The annual average temperature on Earth is 14.2 degrees Celsius.Recently, however, environmentalists are sounding the alarm: the 2002-2012 year were marked by the hottest decade for the entire period of systematic observations.Especially alerted scientists in 2012, which is the temperature indicators fell in the top ten hottest years.However, surely many will be amazed, Europe remembered the winter (January-February) in 2012 as a record-breaking cold.This is because the temperature and thermal equilibrium - not the same thing.The index of average temperature of the planet can be compared with an average temperature of patients at the hospital - including both those who lay sick with a fever, and those who are lying in the morgue.Will 36.6 for hospital patients but that does not help.
Record low winter temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere more than offset the abnormally hot summer.Scientists have observed in the past year "Arctic minimum" - the smallest amount of ice cover in the Arctic for a certain time of the year.The ice of Greenland began to melt faster than five times compared to the period when the scientists 20 years ago, only anxiously talking about it.The cases of deaths of polar bears, whose habitat is shrinking due to the melting of the ice cap of the North Pole.All this gives rise to the most gloomy forecasts: the balance of the system is broken, went to irreversible processes, in 20 years the Arctic Ocean will be completely svobozhden summer ice, and our grandchildren will be able to sail to the North Pole by ship, even in winter.
importance of the Arctic on a global scale is difficult to overestimate.At the North Pole there is the mainland (as Antarctica in the South), which is due to the continental climate accumulates enough ice in the winter to keep him in the summer.Therefore, the ice cap of the Arctic previously served as a "refrigerator" for the Northern Hemisphere.She maintained thermal equilibrium, distributing the air flow so that the climate is softened in the summer.Now, however, due to the reduction in the number of ice, the Arctic has ceased to perform their functions.This "failure in the system," said, first of all, and so in the arid regions of the tropics, but also in other parts of the world.
Impaired thermal equilibrium reduce the area of territory previously covered by permafrost.Methane previously "bound" in the bowels, is released, it enters the atmosphere and only enhances the greenhouse effect generated by human activities.Large-scale melting of ice has meant that the level of water in the oceans has risen compared to 1992 by 1 centimeter and 11 millimeters.In addition to the threat of flooding of low-lying areas, it entails and desalination of the oceans, and therefore, the loss of some species of plankton, invertebrates, fish, and so on up the food chain.Thus, a vicious circle: the heating of the atmosphere leads by heat exchange and air circulation and water to even more warming.
ecological disaster, which resulted in impaired thermal equilibrium, meteorologists have got the name of "El Niño" (Spanish - child).Weather in the last decade has indeed become "naughty" like a spoiled kid: the snow in Jerusalem, the heat under 40 in Moscow.Temperature maxims occur more and more often.They generate strong typhoons and hurricanes.
Should we talk about the impending apocalypse?In this regard, the opinions of scholars differ.At the same pessimistic forecasts predicted flooding of the Netherlands and the global ecological catastrophe, sound is also quite confident voices, that's okay, and out of the ordinary is happening does not occur, and that the impact of the human factor in the planet's climate is somewhat exaggerated.Earlier in the history of our Mother Earth many times there were periods when the thermal equilibrium is disturbed.There have been periods when the North Pole was not at all covered with snow, and there were also times (they found a man, Cro-Magnon), when a giant glacier covered half of Europe, and in modern Spain was tundra.Small period of global warming observed in the late tenth century and up to the XII century and the XIV century was characterized in the history of Europe as a century of global cooling.
