Cristian Suteanu: Arctic warming almost certainly man-made

via Alaska Dispatch, CBC News, Eye on the Arctic, November 28, 2013

A geography and environmental science professor at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax has been analyzing temperature data from the far north and says he’s almost certain the warming in the Arctic is caused by humans.

Cristian Suteanu has been looking at data from weather stations in Canada, Norway and Russia and said it’s almost improbable that the warming trend he’s seeing could be caused by natural variability.

“The temperatures on one day are not independent from the temperature of the next day or the next week, the next month and — it might sound surprising — the next year or the next decade. All the values are correlated with each other,” he told CBC’s Mainstreet.

“If you include that type of correlation in your analysis, the conclusion is that the warming, indeed, is more compelling. Even more importantly, it is even more improbable for the warming to occur naturally so we have to think of an anthropogenic source.”

Suteanu’s analysis of the temperature data will be published in a peer-reviewed journal called Pattern Recognition In Physics.

He said the scale of climate change and what’s happening to the planet is scary.

“You can’t avoid a feeling, a kind of shivering feeling,” said Suteanu.

“The overwhelming thing is that it’s going on on such a scale and the drivers behind that — if this is what we believe it is, anthropogenic — the drivers are so complex with the economy being so much a driver that the solutions seem to be really, really challenging. So that make things even more scary.”

This story is posted on Alaska Dispatch as part of Eye on the Arctic, a collaborative partnership between public and private circumpolar media organizations.

A Canadian professor in a new paper expresses rigorous doubts that the warming trend he’s seeing in the far north is caused by natural variability. Pictured is the Iñupiat village of Kivalina, Alaska. It sits on a narrow barrier island off the state's northwestern coast. A new stone seawall has helped curb erosion from winter storms, but it is only a stopgap, at some point in the near future the village will have to move. Dec 11, 2012Loren Holmes photo
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