Along with a shitload of other deadly stuff creepy-crawling about the worldwide landscape, more warnings today about the continued and worsening climate crisis with a new report-update again noting the situation is really worse than was figured last year — the Arctic is really heating-up, which is bad news for the rest of our planet:

Correction: Temperatures this week reached +30°C (86.5°F) in the Arctic.

— UN Climate Change (@UNFCCC) May 21, 2021

Result of all this cold-climate heating is the horrid methane problem — details via the UK’s Independent this morning:

In five decades, the Arctic has warmed three times more than the Earth’s average temperature increase due to global warming, faster than previously thought, a new report says.

Several climate indicators in the Arctic such as temperature, precipitation, snow cover and sea ice thickness show rapid changes currently underway that may have far-reaching consequences throughout the world, including on global sea-level rise, the report warned.

The report was published by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) and its findings were discussed at a meeting of the Arctic Council — an intergovernmental forum of eight countries including Iceland, Denmark, US and Canada, promoting cooperation in the region.

Analysing changes in several key climate parameters in the Arctic between 1971 and 2019, the researchers behind the AMAP report, said the region is undergoing recent increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events like rapid sea ice loss, Greenland ice sheet melt and wildfires.

During this period, they said the near-surface air temperature in the Arctic increased by 3.1 degrees Celsius — three times faster than the global average.

This is more than the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s conclusion in a 2019 report that the Arctic surface air temperature likely increased “by more than double the global average”.

The new AMAP report also noted that precipitation in the region, including rain and snow fall, rose by 9-percent but added that there was no particular trend in snowfall patterns.

“There has been an increase in extreme high temperatures and a decline in extreme cold events. Cold spells lasting more than 15 days have almost completely disappeared from the Arctic since 2000,” the report noted.

And the way-bigest trouble from all this shit:

The report specifically cautioned about the effects of melting permafrost in the region — long frozen soil that can release potent greenhouse gases like methane when they thaw — potentially causing a vicious cycle of accelerated global warming.

While permafrost in the Arctic has warmed by about 2-3 degrees Celsius since the 1970s, at many colder sites of the frozen soil the warming rates have been greater than any since 1979.

According to the report, extreme precipitation following a consistent rate of long-term permafrost warming can trigger thermokarst erosion in the Arctic that can release large quantities of methane and other greenhouse gases.

“Without action, we will soon reach a dangerous turning point and the Arctic as we know it will be gone by the end of the century,” Iceland Minister for the Environment and Natural Resources Guðmundur Ingi Guðbrandsson reportedly said at the Arctic Council meeting.

The AMAP report is here.
And methane is a real bitch — from The Arctic Institute last October:

Permafrost thaw is one of the gravest yet lesser discussed impacts of climate change.
Permafrost covers 24-percent of the surface of land masses in the northern hemisphere and accounts for nearly half of all organic carbon stored within the planet’s soil. As long as this organic matter remains frozen, it will stay trapped in the permafrost.
However, if it thaws, microbes will begin to eat the material, causing it to decay and releasing carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. Even if a small fraction of these greenhouse gases are released, it will have major consequences on not only the Arctic, but Earth’s entire climate system, as they intensify global climate change.

And here we are…
Hopefully not, on the eve:

“This whole crazy world is just too frustratin’…”

(Illustration found here).