Shorten Says Talk About Adani Mine 'Dumbing Down Climate Debate'

The Guardian - Katharine Murphy | Paul Karp

Labor leader dodges questions about plan to revoke Adani licence if he wins next election

Bill Shorten says ripping up a contract made by a previous government ‘would be sovereign risk’. Photograph: Daniel Mcculloch/AAP

Bill Shorten has repeatedly denied that he told colleagues he intended to ban the Adani coal mine, but dodged questions about whether he intended to revoke its licence if Labor wins the next election.
Shorten was asked on Friday to clarify Labor’s position after the businessman and environmentalist Geoff Cousins this week gave a detailed account of private discussions he had with the Labor leader over December and January.
Cousins said that after a tour of the Great Barrier Reef and the Adani mine site in January, Shorten signalled his support for Labor revoking Adani’s licence based on concern about the impact of the project on the reef, on groundwater and endangered species. He then indicated he would make an announcement to that effect imminently.
The Labor leader faced questions while campaigning in Devonport on Friday ahead of the Tasmanian election on Saturday, including whether he was prepared to announce Labor would revoke the project’s licence if it won government.
Shorten denied on Friday that he wanted to ban the project, and had to be talked out of that position by colleagues.

But the Labor leader did signal publicly after his trip with Cousins, without locking in to a specific option, that he was intending to adopt a harder line against the controversial Queensland coal project.
Shorten also made it clear internally following his discussions with the former president of the Australian Conservation Foundation that he wanted to toughen Labor’s position on Adani, and explore options within the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act for stopping or limiting the project.
Labor’s pivot on Adani went for discussion to shadow cabinet in early February.
Guardian Australia has been reporting since January that there are a range of internal views about how hard to go – and some players, including the CFMEU and the frontbencher Anthony Albanese, have argued publicly against stopping a project which has already been through environmental approvals.
Some Labor figures have been worried about triggering a backlash about sovereign risk, others about the political impact in Queensland. Some who are opposed to the project are concerned there is not a clear legal pathway to that policy.
Legal advice supplied by Cousins and the ACF is considered by some Labor figures to be overly optimistic.
Cousins’s comments have been deeply embarrassing for Shorten and uncomfortable for the ALP given the party is currently facing off against the Greens in the Batman byelection in Melbourne.
Shorten on Friday said he’d made no secret of the fact he wasn’t a fan of the Adani project.
“But what I’ve also said – and I’ve also said it to the Australian Conservation Foundation and right through Queensland – is I respect the principle of Australian politics that if one government enters into contracts then a future government can’t simply rip them up. To do so would be sovereign risk.”
Shorten said he did not believe the project would materialise, citing Adani missing deadlines and his assessment that the project didn’t stack up “financially, commercially, or environmentally”.
Shorten denied that he wanted to ban the project and had to be talked out of that position by colleagues. “You can’t simply ban it and create a sovereign risk ... No party, even the Greens political party, can simply say they can ban something – you have to adhere to the law.”
Asked if he had said – at any stage – that he wanted to revoke the licence of the Adani mine, Shorten said: “No prime minister can simply ignore the law, no prime minister worth their salt should simply engage in massive sovereign risk.”
Shorten said Adani had become “ground zero for a whole lot of other arguments” and accused others of “dumbing down the debate about climate change and the future of mining to one mine project”.

Links

• Batman byelection: Adani casts long shadow over former Labor stronghold
• Shorten says Adani mine decision will be made when Labor is in government
• Shorten is selling out miners to get Green votes on Adani, says Turnbull
• Geoff Cousins reveals how Bill Shorten wavered on Adani mine
• Labor's fence-sitting on Adani has become a double backflip
• Anthony Albanese rules out retrospective legislation to fight Adani
• Bill Shorten says there's a 'role for coal' and Adani mine just 'another project'
• Adani coalmine won't get federal rail funding, Liberal minister says
• Queensland accused of breaking ‘no public funds for Adani’ promise

As Biodiversity Declines, So Does Public Attention

Anthropocene Magazine - Brandon Keim

There are two environmental crises right now: climate change and biodiversity loss. Why are people, particularly journalists, only paying attention to one of them?
That disconcerting question is raised by a new analysis of research funding, scientific publications and press coverage over the past quarter-century. In that time, academic interest in both climate and biodiversity have swelled — but in the mainstream press, biodiversity is an also-ran, receiving no more attention now than in 1992.
What we ought to make of that trend isn’t immediately evident. It certainly isn’t a call for climate change to receive less attention, says Pierre Legagneux, a biologist at the University of Quebec in Rimouski and lead author of the analysis, which was published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. But in a time of mounting species extinctions, extirpations and population declines, it’s worrisome.
“The science, the challenges and the problems associated with biodiversity issues are not likely reaching the public,” write Legagneux and colleagues, who call this shortfall a “biodiversity communication deficit.”
The researchers found that climate change received 3.3 times more coverage than biodiversity between 1992 and 2016, with interest diverging sharply after 2006; in 2016, newspapers mentioned climate eight times for ever mention of biodiversity. While their analysis — which focused on English-language scientific press, funders in the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States, and 12 prominent online newspapers — was not exhaustive, it appears emblematic.
In 2012, some 126 nations joined the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, a biodiversity-focused effort coordinated by the United Nations and patterned after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Member nations have been slow to pay their dues; the IPBES cut its budget by one-third for 2018, postponed its planned reports, and scrapped essential capacity-building and policy-support funding. Meanwhile a recent analysis of Google searches found declining interest biodiversity — something those researchers attributed to biodiversity being too wonky and complicated a concept to resonate with most people.
That’s quite possible, say Legagneux and colleagues, who think biodiversity’s proponents ought to improve their messaging — rather than “biodiversity decline,” think “the burning library of life” — and make more explicit its links to food production, human health, and other things people care about. Perhaps climate change receives more attention because it’s perceived as more urgent, but the urgency of biodiversity loss is being neglected.
Legagneux’s team didn’t look at social media or online-only news, so it’s possible that biodiversity receives more attention there than in traditional outlets. They also didn’t analyze trends for keywords like “nature” or “environment,” which overlap with biodiversity and might well receive more attention. Should that be the case, it would underscore biodiversity’s messaging problems.
Whatever is responsible, time is running short. “Our house is burning down and we’re blind to it,” said French president Jacques Chirac in 2002. Now, say Legagneux’s team, “our house is still burning and we only have one eye on it.”

Links

• Our House Is Burning: Discrepancy in Climate Change vs. Biodiversity Coverage in the Media as Compared to Scientific Literature
• Climate change and biodiversity
• Climate change impacts on biodiversity
• Climate Change Affects Biodiversity
• Climate change impacts on biodiversity in Australia
• Climate Change Impacts on Biodiversity in Australia (pdf)

How Climate Change Is Our Military’s Most Threatening Enemy

Herald Sun - Charles Miranda

AS Cyclone Gita moved into the South Western Pacific corridor two weeks ago, on Russell Hill in Canberra Defence Department officials began reviewing contingency plans for worst case scenarios.
By the time the category 5 struck the region, RAAF humanitarian relief plans were well advanced and led to six flights to Tonga by a giant C-17A Globemaster carrying 140,000kg of humanitarian aid and the deployment of 30 ADF and civilian disaster response personnel.
In the historic capital Nuku’alofa, century-old churches, shops, homes and the parliament building were flattened forcing 3000 people into temporary shelter.
At the request of the Fijian Government, overflight missions were also made by the RAAF’s AP-3C Orion spy plane to assess damage to outlying islands in the southern Lau group.
New Zealand’s military also swung into action with 12 tonnes of aid for the region while in the United States, President Donald Trump declared a state of emergency in American Samoa allowing his Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide equipment and resources to help the 50,000 residents there recover.

Emergency aid pallets unloaded from RAAF C-17A Globemaster at Tonga’s Fua’amotu International Airport in the wake of Tropical Cyclone Gita. Picture: Defence

It is exactly this type of widespread devastation scenario that has prompted a parliamentary inquiry which will later this month report on the implications of climate change for Australia’s national security.
The Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Senate committee probe, which began last June, has painted a fairly bleak picture where category 5 cyclone responses are the norm rather than the exception.
Indeed such is the ever-increasing regularity of such storms in New Zealand, scientists are looking at creating a sixth cyclone category to capture new weather pattern ferocities.
This is not a debate about climate change and its predicted future apocalyptic consequences as described in some quarters, but rather about what is happening right now and its worse-case scenario knock-on effect of mass migration of displaced persons, rising seas already threatening coastlines and conflict over resources namely water.

Aid agency Care Australia staff distributing aid in Tonga post Cyclone Gita. Picture: Supplied

The impetus for Australia’s inquiry stemmed from a 2015 report by the US Department of Defense which concluded the impact of climate change from increased natural disasters, refugee flow and conflict was already occurring and further instability was likely.
“I think we’ll been using the ‘once-in-a-100-year storm’ phrase for such weather events more often than every 100 years,” former Australian Defence Force chief and retired Royal Australian Navy admiral Chris Barrie told News Corp Australia, referring to a descriptor used for the storm that this week hammered Canberra.
The now honorary professor of strategic defence studies said storms and events like Cyclone Gita will happen more often and questioned the attitude by some in government and the public that whatever happened the ADF would just clean it up.
He said with just 58,500 personnel the resources and capacity to respond were finite and greater action should have been done years ago, most recently in 2014 when any mention of climate effects on national security had to be omitted from the Defence White Paper because of the very public denials of then Prime Minister Tony Abbott.
He said thankfully those attitude’s within whole of government were now changing and in Australia planning was underway to deal with climate-security from heatwaves, shifting rainfall patterns and flooding, rising sea levels, bushfire extremes and property and infrastructure.

Damage in Tonga's capital of Nuku'alofa after Cyclone Gita and locals woke to scenes of devastation on February 13 after the most powerful cyclone ever recorded in that country. Picture: AFP

ADF Sergeant Sammy Melville cradles a baby evacuated from the Island of Tanna in Vanuatu during tropical Cyclone Pam in 2015. Picture: Supplied

“Military forces around the globe perceive climate change as a threat multiplier because its impacts can seriously undermine individual and societal wellbeing,” he said.
“The anticipated impacts will affect the availability of food, water and energy creating basic insecurities, as well as fostering migratory movements forced on people by sea level rises and the greater frequency and intensity of extreme weather events such as storms, floods, and heatwaves. These pressures have the potential to lead to conflict.”
In May 2016, the Global Military Advisory Council on Climate Change, a network of serving and retired military personnel formed in 2009 to look at the climate security implications, cited the disappearance of glaciers on the Tibetan plateau which fed freshwater into China, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan among others as a typical potential flashpoint.
India has since built a fence and has armed patrols on the Bangladeshi border. But worse-case scenario would be mass migration of tens of millions of people trying to get to Australia and New Zealand from this Pacific Rim.
Department of Home Affairs deputy secretary Linda Geddes, who has worked in the ADF, Defence Intelligence and Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, also recognises the threat in what she describes as complex and unpredictable possible mass migration.

Smoke visible from Kyeemagh Beach Baths, rising off an out-of-control bushfire burning in the Royal National Park. Picture: Jenny Evans

“While the department’s critical functions have business continuity plans that are activated when there is significant disruption to normal business, climate change effects could permanently alter normal business including the accessibility of assets and capability and the nature of challenges to our management of the border and migration,” she has concluded in her submission to the parliamentary inquiry.
The Hawaii-headquartered US Pacific Command (USPACOM), to which Australia has an unspecified number of ADF seconded staff, has now integrated Australia, Canada and New Zealand into its climate-security emergency mobilisation plans including allowing US troops based in Australia to assist in an emergency here.
It concluded: “The Department of Defense sees climate change as a present security threat, not strictly a long-term risk. We are already observing the impacts of climate change in shocks and stressors to vulnerable nations and communities, including in the United States, and in the Arctic, Middle East, Africa, Asia, and South America.”
Australia’s Defence Department has equally painted a bleak picture from a “threat multiplier” climate change as it now rushed to “embed” the forecast into all future military planning.
“However, the current most likely forecast climate changes may require higher levels of commitment that may create concurrency pressures for Defence from as early as the middle of the next decade or earlier if climate change related impacts on security threats accelerate,” Defence concluded.

Links

• Climate Change Threatens Half Of US Bases Worldwide, Pentagon Report Finds
• Defence Warns Of Climate Change Peril For Food, Energy And Peace
• 'Disaster Alley': Cyclone Debbie Shows How Climate Change Will Test Australia's Military
• The Age Of Consequences
• The White House Doubts Climate Change. Here's Why The Pentagon Does Not
• President Trump, Military Split On Climate Change
• U.S. Defence Experts And Military Officers Sound Alarm About Climate Change
• Climate Change 'Significant And Direct' Threat To U.S. Military: Reports
• The Elephant in Paris – Guns and Greenhouse Gases

Shareholders Target QBE Over Climate Change 'Failure'

Fairfax - Ruth Williams

QBE Insurance Group has become the latest big listed company to be hit with a demand for more transparency about potential risks it faces from climate change, amid calls by a prominent company director for boards to consider "uncomfortable questions" on the issue.
Melbourne NGO Market Forces, which last year filed similar resolutions targeting Santos, Oil Search and Origin Energy, has this time teamed up with the $10 billion Local Government Super to call for more disclosure of climate risks by the insurer.

QBE has been hit with a shareholder resolution on climate risk. Photo: Fairfax

The two groups have filed a shareholder resolution - to be voted on by investors at the QBE AGM in May - asking the company to disclose climate risks using a newly-minted set of rules endorsed by major companies and investors around the world.
LGS, which last year voted in favour of several Australian shareholder resolutions related to environmental or social issues, said climate change risks posed "very significant investment issues for the insurance industry, and these have been felt by QBE in recent years".
Market Forces said the fact that mainstream fund LSG had co-filed the resolution marked a "hardening of investor attitudes towards companies failing to effectively manage climate risk".
t said QBE had so far made "sub-standard" disclosure on the issue and had "failed" to make a commitment to improve.

The matters raised in the resolutions proposed by Market Forces and Local Government Super are important for QBE. QBE spokesman

QBE said it welcomed the dialogue and would be preparing its response to the resolution in coming weeks.
“It’s widely recognised that a changing climate is giving rise to important issues across the insurance sector," a spokesman said. "Indeed we already have a program of sustainability-related work underway across our business.
"In this context, the matters raised in the resolutions proposed by Market Forces and Local Government Super are important for QBE and its shareholders and we welcome the dialogue."

Risky business
The risks posed by climate change to the insurance industry - and the wider financial system - were highlighted by Bank of England governor Mark Carney in a landmark 2015 speech, in which he noted that the number of registered weather-related loss events had tripled since the 1980s - and that inflation-adjusted insurance losses from those events had surged from an annual average of about $US10 billion in the 1980s to about $US50 billion during the past decade.
Climate change risk among listed companies was a recurring topic at the Australian Institute of Company Directors conference in Melbourne on Thursday, where prominent director Sam Mostyn said it was among the difficult conversations that some boards had not, until recently, been having.
In a major speech at the conference, she said regulators - including the Bank of England's Carney and senior figures at the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority - had been asking "uncomfortable questions" that had opened up "a new conversation about director responsibilities presented by climate-related financial risks".

Sam Mostyn says boards must consider climate change risks. Photo: Justin McManus

"If you're not thinking about climate-related risks and you're sitting in a regulated company you're running a risk," said Ms Mostyn, who sits on boards including Virgin Australia, Transurban and Mirvac. "We wouldn't need regulators to tell us this if the right conversations had been happening inside boardrooms, we'd be on to it already."
A 2016 opinion written by Noel Hutley SC found that directors risked breaching their statutory duties if they failed to consider and disclose foreseeable climate-related risks. Meanwhile, institutional investors are becoming increasingly vocal on climate change issues, especially in pushing for companies to boost their disclosure of climate risk along the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures lines.

Resolving the matter
Passive investment giant BlackRock was among those supporting climate change-related shareholder resolutions at US companies ExxonMobil and Occidental last year.
But BlackRock has not backed Australian climate-related resolutions, with its head of investment stewardship in Asia Pacific, Pru Bennett, telling the AICD conference on Thursday that its own engagement with companies had been followed by "some quite remarkable disclosures and changes in attitude" on the issue.
She said the workload created by shareholder proposals lodged by small groups of investors was "disproportionate" for boards.
Prominent director Ziggy Switkowski, during the same session, said climate change was one of several "important risks and stresses" being faced by companies, also listing political risks, technological shifts and "risks associated with activism and the reinforcement of that through social media".
He said climate risk should be acknowledged and described, but both he and Ms Bennett rejected suggestions that climate disclosure should be mandated.

Links

• None Of Our Insurers Are Keeping Pace With Climate Change
• Climate Change Driving More Risks Than Ever Before
• Insurers Paid Out $50bn For Natural Disaster Claims In 2016
• Australia Faces Rising Perils From Climate Change, Earthquakes: Munich Re Report
• Big investors backed shareholder campaigns on climate, human rights

Weather Alert

ABC - Four Corners

Weather Alert Weather Alert goes to air on Monday 5th March at 8.30pm. It is replayed on Tuesday 6th March at 1.00pm and Wednesday 7th at 11.20pm. It can also be seen on ABC NEWS channel on Saturday at 8.10pm AEDT, ABC iview and at abc.net.au/4corners.

How Australia's warming climate is changing the way we live and work.

"This is very 'now'. This isn't a future problem which is 10 or 20 or 30 years (away)."
Climate Risk Expert

Across Australia, farmers, small businesses, government planners and major corporations have stopped waiting for politicians to decide whether climate change is real. They're acting now.

"That debate can rage around us. If I say to my customers, 'Don't worry, in 200 years it will all be okay.' That's not going to cut it."
CEO

Mounting evidence suggests our changing climate is having an impact on everything - from what we grow, eat and drink, to house prices and the cost of insurance.

"If you own a home in one of those areas and you try to sell it, you may find that the buyer is saying, 'Well, I'm not going to be able to insure it.'... Or even, 'I can't even get a mortgage on this house because the bank is saying, 'Well, we don't want the high-risk properties on our books.'"
Climate Risk Expert

Four Corners has travelled from coast to coast to chart how Australians are adapting to the new weather challenges.

"The temperatures are more erratic. We seem to get frosts in the middle of summer, we've had frosts nearly on Christmas day. We're getting hot, dry weather in the middle of winter."
Cattle farmer
"We were probably sceptics... but when we saw those 10 years of drought and the impact it was having on our business... our board decided that we needed to make some significant changes."
Leading wine maker

From farm kitchens to the board rooms of our major cities, people are changing the way they do business.

"It is clear that directors do have duties to take climate risk into account as a foreseeable financial risk, and a failure to do so may expose them to liability for a breach of their duty of due care and diligence."
Corporate risk adviser

Emergency services and state health departments too, have had to significantly alter the way they operate in the face of increasing "extreme" weather.

"It is a significant hazard for us as emergency management agencies. We need to plan and prepare for it because we can get a significant number of people who will end up being very unwell."
Director of Emergency Management

This is a story that leaves the politics behind and shows what the challenges are for many people across Australia in the face of this 'new normal'.

Links

• TV Networks Did A Really Crap Job Reporting On Climate Change Last Year
• At Climate Feedback, Scientists Encourage Better Science Reporting. But Who Is Listening?
• Analysis: The Climate Papers Most Featured In The Media In 2017
• Most Popular Climate Change Stories Of 2017 Reviewed By Scientists

Why Some Conservatives Are Blind To Climate Change

The Conversation - Jiaying Zhao | Jennifer Whitman | Rebecca M. Todd

Homes are surrounded by floodwaters from Tropical Storm Harvey in Spring, Texas on Tuesday, Aug. 29, 2017. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip, File)

Imagine this: A young professional couple at a party mentions they’re thinking of buying a home in a popular waterfront neighbourhood that scientists have found is vulnerable to coastal flooding.
That flood risk is made extra clear by murals in the neighbourhood marking the predicted water level rise. What’s more, media headlines have warned about sea level rise daily during the past week.
So, what gives? Can the young couple just not see the evidence in front of them?
In recent years, we have been exposed to an abundance of information about climate change. This often takes the form of news articles about carbon emissions and the hurricanes, floods and forest fires bolstered by climate change.
Despite the strong evidence that human activities are contributing to climate change, a small minority of the public disagrees with the scientific consensus.
Do you see what I see?
In the face of the evidence, how can we explain this division?
As psychology researchers, we wondered whether some people are just blind to cues of climate risk.
When we’re confronted by visually crowded settings, we tend to notice emotional words and tune out others. For example, if you were presented a series of words appearing one after another in quick succession — 10 words per second — you would struggle to name all of them. But you would be more likely to catch a word like “danger” than a neutral one.
We set up exactly that kind of scenario in our study. We recruited university students, as well as people in shopping malls in the Vancouver area and in Kamloops, B.C. Then we showed each of them a rapid sequence of words and asked them to pick out two targets, such as a set of digits (555555555) and a word in green font, in the sequence.
Due to limits in our visual system, once the first target has appeared, people are unable to “see” the second target if it appears too soon after the first. This phenomenon is called the attentional blink. It’s as if the mind blinks after the first target, preventing you from seeing the second.
But things change when emotional words are used. Previous research has shown that if the second target is emotionally arousing, then people are better able to see it than if it is neutral — compare the words murder and keyboard, for example.

Smoke rises behind a levelled apartment complex as a wildfire burns in Ventura, Calif. in December 2017. (AP Photo/Noah Berger, File)

 When we modified the test to measure people’s attention to climate change, we found people who are concerned about climate change are better at seeing climate-related words, such as carbon, right after the first target than those who are less concerned.
We also asked participants about their political orientation, income, education, religion, profession, experience with natural disasters and whether they owned a home near sea level.
When we analyzed the data, we found a pattern: Conservatives who were less concerned about climate change were less likely to see climate-related words than liberals who were worried about the issue.
In short, conservatives showed climate change blindness.

Targeted communication
Now that we know people’s political orientation affects their visual attention to climate change, this raises a possible feedback loop, where concerned liberals readily tune their attention to news headlines about climate change and become even more concerned.
But unconcerned conservatives may be more blind to the same headlines about climate change and therefore become more entrenched in their disbelief.
The visual blindness can further deepen the denial of the real risks of climate change such as flooding, hurricanes, drought and heatwaves, and consequently a lack of action to mitigate climate change.
If we’re to be successful communicating the risks of climate change to conservatives, we may need to go about it in a different way. Communications about climate change must tailor the climate-related information to the audience, especially those who are conservative or unconcerned.
We can do this by using messages that align with people’s political ideologies and personal values.
For example, we can frame climate change action as protecting our nation against climate catastrophes, advancing economic and technological development and creating a more caring and considerate society, which is an effective message to engage climate deniers. Framing environmentalism as a form of patriotism can be successful, particularly if the appeal is seen as coming from one’s in-group.
It’s always hard to get someone’s attention, but if the messaging is in line with their personal values and motivations, they will take notice.

Links

• For Earth Day, here’s how Americans view environmental issues
• Affective influences on the attentional dynamics supporting awareness
• Political orientation and climate concern shape visual attention to climate change
• Promoting pro-environmental action in climate change deniers
• Think tank’s talking points deepen the divide over climate change
• Growing inequality in the US is bad news for climate change
• Caribbean residents see climate change as a severe threat but most in US don’t — here’s why
• Is lagging on climate change a political liability?

Arctic Warming: Scientists Alarmed By 'Crazy' Temperature Rises

The Guardian - Jonathan Watts

Record warmth in the Arctic this month could yet prove to be a freak occurrence, but experts warn the warming event is unprecedented

‘This is an anomaly among anomalies’: temperatures in parts of the Arctic have recently risen well above average. Photograph: Ralph Lee Hopkins/National Geographic/Getty Creative/Getty Images

An alarming heatwave in the sunless winter Arctic is causing blizzards in Europe and forcing scientists to reconsider even their most pessimistic forecasts of climate change.
Although it could yet prove to be a freak event, the primary concern is that global warming is eroding the polar vortex, the powerful winds that once insulated the frozen north.
The north pole gets no sunlight until March, but an influx of warm air has pushed temperatures in Siberia up by as much as 35C above historical averages this month. Greenland has already experienced 61 hours above freezing in 2018 - more than three times as many hours as in any previous year.
Seasoned observers have described what is happening as “crazy,” “weird,” and “simply shocking”.
“This is an anomaly among anomalies. It is far enough outside the historical range that it is worrying – it is a suggestion that there are further surprises in store as we continue to poke the angry beast that is our climate,” said Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. “The Arctic has always been regarded as a bellwether because of the vicious circle that amplify human-caused warming in that particular region. And it is sending out a clear warning.”

Guardian graphic Source: Danish Meteorological Institute. Data recorded north of the 80th northern parallel

Although most of the media headlines in recent days have focused on Europe’s unusually cold weather in a jolly tone, the concern is that this is not so much a reassuring return to winters as normal, but rather a displacement of what ought to be happening farther north.
At the world’s most northerly land weather station - Cape Morris Jesup at the northern tip of Greenland – recent temperatures have been, at times, warmer than London and Zurich, which are thousands of miles to the south. Although the recent peak of 6.1C on Sunday was not quite a record, but on the previous two occasions (2011 and 2017) the highs lasted just a few hours before returning closer to the historical average. Last week there were 10 days above freezing for at least part of the day at this weather station, just 440 miles from the north pole.
“Spikes in temperature are part of the normal weather patterns – what has been unusual about this event is that it has persisted for so long and that it has been so warm,” said Ruth Mottram of the Danish Meteorological Institute. “Going back to the late 1950s at least we have never seen such high temperatures in the high Arctic.”

Melting ice on the Chilkat river near Haines, Alaska, in winter. Photograph: Michele Cornelius/Alamy

The cause and significance of this sharp uptick are now under scrutiny. Temperatures often fluctuate in the Arctic due to the strength or weakness of the polar vortex, the circle of winds – including the jetstream – that help to deflect warmer air masses and keep the region cool. As this natural force field fluctuates, there have been many previous temperature spikes, which make historical charts of Arctic winter weather resemble an electrocardiogram.
But the heat peaks are becoming more frequent and lasting longer – never more so than this year. “In 50 years of Arctic reconstructions, the current warming event is both the most intense and one of the longest-lived warming events ever observed during winter,” said Robert Rohde, lead scientist of Berkeley Earth, a non-profit organisation dedicated to climate science.
The question now is whether this signals a weakening or collapse of the polar vortex, the circle of strong winds that keep the Arctic cold by deflecting other air masses. The vortex depends on the temperature difference between the Arctic and mid-latitudes, but that gap is shrinking because the pole is warming faster than anywhere on Earth. While average temperatures have increased by about 1C, the warming at the pole – closer to 3C – is melting the ice mass. According to Nasa, Arctic sea ice is now declining at a rate of 13.2% per decade, leaving more open water and higher temperatures.
Some scientists speak of a hypothesis known as “warm Arctic, cold continents” as the polar vortex becomes less stable - sucking in more warm air and expelling more cold fronts, such as those currently being experienced in the UK and northern Europe. Rohde notes that this theory remains controversial and is not evident in all climate models, but this year’s temperature patterns have been consistent with that forecast.
Longer term, Rohde expects more variation. “As we rapidly warm the Arctic, we can expect that future years will bring us even more examples of unprecedented weather.”

Sea ice off Russia. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Jesper Theilgaard, a meteorologist with 40 years’ experience and founder of website Climate Dissemination, said the recent trends are outside previous warming events. “No doubt these warming events bring trouble to the people and the nature. Shifting rain and snow – melt and frost make the surface icy and therefore difficult for animals to find anything to eat. Living conditions in such shifting weather types are very difficult.”
Others caution that it is premature to see this as a major shift away from forecasts. “The current excursions of 20C or more above average experienced in the Arctic are almost certainly mostly due to natural variability,” said Zeke Hausfather of Berkeley Earth. “While they have been boosted by the underlying warming trend, we don’t have any strong evidence that the factors driving short-term Arctic variability will increase in a warming world. If anything, climate models suggest the opposite is true, that high-latitude winters will be slightly less variable as the world warms.”
Although it is too soon to know whether overall projections for Arctic warming should be changed, the recent temperatures add to uncertainty and raises the possibility of knock-on effects accelerating climate change.
“This is too short-term an excursion to say whether or not it changes the overall projections for Arctic warming,” says Mann. “But it suggests that we may be underestimating the tendency for short-term extreme warming events in the Arctic. And those initial warming events can trigger even greater warming because of the ‘feedback loops’ associated with the melting of ice and the potential release of methane (a very strong greenhouse gas).”

Links

• Arctic ice melt 'already affecting weather patterns where you live right now'
• Arctic ice melt could trigger uncontrollable climate change at global level
• 'Extraordinarily hot' Arctic temperatures alarm scientists
• Arctic sea ice shrinks to second lowest level ever recorded
• Arctic sea ice fell to record low for May
• Arctic sea ice extent hits record low for winter maximum
• Rapid Arctic thawing could be economic timebomb, scientists say
• Summer storm spins over the Arctic - big picture