The average annual temperature on planet Earth is +14.2 degrees Celsius. Recently, however, environmentalists have been sounding the alarm: 2002-2012 passed under the sign of the hottest decade for the entire period of systematic observations. Scientists were especially alarmed in 2012, which, according to temperature indicators, was in the top ten hottest years. However, many will certainly be amazed, Europe remembered the winter (January-February) 2012 as a record cold. This is because temperature and thermal equilibrium are not the same thing. The average temperature of the planet can be compared with the average temperature of patients in the hospital - including both those who are in a fever and those who are in the morgue. There will be 36.6 in the hospital, but it’s not easier for patients from this.
The record low winter temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere more than blocked the abnormally hot summer. Scientists recorded last year the "Arctic minimum" - the smallest amount of ice cover in the Arctic for a particular time of year. The ice of Greenland began to melt five times faster compared to the period when scientists only spoke anxiously about this 20 years ago. The deaths of polar bears have become more frequent, the habitat of which is declining 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 disturbed, irreversible processes have begun, in 20 years the Arctic Ocean will be completely free of ice in the summer, and our grandchildren will be able to sail to the North Pole on the ship even in winter.
The importance of the Arctic on a planetary scale is difficult to overestimate. There is no mainland at the North Pole (like Antarctica in the South), which, thanks to the continental climate, accumulates enough ice in winter to keep it in the summer. Therefore, the ice cap of the Arctic used to be a “refrigerator” for the Northern Hemisphere. It maintained thermal equilibrium by distributing air currents so that the climate softened in the summer. However, now, due to the reduction in the amount of ice, the Arctic has ceased to fulfill its functions. This “system failure” affected primarily the already arid regions of the tropics, but also in other parts of the world.
Disturbed thermal equilibrium reduced the area of territories previously covered by permafrost. Methane, previously “shackled” in the bowels, is released, penetrates the atmosphere and only enhances the greenhouse effect generated by human activities. Large-scale melting of ice has led to the fact that the level of water in the oceans has risen by 1 centimeter and 11 millimeters compared with 1992. In addition to the threat of flooding in the lowlands, this entails the desalination of the waters of the oceans, and, consequently, the death of a certain species of plankton, invertebrates, fish, and so on along the food chain. Thus, a vicious circle is obtained: heating of the atmosphere leads to even greater warming by heat exchange and circulation of air and water.
The ecological disaster caused by the disturbed thermal equilibrium was called by the meteorologists “El Niño” (from Spanish - a child). The weather in the last decade really began to be "naughty" like a capricious kid: either snow in Jerusalem, then heat under 40 in Moscow. Temperature maxima are found more and more. They generate powerful typhoons and hurricanes.
Should we talk about the impending Apocalypse? In this matter, the opinions of scientists differ. Along with pessimistic forecasts predicting the flooding of the Netherlands and a global environmental catastrophe, quite confident voices also sound that nothing terrible is happening and that the impact of the human factor on the planet’s climate is somewhat exaggerated. Earlier in the history of our mother Earth, there were repeatedly times when thermal equilibrium was disturbed. There were times when the north pole was not covered by snow at all, and there were times (they were found by a Cro-Magnon man), when a giant glacier covered half of Europe, and in modern Spain there was a tundra. A small period of global warming was observed at the end of the Xth and up to the XII century, and the XIV century was characterized in the history of Europe as a century of global cooling.