Climate change: NJ is warming faster than most of the country. Part 18 in everywhere is warming twice as fast as everywhere else.

https://www.app.com/story/news/local/land-environment/2019/08/23/nj-among-top-states-nation-climate-change/2063691001/

The New Jersey lobster boom has passed.

Tom Fote, legislative chairman for The Jersey Coast Anglers Association, recalls a time in the 1990s when warming waters off the Jersey Shore prompted the tasty crustaceans to reproduce more, attracting more boats to fish for them.

But then the water got too hot. The lobsters stopped reproducing as they had been.

“We were the canaries in the mines,” Fote said of anglers in New Jersey.

New Jersey has emerged as a top state in the nation experiencing climate change, according to a new analysis of climate data by The Washington Post. 

New Jersey heated by nearly 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, since about the turn of the last century, the Post found. That’s double the average for the continental United States. Alaska, then Rhode Island crossed the 2-degree mark, the Post reported. New Jersey is close.

Some studies suggest the 2-degree mark is a “point of no return” for the planet, a juncture where policymakers will be unable to avoid the worst ill effects linked to climate change.

David Robinson, the state climatologist, noted that warming has been much more severe in Arctic regions, like Alaska. But he says the data spells trouble.

“Why NJ is one of the larger warmers in the lower 48 is hardly certain,” he wrote in an email, “however I believe it may have something to do with its coastal location, and atmospheric interactions with the warming waters off our shores.”

Climate change worse everywhere than everywhere else