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Trump has a fighting chance to prevent Arctic meltdown. He should take it.
By Durwood J. Zaelke, Paul Bledsoe | January 8, 2025
Floating icebergs off the coast of west Greenland. (Photo: Chris Stenger on Unsplash)Share
The Arctic Ocean could see its first ice-free day before the end of the decade, according to a new study by Céline Heuzé and Alexandra Jahn recently published in Nature. When that happens, a vast stretch of newly open ocean at the top of the world will absorb immense amounts of the sun’s warmth that until now has been safely reflected into space. The Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the world, half of the reflective sea ice has already melted, and the strong multi-year ice is down to less than five percent of 1980s levels. If the rest is allowed to disappear altogether, which could happen within decades, the loss of reflectivity will add the equivalent of 25 years of carbon dioxide emissions, further super-heating our world.
Last month the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that continued warming and increased wildfires are now causing Arctic tundra to emit more carbon than it stores, further worsening climate impacts. The Arctic is both a cause and a symbol of self-reinforcing warming that, once widely underway, could trigger a timebomb at the top of the world that will be extremely difficult to keep from exploding.
There is still time to slow this process, especially by reducing emissions of methane, hydrofluorocarbon refrigerants (HFCs), nitrous oxide, and other super climate pollutants. Lowering these emissions alongside carbon dioxide can avoid four times as much warming by 2050 as limiting carbon dioxide only and would cut the rate of global warming by half and Arctic warming by two-thirds. Reducing methane emissions by 45 percent below 2020 levels by 2030 would shave almost 0.3 degrees Celsius off future warming as early as the 2040s, while avoiding even more warming in the Arctic—up to 60 percent more—substantially lowering the risk of losing Arctic sea ice.
Unfortunately methane emissions are at record levels, with little success so far in cutting human caused emissions, and with emissions from warming wetlands starting to increase. Mandatory reductions are needed, along with accelerated research on strategies to reduce methane once it’s in the atmosphere, as called for by the National Academy of Sciences.
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Cutting carbon dioxide is crucial for long-term climate safety but doesn’t do much in the next few decades to limit temperatures before 2050 because of co-emitted sulfates that provide temporary cooling.
The need for urgent cuts in super pollutants is sometimes not fully appreciated because a fundamental misconception persists in many policy and political circles that climate change is a largely linear problem—that additional emissions will lead to commensurate additional warming. Yet scientific research emphatically finds otherwise—that climate conditions can in fact tip quickly and in a non-linear way with impacts that are profoundly out of proportion to the added warming.
Last year the global average temperature breached the Paris Climate Agreement’s guardrail of 1.5 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels, at least temporarily. A group of the world’s most respected scientists recently warned that—driven by more than two dozen self-amplifying feedback loops—the world is “on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster” as 1.5 degrees Celsius triggers the first five tipping points. The Amazon, the Antarctic, the Atlantic Gulf Stream, boreal forests, and other elements of the Earth system are in danger of moving from climate protectors to net warming contributors.
Man-made emissions are accelerating heating today far more quickly than in the distant past. As the Earth moved out of ice ages over the past million years, for example, it took 5,000 years for global temperature to rise 4 to 7 degrees Celsius. But now, NASA researchers note, “the predicted rate of warming for the next century is at least 20 times faster.”
How natural systems will react to such rapid heating is a dangerous black box. No one knows the exact likelihood of tipping points falling like dominoes toward a hothouse planet. But even if the risk of passing irreversible tipping points turns out to be low, how many of us would get on a plane when told that at least one in 20 flights would crash.
This is not alarmism—quite the opposite. Protecting against tipping points is an attempt to preserve the stability of natural systems and, thus, a deeply conservative undertaking. What is radical is standing by while natural systems destabilize, which amounts to fatalism, if not nihilism.
Climate change impacts are inflicting extreme hardship on tens of millions of Americans through floods, fires, storms, and heat waves, undermining public safety and kitchen table economics of families here and around the world. Three-fifths of Americans now report that climate impacts and costs are undermining their quality of life, health, or family finances.
There is a long tradition of Republican presidents taking action on the environment. Teddy Roosevelt expanded our national parks and food safety. Richard Nixon oversaw the enactment of the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, as well as setting up the Environmental Protection Agency. Ronald Reagan oversaw the creation of the Montreal Protocol—he called it “a model of cooperation”—which 35 years later has put the ozone layer on the path to recovery by mid-century, while avoiding as much warming as carbon dioxide is causing. George W. Bush strengthened the Montreal Protocol, explicitly to protect the climate as well as the stratospheric ozone layer. In 2020, in the final days of his first administration, President Trump signed the law to implement limits on the HFCs as mandated by the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, which will avoid nearly a half a degree Celsius of warming.
President-elect Donald Trump has a similar opportunity. It would take a lot of courage for Trump to help America and the world avoid the kind of catastrophe he began his political career denying. But just as Nixon went to China, Donald Trump could decide to give the Arctic a fighting chance. Protecting it would strengthen national security and help keep China out of our backyard.
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