A new paper reveals what lies ahead for the fastest-warming region on Earth.
In 2024, the global average air temperature exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels for the first time, contributing to extreme weather events such as record-breaking rainfall and flooding in the Sahara Desert, as well as intense summer heat waves worldwide. However, global warming is expected to continue beyond this threshold. Based on current national pledges to limit greenhouse gas emissions, global temperatures are projected to rise by 2.7 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. This level of warming would significantly alter the Arctic, the fastest-warming region on Earth.
A new review paper, published in Science on February 7, 2025, examines these changes and their far-reaching consequences. The study is led by Julienne Stroeve, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) and a professor at the Centre for Earth Observation Science at the University of Manitoba.
“The Arctic is warming at four times the rate of the rest of the planet,” said Stroeve. “At 2.7 degrees Celsius of global warming, we will see more extreme and cascading impacts in this region than elsewhere, including sea-ice-free Arctic summers, accelerated melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, widespread permafrost loss, and more extreme air temperatures. These changes will devastate infrastructure, ecosystems, vulnerable communities, and wildlife.”
Projected Arctic Changes at 2.7°C Warming
In the review paper, the authors used the Sixth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a starting point. They updated knowledge from the report about three specific areas of the Arctic environment, including sea ice, the Greenland Ice Sheet, and permafrost, focusing on existing studies that show consensus about the changes that will take place in the region.
Under 2.7 degrees Celsius of warming, the Arctic region is likely to experience the following effects:
- Virtually every day of the year will have air temperatures exceeding pre-industrial temperature extremes.
- The Arctic Ocean will be free of sea ice for several months each summer.
- The area of the Greenland Ice Sheet that experiences more than a month of surface temperatures above 0 degrees Celsius will quadruple compared with pre-industrial conditions, causing global sea levels to rise faster.
- Surface-level permafrost will decrease by 50 percent of pre-industrial levels.
“Our paper shows that, already today, mankind has the power to wipe out entire landscapes from the surface of our planet,” said Dirk Notz, professor for polar research at the University of Hamburg and co-author of the study. “It’d be amazing if we could become more aware of this power and the responsibility that goes with it, as the future of the Arctic truly lies in our hands.”
Reference: “Disappearing landscapes: The Arctic at +2.7°C global warming” by Julienne C. Stroeve, Dirk Notz, Jackie Dawson, Edward A. G. Schuur, Dorthe Dahl-Jensen and Céline Giesse, 6 February 2025, Science.
DOI: 10.1126/science.ads1549
Other co-authors on the paper included Jackie Dawson of the University of Ottawa, Edward A.G. Schuur of Northern Arizona University, Dorthe Dahl-Jensen of the University of Manitoba and University of Copenhagen, and Céline Giesse of the University of Hamburg. Funding came from several sources, with the largest piece of Stroeve’s funding from the Canada 150 Research Chairs Program, C150 grant 50296. Data and information from NSIDC’s Sea Ice Today and Ice Sheets Today projects were used in the review.
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3 Comments
Most of these dire warnings about the future are predicated on the unstated assumption that 2024 was typical of what we can expect in the near future.
However, the 2023-24 El Nino was untypical in that the temperature peak is almost twice as wide as other El Nino events in recent decades. My guess is that the massive injection of water vapor into the stratosphere by the Hunga-Tonga eruption in the Pacific Basin increased the warming. We will need to see how temperatures respond over the next few months to be more certain of whether 2024 is a harbinger of what the future holds, or an exceptional outlier in a climate that has warmed in fits and starts for about the last 20,000 years.
Yeah, we’ve been hearing about them “climate catastrophies” for the last 50 years. During that time a lot of big businesses have been built around doom mongering, so it’s not likely we’re gonna stop hearing about it any time soon.
“Virtually every day of the year will have air temperatures exceeding pre-industrial temperature extremes.”
I doubt that the author(s) actually meant what they literally said. It could always get hot in the Arctic When the sunlight lasts 24 hours a day, and it still gets very cold when there is 24 hours of darkness because the cooling follows an exponential decline function.
Note that the words “tipping point” are not used in the actual article. They were probably added by the headline writer. In any event, the words are a poor description of what actually happens and shouldn’t be used in a science article. Their only utility is to scare naive readers.