This article was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center. ocean reporting network.
BAKU, Azerbaijan—In 2024, the hottest year on record, snowpack in the Himalayas plummeted to unprecedented lows, the Arctic became a net carbon emitter, and once stable Antarctic sea ice melted permanently. It looks like it is.
Degradation of the Earth’s snow and ice regions, from the high peaks to the poles, is already causing deadly glacial floods and raising sea levels by more than 11 centimeters. According to the Cryosphere Report, released this week at the 29th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP29), held in Azerbaijan this week, the world It is said to have caused billions of dollars in damage. . If emissions continue to rise, society could face a dire 1 meter rise in sea levels by 2100, coupled with the collapse of our planet’s vital ocean current systems.
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At an event in Azerbaijan after the report was released, officials from Chile, Germany, Norway and Pakistan pressed summit participants to commit to further emissions cuts. The officials are part of a group of 23 governments lobbying for action on ice loss.
“This is not a local issue. This is a global issue,” said Ahmad Atiq Anwar, Parliamentary Secretary at Pakistan’s Ministry of Climate Change. “Climate change happening in one corner of the earth won’t stop there. It will affect us all.”
But fossil fuel emissions continue to rise, according to the latest annual global carbon budget report published by international researchers on November 13. And US President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to withdraw from the 2015 international Paris Agreement to tackle climate change and undertake climate change training. More oil. This year, for the first time, global average temperatures rose 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, temporarily breaking the long-term limits that countries agreed to strive for in the Paris climate accord.
Above 1.5 degrees Celsius, humanity risks crossing a tipping point that could cause dramatic and irreversible melting. The world is scheduled to warm by 3 degrees Celsius by 2100, and the current efforts by countries to reduce emissions will not be able to reduce this by even one degree. Countries are due to publish new targets by February, and are under pressure at COP29 to guarantee hundreds of billions of dollars a year in funding for efforts to reach them.
“There is still time to correct course,” Maisa Rojas, Chile’s environment minister and a prominent climate scientist, told the conference. “The only way to mitigate and prevent the global impacts of ice loss is to rapidly reduce carbon emissions.”
At current emissions levels, nearly all small, low-latitude mountain glaciers will disappear by 2100. Asia is experiencing record ice loss this year. On August 16, an ice wall around two melting lakes on Nepal’s Tiyambo Glacier collapsed, releasing a waterfall of water, ice, rock and sediment in the hometown of Tenzing Norgay, the first mountaineer to reach the summit of Mount Everest. I ran through the village of Term. Famous mountaineer Edmund Hillary. No one was hurt. The village’s schoolchildren had been sent home early that day, and many residents were elsewhere as the climbing season had ended. However, a school, clinic, five hotels and seven houses were destroyed, leaving half the village uninhabitable.
These glacial lake outburst floods, as they are known, currently threaten 10 million people, primarily in Asia and the Americas. Such flooding occurred in Juneau, Alaska, on August 6, when the river rose nearly 5 meters in a few hours, inundating about 300 homes, and the city allocated $2 million for flood barriers. Last year, glacial flooding partially destroyed a $1.69 billion hydroelectric dam in India, killing 42 people. They also contributed to Pakistan’s devastating monsoon floods in 2022.
Melting glaciers and mountain snowpack are also eroding water supplies. COP29 host city Baku gets a quarter of its drinking water from glaciers that are currently receding. In the Hindu Kush Himalayas, which spans from Pakistan to Myanmar, glacier- and snow-fed rivers provide water for drinking, irrigation and hydroelectricity to 2 billion people and generate $4 trillion in economic activity. Last winter, the region experienced its lowest snowfall on record, turning normally white mountainsides brown.
And the deterioration of ice and snow will cause a feedback loop that will further heat the world. As permafrost, the frozen soil that holds twice the amount of carbon currently present in the atmosphere, is thawing, these stores are being released. Warmer temperatures mean increased plant growth, which pulls more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, but permafrost is currently emitting more carbon than it absorbs. Research has shown that we are heating the planet even more.
Melting sea ice is also accelerating other impacts. White ice reflects sunlight back into space, while blue water absorbs it. In the Arctic, sea ice has decreased by 40 percent over the past 40 years. In Antarctica, the extent of sea ice has fallen below 2 million square kilometers for three consecutive summers, an unprecedented situation that signals a “regime shift” from seasonal fluctuations to long-term retreat.
“Last year, I saw first-hand the failure of sea ice to settle in my homeland,” Sarah Olsvig, president of the Inuit Circumpolar Council from Greenland, told the conference. “Families in the north lost the opportunity to go hunting (for seals and small whales). The Greenlandic government had to reach into its own disaster relief funds.”
In some areas, we are approaching the point of no return. Recent modeling shows that it is too late to avoid melting at least some of the West Antarctic ice sheet. And the report says Greenland’s ice sheet is currently losing 30 million tonnes of ice, the equivalent of 250 cruise ships, every hour on average.
This, in turn, threatens the important Atlantic Meridional Circulation (AMOC), a phenomenon in which warm surface water from the tropics flows towards the North Pole. There, the water becomes saltier and colder, sinks, and returns south along the ocean floor.
But an increasing influx of freshwater from melting Greenland glaciers and Arctic sea ice is slowing the cascade of densely salted water that drives this flow. The AMOC is predicted to weaken by up to two-thirds this century, and 44 climate scientists warned this year that they are “significantly underestimating” the risk of its complete collapse. If that happens, Northern Europe could cool by more than 3 degrees Celsius in 10 years.
“This means that the amount of heat coming out of the lower latitude North Atlantic to keep the UK warm will be significantly reduced,” said Robbie Mallett, a sea ice scientist at the Norwegian Arctic University. “This keeps the fisheries in northwest Europe going, which is really, really important.”
The economic cost of all this meltdown is difficult to quantify, but experts presenting a report at COP29 say it’s in the billions of dollars and rising. . Alaska has already spent hundreds of millions of dollars repairing permafrost-induced damage to infrastructure, and across the Arctic, costs could rise to $276 billion by mid-century. In Antarctica, fishing and tourism generate $1.2 billion annually. And a recent study estimates that Antarctica is worth $180 billion a year in benefits to the planet by storing carbon, reflecting the sun’s heat, and keeping sea levels low.
Rising sea levels accounted for at least $8.1 billion of the $60 billion in damage caused by Hurricane Sandy on the U.S. East Coast in 2012, researchers have found.
If sea levels rise by one meter by 2100, parts of cities such as Amsterdam, Bangkok, Karachi, Miami and Vancouver will be submerged and millions of people will be displaced. But if we limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, we can cut that increase in half. Slowing the rate of melting even a little could buy time for adaptation and reduce damage and deaths.
“Every tenth of a degree really matters,” said Heidi Sebest, a glaciologist with the Arctic Council’s Arctic Monitoring and Evaluation Program. “How many more warnings and how many more lives can we get before we find the political courage to give us a chance to fight?”
