Reporting Global Warming  from the Poles (Part-1)

What is Climate Change & Global Warming?

It’s been calculated that if all the ice in Greenland melts, it can potentially add 25 feet or 8 meters to global sea levels (scientist expect a 2-3 feet or almost 1 meter rise by year 2100). However if all the ice in Antarctica were ever to melt it would mean a sea level rise of 175 feet or around 57 meters. That would be the end of the planet as we know it. It would be a ‘water world’ and Hollywood would lap up that plot (or has it already?)

Currently even if we consider conservative estimates (since we know all of the Arctic and Antarctic ice won’t melt soon) we will still have over 130 coastal cities, 50 million people and trillions of dollars of assets are at risk besides the change in our planet’s eco-system itself, on which we and all other living creatures depend.

So to begin with, let’s ask some basic questions – Is climate change or in particular global warming even real or is it just the latest pseudo-intellectual fad of the new generation? Is it no more than a debate between environment idealists on one side and politicians and business houses on the other? How does the everyday person know fact from fiction and truth from propaganda? And should we care at all?

To answer these questions, it’s now accepted among almost all prominent scientist that global warming is in fact real. It’s most profound potential impact areas are the 2 polar ice caps since they hold majority of the fresh water stored as ice. Post multiple actual measurements over the past 70 odd years, it’s been found that majority of the glaciers have either receded or have completely vanished and only a very small minority have retained their size or in the rarest of cases, expanded.

For the last 400,000 years till the start of the industrial age (around 200 years ago), the carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere have been in a cyclical range 180-280 parts per million (ppm). By the 1950’s it had risen to 300 ppm and by the turn of the millennium it was 380. Just 20 years later in 2020 it was 411 ppm and today 4 years later that number has further increased to 421 ppm. So you can see where there is headed. That’s a 50% increase over the historic upper range (280) of the last 400,000 years of Earth’s history, most of which was without the industrial modern man. This is since man (or Homo sapiens) came just 200,000 years ago and the man that can harm the environment (via burning of fossil fuel) was born just 200 years ago.  No one knows exactly how the planet will respond to such never seen before carbon levels, but one thing is certain – Carbon levels, global temperatures and global sea levels move in tandem.

How does Global Warming work?

With the increase in global temperatures, Earth can go into an irreversible automatic feedback loop of warming leading to further warming even if human’s change their ways later i.e. we can reach the point of no return. This is how it actually works:

1. We humans cause the burning of fossil fuels for running industries, coal plants, vehicles, airplanes,  etc. which release CO2 in the atmosphere. Besides, the domesticated animals which are kept in factory farms for meat consumption release large amounts of methane. This is over and above our culling down of ancient forests for producing cash crops, buying farm lands, making highways, industries and residences (such as the ongoing mass cutting and incineration of trees in the Amazon or in the forests of Borneo, Indonesia for palm oil plantations). These forests, or the lungs of the planet as they are called, have the capacity to absorb massive amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere. Hence we add to carbon sources (fossil fuels) and remove our carbon sinks (forests).

2. Both carbon and methane are greenhouse gases i.e. they have the ability to trap heat better than other gases and if their proportion in the atmosphere increases beyond a limit, it will start to heat the planet. Our scientists can measure the historic positive correlation of greenhouse gases and temperatures for thousands of years in the past by analyzing ice cores (they drill deep into the ice and every ice ring, like those in trees, can tell about the atmospheric composition, temperature etc. of that particular time in the past, which helps us in forming climate trends).

3. This heating through more greenhouse gases in the air causes the global ice (both over the poles & on the mountains) to melt faster than normal during summers and recover to less than their normal winter volumes. Hence mountain glaciers recede over time and polar ones both recede and break off into the oceans & seas.

4. Snow and ice reflects back sun’s heat much more than water, which absorbs it better. Hence with less snow and ice and more water (relative to each season of a particular place), more sunlight is absorbed and the planet starts heating exponentially with ice loss outpacing new ice formation.  Besides, if there is more water on the ice itself, then it seeps into the bedrock causing a further breaking and lubrication of ice.

5. With melting causing more melting, these multiple and exponential feedback loops or the snowball effect (pun intended) get locked in. This, at a certain point will become irreversible, even if humans stop or reduce fossil fuel emissions and replace them with renewable clean energy options such as solar, wind, hydro, nuclear etc.

Millions of people especially marginalized populations in South Asia or on the East of the Andes Mountains in South America depend on glacier water for drinking, irrigation and hydropower. A loss or unpredictability of it could lead to mass scale migrations and chaos.  Besides the low lying nations of the Pacific in the islands scattered all over Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia can have vast areas of their land lost to the rising seas. Populous cities such as Mumbai, Dhaka and Ho-Chin Min have a huge people risk and places such as Miami, New Jersey, Shanghai amongst others have asset risk. Climate Change will also bring with it unpredictability of weather such as out of season hurricanes, flash floods, droughts etc. for which humans and animals alike will be unprepared.

So I personally believe that climate change and environment should matter to us and needs to be a top media topic and political agenda, not something that is remembered every once in 4 years at the UN Climate Change Summit with the last one being held in Dubai, 2023.  And since there is no education like first-hand learning, I strongly recommend a visit to Greenland or Antarctica for all the enthusiastic readers and climate science geeks like me.  After all ‘seeing is believing’ and what I saw with my own eyes and heard with my own ears was the thundering crack of a mega iceberg as it broke from the glacial shelf and fell into the sea, violently shaking our boat in the Arctic. And what I also saw was the world’s largest iceberg (A23a) in Antarctica, standing before our ship like an impenetrable wall of ice, covering the entire horizon (it being 3 times the size of New York and London). The A23a iceberg had got unstuck from the ocean bed in November 2023 and was the biggest climate headline for a while but strangely most of the articles released were second-hand accounts from those writers who had got their photographs from researchers who actually saw this iceberg. So just know that this editorial of mine is not a second-hand account. I was there in both the Arctic and Antarctic and have more in store for you of what I witnessed there.