Change is clearly accelerating in the Arctic, and it has global implications for us all. We all have a stake in this future, but none more than the young people who are coming of age, living in the midst of this change. — The Arctic Council’s Snow, Water, Ice and Permafrost
It is no surprise that the Arctic is warming at alarming rates. It is in the news more often and, videos of calving glaciers, images of starving polar bears, and Orcas have gone viral. Now the United Nations Environment Assembly issued a report titled Global Linkages. A graphic look at the changing Arctic which summarized the situation as: “the Arctic’s climate is shifting to a new state.” We have left the refrigerator and freezer doors wide open portending disaster not only for the Arctic but for the world as we know it.
xOn the other side of the world, #Arctic sea ice low again in the Barents Sea. There is a polynya (open water) off the coast of Franz Josef Land, and because of climate change there is no Odden Ice Tongue in the Greenland Sea /4 pic.twitter.com/QwBI4env3i
— Mark Brandon (@icey_mark) March 13, 2019The press release is unnerving as it claims that even if we meet the goals of the Paris Climate Accords, there would still be warming “winter temperatures in the Arctic that would rise 3-5°C by 2050 and 5-9°C by 2080”.
The code red alerts from climate scientists are sounding like a broken record.
Nairobi, 13 March 2019 – Even if the world were to cut emissions in line with the Paris Agreement, winter temperatures in the Arctic would rise 3-5°C by 2050 and 5-9°C by 2080, devastating the region and unleashing sea level rises worldwide, finds a new report by UN Environment.
Meanwhile, rapidly thawing permafrost could even accelerate climate change further and derail efforts to meet the Paris Agreement’s long-term goal of limiting the rise in global temperature to 2°C, warns Global Linkages - A graphic look at the changing Arctic.
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“The urgency to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement is clearly manifested in the Arctic, because it is one of the most vulnerable and rapidly changing regions in the world,” said the Finnish Minister of the Environment, Energy and Housing, Kimmo Tiilikainen. “We need to make substantial near-term cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, black carbon and other so-called short-lived climate pollutants all over the world.”
The impacts globally would also be huge. From 1979 to the present, Arctic sea ice is estimated to have declined by 40%. Climate models predict that, at the current rate of CO₂ emissions, Arctic summers will be ice-free by the 2030s. The melting of the Greenland ice cap and Arctic glaciers contribute to one third of sea level rise worldwide.
Even if the Paris Agreement is met, Arctic permafrost is expected to shrink 45% compared to today. Globally, these frozen soils hold an estimated 1,672 billion metric tonnes of carbon. Increased thawing is expected to contribute significantly to carbon dioxide and methane emissions. The resulting warming will in turn lead to more thawing – an effect known as ‘positive feedback’. This accelerated climate change could even throw the Paris Agreement’s 2°C goal off track, the report underlines.
The lichen that the caribou like to eat grows at the ground level. "Warming means other, taller vegetation is growing and the lichen is being out-competed," he told BBC News. Another very big issue is the number of insects. "Warmer climates just mean more bugs in the Arctic," said Prof Epstein. "It's said that a nice day for people is a lousy day for caribou. "If it's warm and not very windy, the insects are oppressive and these animals spend so much energy either getting the insects off of them or finding places where they can hide from insects." Rain is a major problem, too. Increased rainfall in the Arctic, often falling on the snowy ground, leads to hard, frozen icy layers covering the grazing tundra - a layer the animals simply cannot push their noses through in order to reach their food. BBC NewsBrian Kahn of Gizmodo writes an excellent summary in Earther.
Even if carbon pollution magically stopped tomorrow, the region’s winters would still warm an astonishing 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) by century’s end, according to the UN. Meeting the Paris Agreement pledges—which do not get us to the two degree warming goal—would lead to that level of warming by mid-century and up to 9 degrees Celsius (16.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100, along the way unraveling one of the most fragile ecosystems on the planet and displacing people who have done very little to cause the disruption.
On Friday Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Carbon Brief, took to Twitter to dispute some of the report’s claims, including that Arctic temperatures would rise 5 degrees Celsius even if we “stopped all emissions overnight.” When Earther reached out to Hausfather via Twitter direct message, he said that RPC 2.6, a scenario in which we rapidly phase down emissions, leads to a more modest level of warming overall.
Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) are scenarios that describe different trajectories for carbon emissions and the resulting concentration of gases in the atmosphere.
While each single RCP is based on an internally consistent set of socioeconomic assumptions, the four RCPs together cannot be treated as a set with consistent internal socioeconomic logic. For example, RCP8.5 cannot be used as a no-climate-policy socioeconomic reference scenario for the other RCPs because RCP8.5’s socioeconomic, technology, and biophysical assumptions differ from those of the other RCPs. Each RCP could result from different combinations of economic, technological, demographic, policy, and institutional futures. For example, the second-to-lowest RCP could be considered as a moderate mitigation scenario. However, it is also consistent with a baseline scenario that assumes a global development that focuses on technological improvements and a shift to service industries but does not aim to Reduce greenhouse gas emissions as a goal in itself (similar to the B1 scenario of the SRES scenarios). The proper uses and limits of the RCPs are detailed with the RCP release data at the website. IPCCThe Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe, which translates to dramatic change. Sea ice extent, which has shrunk about 40 percent since regular satellite monitoring began in 1979, could reach zero percent in summer as early as the 2030s. Old, thick sea ice will likely be gone even sooner. Permafrost, frozen ground full of carbon, could thaw out and destroy a third of all the infrastructure in the Arctic (and also release deadly strains of anthrax). Rising temperatures could also unleash a host of other infectious diseases like Lyme disease, which is already on the rise in Canada.
“Insects like mosquitoes and ticks have the potential to connect the Arctic and tropics,” the authors write, which sounds like the sequel to Con