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Last revised October 2007. All information and figures are by approximation, and may be altered and changed without notice. 29 April 2008
THERE may be more to global warming than we thought. On top of the effect of human-made carbon emissions, natural changes in the warm ocean currents travelling to the icy north may be helping to heat up the entire northern hemisphere.
Temperatures in the Arctic are rising far faster than in other parts of the world. Climate models produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which are tuned to reproduce the human-made greenhouse effect, predict the region should have warmed by 1.4 °C between 1960 and 2000. In fact, the Arctic's average air temperature rose by 2.2 °C. Vladimir Semenov of the Obukhov Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Moscow, Russia, says that ocean currents carrying warm water from lower latitudes into polar regions could have played a part in this increase. Text from: http://environment.newscientist.co This website has more to tell about the arctic warming issue. It deals comprehensively with the much more pronounced arctic warming that started 90 years ago at the remote Archipelagos of Spitsbergen at latitude 78 degrees North. It assesses in detail what Vladimir Semenov (see the box) and his colleagues had to say about the earlier warming in 2004[1]; see: Chapter B, “What offers modern science”. Although they acknowledge that: “The huge warming of the Arctic, which started in the early 1920s and lasted for almost two decades (see graph below), is one of the most spectacular climate events of the 20th century”, this website is giving you a more in-depth research on what happened back in the late 1910s with many references and graphs. As necessary as it is to investigate and discuss the situation in the Arctic and its global warming potential, one will remain in the dark as long as the early arctic warming is not fully explained and understood, to which this website wants to be a service, and you can find out whether it is. Have an interesting reading,
[1] Lennart Bengtsson • Vladimir A. Semenov • Ola Johannessen, The early century warming in the Arctic – A possible mechanism, 2003, Report No. 345, Max-Planck-Institute of Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany; |
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