| Report provides a preview of the ‘new Arctic’ |
| By Henry Fountain in NY Times Climate Forward Dec 10, 2020 |
| I’ve been covering how climate change is affecting the Arctic for a few years now, so for me, the release of the annual Arctic Report Card every December is usually something of a ho-hum moment. |
| Overseen by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and representing the work of dozens of Arctic experts, the report card is a useful summary of the changes taking place in a region that’s warming faster than any other on the planet. But since I write about those changes throughout the year, to me it feels a bit like old news. |
| But the release of this year’s report card, on Tuesday at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, felt different. As I reported, it contained the usual detailed information on the state of the region — second-highest average temperatures on record, drastically low sea ice, shrunken snow cover that led to severe wildfires, and more. |
| This time, though, the framing was different. It was not just that the Arctic is changing — that’s been said umpteen times. It was that the region is shifting to a fundamentally different climate, that it is well on its way to becoming a place defined more by open ocean and rain and less by sea ice and snow. The Frozen North that we know is fading, and that will bring — and already is bringing — other changes far to the south. |
| The report felt like it was signaling a sea change (or perhaps more appropriately, an ice change), both for the region and for Arctic scientists. As Rick Thoman, a climate specialist at the University of Alaska and one of the report’s editors, put it, change in the Arctic is happening so quickly “there is no reason to think that in 30 years much of anything will be as it is today.” |
Shift to a Not-So-Frozen North Is Well Underway, Scientists Warn in 30 years nothing will be as it is today,
| It’s not a comfortable thought. Nor is it necessarily new. Scientists have recognized that this shift is occurring, and there have been a number of studies about it. I wrote about one in September in which the researchers suggested that for sea ice, a permanent change has already happened. |
| But the “new Arctic” discussion has stayed largely within the confines of science and academia. To see it become the centerpiece of a report geared to a general audience was, for me at least, remarkable. Perhaps it will jolt more of the public into supporting action to combat climate change. |