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| A rather cold character |
Studying fairly comprehensive data about the climate of western Svalbard, climate researchers long ago concluded that concomitant with Longyearbyen being Earth's most northerly town, it was the fastest-warming as well.
At its present rate, some five times the global average, it could be 8˚C (14˚F) warmer by 2100.
But new data from glacial and unpopulated eastern Svalbard suggests Longyearbyen's days as the hottest nightspot in the high Arctic may be numbered.Collaborating with Russian colleagues who provided research from their side of the Barents Sea, Norwegian climatologist Ragnar Braekkan's team spent four years analyzing local weather-station-on- a-pole files…
Crunching the numbers they found a tiny outlier, Karl XII Island, northeast of Svalbard, that appears to be warming by ~2.7˚C/decade, a rate an order of magnitude faster than the global average of 0.2˚C (0.36˚F).
The largest component of this is accelerated change late in the year, when, absent reforming ice, upwelling sea water can raise Karl XII-øya's October warming rate to an incredible 4˚C per decade, 
making the 2km long slash of rock jutting from the Barents Sea at 80 degrees North Latitude far and away the fastest-warming place on the planet.
It is incidentally one barren of the distractions on which climate skeptics customarily depend when complaining about surface temperature records - no airports, parking lots, idling engines , asphalt paving , underwater volcanoes, hot springs or , above all, air conditioning.
It does however offer contrarians one consolation: a healthy population of polar bears that enjoy munching on visiting climatologists:
