monumental change is triggering a cascade of effects that will amplify global warming and could destabilize the global climate system)

The news last week that summer ice covering the Arctic Ocean was tied for the second-lowest extent on record is a sobering reminder that the planet is swiftly heading toward a largely ice-free Arctic in the warmer months, possibly as early as 2020.

After that, we can expect the ice-free period in the Arctic basin to expand to three to four months a year, and eventually to five months or more.

Since my days measuring the thickness of Arctic Ocean ice from British nuclear submarines in the early 1970s, I have witnessed a stunning decline in the sea ice covering the northern polar regions — a more than 50 percent drop in extent in summer, and an even steeper reduction in ice volume. Just a few decades ago, ice 10 to 12 feet thick covered the North Pole, with sub-surface ice ridges in some parts of the Arctic extending down to 150 feet. Now, that ice is long gone, while the total volume of Arctic sea ice in late summer has declined, according to two estimates, by 75 percent in half a century.

The great white cap that once covered the top of the world is now turning blue — a change that represents humanity’s most dramatic step in reshaping the face of our planet. And with the steady disappearance of the polar ice cover, we are losing a vast air conditioning system that has helped regulate and stabilize earth’s climate system for thousands of years.

Read the Yale 360 Environment story - “As Arctic Ocean Ice Disappears, The Global Climate Impacts Intensify.”

'My climate change' - Andrew Revkin

Some things just seem too momentous to keep in mind. One is the planet we’re living on. We’re on the third rock from the sun twenty-four hours a day, but I’ve only been to one place where that awareness is enforced by nature. Squatting on a floe of eight-foot-thick sea ice at the North Pole, drifting on the 14,300-foot-deep Arctic Ocean hundreds of miles from land, with everything in every direction south and the sun circling the horizon, you absolutely feel you are on a planet.

Another momentous thing we hardly ever think about is the thing we think with: the brain. I think about mine now quite a bit, ever since a hot July day in 2011 when my eyes started telling me conflicting stories about the nature of the world as I huffed and strained to keep up with my far fitter son running up a steep trail in the woods near my home.

My left eye told me the world was paisley. The right eye insisted all was well. I called out; we returned home. I took a shower and some aspirin, wondering if I could be having a stroke. My son drove me to the hospital. It wasn’t a stroke . . . yet.

Read “My Climate Change” by Andrew Revkin.

(Andrew C. Revkin is senior fellow for environmental understanding at Pace University’s Pace Academy for Applied Environmental Studies and the author of the Dot Earth blog at the New York Times).

Climate change has the North Pole on the run

The North Pole is on the run. Although it can drift as much as 10 meters across a century, sometimes returning to near its origin, it has recently taken a sharp turn to the east. Climate change is the likely culprit, yet scientists are debating how much melting ice or changing rain patterns affect the pole’s wanderlust.

The geographical poles—the north and south tips of the axis that the Earth spins around—wobble over time due to small variations in the sun’s and moon’s pulls, and potentially to motion in Earth’s core and mantle. But changes on the planet’s surface can alter the poles, too. They wobble with every season as the distribution of snow and rain change, and over long stretches as well. Roughly 10,000 years ago, for example, Earth woke up from a deep freeze and the massive ice sheets sitting atop what is now Canada melted. As ice mass fled, and the depressed crust rebounded, the distribution of the planet’s mass changed and the north pole started to drift west. This pattern can be clearly seen in data from 1899 onward. But a recent zigzag in the north pole’s path (and the opposite movement in the south pole) suggests a new change is afoot.

Read the Scientific American story - “Earth Is Tipping Because of Climate Change.”

Unusually warm Arctic winter stuns scientists

Right about now, Arctic sea ice should be building up toward its annual maximum, making most of the region impenetrable to all but the most hardened icebreakers. Instead, January and indeed much of the winter so far has been unusually mild throughout large parts of the Arctic.

A freak storm brought temperatures to near the freezing point, or 32 degrees Fahrenheit, near the North Pole for a short time in late December and early January, and other storms have repeatedly acted like space heaters plopped on top of the globe, turning nascent sea ice to slush and eventually, to open water.

Read Andrew Freedman’s Mashable Australia story - “Unusually warm Arctic winter stuns scientists with record low ice extent for January.”

A storm that will 'unfreeze' the North Pole

The sun has not risen above the North Pole since mid-September. The sea ice—flat, landlike, windswept, and stretching as far as the eye can see—has been bathed in darkness for months.

But later this week, something extraordinary will happen: Air temperatures at the Earth’s most northernly region, in the middle of winter, will rise above freezing for only the second time on record.

On Wednesday, the same storm system that last week spun up deadly tornadoes in the American southeast will burst into the far north, centering over Iceland. It will bring strong winds and pressure as low as is typically seen during hurricanes.

Read The Atlantic story - “The Storm That Will Unfreeze the North Pole.”

Here is something new - our poles are on the move!

Every day, it seems, there is something new.

Now researchers have detected that the North Pole is drifting.

NewScientist reports in a story headed: “Earth’s poles are shifting because of climate change”, that subtle changes in Earth’s rotation have resulted from the melting of glaciers and ice sheets.

It has been shown that the melting due to greenhouse gas emissions is making its own contribution to the shift.