Fourier had no idea in 1824 of all the impacts of global warming

From an Article by Robin McKie, The Guardian News Service UK, July 30, 2022

The publication of Bill McGuire’s latest book, Hothouse Earth, could not be more timely. Appearing in the shops this week, it will be perused by sweltering customers who have just endured record high temperatures across the UK and now face the prospect of weeks of drought to add to their discomfort.

And this is just the beginning, insists McGuire, who is emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London. As he makes clear in his uncompromising depiction of the coming climatic catastrophe, we have – for far too long – ignored explicit warnings that rising carbon emissions are dangerously heating the Earth. Now we are going to pay the price for our complacence in the form of storms, floods, droughts and heatwaves that will easily surpass current extremes.

The crucial point, he argues, is that there is now no chance of us avoiding a perilous, all-pervasive climate breakdown. We have passed the point of no return and can expect a future in which lethal heatwaves and temperatures in excess of 50C (120F) are common in the tropics; where summers at temperate latitudes will invariably be baking hot, and where our oceans are destined to become warm and acidic. “A child born in 2020 will face a far more hostile world that its grandparents did,” McGuire insists.

In this respect, the volcanologist, who was also a member of the UK government’s Natural Hazard Working Group, takes an extreme position. Most other climate experts still maintain we have time left, although not very much, to bring about meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. A rapid drive to net zero and the halting of global warming is still within our grasp, they say.

Such claims are dismissed by McGuire. “I know a lot of people working in climate science who say one thing in public but a very different thing in private. In confidence, they are all much more scared about the future we face, but they won’t admit that in public. I call this climate appeasement and I believe it only makes things worse. The world needs to know how bad things are going to get before we can hope to start to tackle the crisis.”

McGuire finished writing Hothouse Earth at the end of 2021. He includes many of the record high temperatures that had just afflicted the planet, including extremes that had struck the UK. A few months after he completed his manuscript, and as publication loomed, he found that many of those records had already been broken. “That is the trouble with writing a book about climate breakdown,” says McGuire. “By the time it is published it is already out of date. That is how fast things are moving.”

Among the records broken during the book’s editing was the announcement that a temperature of 40.3C was reached in east England on 19 July, the highest ever recorded in the UK. (The country’s previous hottest temperature, 38.7C, was in Cambridge in 2019.)

In addition, London’s fire service had to tackle blazes across the capital, with one conflagration destroying 16 homes in Wennington, east London. Crews there had to fight to save the local fire station itself. “Who would have thought that a village on the edge of London would be almost wiped out by wildfires in 2022,” says McGuire. “If this country needs a wake-up call then surely that is it.”

Wildfires of unprecedented intensity and ferocity have also swept across Europe, North America and Australia this year, while record rainfall in the midwest led to the devastating flooding in the US’s Yellowstone national park. “And as we head further into 2022, it is already a different world out there,” he adds. “Soon it will be unrecognisable to every one of us.”

These changes underline one of the most startling aspects of climate breakdown: the speed with which global average temperature rises translate into extreme weather.

“Just look at what is happening already to a world which has only heated up by just over one degree,” says McGuire. “It turns out the climate is changing for the worse far quicker than predicted by early climate models. That’s something that was never expected.”

Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, when humanity began pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, global temperatures have risen by just over 1C. At the Cop26 climate meeting in Glasgow last year, it was agreed that every effort should be made to try to limit that rise to 1.5C, although to achieve such a goal, it was calculated that global carbon emissions will have to be reduced by 45% by 2030.

“In the real world, that is not going to happen,” says McGuire. “Instead, we are on course for close to a 14% rise in emissions by that date – which will almost certainly see us shatter the 1.5C guardrail in less than a decade.”

And we should be in no doubt about the consequences. Anything above 1.5C will see a world plagued by intense summer heat, extreme drought, devastating floods, reduced crop yields, rapidly melting ice sheets and surging sea levels. A rise of 2C and above will seriously threaten the stability of global society, McGuire argues. It should also be noted that according to the most hopeful estimates of emission cut pledges made at Cop26, the world is on course to heat up by between 2.4C and 3C.

From this perspective it is clear we can do little to avoid the coming climate breakdown. Instead we need to adapt to the hothouse world that lies ahead and to start taking action to try to stop a bleak situation deteriorating even further, McGuire says.

Certainly, as it stands, Britain – although relatively well placed to counter the worst effects of the coming climate breakdown – faces major headaches. Heatwaves will become more frequent, get hotter and last longer. Huge numbers of modern, tiny, poorly insulated UK homes will become heat traps, responsible for thousands of deaths every summer by 2050.

“Despite repeated warnings, hundreds of thousands of these inappropriate homes continue to be built every year,” adds McGuire.

As to the reason for the world’s tragically tardy response, McGuire blames a “conspiracy of ignorance, inertia, poor governance, and obfuscation and lies by climate change deniers that has ensured that we have sleepwalked to within less than half a degree of the dangerous 1.5C climate change guardrail. Soon, barring some sort of miracle, we will crash through it.”

The future is forbidding from this perspective, though McGuire stresses that if carbon emissions can be cut substantially in the near future, and if we start to adapt to a much hotter world today, a truly calamitous and unsustainable future can be avoided. The days ahead will be grimmer, but not disastrous. We may not be able to give climate breakdown the slip but we can head off further instalments that would appear as a climate cataclysm bad enough to threaten the very survival of human civilisation.

“This is a call to arms,” he says. “So if you feel the need to glue yourself to a motorway or blockade an oil refinery, do it. Drive an electric car or, even better, use public transport, walk or cycle. Switch to a green energy tariff; eat less meat. Stop flying; lobby your elected representatives at both local and national level; and use your vote wisely to put in power a government that walks the talk on the climate emergency.”

Now available ~ Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide by Bill McGuire is published by Icon Books, £9.99

Five unexpected threats posed by the pumping of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere

1. Under our feet ~ As vast, thick sheets of ice disappear from high mountains and from the poles, rock crusts that had previously been compressed are beginning to rebound, threatening to trigger earthquakes and tsunamis. “We are on track to bequeath to our children and their children not only a far hotter world, but also a more geologically fractious one,” says Bill McGuire.

2. New battlefields ~ As crops burn and hunger spreads, communities are coming into conflict and the election of populist leaders – who will promise the Earth to their people – is likely to become commonplace. Most worrying are the tensions over dwindling water supplies that are growing between India, Pakistan and China, all possessors of atomic weapons. “The last thing we need is a hot war over water between two of the world’s nuclear powers,” McGuire observes.

3. Methane bombs ~ Produced by wetlands, cattle and termites, methane is 86 times more potent in its power to heat the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, though fortunately it hangs around for much less time. The problem is that much of the world’s methane is trapped in layers of Arctic permafrost. As these melt, more methane will be released and our world will get even hotter.

4. Losing the Gulf Stream ~ As the ice caps melt, the resulting cold water pouring from the Arctic threatens to block or divert the Gulf Stream, which carries a prodigious amount of heat from the tropics to the seas around Europe. Signs now suggest the Gulf Stream is already weakening and could shut down completely before end of the century, triggering powerful winter storms over Europe.

5. Calorie crunch ~ Four-fifths of all calories consumed across the world come from just 10 crop plants including wheat, maize and rice. Many of these staples will not grow well under the higher temperatures that will soon become the norm, pointing towards a massive cut in the availability of food, which will have a catastrophic impact across the planet, says McGuire.

West Virginia is still not ready to embrace climate change

CURWOOD: From PRX and the Jennifer and Ted Stanley Studios at the University of Massachusetts Boston, this is Living on Earth. I’m Steve Curwood.

[MUSIC: Miles Davis “Milestones” on Milestone, Sony Music Entertainment Inc.]

CURWOOD: Each Earth Day marks an important milestone for Living on Earth. In April of 1991 Living on Earth started broadcasting weekly on public radio, and we’ve been hitting the airwaves ever since. Biologist and Woods Hole Research Center founder George Woodwell helped inspire me to start this show when he told me that global warming from burning fossil fuels and forests would likely melt the Arctic. He explained that as the permafrost released its CO2 and methane, those added greenhouse gases would cause more warming and melt the arctic even more, which would add yet more carbon to the atmosphere. At some point these self-reinforcing reactions, this feedback loop, would be beyond human control.

CURWOOD: As a journalist it seemed to me that if what George described was allowed to get out of hand, little else would matter much for society. So I decided that climate change and so many other environmental stories needed reporting, and here we are. Now, many things have changed since 1991 and science has made some amazing advances. The human genome was sequenced, and gene therapy began. The Hubble telescope gave us fantastic views of deep space. Technology gave us the world wide web, which made e-commerce, Google and Facebook possible, and the invention of the smart phone put the world in our pocket. And in politics and society, South Africa ended apartheid and freed Mandela and the US elected its first president of direct African descent, Barack Obama.

But the numbers show we are still failing to preserve the climate. Over the last 30 years human-caused emissions have increased by 60 percent. Today the atmosphere holds the equivalent of about 500 parts per million of CO2. That is not good news. We began the industrial age in 1760 with concentrations of CO2 at about half those levels and we are now living through the hottest decade in modern human history.

As a result we are seeing record breaking heat waves and wildfires from California to Siberia, floods, rising sea levels and shrinking Arctic sea ice. Not to mention, record-breaking Atlantic hurricane seasons, searing droughts and massive tornado clusters. And all this climate disruption is a result of just a single degree centigrade rise in average earth surface temperatures since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

But our broadcast today is not simply a look back or lament. We are also looking ahead, to shine a light on some possibilities to head off climate disruption before civilization as we know it becomes untenable. We will consider the possibilities of economics, politics, applied science and technology to address climate disruption, though so far they have fallen short.

So, we will look to see what they may be missing. And since we humans have caused the climate emergency, we’ll also consider how we can think differently about our place on this planet. For some clues we’ll look to some ancient wisdoms and contemporary anthropology.

[MUSIC: Brian Rolland’s “Along the Amazon” on Dreams of Brazil, On The Full Moon Productions]

CURWOOD: Correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation, but there are two striking trends that run parallel to the alarming rise in global warming gases. One is the astonishing growth of economic wealth, and in recent years that increase in wealth in the US has been confined to the very richest. In fact, most families in the US have seen little or no gain, with many losing economic power, as many young adults today can’t afford to buy homes like the ones they grew up in.

The other trend is the loss of confidence in government action at the national and local levels and the failure of international rules governing climate change emissions to go beyond the honor system. The concentration of economic and political power related to those trends has historically thrived on the extraction and burning of fossil resources. Climate policy critics including Van Jones, Kristina Karlsson and Bill McKibben say that has to change, if we are to halt our present march toward climate Armageddon.

Kristina Karlsson is a program manager for the climate and economic transformation team at the Roosevelt Institute.

JONES: The first industrial revolution hurt the people and the planet, too. And, the next industrial revolution has to help the people and the planet.
KARLSSON: Meaningfully addressing climate requires an economic transformation in basically all corners of our economy.
MCKIBBEN: I think we’re reaching a turning point. I think that the political power of the fossil fuel industry has begun to wane after a century or two of waxing. And our job is to accelerate that to push hard for really rapid, rapid change.

CURWOOD: But right now despite pledges and promises from businesses and governments the nascent momentum for rapid change has been put on ice with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The resulting spike in oil and natural gas prices now has the Biden Administration saying drill baby, drill.

ORESKES: The war should be a reminder to us of how many good reasons there are to act on climate besides just the climate system itself. Europe is essentially hostage to Russian gas. And this is one of those things that breaks my heart.

CURWOOD: Naomi Oreskes is a Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University.

ORESKES: Because if we had started the process of transitioning away from fossil fuels to renewable energy. If we started that process back in 88, when the IPCC was first gathered, or in 1990, when they first issued their report, or 1992, when the world’s nations signed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, we could have made that transition by now 30 years is a long time in the history of technology. It’s enough time to build solar farms and wind farms, and improve your electricity grid. We could have fixed this problem.

Instead now we’re essentially hostage to the fossil fuel industry. So at this very moment of crisis, when we absolutely need to stop using fossil fuels. We’re in a situation where the Europeans are saying, well, well, we can’t live without fossil fuels. So this is really a kind of, it’s kind of a tragedy of historic proportions. I do think historians will be writing about this for years to come.

The ice sheets in Antarctica are melting faster and faster

From an Article by Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams News, 4/9/21

A new study is shedding light on just how much ice could be lost around Antarctica if the international community fails to urgently rein in planet-heating emissions, bolstering arguments for bolder climate policies.

The study, published Thursday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, found that over a third of the area of all Antarctic ice shelves—including 67% of area on the Antarctic Peninsula—could be at risk of collapsing if global temperatures soar to 4°C above pre-industrial levels.

An ice shelf, as NASA explains, “is a thick, floating slab of ice that forms where a glacier or ice flows down a coastline.” They are found only in Antarctica, Greenland, Canada, and the Russian Arctic—and play a key role in limiting sea level rise.

“Ice shelves are important buffers preventing glaciers on land from flowing freely into the ocean and contributing to sea level rise,” explained Ella Gilbert, the study’s lead author, in a statement. “When they collapse, it’s like a giant cork being removed from a bottle, allowing unimaginable amounts of water from glaciers to pour into the sea.”

“We know that when melted ice accumulates on the surface of ice shelves, it can make them fracture and collapse spectacularly,” added Gilbert, a research scientist at the University of Reading. “Previous research has given us the bigger picture in terms of predicting Antarctic ice shelf decline, but our new study uses the latest modelling techniques to fill in the finer detail and provide more precise projections.”

Gilbert and co-author Christoph Kittel of Belgium’s University of Liège conclude that limiting global temperature rise to 2°C rather than 4°C would cut the area at risk in half. “At 1.5°C, just 14% of Antarctica’s ice shelf area would be at risk,” Gilbert noted in The Conversation.

While the 2015 Paris climate agreement aims to keep temperature rise “well below” 2°C, with a more ambitious 1.5°C target, current emissions reduction plans are dramatically out of line with both goals, according to a United Nations analysis.

Gilbert said Thursday that the findings of their new study “highlight the importance of limiting global temperature increases as set out in the Paris agreement if we are to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, including sea level rise.” And, “If temperatures continue to rise at current rates,” she said, “we may lose more Antarctic ice shelves in the coming decades.” Also, “Limiting warming will not just be good for Antarctica — preserving ice shelves means less global sea level rise, and that’s good for us all,” Gilbert added.

The researchers warn that Larsen C—the largest remaining ice shelf on the Antarctic peninsula—as well as the Shackleton, Pine Island, and Wilkins ice shelves are most at risk under 4°C of warming because of their geography and runoff predictions.

Low-lying coastal areas such as small island nations of Vanuatu and Tuvalu in the South Pacific Ocean face the greatest risk from sea level rise, Gilbert told CNN. “However, coastal areas all over the world would be vulnerable,” she warned, “and countries with fewer resources available to mitigate and adapt to sea level rise will see worse consequences.”

Research published in February examining projections from the Fifth Assessment Report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as the body’s Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate found that sea level rise forecasts for this century “are on the money when tested against satellite and tide-gauge observations.”

A co-author of that study, John Church of the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales, said at the time that “if we continue with large ongoing emissions as we are at present, we will commit the world to meters of sea level rise over coming centuries.”

Parties to the Paris agreement are in the process of updating their emissions reduction commitments—called nationally determined contributions—ahead of November’s United Nations climate summit, known as COP26.

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Sea level rise will be extreme as melting accelerates

See also: ‘A dire prediction’ on melting ice sheets and rising sea levels – Los Angeles Times, April 7, 2016

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See also: “Will the world ever be all under water?” | Ed Mathez, American Museum of Natural History (AMNH)

If all the ice covering Antarctica , Greenland, and in mountain glaciers around the world were to melt, sea level would rise about 70 meters (230 feet). The ocean would cover all the coastal cities.

Living on “iceberg alley” is unbelievable!!!

From Stephanie Osmanski, Green Matters, December 10, 2020

One of the most overt effects of climate change that researchers can point to is the melting of ice in the Arctic. The average temperature of the planet is getting hotter, with 15 of the hottest years on record having occurred since 2000, according to NASA, and as temperatures climb, the climate no longer becomes sustainable for the environment necessary to support the Arctic. In fact, as of winter 2018, the Arctic’s sea ice coverage was the second smallest it’s ever been measured.

So, what happens if the Arctic melts?

“The Arctic is a natural freezer,” Michael Mann, a climatologist and director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, told The Verge. “Just like you’d be concerned if all of the ice in your freezer melted, so should you be concerned about the loss of Arctic sea ice.”

Sea levels will be drastically affected (increased)

The disappearing ice in the Arctic affects more than just the surrounding area. As the Arctic’s ice disappears, the rest of the world experiences global warming. As per Museum of Natural History, one of the most dangerous ways in which we would be affected by the Arctic melting is the rising of sea levels.

Why is this important? Different cities are established at different sea levels. If the sea levels rise 20 feet, populations and cities would be decimated. Coastal communities — Florida, New Jersey, Maryland – could be drastically affected and even now, are experiencing more instances of flooding. Raise the sea level 20 feet, and these areas will likely not survive.

“If all the ice covering Antarctica, Greenland, and in mountain glaciers around the world were to melt, sea level would rise about 70 meters (230 feet). The ocean would cover all the coastal cities. And land area would shrink significantly,” the Museum of Natural History site reads. “The [main] concern is that portions of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice caps may disappear. We do not know how much or how quickly this could happen, because we do not know exactly how it will happen.

Here’s what happens if the permafrost melts:

Mongabay reports that permafrost – which refers to any ground that remains completely frozen in nature for at least two years straight, usually near the North or South poles – is heading toward a crisis. Permafrost is located in Alaska, Canada, and Siberia.

“Permafrost covers approximately 22.8 million square kilometers (8.8 million square miles) in the Arctic, sub-Arctic and alpine regions — comprising nearly a quarter of the exposed land surface in the northern hemisphere,” according to Mongabay.

“The world’s permafrost serves as a massive carbon reservoir, storing nearly twice the amount of carbon currently found in the atmosphere. An estimated 1,400 gigatons of carbon — made up of decomposed plants and animals which once inhabited the Earth — can be found embedded in permafrost.”

Should the world’s permafrost melt, it could unleash a toxic amount of carbon, while simultaneously damaging wildlife homes.

Damage to the Arctic may also lead to extreme weather

It has been proven that when the Arctic is “unusually warm,” according to The Verge, extreme winter weather is anywhere from two to four times more likely in the Eastern U.S. Clearly, our extreme weather events here, are directly tied to what’s going on in the Arctic. If the Arctic continues to warm – and at alarming rates at that – the U.S. could experience more extreme weather events such as droughts, heat waves, heavy rainfall, and hurricanes and tropical storms.

Some researchers believe the Arctic’s issues are to blame for unusual weather in the U.S. – 2018’s bomb cyclone, record-breaking freezing temps, and a slew of hurricanes in a short period of time, to name a few. It’s not just the U.S. that is affected by the state of the Arctic. A 2017 study linked the Arctic’s disappearing ice predicament to the unhealthy smog layer in China.

How can we stop the Arctic ice from disappearing?

The most important, day-to-day thing we can do to stop the Arctic ice from disappearing is to cut back on greenhouse gas and carbon emissions. The lesser rate emissions happen, the slower the rate of global warming happens. The slower the rate of global warming, the slower ice from the Arctic disappears.

However, researchers are actively searching for ways to slow down the rate of the ice disappearing. Non-profit Ice911 has proposed covering the Arctic in millions of silica and glass beads, to reflect sunlight back into space and while insulating ice that would have otherwise melted. Silica does not pose a threat to nature or animals, and the beads actually stick to the ice and water upon contact.

Ice911’s silica bead tactic is still being field-tested as of 2019, but it could prove an important means to an end in the near future. In the meantime, the most impactful thing the average person can do is be cognizant in trying to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and carbon footprint overall.

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Listen Up! Dr. James Hansen Has A Message For The Citizens Of Earth, Steve Hanley, Clean Technia, September 7, 2020

Dr. Hansen says there are three parameters to the global heating conundrum but only two receive regular attention — the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and average global surface temperatures. The third critical component is the Earth’s energy imbalance and it may be the most important of the three. “Stabilizing climate requires that humanity reduce the energy imbalance to approximately zero,” Hansen writes.

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See also (Video): New projections for sea-level rise due to climate change, CBS News, December 23, 2020,

A newly published scientific paper warns that sea levels are rising more rapidly than previously thought. Oceanographer John Englander is one the authors of that paper, and he joined CBSN’s Tom Hanson to discuss their findings and the importance of the ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica.

A fishing vessel sails in the ice fjord near Ilulissat, Greenland September 12, 2017. REUTERS

From an Article by Cassandra Garrison, Reuters via Portside, August 16, 2020

Greenland’s ice sheet may have shrunk past the point of return, with the ice likely to melt away no matter how quickly the world reduces climate-warming emissions, new research suggests.

Scientists studied data on 234 glaciers across the Arctic territory spanning 34 years through 2018 and found that annual snowfall was no longer enough to replenish glaciers of the snow and ice being lost to summertime melting.

That melting is already causing global seas to rise about a millimeter on average per year. If all of Greenland’s ice goes, the water released would push sea levels up by an average of 6 meters — enough to swamp many coastal cities around the world. This process, however, would take decades.

“Greenland is going to be the canary in the coal mine, and the canary is already pretty much dead at this point,” said glaciologist Ian Howat at Ohio State University. He and his colleagues published the study Thursday in the Nature Communications Earth & Environment journal.

The Arctic has been warming at least twice as fast as the rest of the world for the last 30 years, an observation referred to as Arctic amplification. The polar sea ice hit its lowest extent for July in 40 years.

The Arctic thaw has brought more water to the region, opening up routes for shipping traffic, as well as increased interest in extracting fossil fuels and other natural resources.

Greenland is strategically important for the U.S. military and its ballistic missile early warning system, as the shortest route from Europe to North America goes via the Arctic island.

Last year, President Donald Trump offered to buy Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory. But Denmark, a U.S. ally, rebuffed the offer. Then last month, the U.S. reopened a consulate in the territory’s capital of Nuuk, and Denmark reportedly said last week it was appointing an intermediary between Nuuk and Copenhagen some 3,500 kilometers away.

Scientists, however, have long worried about Greenland’s fate, given the amount of water locked into the ice. The new study suggests the territory’s ice sheet will now gain mass only once every 100 years — a grim indicator of how difficult it is to re-grow glaciers once they hemorrhage ice.

In studying satellite images of the glaciers, the researchers noted that the glaciers had a 50% chance of regaining mass before 2000, with the odds declining since.

“We are still draining more ice now than what was gained through snow accumulation in ‘good’ years,” said lead author Michalea King, a glaciologist at Ohio State University.

The sobering findings should spur governments to prepare for sea-level rise, King said. “Things that happen in the polar regions don’t stay in the polar region,” she said.

Still, the world can still bring down emissions to slow climate change, scientists said. Even if Greenland can’t regain the icy bulk that covered its 2 million square kilometers, containing the global temperature rise can slow the rate of ice loss.

“When we think about climate action, we’re not talking about building back the Greenland ice sheet,” said Twila Moon, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center who was not involved in the study. “We’re talking about how quickly rapid sea-level rise comes to our communities, our infrastructure, our homes, our military bases.”

The temperature in Siberia reached 105 degrees Fahrenheit

Interview by Bobby Bascomb, Living on Earth, July 15, 2020

Siberia hit a record-high temperature of 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit on June 20 in the town of Verkhoyansk, north of the Arctic Circle. Scientists say it is an ominous sign of things to come. “I was shocked at the magnitude of it …” says Susan Natali, Arctic program director at Woods Hole Research Center.

The town of Verkhoyansk in Siberia hit a record-high temperature of 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit on June 20, the highest temperature ever recorded within the Arctic Circle — and scientists are worried.

“I was shocked at the magnitude of it, but perhaps not necessarily completely surprised to see these types of spikes in temperature because this has been happening for a number of years now.”

“I was shocked at the magnitude of it, but perhaps not necessarily completely surprised to see these types of spikes in temperature because this has been happening for a number of years now,” says Susan Natali, Arctic program director at Woods Hole Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts. “The average temperature for June [was] 68 degrees Fahrenheit, so it’s quite a bit warmer than the average.”

The Arctic is warming roughly twice as fast as the rest of the planet. This is due primarily to a phenomenon called regional amplification, Natali says.

Sea ice is a white surface that reflects the sun’s energy; seawater is a dark surface that absorbs the sun’s energy. The energy absorbed by surface water gets slowly released into the Arctic, causing the regional amplifying effect, Natali explains.

This feedback loop will continue to create more and more warming in the future, which will affect both the region’s sea ice and, perhaps more alarming, its permafrost — that is, the soil that is typically frozen year-round. If the Arctic melts and releases all that carbon, suddenly the global carbon budget looks a lot more difficult to achieve.

Permafrost soil, which is basically peat, holds more carbon dioxide than all of the world’s rainforests. If the Arctic melts and releases all that carbon, suddenly the global carbon budget — the amount of carbon the world’s nations can release in order to keep global warming below 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius — looks a lot more difficult to achieve.

“Carbon emissions as a result of permafrost thaw are essentially going to use up anywhere from 25 to 40% of our remaining fossil fuel emissions budget,” Natali explains. “So it’s going to make it really challenging to keep to these temperature targets that were set out in these international climate agreements.”

Permafrost thaws in a couple of different ways, Natali says. There’s gradual thaw when permafrost thaws from the top down, and abrupt thaw, which occurs at extreme temperatures and can lead to complete ground collapse. A single summer like the one affecting the region can now lead to rapid thawing that is measured in tens of meters per year, instead of centimeters per year.

During these extremely warm summer months, the area also gets very dry, which raises the risk of wildfire, Natali adds. Wildfire, in turn, places the permafrost at greater risk because it removes the insulation that the ground provides.

There is also a phenomenon in the Arctic called “zombie fires,” which sounds like something out of a science fiction film but is quite real.

“There’s so much organic matter below the ground that the fires in the Arctic don’t just burn vegetation above ground, they burn peat in the organic material below ground,” Natali explains. “So, you can see a fire burning in August and September below ground, and then it resurfaces…in the spring. It just had been smoldering throughout the winter below the ground.”

Thawing permafrost recently made international headlines when an oil tank collapsed in the town of Norilsk, creating an environmental mess that could take 10 years to clean up.

The oil tank collapse got a lot of attention because of its magnitude, but communities in the far north are dealing with impacts of thawing permafrost on their infrastructure all the time, Natali says.

“The ground structure in the Arctic is maintained because there’s frozen ground below it, but when the ice that’s in the permafrost melts you get ground collapse, you get subsidence, you can get very extreme, abrupt events,” Natali says. “But even gradual events are enough to cause cracks in a building, or to cause gas tanks or other types of infrastructure to fall and to crack, and this is what’s happening in some areas of the Arctic.”

“These other incidents that don’t get these big headlines are really concerning because they are impacting people’s cultures and their health and their livelihoods,” she adds.

Many of us still tend to think about climate change as something that’s going to happen in the future, in 2050 or 2100, but in the Arctic, it’s happening now.

Many of us still tend to think about climate change as something that’s going to happen in the future, in 2050 or 2100, but in the Arctic, it’s happening now, Natali says.

“There are people being impacted by this now and there’s infrastructure that’s being impacted by this now,” she warns, “There are global implications for permafrost thaw and there are feedbacks on global climate that may be happening now and are expected to continue to happen into the future. But there are also these regional impacts, as you see ground collapsing on the people who are living in the Arctic.”

Natali does not like to think of climate change as an insurmountable problem, but some regions of the Arctic have already experienced “pretty extreme permafrost thaw,” she says.

“The actions that we take now in terms of our fossil fuel emissions will really have a big difference on how much of the Arctic will thaw and how many of these communities will be impacted, and how much economic cost there will be,” she cautions. “So it’s not an all or nothing situation in the Arctic. It’s recognizing that, yes, we’ve already bought in for some of these changes that are already happening [and] that are going to happen, but let’s act now and act soon to reduce that impact for people in the Arctic and globally.”

>>>>> This article is based on an interview by Bobby Bascomb that aired on Living on Earth from PRX.

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Related: Melting polar ice poses a serious global risk, November 11, 2017

Related: A bold plan to slow the melt of Arctic permafrost could help reverse global warming, April 30, 2017