SCARY GLOBAL WARMING FOUND IN SVALBARD

Posted by: chaamjamal on: July 27, 2020

• In: Uncategorized
• Leave a Comment

 

THIS POST IS A CRITICAL REVIEW OF A PHYS.ORG ARTICLE  [LINK]  ON HIGH TEMPERATURES RECORDED IN SVALBARD IN JULY 2020  

 

 

 

PART-1 WHAT THE ARTICLE SAYS

 

Highest-ever temperature recorded in the Svalbard archipelago

1. The Svalbard Archipelago is known for its polar bears, which a recent study predicts could all but disappear within the span of a human lifetime due to Climate Change.
2. The Svalbard archipelago on Saturday recorded its highest-ever temperature, the country’s meteorological institute reported.
3. According to a scientific study, global warming in the Arctic is happening twice as fast as for the rest of the planet.
4. For the second day in a row, the Svalbard archipelago registered 21.2C in the afternoon, just under the 21.3C recorded in 1979. Later in the afternoon however, it recorded 21.7C at 6pm, a new all-time record.
5. The island group, dominated by Spitzbergen the only inhabited isle in the Svalbard Archipelago, sits 1,000 kilometres from the North Pole. The relative heatwave, expected to last until Monday, is a huge spike of normal temperatures in July, the hottest month in the Arctic.
6. The Svalbard islands would normally expect temperatures of 5C to 8C at this time of year. The region has seen temperatures 5C above normal since January, peaking at 38C in Siberia in mid-July, just beyond the Arctic Circle.
7. According to the report “The Svalbard climate in 2100,” the average temperatures for the archipelago between 2070 and 2100 will rise by 7C-10C, due to the levels of greenhouse gas emissions. Changes are already visible. From 1971 to 2017 3C to 5C of warming have been observed, with the biggest rise in the winter, according to the report.
   
8. Svalbard, known for its polar bear population, houses both a coal mine, digging out the most global warming of all energy sources, and a “doomsday’ seed vault which has since 2008 collected stocks of the world’s agricultural bounty in case of global catastrophe. The vault required 20 million euros ($23.3 million) worth of work after the infiltration of water due to thawing permafrost in 2016.

 

 

 

PART-2: CRITICAL COMMENTARY

1. Anthropogenic global warming and climate change (AGW) is a theory about very long term warming trends over 30 years or more in global mean temperature. It’s extension to specific regions of the globe is possible to a limited extent such that the climatology of large latitudinal sections of the globe can be interpreted in terms of AGW. For example, the Arctic latitudinal section of the globe defined as above 60 degrees North latitude, can be studied in terms of the impacts of AGW for phenomena that span more than 30 years.
2. Recent studies have found that localized weather events in more limited geographical regions and over shorter time spans cannot be understood in terms of AGW because of what has been termedInternal Climate Variability that cannot be understood or interpreted in terms of AGW. Details of this issue can be found in a related post [LINK] .
3. The findings of the study are that “Internal variability in the climate system confounds assessment of human-induced climate change and imposes irreducible limits on the accuracy of climate change projections, especially for regional climate or over limited time scales less than 30 years.” and thereby makes it impossible to relate the climatology of limited geographical regions or in limited time spans to AGW.
4. Here we find that, in the context of internal climate variability, the high temperatures observed in the Svalbard Archipelago, specifically in the town of Spitzbergen, in July of 2020 are too localized to be generalized to the Arctic region as a whole. As well, the time spans of these data are too short to be interpreted in terms of AGW.
5. Therefore these data presented in the Phys.Org article cannot be interpreted in terms of AGW and therefore they do not imply that these temperature events are the creation of fossil fuel emissions or that they can be moderated by taking climate action in the form of reducing or eliminating the use of fossil fuels.

 

POSTSCRIPT

With apologies for the random insertion of weird fonts by WordPress, a new feature of WordPress over which I have no control.