Rising temperatures, melting sea ice and colder winters?

A recent publication in Nature Climate Change showed that melting Arctic sea ice has led to increasingly harsh winters across Eurasia. Lead author Masato Mori from the University of Tokyo, together with co-authors from the university’s Research Centre for Advanced Science and Technology, and the Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, looked at what might be causing cooling over northern mid-latitudes (particularly over central Eurasia). Their findings point to the same thing: 44% of the cooling of Eurasia between 1995 and 2014 was the result of melting sea ice in the Barents and Kara seas. Not only this, their research also shows that all the models that have linked these two phenomena have underestimated the magnitude of this trend. The paper suggests that the links here are clear: human-induced climate change (what scientists dub ‘anthropogenic forcing’) has increased the likelihood of freezing winter temperatures in Eurasia because warming Arctic temperatures are amplifying the loss of sea ice. The researchers note how important it is to design carefully experiments that explore regional climate change effects and highlight how our understanding of what climate change means for one part of an ocean might result in surprising trends elsewhere on our planet.