When it comes to the cryosphere, let’s get real

Alarms from the Arctic and other frozen regions around the world (known as the cryosphere) keep sounding—and decision-makers around the world keep ignoring them.

Arctic sea ice reached its fifth-lowest maximum level in early March. A few weeks earlier, the Antarctic sea ice minimum was even worse, closely following 2023’s jaw-dropping record. Elsewhere, snowpack is at record lows in the Hindu Kush Himalaya, and researchers in Patagonia are tallying the damage from repeated heat waves on that region’s glaciers.

New scientific evidence confirms that the world’s polar regions began losing ice as long ago as the 1940s, when CO₂ levels in the atmosphere began climbing more steeply. Driven by fossil fuel emissions, levels have risen ever since, breaching 426 ppm in March 2024 for the first time in 15 million years. Ten years ago, CO₂ was still in the 300s. Pre-industrial levels were below 300 ppm.

By any measure, humans are far off-course from the steps needed to halt fossil fuel use. Indeed, course correction was supposed to be the focus of COP28, last year’s UN Climate Change Conference in Dubai. Instead, the event was a kind of “realpolitik” for continued fossil fuel use that ignored the simple physical reality of the cryosphere: the melting point of ice.

Most governments spun the Dubai results as a victory, but for the Arctic, it was a clear failure. Coal will be phased “down,” not “out.” We will “transition away from” fossil fuels, not cease using them altogether. “Transitional fuels” were emphasized—a thinly veiled reference to fossil gas, which at best still emits 70 percent as much CO2 as coal (and at worst, emits more)—alongside futuristic carbon capture technologies. Both approaches legitimize continued oil and gas expansion.

Realism in climate negotiations has come to mean bending to the stubborn realities of a world economically dependent on fossil fuels. But as an Arctic and science-based community, it is past time for us to bring a new kind of realism into climate policy—to confront not just the reality of the melting point of ice, but its irreversible global impacts. Unless we truly correct our course by halting CO2 emissions, the world’s ice stores will keep melting. These stores are vital to freshwater supplies, to keeping stored carbon within permafrost, and to keeping ice frozen at the poles. Melted, it will pour into the oceans and wipe out many of the world’s low-lying coastal areas with sea-level rises of 10-plus metres, potentially by 2300 should today’s emissions continue. These same emissions will also lead to non-survivable acidification in both polar oceans even earlier.

This new realism means facing the cryosphere-consuming consequences of fossil use head on. Fortunately, there are some signs that the message is starting to get through. For example, French President Emmanuel Macron raised these issues at his One Planet Polar Summit just before COP28, joining the new Ambition on Melting Ice High-level Group alongside Italy and the Netherlands. UN Secretary-General António Guterres visited both Antarctica and the Himalayas just before Dubai. And more than 1,000 cryosphere scientists called on COP28 to drop the illusion that 2°C is a safe temperature increase.

But we need more—and we need it now. Not just for the good of the cryosphere, but for the world.