NOAA Arctic Report Card: Permafrost Now Emitting As Much Carbon As South Korea, Canada Or Iran
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released its 2019 Arctic Report Card on Tuesday, and folks, the results aren’t great.
The report details a rapidly changing Arctic environment featuring melting ice, a greener landscape, and, alarmingly, pollution emissions on par with some large nations. The Arctic could be releasing upwards of 600 million tons of net carbon per year, the report finds, potentially putting the region alongside Mexico, Canada, and South Korea as one of the world’s largest contributors to atmospheric CO2. Though the carbon emitted from such industrialized nations is the result of burning fossil fuels, the hundreds of millions of metric tons pumping out of the Arctic is the result of thawing permafrost.
Permafrost being permafrost, it takes more than the seasons changing for it to actually melt it. The increasingly rapid thawing of frozen Arctic earth is the result of climate change, and the NOAA’s report card reveals that temperatures are continuing to rise in the world’s nether-regions, which aren’t as icy as they used to be. In August, for instance, the average sea surface temperatures in several highlighted Arctic bodies of water were 1-7 degrees Celsius warmer than the average from 1982-2010. Just as frightening: the average land surface temperature north of 60 degrees N was the second-warmest since 1900.
t’s not just permafrost that rising temperatures are affecting. The report also found:
The Greenland Ice Sheet is losing 267 billion metric tons of ice per year;
Two of the five lowest months for North American Arctic snow cover in the 53 years records have been kept occurred this summer;
Sea ice extent this summer was tied for the second-lowest since satellite imagery recorded coverage in 1979. Sea ice extent in the winter was also second-lowest, narrowly falling short of the lowest-ever total, which occurred in…2018.
EDIT
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/noaa-climate-report-arctic-emitting-pollution-925216/
= new reply since forum marked as read
