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For residents of the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, the United States’ recent success in passing major climate change legislation may seem too little, too late.
Over the past 40 years, as the world’s largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases on repeated occasions Without taking major climate action, the region surrounding Svalbard has warmed at least four times faster than the global average, according to significant new research published on Thursday.
The study suggests that warming in the Arctic is occurring at a much faster rate than many scientists had expected. And as U.S. lawmakers this summer hammered out the details of a massive bill to accelerate their nation’s shift to cleaner energy, the culmination of months of deliberation—the new findings were just the latest visceral remember that the planet’s changing climate is not waiting for human action.
Recent studies on topics such as tree mortality in North America and evidence of weakening ice shelves in Antarctica, combined with a stream of extreme weather events including last month’s European heatwave and torrential floods most recently in Kentucky and South Korea, are providing consistent evidence of the intensifying impact of global warming on the planet.
The Arctic is where some of the changes are most severe.
Svalbard, a A cluster of Arctic islands famous for their polar bear populations experienced the hottest June on record. By the end of July, 40 billion tons of ice from the archipelago had melted into the ocean. Melting permafrost and unstable mountainsides threaten homes.
And this is just a sample of a region that has warmed at an astonishing rate, roughly 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1979.
“It’s a really vulnerable environment in the Arctic, and to see these numbers, it’s worrying,” said Antti Lipponen, a scientist at the Finnish Meteorological Institute who contributed to Thursday’s peer-reviewed study published in Communications Earth & Environment..
President Biden said on August 8 that the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 would be “a game changer for ordinary people.” (Video: The Washington Post)
The study provides a context for reflection for the expected passage this week by the House of Representatives of the Inflation Reduction Act. Experts say it’s a landmark law that will reduce America’s greenhouse gas emissions by incentivizing the purchase of electric vehicles and energy-efficient appliances and an accelerated pace of renewable energy installations. Recent estimates suggest the bill could reduce US greenhouse gas emissions by up to one billion tons annually by the end of the 2030s.
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But that’s still small compared to the more than 2 trillion tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide that humanity has emitted since 1850, a figure that doesn’t include other warming gases like methane, that too is playing a major role in increasing the temperature of the world.
The Inflation Reduction Act will mark “a historic moment” for the United States, a moment that hasn’t seemed plausible since President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore pushed for meaningful action in the 1990s, said Bill Hare, a scientist of the climate and no. executive of Climate Analytics, a prominent scientific and political institute. The bill could have a global ripple effect that spurs other countries to take more ambitious steps, Hare said.
However, Hare noted that the legislation falls short of President Biden’s goal of cutting emissions by at least half their 2005 levels by 2030. It also includes provisions for additional oil drilling and gas and to facilitate permitting processes for fossil fuel infrastructure, which contradict the conclusions of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that the world must almost eliminate coal and significantly reduce the use of oil and natural gas to have a hope of avoiding catastrophic warming.
At the same time, Hare noted, there is an ongoing “hunger for gas” in Africa and Australia “that is quite inconsistent with the Paris Agreement,” the 2015 agreement in which nations pledged to gradually reduce its emissions to avoid dangerous levels of warming. . And Russia’s war in Ukraine has sparked a short-term scramble for fossil fuels, even in a relatively climate-conscious Europe.
These forces continue to keep the world short of the Paris Agreement’s most ambitious goal of limiting global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. Beyond this threshold, experts warn, the world faces a future of chronic food crises, escalating natural disasters and ecosystem collapse.
As the world has warmed approximately 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit), deadly climate impacts are unfolding worldwide. Europe is simmering amid record heat waves that have scorched crops and sparked wildfires. At least eight people died in Seoul as the heaviest rain in more than 100 years flooded the South Korean capital. Droughts have devastated Mexico and contributed to a growing hunger crisis in East Africa. In the United States, people are dying from extreme heat and from overwhelming floods and wildfires.
“This summer is just a landscape of terror,” said Kim Cobb, a Brown University climate scientist and lead author of the IPCC’s most recent report on the science of climate change. “And I know it’s not going to stop any time soon.”
These disasters underscore what an explosive body of scientific research continues to demonstrate: that adverse climate change continues to outpace the slow progress of policy action. Even a landmark investment like the Inflation Reduction Act, Cobb said, is overshadowed by the scale of the crisis.
“There needs to be an infinite acceleration in the frequency of this type of legislation,” he said. “I think the planet is sending that message pretty loud and clear.”
Surprising trends in the Arctic
Take the new Arctic study, which shows that the amplified warming occurring at the top of the planet, while long overdue, is exceeding what climate models predict by a remarkable margin.
“We suspect that this is either an extremely unlikely event or that climate models are systematically underestimating this Arctic amplification,” Lipponen said of the rapid pace of Arctic warming.
The study takes as its starting point the year 1979 due to the availability of satellite data covering the Arctic. It defines the Arctic as the region above the Arctic Circle, and the authors acknowledge that if longer periods are considered or if the Arctic is defined more broadly, the rate of Arctic warming may appear somewhat lower.
The warming is most concentrated east of Svalbard in the Barents and Kara Seas, regions that have also experienced some of the fastest Arctic sea ice loss. This ice has traditionally reflected much of the sun’s heat back into space, keeping the planet cool. But as it disappears from the sea surface, the ocean absorbs more sunlight, and then the warmer sea surface supports even less ice.
It is one of the best-known climate “feedbacks”, a phenomenon through which a warming effect contributes to increased heat. Although scientists try to account for this feedback in the models they use to predict future climate change, they may be underestimating it. At the extreme, the new study finds some regions between Svalbard and the Russian island of Novaya Zemlya are warming at a rate of more than 1.25 degrees Celsius, or 2.25 degrees Fahrenheit, every decade.
This greatly disrupts arctic life, human and otherwise.
But the interconnections between the ice, atmosphere, land and ocean mean that no part of the planet will be affected. As extreme temperatures bake the carbon-rich permafrost of northern landscapes, the melting earth releases carbon dioxide gas.
Even as people begin to reduce their emissions, nature’s emissions are just beginning.
There are also relevant news from the other pole.
NASA scientists, led by Chad Greene, have derived a technique that allows them to study the enormous, sometimes national-sized, ice shelves called ice shelves that surround Antarctica. These are from Earth main defenses against massive sea level rise, acting as a reinforcement mechanism that slows down the ice in Antarctica.
But the shelves are suffering serious damage. Several, such as Larsen A and B, have completely collapsed. Thwaites Glacier, the most worrying and perhaps most vulnerable place in Antarctica, has lost about 2 trillion tons of ice from its ice shelf, which has retreated dramatically inland, according to new research. The total area lost from Antarctic ice shelves since 1997, about 14,000 square miles, is slightly larger than Maryland and represents about 2 percent of the total ice shelf area.
As a reminder of the vulnerability of these ice shelves, the Conger Ice Shelf in East Antarctica, traditionally thought to be the coldest and most stable part of the ice sheet, suddenly collapsed this year.
The conger wasn’t very big for an Antarctic shelf, just the size of a large city. But its unexpected collapse, which appears to have been triggered by a sudden spell of unusual heat, should be cause for alarm, scientists say.
“It means the Antarctic ice shelves are vulnerable and can still surprise us,” said NASA’s Greene, who works at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. of the event. Greene’s study, which appeared in Nature this week, it was co-authored with colleagues from NASA and the University of Tasmania.
“Conger counters a common expectation that ice shelf collapse should only occur after a long period of thinning and weakening,” he continued. “Conger tells us that…