Re: Reference Soil Climate

The latitudinal trends in these Lower 48 data are consistent with the overall pattern of the arctic warming at a much faster rate than the tropics. This was also true with ice age climate, wherein northern regions were much colder, while the Gulf Coast remained almost as warm as it is today but was less seasonal. Instead of moving has as a unit, the vegetation belts essentially compressed southward or stretched northward with changing climates.

The dominant variable in changing climate is how well the atmosphere retains heat, and less with how well the sun heats it (though, it is the variation in seasonal solar radiation which is responsible for the 100,000 year ice age cycles). Equatorial areas stay at a more or less constant warmth due to a more or less constant solar heating which constantly dissipates laterally to higher latitudes. Higher latitudes depend on transported heat which dissipates into space as it travels. Changing the rate of heat dissipation into space, via a change in atmospheric gas composition, changes the amount of heat which makes it to the poles, but it doesn’t seem to have as much effect upstream where the heat is generated.

For a similar reason, it is the winter season, which has had the greatest increases in temperatures at high latitudes. Without any sun in the winter at high latitudes, there is even more dependence on transported heat.