All my life I came to think of the Arctic as a place of ice and snow. It appears that's about to change.
The Arctic is set to get drenched in the next century.
Globally, precipitation is projected to increase by 2 per cent for every degree the planet warms, but in the Arctic that figure is double. By 2091, the Arctic will see a dramatic increase in overall precipitation and most of it won’t come in the form of snow – instead it will be rain.
“It’s quite a bit, a 50 to 60 per cent increase Arctic-wide. We found that most of this increase is due to the retreat of sea ice because of the Arctic warming,” says Richard Bintanja, a climate researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute who combined data from 37 climate models to predict precipitation in the Arctic between 2091 and 2100.
Anyong...."The Arctic is going to get a lot rainier" And that means The Atlantic which produces between 50% - 81% of the oxygen we breath from the photo-plankton living in the Atlantic, will continue to decrease in salinity causing the Great Ocean Conveyor to continue cooling, killing off the plankton. NASA is presently in Newfoundland studying the effect the melt down of both poles is having upon photo-plankton. "NASA Visible Earth: Photoplankton bloom off Newfoundland, Canada" If that is not worrying and proof of Climate Change, what is? If the Atlantic dies which it presently is, what next?
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ReplyDeleteIt's hard to imagine, Anyong. If you go back just ten years to the climate projections that were then being denounced as "alarmist" and see how understated they were you might suspect today's dire predictions as optimistic if anything.
One of those golden oldies was the projection that, if we didn't slash carbon emissions immediately, the Arctic could be ice free by 2100. Seems they were out by 70-80 years.