Sometimes it feels to me that people think climate change just means more beach days. But by just a little exercise of your imagination you can understand it actually means more famine, more war, more people fleeing across borders, mass extinctions, wholesale shifts in landscapes...
This today from Nature Communications
The influence of Arctic amplification on mid-latitude summer circulation
Abstract
Accelerated warming in the Arctic, as compared to the rest of the globe, might have profound impacts on mid-latitude weather. Most studies analyzing Arctic links to mid-latitude weather focused on winter, yet recent summers have seen strong reductions in sea-ice extent and snow cover, a weakened equator-to-pole thermal gradient and associated weakening of the mid-latitude circulation. We review the scientific evidence behind three leading hypotheses on the influence of Arctic changes on mid-latitude summer weather: Weakened storm tracks, shifted jet streams, and amplified quasi-stationary waves. We show that interactions between Arctic teleconnections and other remote and regional feedback processes could lead to more persistent hot-dry extremes in the mid-latitudes. The exact nature of these non-linear interactions is not well quantified but they provide potential high-impact risks for society.
Nature Communications volume 9, Article number: 2959 (2018)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05256-8?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ncomms%2Frss%2Fcurrent+%28Nature+Communications+-+current%29
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