We Should Listen to the Climate Scientists While We Still Have a Chance

One of the joys of my career has been my two working visits to the Arctic—the first to Arctic Canada and the second to Shishmaref, a village located on a battered island in the Chukchi Sea high in northwest Alaska, 130 miles across the water from Russia and not far from the North American terminus of what was once the Bering Land Bridge, over which, it is believed, Asiatic peoples came to this continent. The Arctic is another world—vast and unknowable. Every look to every point on the compass is an occasion for awe and wonder. And we’re well on our way toward losing it all. From NBC News:

The findings, shared Tuesday in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Arctic report card, show how climate change is scrambling ecosystems and shape-shifting the landscape in the part of the planet where global warming is most intense. Considered a bellwether region for the effects of climate change, the Arctic is heating up far faster than places at lower altitudes—two to four times as quickly, depending on the baselines scientists use for comparison and which geography they include in assessments. The last nine years in the Arctic have all had the highest average temperatures recorded since 1900. That dynamic is the result of a phenomenon called Arctic amplification. As the Arctic loses snow cover and sea ice, more dark-colored ocean water and rock emerge. Those dark surfaces reflect less radiation back to space, absorbing heat, instead. In addition, patterns of circulation in the oceans and the atmosphere are increasingly transporting heat toward the Earth’s poles.

Together, that means the Arctic is a fundamentally different place from what it was just 10 years ago, said the lead editor of the new NOAA report, Twila Moon, deputy lead scientist and science communication liaison at the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

(In related news, NOAA is very high on the Project 2025 hit list. The game plan refers to NOAA as “a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”So I guess we should listen to the NOAA scientists while we still have a chance.)

Overall, the Arctic is becoming a greener landscape with more extreme precipitation and less snow and ice, according to the report. The effects of that transformation are increasingly apparent closer to American homes, as fires in the Arctic send smoke to populated areas and as melting ice raises sea levels, scientists said. “These issues are not not just staying in the Arctic, right—they’re impacting all of us,” said Brendan Rogers, an associate scientist at Woodwell Climate Research Center, in Falmouth, Massachusetts, who studies permafrost and contributed to the report.

Regarding carbon emissions, the loss of permafrost is the whole ballgame.

“The permafrost region contains about twice as much carbon as is in the atmosphere now and about three times as much carbon as in the aboveground biomass of all the world’s forests, so it’s a lot of carbon that’s at stake here,” Rogers said.

More than that, however, the permafrost is a necessary element in all aspects of life in the Arctic. On Shishmaref, for example, it was the habit of the people to store seal meat for the winter in the ground. Also, the remnants of Pacific typhoons end up bashing themselves to death in the Chukchi Sea, exhausting themselves by battering the deep frozen earth and the deep, frozen ocean. Now the sea freezes later and thaws earlier, and the thrashing of the storms tears the newly unfrozen permafrost away from the island. Houses fall into the sea, and the island, which has been continuously occupied for 4,000 years, is disappearing, and people are preparing to move away.

This year, sea ice was the sixth-lowest in the 45 years since satellites began measuring; sea ice extents have decreased about 50% since the 1980s. Meanwhile, the Arctic tundra was the second-greenest since records began in 2000, indicating that more shrubs had taken root and expanded into new terrain. Measurements of Arctic permafrost, which are taken from boreholes drilled below the surface, had higher average temperatures than in all but one previous year.

Then there are the fires.

Wildfires are also contributing to Arctic emissions. Last year, wildfires burned more than twice as much area in the region as in any previous year—exceeding the emissions from Canada’s economic activity. “It’s roughly three times the amount from all other Canadian sectors,” Rogers said of Canada’s total wildfire emissions. “It’s higher than in any other country’s annual emissions except for China, the U.S., India and Russia.”

We are about to pass into years in which the United States will become a primary roadblock to efforts to address the climate crisis. This will happen because enormous swaths of our fellow citizens cannot help but elect people this dumb. And far to the north, something majestic is dying, and there won’t be anyone left to claim the body.