“We’ve lost this melting glacier game and this sea level rise game,” Professor Peteri Taalas told Sky News.
from Hannah Thomas-Peter, climate change and energy correspondent @hannahtpsky
Thursday 08 June 2023 17:47 UK
The British Antarctic Institute has released its new maps, and they are a stark visual depiction of the retreat of the ice at our poles.
The warning of the Secretary-General of the United Nations World Meteorological Organization, Professor Petteri Taalas, is equally categorical.
In an interview with Sky News, he emphasized that melted ice will never return, noting that the planet has “lost this melting glacier game and sea level rise game.”
He said: “Thanks to the already high concentration of carbon dioxide, we have lost this game of melting glaciers and the game of sea level rise.
“This could continue for the next thousands of years because the natural removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is very slow.
“There’s no going back to the climate we had in the last century, so that’s gone … and we’re going to live with those consequences and higher temperatures.”
New charts for Arctic and Antarctic sea ice extent June 2023 (British Antarctic Survey)
Extract from a map of Antarctica showing sea ice extent for the Ron and Brunt ice shelves (British Antarctic Survey)
Professor Taalas’ unusually frank language reflects growing concern about the Arctic and Antarctica ice.
The Arctic the region in particular is warming up to three times faster than the rest of the world, and a recent study suggests it could be free of summer sea ice by 2030, a decade earlier than previous projections.
This matters because the poles essentially function as the planet’s refrigerators.
As they shrink, the heat-reflective white surface is replaced by darker water that absorbs heat, accelerating warming.
Warming leads to further melting, and as ice melts in the oceans, sea levels rise.
This worsens coastal erosion and exacerbates the effects of storm surges.
Along with these impacts, the loss of ice means the loss of valuable habitats for wildlife and the disruption of delicate ecosystems, ocean currents and weather patterns.
And the melting of permafrost, or soil that was previously permanently frozen, is one of the things that worries climate scientists the most.
Permafrost covers 25% of the Northern Hemisphere’s land surface and accounts for nearly half of all organic carbon stored in the planet’s soil.
For all these reasons, what happens at the poles will matter beyond them.