High temperatures in the North Atlantic and record lows in the amount of ice in the Antartic Ocean observed last year are much more severe than what would supposedly occur on Earth at current levels of warming. They are more like what happens with double the current warming, according to a new study.
The study's lead author is concerned that this “be a harbinger of what is to come in the coming decades” and it not only worries you, but makes you wonder why these two climate indicators were so far from what was expected.
A study published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society compared the temperature of the North Atlantic and the level of ice in the Antarctic, on the other side of the planet, with computer simulations. Such reductions in sea ice levels and well-above-normal temperatures in the North Atlantic are supposed to occur periodically in a world that has warmed 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times.
But that is not what is happening now on Earth.
Last year, when heat soared past record levels, the world was 1.48°C (2.66°F) warmer than normal.
“The climate of 2023 with all the disasters, with all the forest fires in Canada and all the floods In Europe, we can interpret it as this is what we will have every year. “Year after year after year, in a world 3 degrees warmer,” said study author Till Kuhlbrodt, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. “We don’t want to get there.”
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This is still several decades away, he said.
This leads to the big question of why or how this happened last year. In the best case, This is a “rare event” coupled with a strong El Niño phenomenon that changes weather patterns around the world, and when it ends, things return to what we now know as normalsaid Kuhlbrodt.
But “if not, and the North Atlantic stays in that range,” the northern hemisphere is in trouble, Kuhlbrodt said. “And it is absolutely essential to find out why this is happening and how bad it will get.”
“There is no doubt that the impacts (of warming) are accelerating and are much more visible than in the past,” said Kathy Jacobs, a climatologist at the University of Arizona, who was not involved in the study.