With all we know about climate change and what’s happening in the Arctic, you’d think world leaders would be marshaling resources to at least slow it down. Instead, industry and governments are eyeing new opportunities to mine Arctic fossil fuels. Factoring in threats to the numerous species of Arctic creatures—including fish, seabirds, marine mammals such as whales and seals, and polar bears—makes such an approach even more incomprehensible.
Royal Dutch Shell spent more than US$4.5 billion on operations and lease purchases in preparation for Arctic drilling.10 But its record shows how risky this is. First, a spill containment dome failed a routine safety test and was crushed by underwater pressure. Later, a drilling rig, which was being towed to Seattle so that Shell could avoid paying some Alaskan taxes, broke free during a storm and ran aground on an island in the Gulf of Alaska. The disastrous BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 showed how dangerous ocean drilling can be, even in relatively calm waters, and how bogus the claims of the industry are that it can contain or even clean up a spill.
Problems with exploration in the Arctic aren’t new. In October 1970, a blowout at a natural gas well on King Christian Island in the Arctic Ocean created a massive flame as up to 200 million cubic feet of gas a day spewed for more than three months. It was the second blowout in the Arctic since drilling began the year before. Around the same time, the drilling consortium Panarctic Oils Ltd. was slapped with a huge fine for dumping junk steel, waste oil, and other garbage into the Arctic Ocean. The drilling companies found a novel solution to the latter problem: they convinced the Canadian government of the day to issue ocean-dumping permits, making the practice legal and common until 1993, when Inuit challenged one of the permits.
Of course, the worst danger is that increased exploitation of fossil fuel resources in the Arctic will exacerbate global warming. Responding to climate change and vanishing Arctic ice by gearing up to drill for the stuff at the root of the problem is insane. Unfortunately, many fossil fuel companies and governments are engaged in a mad rush to get as much oil and gas out of the ground—no matter how difficult—while there’s still a market. The ever-increasing devastation of climate change means we will eventually have to leave much of the fossil fuels where they are—or at the very least, substantially slow the pace of extraction and use the resource more wisely—if we want to survive and be healthy as a species.
As Arctic ice melts, countries like Australia burn, and droughts, floods, and extreme weather increase throughout the world, it’s past time to get serious about events in the Arctic and what they mean for global warming.
Antarctica Tells Another Story
DOWN AT THE other pole, the effects of climate change are somewhat more complicated and less well understood. Warming is occurring at a slower pace than in the north, and some ice sheets appear to be shrinking while others may be growing. Geographical conditions explain some of the differences between global warming’s effects on the two poles. The Arctic is an ocean surrounded by land, but Antarctica is a land mass surrounded by ocean. Because of that, sea ice is not as thick in Antarctica, and it moves more freely. Most of the sea ice that forms during Antarctica’s winter melts in summer, whereas the Arctic retains more winter ice. Wind patterns and water currents also act differently between the two poles.11
A study in the Journal of Glaciology, led by Jay Zwally, chief cryospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, found that glacier mass in Antarctica’s western region is declining while increased snowfall in the eastern interior has led to a “net gain of about 100 billion tons of ice per year,” but other researchers have questioned those findings, which don’t dispute global warming.12
“I don’t think Zwally’s estimates really matter so much in the grand scheme because adding a little snow to Antarctica in no way offsets the complete disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet in the near future,” University of Alaska Fairbanks glaciology professor Erin Pettit said.13
As for the slower pace of warming in Antarctica, researchers from the University of Washington and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say it’s probably because gale-force westerly winds push surface water north, which pulls “deep, centuries-old water to the surface.”14
And parts of Antarctica are warming rapidly. The U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center explains that although most of Antarctica has yet to see dramatic warming, “the Antarctic Peninsula, which juts out into warmer waters north of Antarctica, has warmed 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1950.”15 However, parts of Antarctica are so cold that even if they heat by the same amount as the peninsula, it won’t be enough to melt ice.
In any case, climate change is affecting Antarctica, and that has profound implications. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that atmospheric carbon dioxide reached four hundred parts per million in Antarctica on May 23, 2016—the first time it’s passed that threshold in the remote area in 4 million years!
“The far southern hemisphere was the last place on earth where CO2 had not yet reached this mark,” said Pieter Tans, lead scientist of NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network. “Global CO2 levels will not return to values below 400 ppm in our lifetimes, and almost certainly for much longer.”16
Global warming’s impacts on Antarctica are already negatively affecting some penguin populations and could have an impact on sea levels, as ice shelves collapse. Scientists are working to learn more about what is occurring in Antarctica and what the consequences might be, but the main lesson so far is that climate change knows no boundaries and impacts in Antarctica will be felt around the world.
Oceans Take the Brunt of Global Warming
IT’S OFTEN SAID that we know as much about Mars and the moon as we do about oceans. Considering that oceans cover more than 70 percent of the earth, this should be cause for concern. At the very least, we should be doing more to protect oceans from the negative effects of human activities, including climate change, even if we don’t fully understand all that is happening under the seas.
We do know, however, that greenhouse gas emissions have a tremendous impact on oceans. As thermal sciences professor John Abraham wrote, “As humans add more heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere, it causes the Earth to gain energy. Almost all of that energy ends up in the oceans. So, if you want to know how fast the Earth is warming, you have to measure how fast the oceans are heating up.”17
Oceans and the life they support face numerous threats: pollution, overfishing, massive swirling islands of plastic waste, dead zones caused by nitrogen runoff from agricultural activities and sewage, acidification from excess CO2, oxygen depletion, and more. No oceans have escaped the consequences of human activity. French scientists who completed a two-and-a-half-year journey covering more than seven thousand miles through the Atlantic, Pacific, Antarctic, and Indian Oceans in 2012 found plastic debris in a remote ocean area that was thought to be pristine.
Researchers on the boat Tara, who were studying the effects of climate change on marine ecosystems and biodiversity, found plastic fragments in the Southern Ocean and Antarctica at levels comparable to the global average. “The fact that we found these plastics is a sign that the reach of human beings is truly planetary in scale,” said Chris Bowler, scientific coordinator of Tara Oceans, in the Guardian in 2012.18 It also reminds us that we live on a planet where everything is connected.
A 2011 study by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) found the combined effects of overfishing, fertilizer runoff, pollution, and ocean acidification from carbon dioxide emissions are putting much marine life at immediate risk of extinction.19 The twenty-seven scientists from eighteen organizations in six countries who participated in the review of scientific research from around the world concluded that the looming