The shrinking Arctic sea ice – a loss of 8% per decade during the last 30 years – isn’t just bad news for polar bears. It could be bad news for citizens of Europe and the United States who like to think they live in a temperate zone. Qiuhong Tang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and colleagues from Beijing and the US report in Nature Climate Change that they have identified a link between declining snow and ice in the polar north, and catastrophic heat waves, droughts and floods in the mid-latitudes.
