Climate Change

• Accelerated Arctic warming is reshaping the polar environment, but focusing only on the impacts of long-term annual temperature rise can miss key consequences of shorter-lived, but extreme, weather shifts coming as a result of climate change.
• A new meta-analysis highlights how extreme weather events in winter, such as rain-on-snow and temperature spikes, are increasing across the Arctic — though not every region gets the same extreme whiplash weather.
• Even short surges of wild winter weather — 24 hours of rainfall on snow-covered ground, for example — can decimate animal and plant populations and change an ecosystem for generations. One such rain-on-snow event in 2023 killed nearly 20,000 musk oxen in the Canadian Arctic.
• Better understanding of Arctic winter weather extremes (along with their immediate and long-term effects on flora and fauna), and factoring these into climate models, could help create more accurate, effective, region-specific conservation plans.

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