Crisis — Loss of Arctic Sea Ice
Arctic sea ice is critically important for several reasons. Most importantly it reflects sunlight, mitigating the effects of climate change by cooling the planet. Sea ice is actually the earth’s air conditioner, and snow-covered sea ice reflects up to 90% of solar radiation. When the ice melts, dark blue water absorbs heat quickly. It affects weather globally, insulates the air, and keeps methane at bay.
However the Arctic is warming 4 times faster than the rest of the planet, resulting in rapidly melting ice. In 2018 Harvard scientist James Anderson, the scientist who used a U-2 spy plane to discover the cause of damage to the ozone layer, predicted we have 5 years to save ourselves from climate catastrophe. Focusing on melting arctic ice, he noted that 75–80% of its permanent ice had melted in the last 35 years. Much of the remaining ice is only at a 15% concentration, highly susceptible to melting.
While no one can say for sure how much global warming will increase in an ice free arctic, renowned scientists and scientific institutions have made worse case scenario predictions. In 2020 Mark Urban, director of the Center of Biological Risk and a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut, wrote an editorial in the prestigious journal Science titled “Life without Ice.” He states, “Arctic ice acts as Earth’s air conditioner. Once dark water replaces brilliant ice, Earth could warm substantially, equivalent to the warming triggered by the additional release of a trillion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.”
Scripps Institute of Oceanography in san Diego, CA. is one of the worlds leading ocean science research institutes. In a July 2019 article, a Scripps study published in a peer reviewed journal agreed with Urban’s conclusion: “Losing the remaining Arctic sea ice and its ability to reflect incoming solar energy back to space would be equivalent to adding one trillion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere,” “advancing global warming by 25 years.”
What, if anything, can we do to prevent an ice free arctic? I wish I had a quick answer. Survival and flourishing of the Earth communities requires Governments, NGOs, and individuals to embrace truth-seeking as a a basis for practical policies. What we lack are not so much technical or policy solutions as much as vision and will to implement those policies that we already know work. These include: fast tracking renewable energy grids and technologies; ending fossil fuel subsidies and selective taxing energy and fossil fuel companies; moratorium on deforestation; massive global tree planting projects; converting industrialized corporate controlled agriculture from is destructive carbon intensive practices to sustainable ecological and organic practices. Above all we need to promote reality-based public education programs. If our leaders and the electorate do not believe there is a problem there can be no solution.
