Arctic emergency report - focus on Greenland

[John Nissen]

Dear Sir David,

The threat of DJT taking over Greenland is a wake-up call for those of us who understand the precarious Arctic situation.  

There is a very powerful lobby of businesses and politicians who want the land and sea ice to melt away so that they can exploit resources more easily.  They seem wilfully blind (a legal term) to the implications of unabated Arctic meltdown: extremely high risk of catastrophic sea level rise this century.   

I drafted an Arctic Emergency Report Card last October, and spent some time investigating the AI response to the text.  The AI response was positive but it turns out that AI cannot easily be used as a publicity tool, especially if there's nothing in the public domain.  So I have continued waiting for a means of publicising the report.  

Now, with a world focus on Greenland,  I think there is a window of opportunity, but I would appreciate your support for publication.  I've cut my original draft text to focus on Greenland; see below.  I could get AI to present a nice executive summary.  It needs to be made clear that letting the Greenland Ice Sheet melt continue is risking accelerated disintegration and metres of sea level rise this century

Should we reframe this message as a Greenland Emergency Report Card, and confront those who wish to exploit Greenland regardless of the future?  How should we best confront them?

Cheers, John

ARCTIC EMERGENCY REPORT CARD

Draft of 2025/10/26

Introduction

The Arctic is in a meltdown, which threatens to take at least five tipping elements beyond their point of no return.  Continued meltdown would have catastrophic consequences which we examine below.  Emergency cooling intervention is vital to prevent any of the tipping elements reaching a point of no return.

The original cause of this meltdown was global warming caused by an excess of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.  Global temperature rise has been amplified in the Arctic, mainly by albedo positive feedback, such that, since 1980, the mean Arctic temperature has been rising at about four times the global average.  The retreat of sea ice started to accelerate around 1980, as shown by a comparison with the linear models used by the IPCC.  Satellite images show a corresponding retreat of snow in the Arctic region.  Retreat exposes open water and open ground respectively.  This lowers the albedo causing more heat to be absorbed and more retreat in a vicious cycle known as albedo positive feedback.  Thus Arctic meltdown is accelerating.

[Snip]

Arctic tipping elements

Since 1980 the Arctic has been warming around four times faster than the global average.  Five elements of the Arctic have been categorised as tipping elements in the Earth System; see [3] Figure 3:

• 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). 

The Arctic sea ice exhibits a switch behaviour.  From an initial state of perennial sea ice, there is accelerated retreat followed by decline towards a state where there is only seasonal sea ice.  This final state will be reached when all the multiyear ice has gone.  This departure could happen quite suddenly and be a point of no return, meaning the sea ice cover could not be restored to the perennial sea ice state with multiyear ice.  The Arctic sea ice acts as a vast mirror of many square kilometres. Complete loss of Arctic ice would contribute 3.3 W/m2 to global warming besides triggering the other Arctic tipping elements to the point of no return: a tipping point cascade.

The Greenland Ice Sheet is already disintegrating.  The number of moulins has grown exponentially over the past 20 years or more.  The great glaciers with terminations in the sea are accelerating towards the sea, as their terminations are warmed from Atlantic water, derived from the Gulf Stream.  Their descent is being lubricated by the meltwater which flows through the increasing numbers of moulins.  At some point a great glacier is liable to collapse, with an avalanche of ice blocks racing towards the sea and creating a megatsunami.  Such an avalanche has already occurred for an inland glacier, causing a 200 metre tsunami oscillating between shores of an inland lake.  There is evidence of past collapses when significant parts of Greenland suddenly became free of ice, e.g. in the early Holocene.  A complete collapse of the Greenland Ice Sheet would produce enough meltwater to raise sea level by over 7 metres, risking an even greater contribution from West Antarctic glaciers, already in a critical state. 

[Snip]

Refreezing the Arctic

This is an unprecedented emergency.  Tipping processes are taking the planet towards irreversible and catastrophic climate change and sea level rise.  The Arctic temperature has to be brought down, long before 4C is reached, for there to be any chance to prevent the Arctic tipping elements reaching their "points of no return".  In effect the Arctic has to be refrozen back to some maintainable state, e.g. its state in 1980 before accelerated meltdown got underway.  

Help is at hand.  With powerful cooling intervention using Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) it may be possible, not only to lower the Arctic temperature to around its 1980 temperature but also to reverse climate change and bring the global temperature back to its 1980 value.  The amount of Arctic warming power is estimated at approximately 2.0 W/m2: half coming from albedo loss and half from Atlantification. Thus the cooling power has to be significantly greater than 2.0 W/m2 which equates to 1.0 petawatt.  This has to be directed into the Arctic.  Because most surface water north of 50N flows towards the Arctic, injection of the aerosol or its precursor can be effective at a latitude of 50N.  The bulk of the aerosol will drift towards the pole, taken by the Brewer-Dobson circulation, and descend harmlessly into the troposphere before it reaches the pole.  At the megaton injection level, SO2 is capable of lowering the Arctic temperature, at a cost of a few tens of thousands of dollars per year [6].  Researchers have been unable to identify any unmanageable untoward effects; but deployment can be modelled to anticipate problems even during deployment.  The deployment can be monitored and tuned to avoid any foreseen or unforeseen problems, thus maximising safety, while maintaining effectiveness. 

[snip]

References

[3] Will Steffen et al (2018)

Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene

https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1810141115

[6] Wake Smith et al. 

A sub-polar focussed stratospheric aerosol injection deployment scenario

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2515-7620/ac8cd3

 

[Dave King]

Dear John,

Thank you for your email, and for inviting me to support the publication of your article on Arctic Emergency Report Card.  I don’t think however that I could help with its publication.  But good luck with it.

I apologise for the delay, I have been very busy on several CCAG projects.  

Best wishes,

Dave