Warming		16 July 2020
		The Arctic is warming and Svalbard/Spitsbergen is one of the fastest warming spots in the Arctic. The Norwegian Meteorological Institute has a nice website, where you can follow the weather. The picture to the left is from their website. Sofar the season is warm again. Siberia was in the news with extreme high temperatures, but remember, we are surrounded by an ocean, so extremes will be less. Nevertheless today I realised that I have not been wearing gloves yet. In the nineties I always was wearing gloves without fingertipes outside. Another realisation is that the glaciers now are so far away, that we hardly hear the rumbling of the falling ice. That is also quite different from my earlier period here. Than I had the story that it was difficult to distinguish between thunder or falling ice and I was sometimes tricked into looking for my raincoat.

There is another important website about climatechange nsidc.org. It shows daily pictures on the ice cover in the Arctic. To the top right it is the picture of 14 July. This also shows a disturbing trend that the ice extent is below the values of the present record year 2012. For this site it is documented that the normal values are based on the period 1980-2010. Thirty years is the official definition for calculating normal values. But there is no normal existing. The trend is clearly warming and the normal values are becoming lower as more warm years are included. See the graph to the right and look for the period 1980-2010. The average is not the normal. For the Norwegian website i have not found a proper statement on the normal values. But this is an important issue. The information given in a scientific way, is not showing the real size of climate change. We need a better definition for normal values.

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