water and food security are compromised, disease can start to spread. Climate change isn’t just a matter of more unpredictable weather or increased storms, precipitation, and heat waves; it threatens the basic elements we need to survive and be healthy.
What Can We Learn From Arctic Ice?
THE ARCTIC MAY seem like a distant place, just as the most extreme consequences of our wasteful use of fossil fuels may appear to be in some distant future. Both are closer than most of us realize.
The Arctic is a focal point for some of the most profound impacts of climate change. As we saw in Chapter 1, much of our understanding of global warming comes from studies of the Arctic, where changing conditions can trigger feedback cycles that affect the entire planet. One of the world’s top ice experts, Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University, calls the Arctic situation a “global disaster,” suggesting ice is disappearing faster than predicted and could be entirely gone in the near future.5 “The main cause is simply global warming: as the climate has warmed there has been less ice growth during the winter and more ice melt during the summer,” he told the Guardian.6
Over the past thirty years, permanent Arctic sea ice has shrunk to half its previous area and thickness.7 As it diminishes, global warming accelerates. This is caused by a number of factors, including release of the potent greenhouse gas methane trapped under nearby permafrost, and because ice reflects the sun’s energy, whereas oceans absorb it.
Because of albedo feedback (which refers to the ability of a surface to reflect solar energy), ice-covered regions like the Arctic are affected to a greater degree than other areas by even small changes in global temperatures. Researchers say the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. Fresh Arctic snow and ice can reflect as much as 80 percent of the sun’s energy back to space, and melting ice in summer can reflect 50 percent. According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, ocean water only has an albedo of 10 percent.8 Even small amounts of warming cause ice and snow to melt, reducing the surface area that reflects solar energy. As more dark ocean and land surfaces are exposed, more energy is absorbed, which causes further warming, and further melting, and so on. These feedback loops in the Arctic are complicated, because the Arctic receives little or no sunlight during winter, but up to twenty-four hours of sunlight during summer. But warming during spring, summer, and fall causes spring melt to arrive earlier and fall freezing to start later, meaning the period during which solar radiation can be absorbed rather than reflected lasts longer. And because the oceans absorb more heat during summer, they release the heat during fall and into winter, causing the atmosphere to warm even more. Because the atmosphere over the Arctic is quite stable, the heat stays near the earth’s surface, leading to amplification of warming in the area.
The increase in warming rates in the Artic regions sets off another feedback loop, as CO2 and methane, a greenhouse gas many times more potent than CO2, are released from oceans, permafrost, and soils that are no longer frozen. This causes more warming and more melting, and so on.
According to the IPCC, Arctic warming and feedback loops will “contribute to major physical, ecological, sociological, and economic changes,” including altered drainage, landscapes, species composition, marine ecosystems, and human communities.9 Melting Arctic ice and subsequent warming will also cause sea levels to rise, and more rapid warming at lower latitudes as oceanic heat transfers are slowed.
With all we know about climate change and what’s happening in the Arctic, you’d think world leaders would be marshaling resources to at least slow it down. Instead, industry and governments are eyeing new opportunities to mine Arctic fossil fuels. Factoring in threats to the numerous species of Arctic creatures—including fish, seabirds, marine mammals such as whales and seals, and polar bears—makes such an approach even more incomprehensible.
Royal Dutch Shell spent more than US$4.5 billion on operations and lease purchases in preparation for Arctic drilling.10 But its record shows how risky this is. First, a spill containment dome failed a routine safety test and was crushed by underwater pressure. Later, a drilling rig, which was being towed to Seattle so that Shell could avoid paying some Alaskan taxes, broke free during a storm and ran aground on an island in the Gulf of Alaska. The disastrous BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 showed how dangerous ocean drilling can be, even in relatively calm waters, and how bogus the claims of the industry are that it can contain or even clean up a spill.
Problems with exploration in the Arctic aren’t new. In October 1970, a blowout at a natural gas well on King Christian Island in the Arctic Ocean created a massive flame as up to 200 million cubic feet of gas a day spewed for more than three months. It was the second blowout in the Arctic since drilling began the year before. Around the same time, the drilling consortium Panarctic Oils Ltd. was slapped with a huge fine for dumping junk steel, waste oil, and other garbage into the Arctic Ocean. The drilling companies found a novel solution to the latter problem: they convinced the Canadian government of the day to issue ocean-dumping permits, making the practice legal and common until 1993, when Inuit challenged one of the permits.
Of course, the worst danger is that increased exploitation of fossil fuel resources in the Arctic will exacerbate global warming. Responding to climate change and vanishing Arctic ice by gearing up to drill for the stuff at the root of the problem is insane. Unfortunately, many fossil fuel companies and governments are engaged in a mad rush to get as much oil and gas out of the ground—no matter how difficult—while there’s still a market. The ever-increasing devastation of climate change means we will eventually have to leave much of the fossil fuels where they are—or at the very least, substantially slow the pace of extraction and use the resource more wisely—if we want to survive and be healthy as a species.
As Arctic ice melts, countries like Australia burn, and droughts, floods, and extreme weather increase throughout the world, it’s past time to get serious about events in the Arctic and what they mean for global warming.
Antarctica Tells Another Story
DOWN AT THE other pole, the effects of climate change are somewhat more complicated and less well understood. Warming is occurring at a slower pace than in the north, and some ice sheets appear to be shrinking while others may be growing. Geographical conditions explain some of the differences between global warming’s effects on the two poles. The Arctic is an ocean surrounded by land, but Antarctica is a land mass surrounded by ocean. Because of that, sea ice is not as thick in Antarctica, and it moves more freely. Most of the sea ice that forms during Antarctica’s winter melts in summer, whereas the Arctic retains more winter ice. Wind patterns and water currents also act differently between the two poles.11
A study in the Journal of Glaciology, led by Jay Zwally, chief cryospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, found that glacier mass in Antarctica’s western region is declining while increased snowfall in the eastern interior has led to a “net gain of about 100 billion tons of ice per year,” but other researchers have questioned those findings, which don’t dispute global warming.12
“I don’t think Zwally’s estimates really matter so much in the grand scheme because adding a little snow to Antarctica in no way offsets the complete disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet in the near future,” University of Alaska Fairbanks glaciology professor Erin Pettit said.13
As for the slower pace of warming in Antarctica, researchers from the University of Washington and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say it’s probably because gale-force westerly winds push surface water north, which pulls “deep, centuries-old water to the surface.”14
And
