Russia and Canada Heat Up Faster Than the Arctic
New maps show that temperatures are rising quickest across Earth’s northern midlatitudes
By Mark Fischetti
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We’ve heard for awhile that the Arctic is heating faster than any other place on the planet. That’s true—except for a band around the Northern Hemisphere that follows an approximate line across central Canada and southern Russia. The same new data also show that a few locations around the world are actually cooler than they were 60 years ago.
Those insights come from a study by Zhaohua Wu, an assistant professor of meteorology at Florida State University, published in Nature Climate Change. Wu and a team of fellow meteorologists analyzed worldwide temperature data in unprecedented detail, comparing the readings every decade since 1950 against levels in 1901. The outcome is a series of fine-grained maps that show the decade-to-decade temperature rise. The maps can be seen and compared in our slide show. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group)
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