The image to the left was created using the Climate Reanalyzer software developed by Sean Birkel for the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine. The reanalyzer allows us to cast forward and backward in time to visualize weather patterns and climate change. We are looking at a temperature anomaly that took place at the North Pole on December 30th, 2015. Temperatures at the Pole rose to above freezing on that day in an extremely rare mid-winter warmup.
The warm up is being felt in Maine as well; the Gulf of Maine is warming at a rate greater than 99% of all other ocean bodies in the world. More storms will result from these trends and as the waters warm, they expand, which contributes to sea level rise. Co2 is making the ocean more acidic and sea life is being impacted, especially shell fish. According to an article that came out in the New York Times in July of 2018, Maine’s lobster industry has in recent years benefitted by the warming trends in that lobsters have moved north into Maine to seek colder waters. This has helped expand Maine’s fishery to a half-billion-dollar industry. But last year the state’s lobster harvest dropped dramatically to 111 million. As the article points out, the maximum water temperature that a lobster can tolerate is about 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Continued warming threatens to keep pushing Maine’s lobsters north; on a different note, warming is good for cruise ships and boats that carry raw materials in and out of the Arctic, and Portland is a coastal city and is likely to benefit by new trade routs opening up. It will also be impacted by rising seas.