Europe and Asia purportedly face an increased risk of particularly harsh winters in the coming years because of Arctic ice melt, a new study concludes. Bloomberg reports, “Sea-ice melt in the Arctic, Barents and Kara seas since 2004 has made more than twice as likely atmospheric circulations that suck cold Arctic air to Europe and Asia, a group of Japanese researchers led by the University of Tokyo’s Masato Mori said in a study published … in Nature Geoscience.” One researcher writes: “This counterintuitive effect of the global warming that led to the sea ice decline in the first place makes some people think that global warming has stopped. It has not. Although average surface warming has been slower since 2000, the Arctic has gone on warming rapidly throughout this time.” In fact, it’s warming so rapidly that sea ice concentration in the Northern Hemisphere is currently at a decade high (sorry, AlGore). Moroever, the anomaly sits within two standard deviations of normal. These cold hold facts brought to you by Science™. More…