Extreme Arctic Warming Breaks Color Barrier Into Hot Pink

As global warming from unlimited fossil fuel burning accelerates, the Arctic is being radically transformed. This winter saw large regions of Canada and Greenland about 10°C (about 15-20°F) above the historical average. Temperatures in eastern Canada in the dead of winter were a staggering 21°C (37.8°F) above average. The extreme Arctic warming is wreaking havoc with the polar ecosystems and is linked to the catastrophic snowstorms that pummeled the United States. In a summary of how global climate change is becoming observable to people in their daily lives, NASA scientist James Hansen was forced to redraw his global map with hot pink:

The temperature anomaly in the Arctic — the amount that current temperatures differ from historical norms — is now so severe that NASA’s James Hansen had to add a new color to his charts in order to accurately depict it: Hot pink.

“One sure bet is that this decade will be the warmest in history,” Hansen writes in his survey. Globally, extreme summer temperatures are becoming even more pervasive than warmer winters. “If people cannot recognize that summers are becoming more extreme they may need to have their senses examined or their memories.”

This is not the first time climate change has broken through scientists’ temperature scales. Updating from 2002 to 2009, MIT scientists were forced to add new colors to their “Greenhouse Gamble” roulette wheels for projected future warming.

(HT Climate Sight)