This story was produced in collaboration with the Pulitzer Center Ocean Reporting Network.
BAKU, Azerbaijan—During 2024 hottest year On record, snowpack in the Himalayas has fallen to record lows, the Arctic has become a net carbon emitter, and the stable Antarctic sea ice appears to be permanently melting.
The deterioration of the planet’s snow and ice regions, from the highest peaks to the poles, has already created deadly glacial floods and raised sea levels by more than 11 centimeters. This is costing the world billions of dollars in damage, according to the State of the Cryosphere report presented this week at the 29th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP29) in Azerbaijan. . If emissions continue to rise, society could face a catastrophic rise of one meter, along with the collapse of a system of ocean currents critical to the planet, by 2100.
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At an event in Azerbaijan following the report’s release, the leaders of Chile, Germany, Norway and Pakistan pressed the summit for countries to commit to reducing emissions. Officials a the team of the 23 governments that are promoting action against ice loss.
“This is not a regional problem. This is a global problem,” said Ahmad Atteeq Anwer, Parliamentary Secretary to Pakistan’s Ministry of Climate Change. “Climate change that occurs in one end of the world will not stay there. It will affect each of us.”
But fossil fuel emissions continue to rise, according to the latest annual Global Carbon Budget report published by international researchers on November 13. And incoming US President Donald Trump has vowed to pull out of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change—and ditch it. more oil This year the global average temperature has reached 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels for the first timeTemporarily violating the long-term limit agreed by the countries in the Paris Agreement.
Above 1.5 degrees C, humanity risks crossing tipping points that could cause massive and irreversible melting. The world is on track to warm by three degrees C by 2100, and current commitments by countries to reduce emissions would shave less than one degree. Nations must publish new targets by February, and are under pressure at COP29 to secure hundreds of billions of dollars in funding each year for efforts to achieve those targets.
“We still have time to correct the course,” Maisa Rojas, Chile’s environment minister and a prominent climate scientist, told the conference. “The only way to mitigate and avoid these global impacts of ice loss is to rapidly reduce carbon emissions.”
At current discharge levels, almost all small, low-latitude mountain glaciers would disappear by 2100. Asia has experienced record ice loss this year. On August 16, the walls of ice surrounding two melt lakes on Nepal’s Thyanbo Glacier erupted, sending a cascade of water, ice, rock and sediment into Thame, the hometown of mountaineer Tenzing Norgay, the first person to reach the summit of Everest, and noted mountaineer Edmund Hillary. No one was injured; the town’s school children were sent home early that day, and many residents were elsewhere because the climbing season was over. But a school, a health clinic, five hotels and seven homes were destroyedand half the town became uninhabitable.
These glacial lake floods, as they are known, now threaten 10 million people, mainly in Asia and North and South America. On August 6, such a flood raised a river in Juneau, Alaska, nearly five meters in a few hours. the swamp promoting almost 300 homes and the city aset aside $2 million for flood barriers. Glacial floods partially destroyed a $1.69 billion hydraulic dam and killed 42 people in India last year; They also contributed to the disastrous monsoon floods in Pakistan in 2022.
The melting of glaciers and mountain snowpack is also weakening the water supply. COP29 host city Baku gets a quarter of its drinking water from the now retreating glacier. In the Hindu Kush Himalayan mountains stretching from Pakistan to Myanmar, glaciers and snow-fed rivers provide drinking water, irrigation and hydropower for two billion people and generate $4 trillion in economic activity. the region suffer last winter saw the lowest snowpack on record, leaving the normally white hillsides brown.
And the deterioration of ice and snow creates feedback loops that will further warm the world. Permafrost, the frozen ground containing twice the amount of carbon found in the atmosphere today, is thawing and releasing these stores. Warming temperatures mean that plant growth is increasing and more carbon dioxide is coming down from the atmosphere, but studies have revealed that the permafrost zone is releasing more carbon than it absorbs, warming the planet even more.
Melting sea ice also accelerates other effects. White ice reflects sunlight into space, but blue water absorbs it. In the Arctic, sea ice has shrunk by 40 percent over the past 40 years. In Antarctica, the extent of sea ice has fallen below two million square kilometers for the third summer in a row, an unprecedented development that suggests a “regime shift” from seasonal variation to long-term lag.
“Last year, in my home country, we saw how the sea ice was not settling,” Sara Olsvig, president of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, from Greenland, said in the speech. “Families in the north lost access to hunting (seals and minke whales)…the Greenland government had to reach into its disaster funds.”
In many areas, we are approaching a point of no return. Recent modeling has shown that it is too late to prevent at least some melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet. And the Greenland ice sheet is now losing 30 million metric tons of ice — the size of 250 cruise ships — every hour on average, according to the report.
This, in turn, threatens the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a phenomenon that flows warm surface water from the tropics towards the North Pole. There the water becomes saltier and colder, causing it to sink and then flow back south along the ocean floor.
But the increasing flood of freshwater from melting Greenland glaciers and Arctic sea ice has slowed the cascade of dense, salty water that drives that current. The AMOC is predicted to weaken by two thirds this century, and 44 climate scientists he warned because this year we completely underestimate the risk of a complete collapse. If this were to happen, northern Europe could cool by more than three degrees C per decade.
“It means a huge reduction in the amount of heat coming out of the low-latitude North Atlantic and keeps Britain warm,” said Robbie Mallett, a sea ice scientist at the Arctic University of Norway. “It keeps the fisheries of north-west Europe going, which is really important.”
The financial price of all this melting is difficult to quantify, but experts presenting the report at COP29 say it is in the billions of dollars and growing. Alaska is already spending hundreds of millions of dollars repairing infrastructure damage from thawing permafrost, and across the Arctic, those costs could be high. get up to 276,000 billion dollars by the middle of this century. In Antarctica, fishing and tourism earns 1.2 billion dollars annually. And Antarctica’s benefits to the planet by storing carbon, reflecting solar heat and keeping sea levels low are worth $180 billion a year, according to recent studies. appreciated.
At least $8.1 billion of the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy on the U.S. East Coast in 2012 was attributed to sea level rise, according to researchers. find.
If seas rise by one meter by 2100, parts of Amsterdam, Bangkok, Karachi, Miami, Vancouver and other cities would be underwater, displacing millions of people. But if we limit warming to 1.5 degrees C, we could cut that rise in half. Slowing down the melt a bit would buy time for adaptation, reducing damage and death.
“The tenth of a degree really matters,” said Heïdi Sevestre, a glaciologist with the Arctic Council’s Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program. “How many more warnings, how many more lives before we find the political courage to give ourselves a fighting chance?”
