Scientists look to keep NWT’s huge carbon stores out of the air

a photograph of a bend in a river, with blue waters and evergreen trees growing nearby. mountain foothills appear in the background

Cutting human-driven greenhouse gas emissions is already proving tough in the North. Now, attention is turning to carbon within the land itself – an emissions problem that also needs solving and which could be hugely damaging.
Governments across Canada and the world have spent years trying to bring down the emissions we put out through our use of fossil fuels.

Yet targets are being missed and our world is still warming. As it does that, the likelihood increases that massive stores of carbon contained within our landscape will start to emerge into the air, making the overall problem worse.

Next week, scientists will gather in the Northwest Territories to talk about that.

Continue reading on Cabin Radio.

January 2025 was warmest on record as climate change ‘overwhelms’ La Niña’s cooling

a greyscale photo of a man in a coat standing under an umbrella, facing away from the camera

January 2025 was the warmest January on record, surpassing the previous record set by January 2024, according to satellite data from the EU’s Copernicus program. The findings were unexpected as ongoing La Niña conditions in the Pacific typically cool down global temperatures.

The global average surface air temperature for the month reached 1.75° Celsius (3.15° F) above pre-industrial levels. The most dramatic variation, up to 6°C (10.8°F), was concentrated in northern Canada, Russia and the Scandinavian countries.

Read more on Mongabay.

Warmth is weakening the polar vortex. Here’s what it means for extreme cold.

Research has found that rising temperatures in the Arctic are weakening weather systems that normally trap the cold around the poles, making winter weather more chaotic.

a bunch of thick icicles hanging from a snowy rock edge

The blast of cold that fueled record snowfall across Gulf Coast beaches last week was just the latest to transport frigid air that normally swirls above the North Pole to places much farther south — a phenomenon that researchers connect to a warming climate.

While scientists say that there is not evidence that extreme cold is becoming more frequent or intense, a growing body of research is finding that rising temperatures in the Arctic are weakening weather systems that normally trap the cold around the poles, making winter weather more chaotic. This shift is encouraging the erratic weather patterns high in the atmosphere that can cast chills even on regions with typically balmy climates, some research suggests, threatening to overwhelm communities not prepared for such frigid conditions.

Continue reading on The Washington Post.

Sobering news for the North

Collapsing permafrost thaw field

Science columnist Torah Kachur says new research indicates the Canadian North is not as effective a carbon sink as once thought.

Listen on CBC.

A third of the Arctic’s vast carbon sink now a source of emissions, study reveals

Critical CO2 stores held in permafrost are being released as the landscape changes with global heating, report shows

Burned spruce trees are silhouetted against a grey sky

A third of the Arctic’s tundra, forests and wetlands have become a source of carbon emissions, a new study has found, as global heating ends thousands of years of carbon storage in parts of the frozen north.

For millennia, Arctic land ecosystems have acted as a deep-freeze for the planet’s carbon, holding vast amounts of potential emissions in the permafrost. But ecosystems in the region are increasingly becoming a contributor to global heating as they release more CO2 into the atmosphere with rising temperatures, a new study published in Nature Climate Change concluded.

Read more on The Guardian.

Map reveals Alaskan ‘hotspots’ of extreme warming

map of warming stress across the arctic

Some of the regions changing the fastest due to climate change are in the far north of the U.S. and Canada.

According to a new paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the fastest-changing areas are dotted around Alaska, Canada’s Northwest Territories, and Siberia.

20 of the most vulnerable hot spots were home to permafrost, which is rapidly thawing around the Arctic, with others being boreal forests.a

Read more on Newsweek.

Why more frequent cold blasts could be coming from global warming

Stock image: A person walks away from the camera down a snowy street, next to cars blanketed with snow

Frigid air that normally stays trapped in the Arctic has escaped, plunging deep into the United States for an extended visit that is expected to provoke teeth-chattering but not be record-shattering.

It’s a cold air outbreak that some experts say is happening more frequently, and paradoxically, because of a warming world. Such cold air blasts have become known as the polar vortex. It’s a long-established weather term that’s become mainstream as its technical meaning changed a bit on the way.

Continue reading on AP News.

A year of extreme weather that challenged billions

a satellite image looking straight down at Hurricane Beryl's swirling array of clouds

Climate change has brought record-breaking heat this year, and with it extreme weather, from hurricanes to month-long droughts.

This year is expected to be the hottest on record, and new research shows that people around the world experienced an additional 41 days of dangerous heat due to climate change.

Researchers from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group at Imperial College and Climate Central said the study shows “we are living in a dangerous new era”.

From Brazil to Indonesia we take a look back at the climate events that affected the lives of billions in 2024.

Read more on the BBC.