The Independent has an article about global warming in today’s edition that raises some very disturbing questions. Exclusive: No ice at the North Pole:

It seems unthinkable, but for the first time in human history, ice is on course to disappear entirely from the North Pole this year.

The disappearance of the Arctic sea ice, making it possible to reach the Pole sailing in a boat through open water, would be one of the most dramatic – and worrying – examples of the impact of global warming on the planet. Scientists say the ice at 90 degrees north may well have melted away by the summer.

“From the viewpoint of science, the North Pole is just another point on the globe, but symbolically it is hugely important. There is supposed to be ice at the North Pole, not open water,” said Mark Serreze of the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado.

…

Seasoned polar scientists believe the chances of a totally ice free North Pole this summer are greater than 50:50 because the normally thick ice formed over many years at the Pole has been blown away and replaced by huge swathes of thinner ice formed over a single year.

This one-year ice is highly vulnerable to melting during the summer months and satellite data coming in over recent weeks shows that the rate of melting is faster than last year, when there was an all-time record loss of summer sea ice at the Arctic.

…

The polar regions are experiencing the most dramatic increase in average temperatures due to global warming and scientists fear that as more sea ice is lost, the darker, open ocean will absorb more heat and raise local temperatures even further. Professor Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University, who was one of the first civilian scientists to sail underneath the Arctic sea ice in a Royal Navy submarine, said that the conditions are ripe for an unprecedented melting of the ice at the North Pole.

…

There are other indications that the Arctic sea ice is showing signs of breaking up. Scientists at the Nasa Goddard Space Flight Centre said that the North Water ‘polynya’ – an expanse of open water surrounded on all sides by ice – that normally forms near Alaska and Banks Island off the Canadian coast, is much larger than normal. Polynyas absorb heat from the sun and eat away at the edge of the sea ice.

Assuming a blue Arctic happens this summer or within the next few years (which seems inevitable), those disturbing questions are:

First, what does this imply about the current and future state of global warming? As the article above mentions, one of the critical feedbacks is the “albedo flip”, in which highly reflective ice and snow is replaced by much darker open water (or on land, by soil and vegetation). If we’re entering a time when the Arctic Ocean is converted into a vast solar collector for even a small portion of every year, all the additional heat absorbed would add significantly to the warming that’s already happening.

Second, what does this say about our ability to assess the world’s climate in a time of rapid change? It wasn’t long ago that scientists thought the Arctic wouldn’t see an ice-free summer within decades, but the estimates of when that will happen have been repeatedly reeled in as more data about actual melting and the condition of the ice, etc., have accumulated. This is not to criticize climate scientists in any way. Even without the sharp kick that a higher atmospheric CO2 concentration has delivered to the global climate system, they had a more than sufficiently challenging job. The simple fact is that for decades humanity hasn’t spent enough resources on understanding and modeling the world’s climate–at least not enough to assess the current situation and make useful predictions. Perhaps the biggest single error we’ve made in this area is the meta-mistake of misjudging the importance of climate science itself.

Third, how will we respond to a blue Arctic? I would like to give in to my optimistic streak and think that this would be The Event, the mental tipping point that once and for all made the urgency of the situation clear to a large majority of people in the developed and rapidly developing nations, including policymakers.[1] How could such a shocking and immense sign fail to get and hold our attention, and then spur us to take meaningful action? The answer is all around us. We’re surrounded by far too many deniers, fueled by ideological and/or financial incentives, and people who are so overwhelmed with the details of their lives or are simply so apathetic that they just don’t care about anything that isn’t impacting them this very minute.

My prediction is that when we see a blue Arctic, we’ll have a flurry of reports in all the major broadcast and print media. People will blog about it until their fingers bleed and their vision grows blurry. For every person claiming that we’ve reached a critical point in the effects we’re having on the planet, we’ll have at least one more telling us how wonderful this is because, for example, we can now ship goods across the top of the world cheaper, at least during the summer. In particular, I expect some media outlets to reach new heights of absurdity in their practice of the faux balance technique–you can’t have Al Gore or someone from Greenpeace or the NRDC or whomever from the left/enviro camp without “balancing” that person with James Inhofe or someone from one of the right-wing think tanks. Expect to see and hear heavy use of “But some experts think otherwise…”.

In short, I’m not at all optimistic about the answer to this third question, and I think we’ll simply turn a blue Arctic into yet another debating exercise and de facto “victory” for the delayers and deniers. Given the long lead time involved in making major changes to reduce CO2 emissions and the even longer time needed to bring down atmospheric CO2 levels, that may be a delay we can’t afford.

[1] Just to be clear, for a long time I wondered what the mental tipping point would be, and assumed it would be a blue Arctic or something much sooner, as I assumed the projections I’d read were right and a blue Arctic was decades away. I now think it will have to be something far worse, like rapidly rising sea levels starting to swamp major coastal cities, or a hurricane hitting New York City and some widely respected climate scientist or organization saying that such events will be more common as the atmosphere continues to warm.