Record heat in the Arctic circle

The midnight sun shines at the border area between Finland and Norway in Kilpisjarvi, Enontekio, Finland, on June 22, 2020. Finland’s national meteorological institute has registered its hottest temperature for June since records began in 1844. Photograph: LEHTIKUVA/Reuters

From The Guardian:

 

Nordic countries have registered near-record temperatures over the weekend, including highs of 34C (93.2F) in some places.

The latest figures came after Finland’s national meteorological institute registered its hottest temperature for June since records began in 1844.

Kevo, in Lapland, recorded heat of 33.6C (92.5F) on Sunday, the hottest day since 1914 when authorities registered 34.7C (94.5F), said the STT news agency. Several parts of Sweden also reported record highs for June.

The high temperatures follow the record-breaking heatwave and wildfires that have caused devastation in parts of North America.

The intense heatwave has killed 95 people in the US state of Oregon alone, its governor said on Sunday. Hundreds are believed to have died from the heat in the US north-west and south-western Canada.

Michael Reeder, a professor of meteorology in the school of Earth, atmosphere and environment at Australia’s Monash University, said the events on the European and North American continents were not unlinked.

Reeder has written about the meteorological conditions that allowed for the North American heatwave to form. He said a tropical low in the western Pacific, near Japan, had disturbed the atmosphere, creating ripples around the hemisphere as what is known as a Rossby wave.

That wave broke off the west of Canada, triggering the conditions for the heatwave.

“It’s like plucking a guitar string. The disturbance propagated along the jet stream,” Reeder said.

“It gets to North America, it (amplified) and produced a big high pressure system in the middle part of the atmosphere.”

He said that had then kicked off another wave over the north Atlantic that then broke and produced the conditions for high temperatures in the Nordic regions.

“So from that perspective, the high temperatures over Scandinavia are directly linked to what happened in North America.”

From LiveScience:

On the summer solstice (June 20 — the longest day of the year) two European Union satellites recorded a scorching temperature of 118 degrees Fahrenheit (48 degrees Celsius ) on the ground in Arctic Siberia.

This isn't quite a new heat record; as a post on the EU's Copernicus satellite website noted, this egg-boiling temperature was detected only on the ground in Siberia's Sakha Republic, while the region's air temperature (the temperature people would actually feel while walking around) was a toasty 86 F (30 C).

However, that's still an anomalously high temperature for the Arctic Circle — and one that could exacerbate the region's melting permafrost, which is the only thing preventing ancient caches of greenhouse gases from reentering Earth's atmosphere, according to Gizmodo.

The EU's Copernicus Sentinal-3A and 3B satellites recorded the high temperatures in the midst of an ongoing heat wave over much of Siberia. The heat spike is, unfortunately, a predictable start to summer, following a spring that saw hundreds of wildfires scorching the Siberian countryside and blacking out major cities with blankets of smoke.

Many of these spring fires were "zombie fires," so named because they are thought to be the rekindled remains of wildfires that ignited the previous summer and were never fully extinguished. The zombie fires smoldered for months under winter ice and snow, fed by the carbon-rich peat below the surface. When the spring melt arrived, the old fires blazed anew, Live Science previously reported.

If last summer is any indication, the hot solstice temperatures are just the beginning. Precisely one year ago, on June 20, 2020, the same region of Siberia recorded the first 100 F (38 C) day above the Arctic Circle — the hottest temperature ever recorded there. The sweltering day in Siberia fits into a larger climate change trend. For years, average temperatures in the Arctic have been rising at a far faster rate than anywhere else on Earth, largely due to melting sea ice induced by man-made global warming.

This is the frigging Arctic, people.  Not the Middle East.  Nor Outback Australia.  It has to be obvious to everybody (except those whose salaries depend on their blind eyes) that climate change is happening right now.  We don't have to wait for another 30 years to see its consequences.  They're crystal clear.  Right now, And we must act now to prevent it getting worse.