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.
Rasmus: We have plenty of such examples from the past: chemtrails, Haarp, Climate denial, 5G-COVID, and anti-vaxxers.
Those are all from the good old days now…
Chemtrails, HAARP, climate denial, and anti-vaxxers (at least) keep popping up in Facebook and other places on the web. They are not solely in the past by any means.
Geoengineering always makes me think of the old nursery rhyme, The Old Lady who Swallowed a Fly. Before you know it you’re in some manner of “Red Queen’s Race” with yourself, trying to fix all the new (and previously unforeseen) problems that have arisen because of the previously introduced “fix”.
Geo-engineering is definitely having a moment. I recently made a post about it (https://substack.com/home/post/p-197347607), which has a paragraph about various ice-saving approaches (“Ice Ice Maybe”). I am similarly dubious about the value of geo-engineering, but still think it is worth researching.
I also have a soft spot for the Arctic Council, having served on the Arctic Council Expert Group on Black Carbon and Methane for many years. The Arctic Council always seemed like a really positive, consensus based organization and served as a great example of international cooperation. The Russian invasion of Ukraine definitely hampered the EGBCM’s activity, but I think it was the Trump administration which really stopped it in its tracks (along with so many other valuable international efforts).
For years I’ve read that the Arctic is warming 4 times faster than the average for Earth with the loss of sea ice being a big contributor to this.
Now Rasmus tells us this is not true. Further that more of the Arctic warning happens in the Winter than in the Summer.
Please can he, or someone else provide a link, to an explanation of this.
[Response: Annual Arctic temperature changes are a little more than 3x the global mean (see the Miscellaneous figures page), but it depends a little on your definition of the Arctic (the more poleward your area, the warmer it is getting). It has always been true that winter warming is greater than summer warming in the Arctic (since summer temperatures can’t go much above 0ºC on average while there is still sea ice around). – gavin]
Gavin. THANK YOU for the clear and easily understandable explanation of why there is little or now temperature increase in the Summer.
1) How to we reconcile this ‘fact’ you provide with the ‘fact’ that the loss of sea ice causes more solar energy to be absorbed in the summer only? (In the winter the Sun does not put in an appearance.)
2) More generally I’m bemused at how the Arctic can warm during the dark winter.
2)bHmm, let’s think. If the sun isn’t shining, where is the heat coming from? And if there is more heat in that original source, what do you expect will happen?
To expand upon this for Robert (and anyone else interested), there are a couple of things. One is that the water of the Arctic Ocean is indeed warming. But also, the loss of sea ice means more open water–and the transfer of whatever heat there is from the sea to the atmosphere is thereby augmented, since the sea ice is a pretty good thermal barrier, and and even better one for evaporation and precipitation. Remember that the Arctic navigation season–by which I mostly mean of the Northeast Passage, which is more consistently navigable than the Northwest–typically runs into November, long after the start of the Long Night.
Some of this is a bit counter-intuitive, including the fact that the more ice you lose in the summer, the more rapid and extensive ice growth in the fall and winter tends to be–simply because there’s so much more ‘headroom’ for rapid expansion once the sun sets for the season. (And secondarily, there’s more of it farther north than in the past.)
Robert, the reporting on this has been less than clear in the past. I’ve tried to correct that here from time to time.
Here’s a graph of solar input:
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Incident-solar-radiation-in-the-Arctic-Wm-based-on-Figure-26-of-Hartmann2016-for_fig4_364172308
The problem is that people focus on the minimum sea ice coverage, which occurs in September. But as you can see, incident solar energy is very low at that point. So when the input is high in June, there is still a lot of ice.
The other thing that is poorly communicated is that less ice in September means that more energy is radiated from the water, meaning that more ice forms. But that energy “warms” the atmosphere, which is what the term “warming” used here refers to.
Hope that helps; you have good questions.
Robert Gibson,
The DMI have a web-page HEREof re-analysis temperature data showing the annual cycle of Arctic temperature above 80ºN, so the bit of the Arctic closest to the North Pole..
Note the Jan-Feb temperature averaged 1958-2002 is stuck down at -30ºC while Jun-Jul-Aug temperatures manage to just exceed 0ºC. In terms of the impacts of a warming world, a linked-DMI-page shows winter & summer temperatures relative to that 1958-2002 average, the summer trace showing effectively zero warming and the winter trace today showing perhaps +6ºC above that 1958-2002 average – so now you’d expect today Dec-Jan-Feb will be averaging roughly -26ºC.
If you take the whole of the Arctic above 66.5ºN, as shown by this ClimateAnalyser page, the Dec-Jan-Feb average 1940-2026 is about -24ºC while Jan-Jul-Aug averages about +3.5ºC. The summers still don’t show much warming thro’ this period (last summer averaged +4.05ºC) while winters are still showing warming well-above global average (last winter averaged -21ºC).
Without sunlight the Arctic gets very cold but it is warmed by the rest of the planet and more.
The annual poleward energy flux on this graphic at 80ºN is plotted at +0.8 PW or 25 Zj which is 31% of the flux plotted at 66.5ºN. During winter that flux will be running at peak of its annual cycle while more warming will be provided by ice-forming which will add something like 5 Zj of latent heat direct into the Arctic.
I should have mentioned that bit about heat released in ice formation in the comment above. Oh, well.
Good point!
MAR, Kevin
“more warming will be provided by ice-forming”
So if no ice formed, you are saying that the Arctic wouldn’t be “warmed” as much?
Gavin,
I am not going to guess at a reason, but using the 60N-90N UAH dataset there certainly seems to be more at play than a simple winter>summer trend. Here is the monthly data :-
https://photos.app.goo.gl/bXpWeJkHc9Kqyr2e9
…. and for the record RSS shows a very similar picture, just larger trend numbers
https://photos.app.goo.gl/5TwWmyii88bCND2N6
Rasmus wrote: “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.” This discussion is well-known in this forum, thanks to the very informative writings here by Stefan.
What hasn’t been covered quite so much here, as far as I have noticed, is the research at the Bjerknes Centre in Bergen here in Norway: “The Atlantic Ocean’s major circulation systems may be approaching critical tipping points that could trigger dramatic climate shifts across Europe and beyond, according to a new scientific report. The report examines two interconnected ocean systems, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and the Subpolar Gyre (SPG), and their potential for abrupt, irreversible changes.
The AMOC acts as a massive heat pump, transporting warm water north through the Atlantic and returning cold, deep water south. This circulation is responsible for the relatively mild climate that Northern Europe enjoys today. The Subpolar Gyre, located in the northern North Atlantic, is a crucial region where this warm surface water is transformed into dense, deep water through a process called ocean convection.
«While these systems are strongly connected, they can tip independently,» says Andreas Born, a researcher with the University of Bergen and the Bjerknes Centre. Born is one of the researchers who contributed to the report (…)
While an AMOC collapse would unfold over five to ten decades, an SPG collapse could happen much more rapidly, within one or two decades. The mechanism involves a positive feedback loop: when the boundary currents carrying warm, salty water become fresher, convection weakens. This reduces the density gradient that drives the circulation, which in turn weakens the currents further.
Historical evidence suggests SPG tipping has occurred before. High-resolution paleoclimate data reveals two episodes of SPG convection shutdown prior to the Little Ice Age, driven by freshwater inputs from Arctic Sea ice and Greenland ice melt. Similar events have been identified in reconstructions of the last interglacial period and over the past 21,000 years” https://bjerknes.uib.no/en/news/to-systemer-en-kritisk-utfordring .
This SPG-subject hasn’t got much attention in the media, and even not here at Realclimate, but it seems to me that this topic deserves more attention here.
What can be confusing for the norwegian public, is that the Bjerknes Centre, according to the norwegian news media (!), seems to be a separate “school” so to speak of norwegian researchers working with the currents in the north Atlantic, who – unfortunately not very surprising – are the only ones being cited in norwegian newspapers concerning the AMOC-theme, often (wrongly) popularized as “collapse of the Gulf stream” etc., and always for saying that “there are no signs indicating a coming collapse of the Gulf Stream”. This is part of the usual denialist agenda: any problem connected with the CO2-emissions from fossil fuel consumption – in this case the ongoing weakening and maybe even collapse of the AMOC, and first of the SPG – is automatically and absolutely denied.
It’s very important that this is clarified by the norwegian researchers as soon as possible. Hitherto that hasn’t been done, probably because the media aren’t willing to listen.
The reason why this denial of any weakening of the AMOC in the norwegian media isn’t surprising, is that the norwegian news media generally are some of the most denialist in the western world (albeit in a more subtle – “greenwashed” – form than the usual trumpism etc.) which of course is closely connected with the fact that Norway is a petro-state, earning a lot of revenue from the oil and gas exploration in the Norwegian seas. The main argument runs like this: the norwegian oil and gas exploration is the cleanest in the world, and if Norway doesn’t produce this, some less clean producers will take their part of the market. The last part of this is correct, but it only underscores the importance of working for the solution called “carbon fee and dividend”, because if a country, fx. Norway, chooses this model, it means that it inserts into it’s economy a mechanism using the market to gradually transition away from it’s dependency of fossil fuels, because everything will get more expensive proportional to it’s use of fossil fuels, while the around 70 pct. lowest on the income ladder will be compensated by the dividend. In the long run this will give the countries using this model a competitive advantage, because they modernize their energy systems faster.
The main argument against geo-engineering is as mentioned by Rasmus and others here, the enormous risks connected with it.
But the main problem now is that geo-engineering *already is presupposed by most mainstream “green” politicians under the slogan “net zero”*: they want to continue with fossil fuel business as usual using the hollow excuse that in the near future “we will find ways to succeed with carbon capture and storage, geo-engineering etc., and thereby avoiding crossing the two degrees limit”…
Karsten, your mention of the “if Norway doesn’t produce this, some less clean producers will take their part of the market” reminded me of the same self-serving reply a Ford spokesperson gave when asked why they decided to build whatever colossal, wasteful, profitable monster SUV some years back. The reply was a laughable “If we don’t build these =responsibly= it just means some other company would — blah blah blah.” The amount of harm in the world that’s exacerbated by the efforts of PR and marketing…
But to the Arctic and geoengineering – Carolyn Gramling at Science News just did a great job on discussing the recent AMOC paper suggesting ~50% weakening by 2100, along with the “conceptual study” some researchers put up about building a dam to bottle off the Bering Straight to aid the AMOC.
She covers the nuance and seems to have contacted Stefan for his view. Good summary for science-interested types plus she links to the papers discussed. And it’s always worth pointing to Science News because their staff are great at understanding what they’re writing about so you don’t get arm-wavy articles- Gramling’s got the degrees to write about geology and oceans.
The outlook for a climate-regulating ocean current is…not good
A key ocean current that warms Europe is weakening, spurring a controversial megadam proposal”
More specifics about Norway’s addiction – and warnings against their urging the EU to just let them drill a bit more. This was an editorial on May 29 in the Barents Observer. The part I quote shows what you pointed out and the editorial also pushes back – “petroholics” was a good touch, I’ll probably be using that.
The heat is on — and Norway is adding fuel to the fire
“Norway risks placing itself on the wrong side of history by lobbying against the European Union’s opposition to new Arctic oil and gas drilling.”
“This April was the warmest ever recorded in Northern Norway. On the very day the Norwegian Meteorological Institute reported this milestone, the government announced plans to open dozens of new offshore blocks for oil and gas exploration. Thirty-eight of those blocks are located in the Barents Sea — part of the Arctic Ocean.
Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said the new licences “will enable us to continue generating substantial value for society, support jobs across the country, safeguard our shared welfare, and contribute to Europe’s energy security”.”
Geoengineering (or “climate interventions”). A FF dream. Treat the effects, not the cause. These guys will never give up on their adaptationist only stance. Just to keep a few crappers rich.
Military buildup or threats can be a boon for science. Logistics for boots on the ground buildup require high quality, ground truthed understanding of the landscape and cryosphere. A peruse through the abundance of work by Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) under the US Army Corps of Engineers highlights top level scientific research pertaining to cold regions ( i.e. Arctic) across many disciplines over multiple decades. The threats pertaining to mankind survival in a cold environment are arguably greater than those of mankind survival in a hot environment.
If we don’t collect the data, how will we know if something is happening?
Trump Administration to Dismantle Ocean Monitoring System
Link to shared article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/climate/ocean-observatories-initiative.html?unlocked_article_code=1.nFA.NuL2.leDbQw-TUkg8&smid=url-share
This is criminal vandalism, a waste of US taxpayers’ money as well as a loss of scientific information.
How can any conscientious NSF employee be involved in this?
Re.: “If we don’t collect the data, how will we know if something is happening?”
Obviously that is the whole point.