Warm Arctic, Cold Continents? It Sounds Counterintuitive, but Research Suggests it’s a Thing
Scientists suspect that rapid warming in the Arctic is causing more climate extremes farther south, including bouts of severe cold and snow in the Northeast.
By Bob Berwyn
November 22, 2020
By any measure, the Arctic has changed profoundly in the last 40 years, warming three times as fast as the global average, and losing half its summer sea ice, as well as billions of tons of land-based glacier ice.
And even though the Arctic only encompasses about 6 percent of the Earth’s surface area, the warming there has kicked off climate chain reactions that are disrupting weather and climate patterns across the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, including most major North American and European cities and agricultural areas. The abrupt and accelerating Arctic warming directly harms the communities, livelihoods and traditions of the 4 million people who live in the polar region.
Some scientists say a more frequently recurring cycle they refer to as “warm Arctic, cold continents,†is a sign of that disruption. The pattern seemed to emerge as a global warming signal about 10 years ago, as researchers documented an increase of summer and winter extremes in parts of North America and Eurasia, including heat waves, killer blizzards, floods and cold snaps, occurring even as Arctic warming and ice loss accelerated.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22112020/warm-arctic-cold-continents-climate-change/
