President Trump, welcome to the Arctic

U.S. government scientists have just announced that 2016 was the hottest year on record, with a major contribution from the unprecedented warming of the Arctic.  At the same briefing it was also reported that the warming of the Arctic was accompanied by record loss of sea ice and snow cover.

 

The drama of the unraveling Arctic brings immediate challenges to the Trump administration. In May, the State Department is organizing and hosting a ministerial meeting in Fairbanks, Alaska to conclude the two-year U.S. chairmanship of the Arctic Council. The Arctic Council is the eight-member group of nations bordering the Arctic, and plays a key role in responding to Arctic science and developing appropriate policy. As the chair of the Council, the Secretary of State will be challenged in Fairbanks with the grim reality of a failing Arctic. Moreover, he will have to do so across the table from many of our allies (as well as the Russians), indigenous member groups and observer countries from around the world, all of whom take the global climate issue very seriously.

 

{mosads}The Arctic environment is a pillar of the earth’s climate system. Sea ice and snow cover reflect solar energy away from the surface of the earth, acting as the planet’s “air conditioner.” By storing masses of ice in the Greenland ice sheet as well as Canadian and Alaskan glaciers, the Arctic helps to protect coastal cities from flooding, and ultimately inundation, from rising sea levels.

 

Additionally, frozen permafrost across the Arctic stores twice the carbon content of the atmosphere, preventing an enormous increase to planetary warming that will result from thawing.

 

Decades of satellite and ground-based observations have tracked the unraveling of the Arctic, and data from recent years times have at times left many observers incredulous as to the rapidly increasing rate of change. And 2016 was even more remarkable, with record temperatures, record loss of sea ice and snow cover and continued shrinkage of the Greenland ice sheet. Also, the Arctic Report Card of 2016 — a peer-reviewed study by the Arctic scientific community and released by NOAA in December 2016 — documented all these trends and included an unprecedented addendum to bring new information right up to the moment of release.

 

It is impossible to deal with the massive changes that have been observed in the Arctic and not acknowledge climate change. This was not the case a decade ago, when it wasn’t quite so clear how advanced the warming of the Arctic had become. But no longer, because we’re now witnessing impacts in the lower 48. In particular, Florida, South Carolina, Virginia and many other coastal states are experiencing rapidly rising sea levels, resulting in increased flooding, even during non-stormy days. A substantial portion of that sea level rise now is coming from a melting and warming Arctic.

 

The Obama administration made an appropriate decision to make climate change in the Arctic a major focus of its two-year chairmanship of the Arctic Council. The logic was simple; how could we ignore the driving force behind the enormous changes taking place in the Arctic, which are affecting all life in the Arctic as well as the global climate system?

 

So exactly what is the new administration going to say to the rest of the world when we host the Fairbanks ministerial and are confronted with a rapidly warming Arctic? There can be no more hiding from the facts. With rising tides soon to be lapping at the gates of Mar-a-Lago (the new winter White House), the new president will have to face the reality of global climate change.

 

So what should we do? First and foremost, the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, hammered out among almost 190 nations to begin ramping down global greenhouse gas emissions, is a critical step that must stay in place. Second, we should reinvigorate efforts to control short-lived climate pollutants to slow the pace of warming. Third, the Arctic Council should emerge from the May ministerial with a mandate to answer the question: “What is the end state of the Arctic that protects and sustains the planet’s climate system, and what will be required to achieve that condition?”

 

President Trump, American greatness rests on a dramatic response to the warming of the planet. The Arctic will be your administration’s early confrontation with reality.