This has been another year of striking climate events and records – but they seem to be happening so much more often today that their effect on me has weakened. That’s pretty cold-hearted, I admit. ‘Extreme weather’ is having terrible effects on peoples’ lives all around the world. But the truth is that we can only handle so many problems before becoming too numbed and overwhelmed to act. And last year, Stefan Rahmstorf and coworkers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research showed temperature records are much more likely today than in a stable climate. “I don’t think many people appreciate how much the odds for such extremes have increased due to global warming,” he told me at the time. “I certainly didn’t until we had performed this study.” So it’s hardly surprising if we begin to get complacent when records are flowing thick and fast. But when I actually faced up to what’s happened in the climate this year, it was intriguing how well you could see global warming’s fingerprint.
Warming’s most dramatic effects have long been obvious in the Arctic, and 2012 was no different. Images from three satellites showed that almost Greenland’s entire ice sheet surface was temporarily melted by July 12. That’s the largest area in over 30 years of satellite observations. Then, on September 16, sea ice in the Arctic reached a record annual minimum area of 1.32 million square miles, approximately half the size of the average annual minimum for 1979 to 2000. Just two weeks later, Antarctic sea ice covered its highest area on record at the peak of winter, at 7.49 million square miles. In case you think that’s a natural balance that shows the planet isn’t warming, it’s worth noticing the scale of the changes. The Antarctic record is 193,000 square miles higher than its average maximum area for the last 30 years. That’s much less than the 1.32 million square miles the Arctic lost compared to its long-term average. Read the rest of this entry »