High temperatures in the Arctic this time of year are "extremely unlikely" without climate change, according to scientists with the World Weather Attribution.
"The monthly mean November temperature was 13º C (23º F) above normal on the pole. Temperatures in this region declined slightly after that but remained well above normal," reads the WWA report, which is credited to 10 writers.
The researchers concluded that "it is extremely unlikely that this event would occur in the absence of human-induced climate change."
"We probably slightly underestimated the temperature as a whole for November-December, but not by much," Andrew King, a researcher with the University of Melbourne who assisted with the study, told The Washington Post.
King is confident that the North Pole is highly unlikely to reach these temperatures without human influence.
"We found that in our natural simulations, those without any human influences, we didn't see Arctic winters as warm as this at all," King said. "In our simulations that kind of represent the world of today, including human forcings, it was a roughly one in a 200 year event. So it's a very unusual event even in the current climate model simulations. Even including human forcings, it's right at the tail of the distribution. It's an extreme."
Climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh of Stanford University noted to the Post that the Arctic is reacting to climate change extremely quickly, more quickly that scientists anticipated.
"One interesting thing in looking at the history of the peer reviewed literature over the last decade and a half is that the climate models have, as a whole, have really been less sensitive, in the Arctic, than what's happened in the real world," he said.
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