An international team of scientists says the Arctic is warming much more rapidly than previously known because of the burning of fossil fuels around the world

Tuesday, October 22, 2019

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An international team of scientists says the Arctic is warming much more rapidly than previously known because of the burning of fossil fuels around the world. Their four-year study says Arctic warming is occurring at nearly twice the rate of the rest of the world, with major impacts that are spreading far beyond the region, such as rising sea levels. The 300 scientists who contributed to the report say concentrations of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxid, have caused a three to four degree Celsius rise in Arctic temperatures over the last 50 years. The report says the trend is expected to continue over the next century with an additional average temperature increase of three to five degrees over land and up to seven degrees over the Arctic Ocean. The author, Susan Hassol, says the amount of Arctic Sea ice during the summer is expected to decline by at least half by the end of this century, tells VOA News. According to the Guardian Unlimited, a team of scientists has condemned claims of climate catastroph as "fatally flawed" in a report released today. The study appears on the same day that 300 climate scientists warn that winter temperatures in Alaska, western Canada and eastern Russia have risen by up to 4 C in the past 50 years - and could warm by up to 7 C. Martin Agerup, president of the Danish Academy for Future Studies and colleagues from Stockholm, Canada, Iceland and Britain say in their report that predictions of "extreme impacts" based on greenhouse emissions employed "faulty science, faulty logic and faulty economics". Predictions of changes in sea level of a metre in the next century were overestimates: sea-level rises were likely to be only 10cm to 20cm in the next 100 years. Claims that climate change would lead to a rise in malaria were not warranted. But the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, to be presented in Reykjavik today, tells a different story. The Arctic scientists predict that north polar summer ice may decline by at least 50% by the end of this century. Some computer models predict almost the complete disappearance of ice. This would have a devastating impact on indigenous populations, who use the ice for hunting and fishing. Warming could also lead to a "substantial" melting of the Greenland ice sheet. If this were to disappear sea levels would rise by about seven metres

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