The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued its annual Arctic report card and the results are startling. 2007 was the warmest year on record for the Arctic, a continuation of the Arctic-wide warming trend that began in the mid-1960’s. In fact the annual mean surface air temperature anomaly has nearly doubled from the Dust Bowl years of the 1930’s. Check out the NOAA graph I’ve included above. What jumps out at me is that, since the sixties, temperature anomalies crescendo upward; leaving behind any sort of semblance of normalcy visible in the first half of the century.
One item of particular note is the feedback loop that is now clearly showing in the data as this autumn’s Arctic temperatures are running 5 degrees C over normal. With record losses of summertime sea ice the last few years, solar heating of the open ocean is contributing to Arctic wide warming. Further the freeze-up of the ice now occurs later in the season which prevents it from thickening to historic levels and thus results in a faster melting in the spring – And there’s the loop. What we are witnessing clearly demonstrates the effects of global warming.
