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.
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
Science columnist Torah Kachur says new research indicates the Canadian North is not as effective a carbon sink as once thought.
One of President Trump’s first actions this past week—and also in his first term—was to announce the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement. It is a step that is both misinformed and misguided. But how much difference will it make? Here’s what you need to know.
1. Significance of the Paris Agreement
The Paris Agreement was adopted by 197 countries in December 2015 and has been the underpinning of international climate action for nearly a decade. The goals and strategies it sets out are critically important to maintaining a stable climate, which is the foundation of successful societies and economies. The Parties to the Paris Agreement are legally obliged to submit national climate plans, known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) every five years. However, the content and level of ambition of those NDCs are (as the framing “nationally determined” makes clear) up to the Party itself.
2. Immediate legal implications
The Paris Agreement stipulates that any nation’s withdrawal takes effect one year after an official notice has been submitted to the Secretary-General of the United Nations. In the case of the United States, the earliest effective date of official withdrawal is, therefore, sometime in January 2026. After that, the country will not be bound by its obligations under the Paris Agreement. Those include the submission of NDCs every five years, accounting of progress toward commitments, the submission of biennial transparency reports, and the general obligation to provide climate finance. The United States will also lose, in particular, its right to vote on decisions within the governing body of the Paris Agreement, to nominate members to institutions serving the Paris Agreement, and to participate in emission trading under the Paris Agreement. However, as the United States submitted a new NDC and a biennial transparency report in December 2024, it is currently in compliance with the key obligations under the Paris Agreement.
3. What withdrawal from the Paris Agreement doesn’t do
The executive order of January 21, 2025 does not withdraw the US from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the 1992 treaty that established the international climate negotiation process. The language of the executive order indicates that this is deliberate—the US will retain its right to vote in the Conference of Parties, as well as its reporting obligations under the UNFCCC. This is possibly due to the fact that a withdrawal from the UNFCCC, a treaty ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1992, requires a two-thirds majority in the Senate. It is also notable that no action has been taken to withdraw the NDC submitted by the Biden Administration in December 2024.
4. The policy impact
The United States’ withdrawal makes maintaining—let alone enhancing—the ambition of emission reduction efforts across the world significantly more difficult. When a major emitter “free-rides,” it de-motivates ambition by others. However, although the U.S. has the second-highest GHG emissions in the world, and has always been a key player in global climate collaboration, it is important to bear in mind that 194 other countries representing approximately 90% of global emissions have not withdrawn from the Paris Agreement.
The executive order is targeted at stopping any U.S. climate finance contributions. This will mean that the new global climate finance goal of $1.3 trillion per year by 2030, agreed upon in Baku, has become much harder to achieve. This will impact the poorest countries directly, as well as degrading the international community’s trust in the effectiveness of the process.
5. What happened last time
President Trump also withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement during his first administration. Then, as now, one of the primary impacts was to create a leadership vacuum. In that case, that vacuum was largely filled by other nations, plus state, local, and business leaders. The resulting groundswell generated momentum that carried into the Biden Administration and the U.S. re-entry into the Paris Agreement. While much of that foundation remains strong, trends in the private sector have shifted, with a growing number of major corporations and financial institutions backing away from their climate commitments. Global geopolitics has also evolved, raising questions about what role other governments, in particular China, might play in reaction to the United States’ withdrawal from the international governance structures.
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
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.
After millennia as a carbon deep-freezer for the planet, regional hotspots and increasingly frequent wildfires in the northern latitudes have nearly canceled out that critical storage capacity in the permafrost region, according to a new study published in Nature Climate Change.
Read more on Permafrost Pathways.
Map reveals Alaskan ‘hotspots’ of extreme warming
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
Ecological warning lights have blinked on across the Arctic over the last 40 years, according to new research, and many of the fastest-changing areas are clustered in Siberia, the Canadian Northwest Territories, and Alaska. The analysis of the rapidly warming Arctic-boreal region, published in Geophysical Research Letters this week, provides a zoomed-in picture of ecosystems experiencing some of the fastest and most extreme climate changes on Earth.
Many of the most climate-stressed areas featured permafrost, or ground that stays frozen year-round, and experienced both severe warming and drying in recent decades.
To identify these “hotspots,” a team of researchers from Woodwell Climate Research Center, the University of Oslo, the University of Montana, the Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri), and the University of Lleida used more than 30 years of geospatial data and long-term temperature records to assess indicators of ecosystem vulnerability in three categories: temperature, moisture, and vegetation.
Building on assessments like the NOAA Arctic Report Card, the research team went beyond evaluating isolated metrics of change and looked at multiple variables at once to create a more complete, integrated picture of climate and ecosystem changes in the region.
“Climate warming has put a great deal of stress on ecosystems in the high latitudes, but the stress looks very different from place to place and we wanted to quantify those differences,” said Dr. Jennifer Watts, Arctic program director at Woodwell Climate and lead author of the study. “Detecting hotspots at the local and regional level helps us not only to build a more precise picture of how Arctic warming is affecting ecosystems, but to identify places where we really need to focus future monitoring efforts and management resources.”
The team used spatial statistics to detect “neighborhoods,” or regions of particularly high levels of change during the past decade.
“This study is exactly why we have developed these kinds of spatial statistic tools in our technology. We are so proud to be working closely with Woodwell Climate on identifying and publishing these kinds of vulnerability hotspots that require effective and immediate climate adaptation action and long-term policy,” said Dr. Dawn Wright, chief scientist at Esri. “This is essentially what we mean by the ‘Science of Where.’”
The findings paint a complex and concerning picture.
The most substantial land warming between 1997-2020 occurred in the far eastern Siberian tundra and throughout central Siberia. Approximately 99% of the Eurasian tundra region experienced significant warming, compared to 72% of Eurasian boreal forests. While some hotspots in Siberia and the Northwest Territories of Canada grew drier, the researchers detected increased surface water and flooding in parts of North America, including Alaska’s Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta and central Canada. These increases in water on the landscape over time are likely a sign of thawing permafrost.
Among the 20 most vulnerable places the researchers identified, all contained permafrost.
“The Arctic and boreal regions are made up of diverse ecosystems, and this study reveals some of the complex ways they are responding to climate warming,” said Dr. Sue Natali, lead of the Permafrost Pathways project at Woodwell Climate and co-author of the study. “However, permafrost was a common denominator—the most climate-stressed regions all contained permafrost, which is vulnerable to thaw as temperatures rise. That’s a really concerning signal.”
For land managers and other decisionmakers, local and regional hotspot mapping like this can serve as a more useful monitoring tool than region-wide averages. Take, for instance, the example of Covid-19 tracking data: maps of county-by-county wastewater data tend to be more helpful tools to guide decision making than national averages, since rates of disease prevalence and transmission can vary widely among communities at a given moment in time. So, too, with climate trends: local data and trend detection can support management and adaptation approaches that account for unique and shifting conditions on the ground.
The significant changes the team detected in the Siberian boreal forest region should serve as a wakeup call, said Watts. “These forested regions, which have been helping take up and store carbon dioxide, are now showing major climate stresses and increasing risk of fire. We need to work as a global community to protect these important and vulnerable boreal ecosystems, while also reining in fossil fuel emissions.”