The Rise of Climate Unrest
Thousands of miles north of New York City, inside the Arctic Circle, summers have recently been warming at a rate faster than the global average. Weakened by the abnormal heat, the last fully intact ice shelf in Canada collapsed last month, splintering off an iceberg the size of Manhattan.
Back in the United States, several states also felt the burn of July skies, reporting record-breaking temperatures.
That the unusually hot summer belongs to a year that began with Antarctica feeling its hottest day on record — and a year that has already been shaped by numerous extraordinary forces — is about the only thing that feels normal about climate unrest. Of course, these things are happening this year!
In his comments on the recent ice shelf collapse, climate expert and environmental scientist at the University of Ottawa, Luke Copland, noted that this summer has been up to 9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the average between 1981 and 2010, but that the region in Canada were the Manhattan-sized iceberg snapped “has been warming at two or three times the global rate.”
“This drastic decline in ice shelves is clearly related to climate change,” he added, warning that “other ice shelves in Canada are simply not viable any longer and will disappear in the coming decades.”
