The \u201cRoad to Paris\u201d Goes through Cryosphere<\/p>\n
With the Bonn UNFCCC climate negotiations taking place next month, the phrase \u201croad to Paris\u201d is the theme of countless policy forums and media coverage.\u00a0 For ICCI, that \u201croad\u201d focuses on cryosphere \u2013 but increasingly, science is telling us that any path towards a new climate agreement in Paris this December inevitably runs through the world\u2019s ice and snow-covered regions:\u00a0 the Poles, Himalayas and high alpine areas, Arctic and South American tundra.<\/p>\n
A subtle but important shift has occurred in the research world since the IPCC\u2019s AR5, which was silent on a number of cryosphere-climate interactions because we simply did not understand them sufficiently. From a negotiating point of view, the most important of these involve the risk of irreversible processes and changes to the climate system arising from cryosphere.<\/p>\n
These include permafrost melting, that an April 9 Nature<\/em> article calculated will probably add the equivalent of another larger emitter \u2013 China or the U.S. — to the emissions mix, making the 2 degree goal all that much harder to reach.\u00a0 It also encompasses the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), which researchers believe may already have reached, or be approaching, a point of no return, leading to 4-6 meters\u2019 ultimate sea-level rise. Even today, with about a 1.2 degree temperature rise over pre-industrial, we have baked in a full meter (3 feet) of ultimate sea-level rise just from warmer water (thermal expansion) and loss of land glaciers.<\/p>\n Cryosphere climate change is not like addressing air pollution. In the latter, once the air becomes cleaner, many of the negative impacts reverse, certainly within a generation. The cryosphere, we are increasingly learning, is different: we are living in a world made relatively stable by the moderating influence of ice sheets and glaciers left over from the last Ice Age.\u00a0 To restore these glaciers and ice sheets and the world we have known for the past 11,000 years or so will require temperatures well below<\/em><\/strong> pre-industrial \u2013 as one research paper drily put it, a new Ice Age.<\/p>\n That is the physical reality that negotiators will determine in Bonn and Paris over the next six months. Political leaders are playing with fire \u2013 or rather, the stabilizing impact of ice \u2013 to pretend otherwise. Long called a “canary in the coal mine” indicator<\/strong> of climate change, these regions are shifting from mere signals, to drivers<\/strong> of change: and in a far briefer time frame than political leaders yet appreciate.<\/p>\n By all accounts, the \u201croad to Paris\u201d may turn into a crossroads: and both roads lead through cryosphere.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The \u201cRoad to Paris\u201d Goes through Cryosphere With the Bonn UNFCCC climate negotiations taking place next month, the phrase \u201croad to Paris\u201d is the theme of countless policy forums and media coverage.\u00a0 For ICCI, that \u201croad\u201d focuses on cryosphere \u2013 but increasingly, science is telling us that any path towards a new climate agreement in […]\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ice-blog"],"modified_by":"admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1075"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1075\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1076,"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1075\/revisions\/1076"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}