“The Arctic Council is not dead”

The 4th UArctic congress on the Faroe islands finished with the message that the Arctic Council is still alive. It has overcome recent setbacks with difficulties concerning two of its member states, Russia and the US. The Arctic Council represents 8 nations together with indigenous peoples and has observers from around the world, and this wide-ranging diversity of course coloured the congress. It was allegedly the largest scientific conference on the Faroe islands ever, as it was combined with the Oceans Connectivity Conference.

I participated at the congress as a member of the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme’s (AMAP) climate expert group to present the Arctic Climate Update reports for 2024 and 2026 (in progress).

Some of the topics that interested me included climate change, so-called “climate interventions”, and the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) which also has been discussed previously by Stefan. I noted that the question concerning changes to the AMOC is still being discussed, and scholars have different opinions on whether it will collapse or if it merely will weaken to a more modest degree.

While everybody at the congress agreed on climate change, the question concerning climate interventions, formally known as “geoengineering”, was highly controversial. I was invited to a side meeting organised by Ocean Visions on rescuing the sea ice. 

I expressed my doubts about the idea of geoengineering in the Arctic, as the region seems to have a semi-permanent cloud-cover that moderates the sea ice albedo during summer. The strongest Arctic warming by far, after all, takes place during the winter and the Polar Nights, in darkness when albedo cannot play a role. 

The sea ice does nevertheless play an important role for the warming, as retreating sea ice exposes a warmer ocean surface underneath. But sea ice is not necessarily the top amplifying feedback mechanism in the Arctic, according to AMAP’s Adaptive Actions in a Changing Arctic report for the Barents Sea region from 2017 (p.65). There are also some preliminary analyses suggesting that low-level cloudiness increases where the sea ice retreats. However, the cloud cover in different reanalyses and satellite observations are not entirely consistent, and more work is needed to address this question. 

Other reasons why spraying particles into the air is a bad idea is that it doesn’t deal with the oceanic acidification, which is particularly a problem for the cold oceans in the Arctic. It’s a big concern for marine ecosystems. Furthermore, it completely ignores the fact that the global hydrological cycle is entangled with the greenhouse effect and is also affected by our exploitation of fossile resources.

Finally, geoengineering opens a can of worms when it comes to conspiracy theories that may pave way for new unnecessary conflicts. We have plenty of such examples from the past: chemtrails, Haarp, Climate denial, 5G-COVID, and anti-vaxxers.