US Farms Could Suffer as the Arctic Heats Up
Planet Earth is getting hotter. One of the more confusing aspects of this global trend is the persistent, undeniable discomfort of winter. Even more confusing is when that chilly weather continues into April, May, or godforbidpleasenot June.
This might clear the confusion (but probably not the frustration): Those colder temperatures in the first half of the year might be due to warmer weather in the Arctic. Authors of a new study, published Monday in Nature Geoscience, found this trend looking at over 100 years of climate data from the Arctic and North America. This warm Arctic/cold North America connection has been particularly noticeable since 1990. And that doesn’t just mean you’ll be wearing a puffy jacket to Memorial Day cookouts from now on. Spring is an important time for agriculture, and the authors noted that US crop productivity declined by as much as 4 percent following warm Arctic years. Plus, those crops, along every other plant affected by the connected weather cycles, absorb less CO2—Arctic warming begets the potential for even more warming.
The Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on the planet. This causes problems, because that big gob of cold air messes with large scale atmospheric circulations in the latitudes the US occupies. “The Arctic warming has a remote impact via atmospheric teleconnection,” says Jong-Seong Kug, an environmental scientist at Pohang University of Science and Technology in South Korea, and co-author of the new paper. Atmospheric waves, induced by polar forcing, convey signals to the middle latitudes.” What kind of signals? Well, the upper atmospheric waves could alter the position…
