Nick Breeze of Envisionation is a climate change journalist and interviewer. In September, he interviewed Professor Jason Box, a glaciologist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. In the interview, Box revealed how the largest ice shelf in Greenland had just lost an area of ice shelf the size of Manhattan. He described the event as 'spectacular' and warned that it is highly abnormal and raises alarms about the Arctic system and sea level rise.
Greenland’s glaciers are not simply melting they are crumbling and falling apart. We have seen massive chunks of ice cracking off the front edges of glaciers where the icebergs plunge into the ocean. It is not simply warming that is causing these calving events. The glaciers no longer flow at a glacial pace, but instead are flowing faster and faster due to changes in their dynamics, they are thinning from the top and below, they are breaking apart, retreating and dumping ice into the ocean.
The Guardian, in a piece titled “Arctic ice melt could trigger uncontrollable climate change at global level”, reports on the Arctic Resilience Report which Arctic scientists have warned that rapid melting in the Arctic is risking 19 tipping points in the region. These tipping points will be felt through out the world and not one of them will be welcome or pleasant. They note that temperatures in the Arctic “are currently about 20C above what would be expected for the time of year, in which scientists describe as “off the charts”. Sea ice is at the lowest extent ever recorded for the time of year.”
Climate tipping points occur when a natural system, such as the polar ice cap, undergoes sudden or overwhelming change that has a profound effect on surrounding ecosystems, often irreversible.
In the Arctic, the tipping points identified in the new report, published on Friday, include: growth in vegetation on tundra, which replaces reflective snow and ice with darker vegetation, thus absorbing more heat; higher releases of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from the tundra as it warms; shifts in snow distribution that warm the ocean, resulting in altered climate patterns as far away as Asia, where the monsoon could be effected; and the collapse of some key Arctic fisheries, with knock-on effects on ocean ecosystems around the globe.
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Scientists have speculated for some years that so-called feedback mechanisms – by which the warming of one area or type of landscape has knock-on effects for whole ecosystems – could suddenly take hold and change the dynamics of Arctic ice melting from a relatively slow to a fast-moving phenomenon with unpredictable and potentially irreversible consequences for global warming. For instance, when sea ice shrinks it leaves areas of dark ocean that absorb more heat than the reflective ice, which in turn causes further shrinkage, and so on in a spiral.
The Arctic ice cap helps to cool sea and air temperatures, by reflecting much of the sun’s radiation back into space, and acting as a global cooler when winds and ocean currents swirl over and under it. It has long been known to play a key part of the global climate system, but the difficulty and expense of close monitoring have meant that scientists have only in recent years been able to make detailed assessments.
Unfortunately, conservative and science denying politics have won over reason and fact in the US elections. Climate change denier, Donald J. Trump has been elected President of the United States and a hostile GOP is now in control of the US House of Representatives and the US Senate. Trump’s aides have promised to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord, fill critical environmental Cabinet positions with fossil fuel interests, and perhaps most alarmingly, announced that the critical research into climate change that NASA performs will no longer be funded and those funds transferred to space exploration. If they are successful, this will effectively kill the Earth Sciences and critical climate research at NASA.
Marcus Carson of the Stockholm Environment Institute and one of the lead authors of the report noted “That would be a huge mistake, It would be like ripping out the aeroplane’s cockpit instruments while you are in mid-flight” adding “These are very serious problems, very serious changes are happening, but they are still poorly understood. We need more research to understand them. A lot of the major science is done by the US.”