Diplomatic shifts in the warming Arctic

 

The summer of 2010 saw the third-lowest amount and extent of Arctic sea ice ever recorded. For the third year in a row both the Northwest Passage between Greenland and Alaska and the Northern Sea Route between Norway and Kamchatka were ice-free – something that had not happened before 2008 in recorded history. As the physical state of the High North is changing, so too is the diplomatic environment.

 

The changing North

On 19 September 2010, sea ice covered 4.6 million km² of the 14.1m km² Arctic Ocean. This was 2.1m km², or 31%, below the average summer minimum during the last two decades of the twentieth century. It was the third-lowest extent, after 2007 and 2008, since consistent records began. Eight of the ten lowest minimums have been experienced in the last ten years. Change is also visible in winter ice cover: the maximum extent in March 2010 was 4% below the 1979–2000 average of 15.8m km², an area greater than the Arctic Ocean itself, since many areas outside the Arctic also freeze. The extent of ice cover is not the only story. The total volume of ice is also showing a downward trend, in both summer and winter. This is because the proportion of multi-year to newly formed ice is also declining. Since older ice tends to be thicker, this changing proportion means the total amount of summer ice in the Arctic is declining faster than the area it covers.

 

Some observers have taken comfort in the fact that ice extent increased year-on-year in both 2008 and 2009, with 2010 levels still above those of 2007 and 2008. But this was in part because the record low of 4.1m km² in 2007 was an anomaly, falling well below the long-term trend. Other observers worried that the 2007 melt was a harbinger of disaster – that a tipping point had been passed and that accelerating warming might lead to a seasonally ice-free Arctic in as little as ten years. But the figures for 2010 closely reflect the long-term trend. Both the optimists and the pessimists appear to have been wrong.

 

However, this long-term trend is worse – in the context of global climate change – than projected even five years ago. Only the most extreme of the projections included in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) 2007 Assessment Report showed an ice-free Arctic by the end of the twenty-first century. Yet the trend with regard to actual observations falls outside the range projected by the IPCC models (see chart). A simple linear extrapolation of the current trend would imply some seasonally ice-free years in the Arctic by the 2040s, while an accelerating trend that better fits the data suggests a date of 2030. Recent model-based projections that take into account the latest data give dates ranging from around 2040 to 2080, with most expert opinion inclining towards the earlier end of the range.

 

The full article can be found at IISS

 

Image source: IISS