![]() Bright white sea ice plays an important role in reflecting heat from the Sun back out into space, a bit like a reflective jacket. The summer of 2020 saw sea ice area at its second lowest on record, and sea ice extent (a larger measure, which includes ocean areas where at least 15% ice appears) also at its second lowest.Īs well as being a symptom of climate change, the loss of ice is also a driver of it. On the Eurasian side of the Arctic Circle, the ice did not freeze until the end of October, which is unusually late. "You definitely saw the impact of those warm temperatures," says Julienne Stroeve, a polar scientist from University College London. The heatwave accelerated the melting of sea ice in the East Siberian and Laptev seas and delayed the usual Arctic freeze by almost two months. ![]() In June 2020, the temperature reached 38 C in eastern Siberia, the hottest ever recorded within the Arctic Circle. Nowhere is that increase in heat more keenly felt than in the Arctic. "The intensity of those fires and number of people being killed is truly significant," says Siegert. The exceptionally warm temperatures triggered the largest wildfires ever recorded in the US states of California and Colorado, and the "black summer" of fires in eastern Australia. How to reduce emissions from your fridge.In other words, without La Niña bringing global temperatures down, 2020 would have been even hotter. But 2020 was unusual because the world experienced a La Niña event (the reverse of El Niño, with a cooler band of water forming). Record temperatures, including 2016, usually coincide with an El Niño event (a large band of warm water that forms in the Pacific Ocean every few years), which results in large-scale warming of ocean surface temperatures. In Europe it was the hottest year ever, while globally 2020 tied with 2016 as the warmest. The year 2020 was more than 1.2C hotter than the average year in the 19th Century. ![]() The past decade was the hottest on record. There was no ice on the planet then and it was 12C warmer," says Siegert. ![]() We haven't had that for 55 million years. "If we keep tracking the worst-case scenario, by the end of this century levels of CO2 will be 800ppm. That is 100 times faster than previous natural increases, such as those that occurred towards the end of the last ice age more than 10,000 years ago. "We have put 100ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere in the last 60 years," says Martin Siegert, co-director of the Grantham Institute for climate change and the environment at Imperial College London. The effect of lockdowns on concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere was so small that it registers as a "blip", hardly distinguishable from the year-to-year fluctuations of the carbon cycle, according to the World Meteorological Organization, and has had a negligible impact on the overall curve of rising CO2 levels.
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