A Hellish 2016 Arctic Melt Season May Have Already Begun

[Binkie The Clown]

We have never seen heat like this before in the Arctic. Words whose meaning tends to blur due to the fact that, these days, such events keep happening over and over and over again.

Ever since at least the 1920s, the Arctic has been warming up due to a destructive and irresponsible human greenhouse gas emission. And, over recent years, the Arctic has been warming more and more rapidly as those dangerous emissions continued to build on into the 21st Century. Now the Earth has been shoved by those emissions into realms far outside her typical Holocene context. And it appears that the Winter of 2016, for the Arctic, has been the hottest such year during any period of human-based record-keeping and probably the hottest season the Arctic has experienced in at least 150,000 years.

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[msongs]

1. tonights low in Fairbanks, +5 degrees. toasty. nt

[Binkie The Clown]

2. Compared to Fairbanks' average February low of -13, that IS toasty! 18 degrees above average. n/t

[GliderGuider]

3. Nothing in human history compares to what we're doing.

Nothing in the recent geological past can compare to the danger we are now in the process of bringing to bear upon our world. Not the Great Flood. Not the end of the last ice age. Those were comfortable, normal cataclysms. Human beings and life on this world survived them. But the kind of geophysical changes we — meaning those of us who are forcing the rest of us to keep burning fossil fuels — are inflicting upon the Earth is something entirely new. Something far, far more deadly.

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. Over the past 30 days, Svalbard has been over 20 deg Fahrenheit above its average

Last 30 days: Average temperature was -4.7 °C, 11.4 °C above the normal. Highest temperature was 4.5 °C (24 January), and the lowest was -13.6 °C (9 February).

http://www.yr.no/place/Norway/Svalbard/Longyearbyen/statistics.html

It didn't once get down to its average temperature in those 30 days. And just to note how far north it is - the sun was set between October 26th and Feb 16th, so most of that warmth was achieved without direct sunlight:
http://www.timeanddate.com/sun/norway/longyearbyen

The Barents Sea, between Svalbard and Russia, has under 200,000 sq. km of ice - compared with the 1979-2008 mean of about 700,000 sq. km. It normally takes until the beginning of July to get down to 200,000 sq. km:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.6.html

[Nihil]

5. Wow ... that is scary ...

> Over the past 30 days, Svalbard has been over 20 deg Fahrenheit above its average
> It didn't once get down to its average temperature in those 30 days.
> And just to note how far north it is - the sun was set between October 26th and Feb 16th,
> so most of that warmth was achieved without direct sunlight

F . . K !

[emmadoggy]

6. !