Fwd: Arctic no longer reliably frozen

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John Nissen

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Oct 21, 2025, 10:09:03 AMOct 21
to Clive Elsworth, Planetary Restoration, healthy-planet-action-coalition, David Spratt, Peter R Carter
Hi Clive,

At the NOAC meeting on Monday last week, I spoke of making an Arctic Report Card, to reflect the real situation to contrast with the NOAA official view, expressed in their annual report card.  The NOAA card for 2017 was mentioned in the "Start the Week" programme, also on Monday last week.  The programme did not mention the huge dangers arising from continued and accelerating Arctic meltdown.  So I have written to the programme presenter, Adam Rutherford, see below.  My intention now is to produce an Arctic Report Card with as much authority as I can muster, giving a more realistic view of the situation than NOAA have managed, e.g. in their report card for 2017; see reference [2] in the email below.

In the report card I will give details of the five tipping elements mentioned in the email.  I will put these details in the context of the global warming situation.  Data points from your graphs would be useful, Clive.  I hope to add bits of relevant information from other sources, and also discuss some of the proposed "remedies" to refreeze the Arctic and avoid tipping catastrophe.

Cheers, John

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: John Nissen <johnnis...@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Oct 20, 2025 at 8:50 PM
Subject: Arctic no longer reliably frozen
To: <startt...@bbc.co.uk>
Cc: Peter Wadhams <peter....@gmail.com>, Sir David King <d...@camkas.co.uk>, Shaun Fitzgerald <sd...@cam.ac.uk>, Oren Gruenbaum <oren.gr...@theguardian.com>


To: Adam Rutherford
Re: Start the Week, 13th October, "Endangered languages and vanishing landscapes"

Dear Adam,

I very much enjoyed your programme last week [1], but was disappointed by one thing.  The last speaker, Klaus Dodds, quoted from the NOAA 2017 "Arctic Report Card" [2] saying that the Arctic was no longer reliably frozen.  He then went on to discuss the fight for exploitation of the Arctic, as it becomes unfrozen.  What I missed was any discussion of the implications for the rest of the world of allowing the Arctic meltdown to continue unabated.  A Guardian journalist friend, Oren Gruenbaum, suggested I get in touch with you directly about this.

Since 1980 the Arctic has been warming around four times faster than the global average.  Besides the snow, mentioned in your programme, there are five elements of the Arctic which are particularly affected by this rapid warming and which are of great concern:
  • the Arctic sea ice; 
  • the Greenland Ice Sheet; 
  • the Arctic permafrost, both on land and under the seabed; 
  • the polar jet stream; 
  • the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). 
These five elements have been categorised as tipping elements in the Earth System; see [3] Fig 3.

Professor Peter Wadhams, author of "A Farewell to Ice", has been my mentor in studying these elements, and we have discussed them with Sir David King, former chief scientific advisor to the government.  We have some startling conclusions.  For example, the melt of the Greenland Ice Sheet is accelerating.  If the Arctic temperature is not reduced enough to start refreezing the Arctic, the ice sheet is destined to produce enough meltwater to raise the global average sea level at least 7 metres, triggering an even greater contribution from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet where some large glaciers are already in a critical condition.  As another example, if the Arctic permafrost thaw is allowed to continue accelerating, emissions of the potent greenhouse gas, methane, could rise to a level sufficient to tip the planet into a hot-house state; see [3] Fig 1.

The danger from Arctic meltdown is downplayed by the majority of climate scientists, but obviously something has to be done to avert such disasters.  Earlier this year there was a conference on Arctic Repair in Cambridge, where there were proposals for refreezing the Arctic.  The conference was masterminded by Shaun Fitzgerald.  Saving the Arctic from meltdown is not a lost cause; but the proposed remedies are extremely controversial. I would very much appreciate an opportunity to discuss the situation in detail with you, together with possible remedies.  I have recently moved from Bath to Ealing, so a meeting in London would be convenient for me.

Kind regards,

John Nissen
Chair of the Planetary Restoration Action Group (PRAG)

Mobile: 07890 657 498

References:

[1] Start the week

[2] NOAA Arctic Report Card 2017
(Note the warning "The U.S. Government is closed.  This site will not be updated...")

[3] Will Steffen et al (2018)
Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene


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