Re: [HPAC] Reminder: Link for John Moore HPAC presentation today Thursday Jan. 8 at 1:00 pm EST HPAC on polar climate intervention and "local winners"

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John Nissen

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Jan 8, 2026, 11:29:24 AMJan 8
to robert...@gmail.com, healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com, Barbara Sneath, Ron Baiman, Soumitra Das, Planetary Restoration
Hi Robert, 

I have already pointed this out.  It is very unfortunate nothing was done either to move John Moore earlier or the MEER talk later, since polar climate intervention and refreezing the Arctic could not be facing more serious opposition as the result of DJT, and an hour may not be enough to discuss the matter.

However we could continue this matter next week if I called a PRAG meeting at some time to suit Soumitra: India could be a key player when the US government is in denial of the crisis and wants to exploit a near-ice-free Arctic.

Regards, John


On Thu, Jan 8, 2026 at 2:43 PM <robert...@gmail.com> wrote:

Note the overlap with Paul Gambill on MEER Talk that starts at 2pm EST.

Join MEER Talk Zoom Meeting
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83708894361?pwd=ikCO40610kcESfwXgrkPvyFabLtkKm.1

Regards

Robert


On 08/01/2026 14:36, Ron Baiman wrote:

Dear Colleagues,

It is our pleasure to host John Moore whi will be presenting a talk on: "High latitude interventions to conserve the cryosphere must have local winners"   this Thursday Jan 8, 2026 at 1:00 pm EST.

Note that this talk will be earlier at 1:00 pm EST than our usual 5:30 pm EST!

John Moore is:


Research Professor at Arctic Centre, University of Lapland, Finland.  

Lead University of the Arctic Thematic Network in Frozen Arctic Conservation 

Member of Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. 

 

Member of 6 Antarctic, 5 Greenlandic and 20 Svalbard scientific expeditions.

Led the Chinese geoengineering research program 2015-2022.

Authored over 200 articles ~26000 citations, H-index=69, 

19 articles published in PNAS & the "Nature" group. 

Research Activities: Climate-engineering. Sea level change. Ice sheet dynamics. Social-natural and indigenous-western science co-design of targeted interventions to conserve the cryosphere. 


We hope that you can make it!

Best,
Ron 
On behalf of the HPAC SC

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Ron Baiman

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Jan 8, 2026, 12:17:22 PMJan 8
to John Nissen, robert...@gmail.com, healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com, Barbara Sneath, Soumitra Das, Planetary Restoration
Dear John, 

With all due respect the initial notice of the meeting at 1:00 pm was sent out Monday 1/5 four days ago and no one got back to me (until you a couple hours ago) about the MEER conflict, so I'm not the only one who didn't realize this until much too late!

Best,
Ron

John Nissen

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Jan 13, 2026, 4:52:46 PM (14 days ago) Jan 13
to John Moore, Ron Baiman, healthy-planet-action-coalition, Sir David King, Nick Breeze, JOHN ENGLANDER, Albert Kallio, Peter Wadhams, Soumitra Das, Planetary Restoration
Hi John,

I think you meant SSP5 was the worst case scenario, not SSP3, but never mind.

My particular fear is over Greenland. You suggested that even with cooling, disintegration would continue.  Glacier descent rate is accelerating for most of the glaciers in Greenland and elsewhere in the Arctic.  Cooling the Arctic as a whole is a prerequisite for halting ice mass loss from Arctic glaciers.  Particular measures for Greenland are needed in addition to halt the disintegration.

The SSPs do not affect any of the costs from sea level rise, unless (i) they imply more or less defence or (ii) they imply more or less attention to preserving Greenland ice.  The pathways as currently defined do not have any such implications.  So I don't see that the different SSPs would have different damage costs.

Now there is a present worst case pathway/scenario where the countries in dominance welcome a warmer Arctic for purposes of exploitation.  In this, the current scenario, the Greenland Ice Sheet is doomed to sudden partial disintegration, probably within the next half century.  The world would be unprepared for a sudden SLR of perhaps several metres, and the cost in damage, human lives and livelihoods would be inestimable, certainly provoking a fatal mix of mass migration, mass starvation, economic collapse and inevitable conflict.

Most of the governments of countries in dominance today welcome a warmer Arctic, especially the US government.  They have no consideration for the future of mankind: for future catastrophic sea level rise or future catastrophic climate change for that matter.  They are just interested in short-term gain from exploitation of resources and sea routes.  Personal greed prevails amongst the leaders.

India and China are perhaps the only significant powers which might take a long-term approach and want to protect their peoples through SAI and other measures directed at refreezing the Arctic while it is still possible.  What do you say to that?  I know you have worked in China, or at least with Chinese collaborators.

Western Europe has a lot of low-lying land, but would they ever take the initiative, when there is so much opposition to SRM and SAI in particular?

Could there be an uprising from young people, small island states and Arctic indigenous peoples to change matters?  A better world Is possible, if SAI is embraced as necessary for refreezing the Arctic, which is a prerequisite for global cooling, climate change reversal and a slowing of sea level rise.  And these in turn are prerequisites for restoring the planet to a safe, sustainable, biodiverse and productive state, maintaining a world population rising to 10-11 billion people by the end of the century.  A rosy future is still just possible for the young people of today.

Cheers, John



On Tue, Jan 13, 2026 at 1:56 PM John Moore <john.mo...@gmail.com> wrote:
Not sure I get what you mean. The SSP does affect damage costs, it impacts many parameters that affect costs: population number and demographics, GDP, trade and differential growth of sectors. Brown do indeed have big differences between SSPs. SSP3 is far worse than others.

I have no problem with the paper - it has noted slr and economics experts on it (e.g. Tol, Nicholls, Jevrejeva) and it's a respectable journal. I don't see anything wrong - in fact they published a correction after I did point out an error in their figures. It is what it is. Other publications are also available that quantify costs somewhat differently, eg. DOI 10.3389/fmars.2025.1505633 (which also has some same authors as Brown)

The cost is $700billion/yr/m, not million. The Brown paper takes into account inflation and normalizes to present day values (2014) using standard discount rates I think. They do not miss inflation at all as far as I can see. Exponential growth works just as well for mm and metres.

The paper only deals with global sea levels. It does not take into account the differing "fingerprints" of sea level rise in future doi:10.1073/pnas.1605312113   due to changes in dynamic sea level, GIA and relative mass inputs. 
e.g we looked at dynamic sea levels under SAI relative to SSPs.       https://doi.org/10.1038/s41612-023-00466-4

The Arctic is one of the big unknowns due to poor representation in GIA models as well as localized mass changes (which e.g. along the Greenland coast lower sea levels). It also does not consider potential changes in extreme events, especially tropical storms, which impact global south extremes a lot. But again this has been looked at in other work,. e.g. in this I added sea level and hurricane flooding for the US, doi:10.1073/pnas.1510530112

For me the biggest missing item is the lack of data post 2100. This is simply active research, and of course the discount rates used are completely fantastical even 20 years in the future nevermind 200. There have been some estimates of population migration, but its not a published paper yet.   https://zenodo.org/records/14650681

john

On Tue, 13 Jan 2026 at 14:57, John Nissen <johnnis...@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi John,

What makes me suspicious of the Brown paper is that the RCP or SSP designations should make a difference to the cost.  The CO2 level should not make any difference to the cost of dealing with sea level rise through adaptation or the cost from damage and recovery. I think the paper is just covering the former. From experience, the big rise in costs comes from damage and recovery when flooding has occurred. I have read that there's has been an exponential increase in these costs over the past few decades, despite an SLR of a few mm over the same period. Is the $700/m/year estimate reasonable despite this omission from the paper? 

The whole issue is complicated by an increase in weather extremes. As the Arctic temperature increases, we get both SLR from land ice melting and weather extremes from a reduced Arctic to tropics temperature gradient. 

Cheers John from mobile 




On Tue, 13 Jan 2026, 10:49 am John Moore, <john.mo...@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Ron et al.

Not sure where your numbers come from. 
It seems by eye from Brown fig. 4 to me that all except ssp3 are around $700/m/yr.  You need to sum all the income groups in Brown fig. 4. 

We also have analyzed the spread sheets accompanying Brown et al and get numbers like I reported for all except ssp3. 
For example:
By the end of the century we get $1.3 t/yr for sssp585 (which has about 1.1m slr at 2100), ssp245 600b/yr with 0.9m slr at 2100, and 400 b/yr for ssp3 with 1.05m slr at 2100.

BTW if Thwaites collapse e.g. in the van den Akker (in the The Cryosphere, 2025), which simulates far faster rates of slr, we save about $600 trillion during the 250 year collapse with a curtain.

John

On Mon, 12 Jan 2026 at 00:12, John Nissen <johnnis...@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Ron,

Thanks for organising the talk by John Moore, who I'd met at the Cambridge "Arctic Repair" event at the end of June last year.

Cost of sea level rise (SLR)
I had asked John about his source for cost per metre of SLR.  I followed up John's reference in the chat and I've attached the paper from Brown et al.

I couldn't see any figures suggesting a cost of $700 billion per year per metre of SLR.  However, looking at Figure 4, I can see that the cost is between 300 and 400 billion dollars per year for one metre of SLR, as shown in the bottom row for the worst case emissions scenario.  This is a total for the "World Bank income groups".  These are adaptation costs, so assume adaptation is possible, which may not be the case for a country like Bangladesh or Vietnam.

I'm copying this email to Sir David King who did a study of the effects of SRL on megacities.  He gave a talk about this study (I think it was at the Paris COP*) and reckoned that a number of megacities would be devastated by 0.3 to 0.4m of SLR. 

The UK costs
Huge relocation costs would be involved, where dikes and barriers are infeasible or left too late.  London is said to be able to cope with 5m of SLR, presumably with a barrier across the Thames Estuary.  Do we have an estimate of the cost?

However, having been the resident of a house by the river, I know that the most being considered for defence against SLR is a raising of the Thames Barrier by half a metre or so.  We could get a sudden SLR of over half a metre from the partial collapse of the Greenland Ice Sheet.  So there's a real risk of the London authorities being caught off-guard.  As for Cambridge, Ely and the fens they'd be in real trouble.  And the Severn Estuary, with Somerset levels, Gloucester and Hinkley Point nuclear stations, could be devastated by the megatsunamis arising from any collapse of ice into the sea off the west coast of Greenland.  No defence is practicable IMHO.

Cost of slowing Greenland melt and reducing the risk of partial collapse
The cost of reducing the Arctic temperature using SAI is relatively small, estimated at around $11 billion per year in a recent study by Wake Smith et al.  Buttressing or other measures to stabilise glaciers may be necessary in addition; see my previous email in this thread.

Cheers, John

* I may have got these figures 2nd hand from Nick Breeze, who has attended most if not all the COPs this century - and written a book about them.



On Thu, Jan 8, 2026 at 8:29 PM John Nissen <johnnis...@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi all, here's the chat:

Robert Chris  to  Everyone 18:44
Sorry, I have to go.  I'm on the panel for the MEER Talk and need to log in early.
Interesting discussion.  Too short to examine the prospects of any of this being scalable at sufficient speed to make any significant difference to the Arctic, let alone the rest of the world.
I still struggle to understand how we, that's the global 'we', can make the shift from these delightful, respectful, interesting debates and actually do stuff that'll make a climatically significant difference.

Jonathan Cole  to  Everyone 18:47
two questions,  are you convinced by your research that the net ice loss for Greenland will reverse if the AMOC slows significantly over the coming years?  and from you familiarity with the culture of those citizens of Greenland, will they respond with a yes to an offer of 10 million dollars each and a thousand acres of free land, to change their sovereignty to the USA?

Robbie Tulip  to  Everyone 18:52
Thanks John, have to go to MEER.

John Moore  to  Everyone 18:53
Brown, S. et al. (2021) Global costs of protecting against sea-level rise at 1.5 to 4.0 °C. Climatic Change 167, 4.

Gregory Slater  to  Everyone 18:56
thanks to john moore

I asked at the meeting for support in the preparation of an Arctic emergency report press release, especially detailing the sea level rise from the Greenland Ice Sheet if its disintegration is not halted.  
John said that the disintegration was now mechanical, "geometrically unstable", and unstoppable through cooling intervention.  If that is the case, then we need interventions such as buttressing the terminations of glaciers to slow their descent.

Cheers, John



On Thu, Jan 8, 2026 at 4:46 PM Ron Baiman <rpba...@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear Colleagues,

Link to today's 1:00 pm meeting with John Moore (it appears that I may have sent out the wrong link in some posts!): 

Ron Baiman is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: HPAC John Moore Presentation
Time: Jan 8, 2026 01:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://benu.zoom.us/j/84275696258?pwd=9qaERwoEvGfkLECdkonCcJA3fV2oRs.1

Meeting ID: 842 7569 6258
Passcode: 333816

---

One tap mobile
+13052241968,,84275696258#,,,,*333816# US
+13126266799,,84275696258#,,,,*333816# US (Chicago)

Join instructions
https://benu.zoom.us/meetings/84275696258/invitations?signature=Xp97n_3Bo2cfv7LhcWpZ2Wc1-xs8tTgFShSVaEpCsFw




On Thu, Jan 8, 2026 at 10:27 AM Ron Baiman <rpba...@gmail.com> wrote:
Sorry John (and my apologies to MEER for this as I did not realize it would conflict), but the time was set long ago with John M and me, and sent out publicly  as well, so we (speaking for myself anyway - I’m in FL and have commitments this afternoon) really can’t change it.
Best,
Ron

Sent from my iPhone
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/healthy-planet-action-coalition/CAPhUB9AHZ7ChrLz_TOFmZmFGG66oBEQmwLaLh7VKsrTUWpDjOw%40mail.gmail.com.


--
Professor John C. Moore
Arctic Centre, University of Lapland, Finland
Lead - UArctic Thematic Network on Frozen Arctic Conservation



--
Professor John C. Moore
Arctic Centre, University of Lapland, Finland
Lead - UArctic Thematic Network on Frozen Arctic Conservation

John Moore

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Jan 14, 2026, 1:17:02 PM (13 days ago) Jan 14
to John Nissen, Ron Baiman, healthy-planet-action-coalition, Sir David King, Nick Breeze, JOHN ENGLANDER, Albert Kallio, Peter Wadhams, Soumitra Das, Planetary Restoration


I think you meant SSP5 was the worst case scenario, not SSP3, but never mind.

No SSP3 is far worse. Look at the figures in Brown. The reasons are because the SSP3 scenario (regional rivalry) means far less wealth. The fractional wealth spent on damages is twice as high as SSP5. see also https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2023.09.004 where we compare total economic costs for SSP and SAI scenarios.


My particular fear is over Greenland. You suggested that even with cooling, disintegration would continue.  Glacier descent rate is accelerating for most of the glaciers in Greenland and elsewhere in the Arctic.  Cooling the Arctic as a whole is a prerequisite for halting ice mass loss from Arctic glaciers.  Particular measures for Greenland are needed in addition to halt the disintegration.

The SSPs do not affect any of the costs from sea level rise, unless (i) they imply more or less defence or (ii) they imply more or less attention to preserving Greenland ice.  The pathways as currently defined do not have any such implications.  So I don't see that the different SSPs would have different damage costs.

No. The SSPs do affect damages from sea level rise and other things. You are simply ignoring the evidence and actual results in every paper that considers the SSPs. SSPs affect wealth, demographics, trade etc. That is why they impact damage costs.

Now there is a present worst case pathway/scenario where the countries in dominance welcome a warmer Arctic for purposes of exploitation.  In this, the current scenario, the Greenland Ice Sheet is doomed to sudden partial disintegration, probably within the next half century.  The world would be unprepared for a sudden SLR of perhaps several metres, and the cost in damage, human lives and livelihoods would be inestimable, certainly provoking a fatal mix of mass migration, mass starvation, economic collapse and inevitable conflict.

Most of the governments of countries in dominance today welcome a warmer Arctic, especially the US government.  They have no consideration for the future of mankind: for future catastrophic sea level rise or future catastrophic climate change for that matter.  They are just interested in short-term gain from exploitation of resources and sea routes.  Personal greed prevails amongst the leaders.

India and China are perhaps the only significant powers which might take a long-term approach and want to protect their peoples through SAI and other measures directed at refreezing the Arctic while it is still possible.  What do you say to that?  I know you have worked in China, or at least with Chinese collaborators.

Its true that we are on an SSP3 path now - regional rivalry is proceeding. This is the worst case scenario among SSPs.
I lived 10 years in Beijing and led their geoengineering program. China takes a long term view. In the 1980s Deng Xiao Ping noted that rare earth's were China's oil, 40 years before China dominates that resource today. I am not very well versed in India's position.  

Western Europe has a lot of low-lying land, but would they ever take the initiative, when there is so much opposition to SRM and SAI in particular?

No idea. Things change, the expiration of NATO seems likely, then who knows. 
 

Could there be an uprising from young people, small island states and Arctic indigenous peoples to change matters?  A better world Is possible, if SAI is embraced as necessary for refreezing the Arctic, which is a prerequisite for global cooling, climate change reversal and a slowing of sea level rise.  And these in turn are prerequisites for restoring the planet to a safe, sustainable, biodiverse and productive state, maintaining a world population rising to 10-11 billion people by the end of the century.  A rosy future is still just possible for the young people of today.


An uprising of young people will result in megadeaths. I would not recommend it. I have close colleagues in Iran. Proven liars encouraging them to continue to protest and risk their lives when they have no care to help them, only themselves, are despicable.
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