Re: Atmospheric physicists find error in widely cited Arctic snow cover observations

[John Nissen]

Hi Renaud,

This is an important finding, because the snow is retreating as well as the sea ice (now only a metre thick in mid winter, Albert tells me!).  NOAA has been misleading us, not only on this but on the need for SRM cooling. The urgency for interventions to cool and refreeze the Arctic such as to restore Arctic albedo could not be greater, since anything to do with GHGs would come too little and too late.  

At the stage we have reached, SAI is the only intervention with enough cooling power, both to refreeze the Arctic and to cool the planet as a whole.  For refreezing the Arctic the SAI has to more than compensate for the heating power from albedo loss (principally from snow and ice retreat) and atlantification (warmer water entering the Arctic).  For global cooling, the SAI has to more than compensate for the heating power from albedo loss (e.g. reduced cloud cover) and from GHGs whose level can't suddenly be reduced. 

But SAI probably needs to be supplemented by other methods to preserve ice, such as Soumitra and Leslie have been investigating for the Himalayas and John has been investigating for the Greenland glaciers.

I am adding your reference for my Arctic Emergency Report Card - do you know about this?  We are checking it out with AI.  We hope to get a final version soon, suitable for publication as a press release from PRAG, which I chair, but with support from others who appreciate the crisis we are in and what has to be done.  For AI, we have found we need really good references, like the one you have given me.

Cheers, John

On Tue, Jan 13, 2026 at 7:42 AM Renaud de RICHTER <renaud.d...@gmail.com> wrote:

https://phys.org/news/2026-01-atmospheric-physicists-error-widely-cited.html