Freakishly+Warm+Weather+in+the+Arctic+Has+Climate+Scientists+'Stunned'

Freakishly Warm Weather in the Arctic Has Climate Scientists 'Stunned' Live Science Accessed on February 28, 2018 https://www.livescience.com/61864-arctic-temperatures-record-high.html

Summary: Arctic researchers have been monitoring the Arctic for a very long time, considering the threat of global climate change disrupting the ice caps. However, in this study performed, it shown to be true. In places near the Arctic, like Greenland and the Arctic itself, temperatures have reached above freezing. This is a very strange occurrence considering the fact that it is always supposed to stay cold there, since it is tilting away from the sun. It is mentioned that this phenomenon is due to the fact that jet stream has started interacting with storms in the northern Atlantic, allowing the heat and vapor from the stream get into weather patterns in the Arctic areas. Because this is occurring, ice is thinning faster than the rates projected by scientists previously, and it doesn't seem like it will slow down anytime soon, since the warm air now in the Arctic will take longer to cool down. This whole event has environmentalists very worried because it shows some consistent things: first of all, we can't rely on the polar jet stream to maintain the weather as it has previously done. Second, higher instances of destabilization in the weather will occur. Finally, the time that was originally predicted for the summer ice to melt has now been halved.

Relevance to Course: As I continue to reinstate the idea of warming of air, it brings about the point of climate change. Climate change is highly attributed to the use of greenhouse gases (Miller 161), which can be carried by the polar jet stream to the Arctic where it then creates irregular weather patterns. Also the pattern of increased temperatures are apparent throughout a history before us. Every 10,000 years, there would be a warming, but for the recent years, they have been coming around each decades, which greatly thin out the ice in the Arctic (Miller 501/502). Because of thinning to ice, sea levels will rise, causing the submerging of land that is close to zero feet sea level. The thinning will not stop, and is predicted to continue for around another century, which will greatly affect livelihood in fishing, mining, the environment/native animals, and more (Miller 503).

Opinion: I'm sure I am not the only one who has been concerned with increasing climate change. I, and I'm 98.783 percent sure you, have heard about this issue being long lasting from ever since childhood. I want to be able to find another way to prevent climate change from occurring at such a fast rate, but considering the position humanity has brought itself to this issue, it would be a fallacy. No matter the state, I believe that humanity, more specifically science, should try to come up with some sort of medium solution to delay this phenomenon from occurring since it benefits both the environment and humanity in commercial and environmental use. For starters, there should be drastic regulations and enforcement of things like what is mentioned in Coase Theory, and or taxes on greenhouse gases to stop it from getting into the polar jet stream. If this isn't enforced, it will turn out to be a recurring positive feedback loop, and become a negative externality to society.

Laws: Now there have been no directly enforced laws to this issue, but some other laws have been put in place previously. The Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1965, which sets standards for pollution emission rates and emission of for that matter. In addition to that, the Pollution Prevention Act of 1990 basically was a congressional act proposed to limit pollution, recycle all products that could be recycled, and if neither of those can be fulfilled, that the product is removed in the most environmentally ethical way possible. These acts are contextual to hopefully slow the rate at which the ice is thinning.



(This is an image of the declining thickness of ice according to submarine observations in the northern Arctic waters, This is sourced by the University of Washington. http://www.washington.edu/news/2015/03/03/on-thin-ice-combined-arctic-ice-observations-show-decades-of-loss/)