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Our Ocean and Cryosphere Under Threat
›Evidence of the effects of climate change continues to mount. We see it in extreme weather events, including droughts and intense hurricanes and cyclones, in biodiversity loss, and in erratic weather patterns around the globe. While many of these impacts rightfully make it into front-page news, climate change is also profoundly affecting parts of our planet that we do not understand well—the ocean and the cryosphere.
In September 2019, the International Panel on Climate Change issued a Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (SROCC). The report provides a new and sobering analysis of current conditions, as well as projections into the future. Produced by more than 100 authors from 36 countries, the SROCC painstakingly reviews the latest scientific literature, referencing some 7,000 scientific publications in all.
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Permafrost Melt, Rising Seas, and Coastal Erosion Threaten Arctic Communities
›November 5, 2019 // By Shawn Archbold“In 1959, he knew it was coming,” said Delbert Pungowiyi, a Yupik native of Savoonga, Alaska, on St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea in an interview at the Wilson Center’s 8th Syymposium on the Impacts of an Ice-Diminishing Arctic on Naval and Maritime Operations. “He prepared me my whole life for this. It is a crisis.”
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China’s Ready to Cash In on a Melting Arctic
›Put simply, “the damn thing melted,” Navy Secretary Richard Spencer explained in recent testimony, referring to Arctic ice melt as the trigger for the new U.S. Navy Arctic Strategy that is to be released this summer. What the Navy planned as a 16-year road map is in need of updates after only four years, in part due to receding polar ice caps, which are “opening new trade routes, exposing new resources, and redrawing continental maps,” but also in part due to the rise of China as an “Arctic stakeholder” and increasing important player in the region.
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Climate Change Will Further Complicate the Politics of U.S. Military Bases
›The effects of climate change on an abandoned U.S. nuclear project in Greenland could create not just environmental problems, but also disrupt military politics and spur diplomatic conflicts. My new article in Global Environmental Politics finds that climate change will eventually expose toxic waste, long immobilized by ice, at Camp Century, which the U.S. military left in the 1960s. This situation—which has already spurred the dismissal of Greenland’s foreign minister—could be the canary in the coalmine signaling that climate change will further complicate the already contentious politics of military bases.
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Melting Ice Threatens to Expose Former U.S. Nuclear Base in Greenland
›Climate change is poised to remobilize hazardous wastes that the U.S. Army abandoned and believed would be buried forever beneath the snow and ice in Greenland.
Showing posts from category Greenland.