Small increases in global average temperature may eventually lead to sea level rise of six metres or more, according to evidence from past warm periods in Earth’s history.

That was the worrying message from a paper published in the journal Science this week.  The researchers, part of the international “Past Global Changes” project, analysed sea levels during several warm periods in Earth’s recent history, when global average temperatures were similar to today or slightly warmer – around 1°C above pre-industrial temperatures.

I was able to talk briefly to one of the authors, Stefan Rahmstorf from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), who was in Paris at the international scientific conference “Our common future under climate change” this week. (The article I wrote on that event, billed as the biggest climate science gathering ahead of the key COP in Paris in December, and the full interview with Rahmstorf are online now).

Rahmstorf described the new study on polar ice sheet disintegration and sea level as “a review of our state of knowledge about past changes in sea level in earth’s history, especially looking at all the data we have on past warm periods, due to the natural cycles of climate – the ice age cycles – that come from the earth’s orbit.”

Climate expert Rahmstorf (Pic: S.Rahmstorf)

He went on: ”We have had warmer times in the past, the last one was about 120,000 years ago, and we find that invariably, during these warmer times, the sea level was much higher. It was at least about six meters higher than today, even though temperatures were only a little bit higher, maybe one to three degrees warmer – depending on what period you are looking at – compared to the pre-industrial climate.”

Bad news for coastal dwellers

Not happy reading for anyone living close to the coast, if you look at temperature development today:

“Basically the message is: the kind of climate we are moving towards now – even if we limit warming to two degrees – has in the past always been associated with a sea level several metres higher, which would of course have catastrophic consequences for many coastal cities and small island nations.”

With warming currently on course to reach four degrees and more by the end of this century if greenhouse gas emissions continue on their present trajectory, this message adds yet another piece of evidence to motivate the world’s governments to come up with a new World Climate Agreement at the UN Paris summit at the end of the year – and to get moving towards a zero-carbon economy asap.

The interdisciplinary team of scientists concluded that during the last interglacial warm period between ice ages 125,000 years ago, the global average temperature was similar to the present, and this was linked to a sea-level rise of 6 to 9 metres, caused by melting ice in Greenland and Antarctica. Around 400,000 years ago, when global average temperatures were estimated to be between 1 to 2 degrees Celsius higher than –pre-industrial levels, sea level reached 6 to 13 meters higher. The lead author of the study, Andrea Dutton from the University of Florida, told journalists global average temperatures were similar to today during these recent interglacial periods, but polar temperatures were slightly higher. However, she stressed: “The poles are on course to experience similar temperatures in the coming decades”.

The Arctic is currently warming faster than the global average. IPCC estimates indicate that it could be almost two degrees warmer by 2100 compared with the temperature from 1986 to 2005 – IF the two-degree target is adhered to. Otherwise, it could rise by as much as 7.5°C.

Polar ice being discharged into the sea. (Pic: I.Quaile, Greenland)

Speed of sea level rise hard to predict

The authors of the study stress that the further back you go (they tried to estimate sea level as long as three million years ago), the more difficult it gets to calculate precisely how high sea level was, given that geological forces push and pull the Earth’s surface and can also cause vertical movement measuring tens of metres. This makes it hard to separate the geological changes in shoreline position from sea level rise caused by polar ice sheet disintegration.

Still, the authors point out that small temperature rises of between one and three degrees were, in the past, like today, linked with magnified temperature increases in the polar regions, which lasted over many thousands of years.

They conclude that even keeping to the overall two-degree warming limit is no guarantee: “Even this level sustained over a long period of time carries substantial risk of unmanageable sea level rise, not least because carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for over a thousand years”.

The researchers are not able to say how fast sea levels rose in the past, which would be a key piece of information for planning adaptation.  Further research will be necessary for that.

Co-author Anders Carlson of Oregon State University says by confirming that our present climate is warming to a level associated with significant polar ice-sheet loss in the past, the study us providing “perhaps the most societally relevant information the paleo record can provide”.

Carlson heads the PALSEA2 Working Group, hosted by the Past Global Changes  (PAGES) project, which used computer models and evidence from around the globe to come up with the conclusions in the study.

Switching to renewables even in oil-state Abu Dhabi. (Pic: I.Quaile)

Stefan Rahmstorf draws a clear conclusion from the results of this research and other recent studies on instabilities in the Antarctic ice sheet and changes in ocean currents:

“This really calls for limiting warming to 1.5 degrees. And it is still feasible to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. But that requires a much stronger political will than we currently have”.

Still, the Potsdam professor is more optimistic than he used to be that advances in renewable energy and other technologies and growing awareness of the negative impacts climate change is already having around the globe could mean the UN Paris conference at the end of the year will mark a turning point.

Not that he thinks Paris can “do it all”. As you’ll see if you read my interview with him, he is hoping for the start of a process similar to the Montreal Protocol, where the original agreement was not too strong, but worked eventually by toughening up as it went along. Now that would be really good news. He told me it was time to “turn the tide of rising emissions”. Here’s hoping it happens in time to keep the sea level around the world well below that six metres that were there in the past.

Can UN climate talks move fast enough to save Arctic sea ice? (Pic: I.Quaile)

With western Europe sweltering in a record-breaking heatwave, climate scientists are meeting in Paris this week for what is regarded as the last major climate science conference before the key COP 21 in Paris at the end of this year. “Our Common Future under Climate Change” wants to be “solutions-focused”, but starts off with a resumé of the state of science as a basis.

One of the topics on the wide agenda is, of course, the cryosphere, with scientists reporting on rapid changes in the Arctic ice and permafrost, and worrying developments in the Antarctic.

As conference after conference works to prepare a new World Climate Agreement, to take effect in 2020,  the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative (ICCI)  is concerned that the INDCSs, or Intended Nationally Determined Contributions, i.e. the climate action countries propose to take  are not in line with keeping global warming to the internationally set target of a maximum two degrees centigrade. Scientists tell us this itself would already have major impacts on the world’s ice and snow.

Climate pledges way too low

Pam Pearson, the founder and director of ICCI, told journalists during a recent visit to Bonn her indication of INDCS so far was that they are ”somewhere between 3.8 and 4.2 degrees”.

Pearson and her colleagues are working hard to make the scientific evidence on climate changes in our ice and snow regions accessible and “must-reads” for the politicians and others who are preparing to negotiate the new agreement at the Paris talks at the end of the year, to replace the Kyoto protocol. She was here in Bonn at the last round of UN preparatory climate talks last month, holding a side event and briefing media and negotiators.

Pam Pearson  urges more ambition, faster action. (Pic: I.Quaile)

Pearson was part of the original Kyoto Protocol negotiating team. She is a former U.S. diplomat with 20 years’ experience of working on global issues, including climate change.  She says she resigned in 2006 in protest over changes to U.S. development policies, especially related to environmental and global issues programmes. From 2007-2009, she worked from Sweden with a variety of organizations and Arctic governments to bring attention to the potential benefit of reductions in short-lived climate forcers to the Arctic climate, culminating in Arctic Council ministerial-level action in the Tromsø Declaration of 2009.

Pearson founded ICCI immediately after COP 15 to bring greater attention and policy focus to the “rapid and markedly similar changes occurring to cryosphere regions throughout the globe”, and their importance for the global climate system.

IPCC reports already out of date

At the briefing in Bonn a couple of weeks ago, she said:

“Certainly through AR5, (the 5^th Assessment Report of the IPCC) the science is available to feed into the negotiations. But  I think what we see as a cryosphere organization, participating as civil society in the negotiations – and I think also, very importantly,  what the IPCC scientists see – is a lack of understanding of the urgency of slowing down these processes and the fact that they are irreversible. This is not like air or water pollution, where if you clean it up it will go back to the way it was before. It cannot go back to the way it was before and I think that is the most important aspect that still has not made its way into the negotiations”.

Scientists taking part in the event organized by the ICCI in Bonn stressed that a lot of major developments relating especially to Antarctica and to permafrost in the northern hemisphere was not available in time for that IPCC report. This means the scientific basis of AR5 is already way out of date, and that it does not include very recent important occurrences.

Sea ice in decline

Dirk Notz from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg heads a research group focusing on sea ice and rapid changes in the Arctic and Antarctic.

He told journalists in Bonn: “Over the last 10 years or so we’ve roughly seen a fifty percent loss of Arctic sea ice area, so this ice is currently retreating very, very rapidly. In the Antarctic, some people are talking about the increase of sea ice. Just to put things into perspective: there is a slight increase, but it’s nothing compared to the very rapid loss that we’ve seen in the Arctic.“

The slight increase in sea ice in the Antarctic is certainly not an indicator that could disprove climate warming, as some of a skeptical persuasion would like to have us believe.

“In the Antarctic, the changes in sea ice are locally very different. We have an increase in some areas and a decrease in other areas. This increase in one area of the southern ocean is largely driven by changes in the surface pressure field. So the winds are blowing stronger off shore in the Antarctic, pushing the ice out onto the ocean, and this is why we have more sea ice now than we used to have in the past. Our understanding currently says that these changes in the wind field are currently driven by anthropogenic changes of the climate system,“ said Notz.

He stresses that as far as the Arctic is concerned, the loss of sea ice is very clearly linked to the increase in CO2. The more CO2 we have in the atmosphere, the less sea ice we have in the Arctic.

Changing the face of the planet

Notz stresses the speed with which humankind is currently changing the face of the earth:

“Currently in the Arctic, a complete landscape is disappearing. It’s a landscape that has been around for thousands of years, and it’s a landscape our generation is currently removing from the planet, possibly for a very long time. I think culturally, that’s a very big change we are seeing.”

For indigenous people in the Arctic, climate change means lifestyle change. (Pic.I.Quaile)

At the same time, he says the decline in the Arctic sea ice could be seen as a very clear warning sign:

“Temperature evolution of the planet for the past 50 thousand years or so shows that for the past 10 thousand years or so, climate on the planet has been extremely stable. And the loss of sea ice in the Arctic might be an indication that we are ending this period of a very stable climate in the Arctic just now. This might be the very first, very clear sign of a very clear change in the climatic conditions, like nothing we’ve seen in the past 10,000 years since we’ve had our cultures as humans.”

Simulations indicate that Arctic summer sea ice might be gone by the middle of this century. But Notz stresses that we can still influence this:

“The future sea ice loss both in the Arctic and the Antarctic depends on future CO2 emissions. A rapid loss of Arctic summer sea ice in this decade is possible but unlikely. Only a very rapid reduction of CO2 might allow for the survival of Arctic summer sea ice beyond this century.”

Antarctic ice not eternal

Whereas until very recently, the Antarctic ice was regarded as safe from climate warming, research in the last few years has indicated that even in that area, some possibly irreversible processes are underway. This relates to land ice rather than sea ice.

Ricarda Winckelmann is a scientist with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact research (PIK). She told journalists and climate negotiators at the Bonn talks that Antarctica could be regarded as the “sea level giant”. The global sea level would rise by five metres if West Antarctica’s ice sheet melted completely, 50 metres for the East Antarctic ice sheet.

“Over the past years, a couple of regions in Antarctica have really caught our attention. There are four hotspots. They have all changed rapidly. There have been a number of dynamic changes in these regions, but they all have something in common, and that is that they bear the possibility of a dynamic instability. Some of them have actually crossed that threshold, some of them might cross it in the near future. But they all underlie the same mechanism. That is called the marine ice sheet instability. It’s based on the fact that the bottom topography has a certain shape, and it’s a purely mechanical, self-enforcing mechanism. So it’s sort of driving itself. If you have a retreat of a certain region that undergoes this mechanism, it means you cannot stop it. “

The hotspots she refers to are the Amundsen Basin in West Antarctica, comprising the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers, which are the fastest glaciers in Antarctica:

“It has been shown in a number of studies last year that it actually has tipped. Meaning it has crossed that threshold, and is now undergoing irreversible change. So all of these glaciers will drain into the ocean and we will lose a volume that is equivalent to about a metre of global sea level. The question is how fast this is going to happen.”

Next comes the Antarctic peninsula, where very recent research has indicated that warm water is reaching the ice shelves, leading to melting and dynamic thinning.

Even in East Antarctica, which was long considered virtually immune to climate change, Winckelmann and her colleagues have found signs that this same mechanism might be at work, for instance with Totten Glacier:

“There is a very recent publication from this year, showing that (…) this could possibly undergo the same instability mechanism. Totten glacier currently has the largest thinning rate in East Antarctica.  And it contains as much volume as the entire West Antarctic ice sheet put together. So it’s 3.5 metres worth of global sea level rise, if this region tips”, says the Potsdam expert.

Even the Antarctic is not safe from warming (Pic thanks to International Polar Foundation)

Pulling the plug?

The other problematic area is the Wilkes Basin.

“We found that there is something called an ice plug, and if you pull it, you trigger this instability mechanism, and lose the entire drainage basin. What’s really striking is that this ice plug is comparably small, with a sea-level equivalent of less than 80 mm. But if you lose that ice plug, you will get self-sustained sea level rise over a long period of time, of three to four metres.“

This research is all so new that it was not included in the last IPCC assessment:

“We’ve known that this dynamic mechanism exists for a long time, it was first proposed in the 1970s. But the observation that something like this is actually happening right now is new,” Winckelmann stresses.

Clearly, this is key information when it comes to bringing home the urgent need for rapid climate action.

Pam Pearson stresses that these changes in themselves have a feedback effect, and have an impact on the climate:

“The cryosphere is changing a lot more quickly than other parts of the world. The main focus for Paris is that these regions are moving from showing climate change, being indicators of climate change, to beginning to drive climate change, and the risks of those dynamics beginning to overwhelm anthropogenic impacts on these particular areas is growing as the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere goes up, as the temperature rises.”

Clilmate factor permafrost

This applies in particular to the effect of thawing permafrost. Susan Natali from the US Woods Hole Research Centre is co-author of a landmark study published in Nature in April. She also joined the ICCI event in Bonn:

“Carbon has been accumulating in permafrost for tens of thousands of years. The amount of carbon currently stored in permafrost is about twice as much as in the atmosphere. So our current estimate is 1500 billion tons of carbon permanently frozen and locked away in permafrost. So you can imagine, as that permafrost thaws and even a portion of that gets released into the atmosphere, that this may lead to a significant increase in global greenhouse gas emissions.”

Greenhouse gases are captured under Arctic permafrost. (Pic I. Quaile)

The study was conducted by an international permafrost network.  “The goal is to put our current understanding of the processes in permafrost regions into global climate models. The current IPCC reports don’t include greenhouse gas emissions as a result of permafrost thaw”, says Natali.

Permafrost regions make up some 25% of the northern hemisphere land area. The scientists say between 30 and 70 percent of it could be lost by 2100, depending on the amount of temperature rise.  There is still a lot of uncertainty over how much carbon could be released, but Winckelmann and her colleagues think thawing permafrost could release as much carbon into the atmosphere by 2100 as the USA, the world’s second biggest emitter, is currently emitting.

The time for action is now

“The thing to keep in mind is that the action we take now in terms of our fossil fuel emissions is going to have a significant impact on how much permafrost is lost and in turn how much carbon is released from permafrost. There is some uncertainty, but we know permafrost carbon losses will be substantial, they will be irreversible on a human-relevant time frame, and these emissions of ghgs from permafrost need to be accounted for if we want to meet our global emissions targets”, says Winckelmann.

The challenge is to convince politicians today to act now, in the interests of the future. Pam Pearson and her colleagues are working to have a synthesis of what scientists have found to date accessible to and understandable for the negotiators who will be at COP21 in Paris in December.

In terms of an outcome, she says first of all we need higher ambition now, in the pledges being made by different countries. The lower the temperature rise, the less the risk of further dynamic change processes being set off in the cryosphere. The other key factor is to make sure there is flexibility to up the targets on a regular basis, without being tied to a long negotiating process. The current agreement draft envisages five year reviews.

“There are a number of cryosphere scientists who actually expect these kinds of signals from cryosphere to multiply, and that there may be some dramatic developments just over the next three to five years, that may finally spur some action”, Pearson says.

Here’s hoping the UN negotiators will not wait for further catastrophic evidence before committing to an effective new climate treaty at the end of this year.

Further reading from my coverage:

Civil Society heats up climate debate

Thicker Antarctic ice – good for the climate?

Antarctic melt could raise sea levels faster

West Antarctic ice sheet collapse unstoppable?

Climate change risk to icy East Antarctica

Preparing for Paris: Staff at UNFCCC headquarters in Bonn are working overtime. (Pic Quaile)

Things are hotting up on the international climate talks front, with one event after another telling us how important it is for the world to reach a new climate treaty at the UN Paris meeting at the end of the year.

I have just written an article: Climate countdown: 200 days to key Paris meeting. While I come to the conclusion that there is no alternative to a new agreement, with time running out, my research has also confirmed my feeling that we are not going to see enough emissions cuts on the table to bring us in any way close to the two degree goal – let alone the 1.5 degree upper limit for global temperature rise which an increasing number of experts say is the safer figure.

After this week’s Petersberg Dialogue in Berlin, hosted by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and attended by French President Francois Hollande, two potential heavyweights in the international climate debate, the message seems to be that there will be a Paris agreement, but that the meeting will be just one more step in a long-term process towards a low-carbon world. There is much talk of achieving that in the second half of the century – and that, I fear, could be too late for the Arctic.

Can Paris slow ice melt? (I.Quaile)

CO2 on the rise, Arctic ice in decline

The NSIDC says the Arctic sea ice extent for April 2015 averaged 14.0 million square kilometers (5.4 million square miles), the second lowest April ice extent in the satellite record. It is 810,000 square kilometers (313,000 square miles) below the 1981 to 2010 long-term average of 15.0 million square kilometers (6.0 million square miles) and 80,000 square kilometers (31,000 square miles) above the previous record low for the month observed in 2007.

With scientists predicting the Arctic Ocean could be sea-ice free in summer in just a few years’ time, the adoption of a long-term approach to tackling climate change is not good news for the icy north.

In March, the global monthly average CO2 concentration crossed the critical 400 parts per million (ppm) mark. That was the first month in modern records with a global concentration of more than 400 ppm. The rise has happened much faster than natural change in the past. It would have taken around 6,000 years for nature to achieve what humankind has done in the past few decades.

CO2 is one of the chief factors responsible for the rise in global temperature. Countries would have to reduce their emissions dramatically to have any chance of achieving the goal set by the international community of keeping global warming to under two degrees Celsius.

Climate creeping up political agenda

The UN Climate Secretariat UNFCCC, based here in Bonn, is working round the clock to prepare the key Paris meeting and ensure that governments put firm pledges on the table. Climate change has also become an issue on the agenda of other key international meetings, like that Petersberg Dialogue mentioned above, a “Climate Week” including a business and climate conference in Paris this week, but also other non-specialised meetings, like the key G7 meeting to be hosted by German at Schloss Elmau, Bavaria, early next month. On the one hand, this shows climate change is gaining in importance on the international political agenda. But it also demonstrates that the annual rounds of UN talks alone cannot bring about the changes needed to halt climate change within the necessary time frame.

CO2 still  on the rise (Measuring station on Svalbard, Pic. Quaile)

Not enough for two-degree target

And while there is no shortage of high-profile meetings with politicians stressing the need for rapid climate action, the pledges so far on the table are not sufficient to cut emissions to the level necessary to keep to the two degree target. Countries have been asked to put their figures on the table by October. So far, 38 countries have submitted.

Jennifer Morgan, Global Director of the Climate Program at the World Resources Institute (WRI) confirmed to me during a recent visit to Germany that there is still a huge gap between what has been promised and what is necessary. She says available solutions are not yet being deployed at the scale or speed required to accomplish an orderly transition to a low-carbon and climate-resilient economy.

“What Paris can help do is close that gap, both by getting stronger targets and commitments from countries, but also by creating a mechanism in the agreement itself that will strengthen targets every five years and by aiming towards a long-term goal of phasing out emissions by mid-century. That type of ambition mechanism can send signals that can accelerate the pace of change -which is very much needed.”

Morgan is a leading member of the “Agreement for Climate Transformation Consortium” (ACT), a group of climate experts from around the world. ACT has produced its own draft legal text for a new world climate agreement, which would include such a mechanism to continually up the climate targets.

Not all gloom and doom?

While even the top emitters China and the USA are signaling they have understood the need for emissions cuts, it is still not clear whether industrialized and developing countries will be able to agree on a “division of labour” – or rather emissions allowances and climate adaptation and loss-and-damage funding – to make an effective agreement possible.

France’s foreign minister Laurent Fabius, who will chair the key Paris summit, told the Petersberg Dialogue in Berlin:

“We must commit ourselves very resolutely because there isn’t an alternative solution, for the simple reason that there isn’t an alternative planet.”

German environment minister Barbara Hendricks spoke of a moral obligation to fight climate change, but stressed the need to take a long-term approach to “terminate the age of fossil fuels”.

With just 200 days to go until the start of the two-week Paris meeting, the sobering assumption seems to be that the conference itself will not come up with pledges enough to keep to the two degree target, let alone the 1.5 percent which many experts say would be the better goal.

But there is also widespread acknowledgement that there is no alternative to a world climate agreement and that mechanisms have to be put in place which will steadily increase the momentum and bring about the transition to a low-carbon economy by the second half of this century. Meanwhile, in a steadily warming world, the ice which sustains the unique and fragile ecosystems of the Arctic, continues to melt.

The fragile beauty of Arctic ice (Pic I.Quaile)

Walking over the frozen Chukchi sea in Alaska. Do we really need oil from here?

Was it too good to be true? The euphoria over the US administration’s moves to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was dampened somewhat when, just two days later, it released a long-term plan for opening coastal waters to oil and gas exploration, including areas in the Arctic off Alaska. The plan excludes some important ecological and subsistence areas from potential drilling, but it still includes some Arctic areas, including parts of the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.

Margaret Williams, managing director of WWF US Arctic Programs, told Deutsche Welle, she welcomed in particular the decision to protect the biological hotspot of Hanna Shoal from risky offshore drilling. The Hanna Shoal is a key site for walruses and other animals.

But she stressed other areas of the US Arctic were still subject to oil exploration. The new program will not affect existing leases held by Shell in the Chukchi Sea. The company’s efforts have been the subject of controversy, not least since the grounding of the drill rig Kulluk.

Conservation groups like Greenpeace want to protect the Arctic from drilling. (I.Quaile, Bonn)

Williams says the problem with the new proposal in general is that it “keeps drilling for oil in the US Arctic offshore in the picture”. With the US poised to take the helm of the Arctic Council, she called for protecting biodiversity to be a top priority for all Arctic nations.

Oil: valuable asset or liability?

It comes as no surprise that Alaskan state politicians and the oil industry promised to fight planned restrictions, saying they were harmful to the economy. But this brings us back to the question of whether the search for new oil in the Arctic makes any sense at all at a time when oil prices are at a record low and the USA is producing plentiful supplies of shale gas.

Bloomberg financial news group quotes financial experts as saying the world’s biggest oil producers do not have “bulletproof business models”, and cites financial cutbacks by BP, Chevrol and Shell:

“The price collapse hobbles a segment of the industry that had already been struggling with years of soaring construction costs, project delays, missed output targets and depressed returns from refining crude into fuels”, analyst Anish Kapadia told Bloomberg.

Climate paradox

Conservation groups stressed the need for a different focus, in the year when the USA has pledged to help create an effective new world climate agreement in Paris in November.

Cartoon by psychologist Per Espen Stoknes, BI Norwegian School of Management.( I photographed it at a workshop on climate change psyschology)

“Rather than opening more of the Arctic and other US coastal waters to drilling for dirty energy, the US needs to ramp-up its transition to a clean energy future. As the Administration works to rally international leaders behind a bold climate pact in 2015, decisions to tap new fossil fuel reserves off our own coasts sends mixed signals about US climate leadership abroad, ” said WWF’s Williams.

We know the Arctic is being hit at least twice as fast as the global average by climate change. The ecosystem is already under huge pressure. The Arctic itself is in turn of key importance to global weather patterns. And burning more oil would exacerbate the situation even further.

“We would like to think that we can shift our energy paradigm to clean energy so that we don’t have to take every last bit of oil out of the earth, especially out of the oceans”, said Jackie Savitz from the Oceana Campaign croup.

Studies by the group and by WWF indicate that developing renewable energy technologies such as offshore wind could create more jobs than hanging on to fossil fuel technologies.

Oil spill concern

In addition to the climate paradox of the hunt for new fossil fuels, environmentalists are concerned about the possible impact of an oil spill. Their  opposition is not limited to the Arctic. Proposals to open up large areas of coastal waters including some parts of the Atlantic for the first time have also aroused anxiety about possible pollution. But the Arctic is of particular concern because of its remoteness, harsh weather conditions and seasonal ice cover, which is not likely to disappear soon even with rapid climate change:
“Encouraging further oil exploration in this harsh, unpredictable environment at a time when oil companies have no way of cleaning up spills threatens the health of our oceans and local communities they support. When the Deepwater Horizon spilled 210 million gallons of crude oil five years ago, local wildlife, communities and economies were decimated. We cannot allow that to happen in the Arctic or anywhere else,” said WWF expert Williams.

White House senior counsellor John Podesta justified the ban on oil exploration in the ANWR by saying “unfortunately accidents and spills can still happen, and the environmental impacts can sometimes be felt for many years”. The question is – why should this only be applicable in certain areas?  Campaigners say it also applies to the other areas now designated by the administration as “OK” for exploration. For the Arctic in particular, limiting exploration to remote offshore areas does not protect the region against the risk of environmental disaster.

Tromso campus, the Arctic University of Norway, hosts Arctic Frontiers

I have followed the past two days, the political section of the Arctic Frontiers conference, with great interest, with the thought of the Paris climate conference in November always at the back of my mind.

Clearly, in a country rich from the sale of oil, cutting climate-killing emissions is a tricky issue. The oil sector was strongly represented here, but so too were those who see the need for a transition away from fossil fuels in the interests of the global climate.

With climate change opening the Arctic to development and the search for the oil, gas and minerals thought to be locked beneath the icy region, this year’s Arctic Frontiers meeting has attracted record participation. The impact of low oil prices on development prospects, and political tensions between Russia and western Arctic states have heightened interest in listening to what experts and decision-makers have to say on the relation between climate and energy.

Arctic fan Prince Albert of Monaco and US special rep Fran Ulmer debated the feasibility of Arctic oil

With prime ministers from Norway and Finland and other ministers from Sweden and Denmark, as well as the US special Representative for the Arctic and the Russian President’s special representative for international polar cooperation addressing the meeting, media interest is high in this Arctic city, two hours flight north of the Norwegian capital, Oslo. (Looking at my flight schedule, I see Oslo is actually closer to Frankfurt than to the Arctic north of the country).

Do we need Arctic oil in a warming world?

The Norwegian premier Erna Solberg was here for the presentation of a report on sustainable growth in the north, a joint venture by Norway, Sweden and Finland. Gas is one of the four drivers named in the report. She left no doubt about her country’s continuing interest in oil and gas exploitation in the Arctic region. She told me in a brief interview she sees no contradiction between this and attempts to reach a new world climate agreement in Paris at the end of the year:

Norwegian PM Solberg wants to combine climate protection with Arctic gas

“’We have an oil and gas strategy. There are many not yet found areas where we think there is more gas. We think gas is an important part of a future energy mix, and I think we have to explore to find it.”

The same day, the Norwegian government allocated new licenses for exploration in the north-western Barents sea area of the Arctic. Many of the blocks released for petroleum licensing are close to the sea ice zone that had previously been protected. The zones have now been redefined. Conservation groups are upset. WWF Norway says the announcement is risky, as there is still a lack of knowledge about species and ecosystems in this area.

Will low oil price halt Arctic energy development?

Ice is a problem for shipping and other activities in the dark season

With oil prices at a record low, environmentalists hope Arctic development will slow down or even be put “on ice” permanently. Representatives of WWF told the delegates in Tromso – including high-ranking representatives of major oil companies Statoil and Rosneft – the world does not need oil from the Arctic. And gas should be only a “transition fuel”. Samantha Smith, leader of the ngo’s Global Climate and Energy Initiative, quoted the recent study indicating that 50% of the world’s remaining gas and 30% of the oil must stay in the ground if the two degrees centigrade target for maximum global temperature rise agreed by the international community is to have any chance of being adhered to.  She presented an alternative vision of “a thriving green economy in the white north”, with renewable energies replacing the search for oil and gas.

Business rethinking fossil investment?

Tromso: the gateway to the Arctic

As I wrote here on the Ice Blog after the Sunday evening opening, it is not only the environment lobby that is advocating  a switch to renewable enerergy. Jens Ulltveit-Moe, the CEO of  Umoe, one of the largest, privately owned companies in Norway, active amongst other things in shipping and energy, said with the current low oil price, Arctic oil was simply not viable, and this would remain the case for many years to come.  And by then, he said, the EU’s climate targets and the international support for a two-degree target would make fossil fuels a non-option.

But Sjell Giæver, Director of Petroarctic and Tim Dodson, Norwegian Statoil’s Head of Global Exploration, insisted  short-term price drops  alone would not halt Arctic exploration. The region was the last place to discover large new reservoirs to satisfy continuing high demand for oil and gas for an increasing world population.

Oil ventures in the Arctic have not been particularly successful in recent years. Statoil’s Dobson admits the biggest ever exploration drilling programme in the Barents Sea last year had a disappointing outcome. Statoil and others have also withdrawn from the hunt for oil off the coast of Greenland.

Russia hungry for Arctic energy

But the Russian President’s Special Representative for International Cooperation in the Arctic, Arthur Chilingarov, who is also a Member of the Board of Directors at the Russian oil giant Rosneft, stressed the company had completed construction of the northernmost well in the world last September. He said a new oil and gas field has been discovered and the program of Rosneft for 2015 to 2019 provided for a large volume of prospecting and drilling in the western part of the Arctic.

The rector of Tromso UiT Arctic University of Norway  Anne Husbeckk and the mayor of Tromso Jens Johan Hyort have reason to be happy with the attendance at this year’s Arctic Frontiers event.

One factor however that is slowing Russian activity the Arctic is the implementation of sanctions by European countries and the USA on account of the tensions over Ukraine. Russia has turned to China and other countries for help, but the lack of western technology is an obstacle to further development in a region where bad weather, ice, remoteness and complete darkness in the winter months make oil and gas development a risky business.

There is a clear tendency amongst those involved in Arctic cooperation to play down the sanctions and keep political tensions out of the region. Norwegian President Solberg told me: “We have a good relationship in the Arctic Council with Russia. We have said we will be in line with Europe on sanctions, although Norway is one of the countries hit most by the counter-sanctions from Russia, for instance the fact that oil and gas exploration are among the sanction areas.”

But in the meantime, on a day-to-day basis, cooperation continues, for instance in the joint management of fish resources, said Solberg.

Business as usual?

While the debate continued in the political section of Arctic Frontiers, a new, business strand of the conference opened in parallel. It focuses – on oil, gas and minerals.   Olav Orheim from GRID Arendal, a centre that works with UNEP, stressed that a lot of people here are in favour of Arctic oil and gas exploration, in the interests of jobs and economic benefits.Yet after the publication of last year’s IPCC report and with climate change high on the international agenda, there seems to be a wider acceptance here in Tromso of the disconnect between burning fossil fuels and the ever more urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Gunnar Sand is Vice President of  SINTEF, the Norwegian “Foundation for Scientific and Industrial Research”,  which has close ties to the oil business. From a moral point of view, “we all want to stay below the two degree limit”, says Sand. But it is not possible to change a society and an infrastructure based on fossil fuels overnight.

Technical progress too slow to stop warming

Technology for renewable energy is still not developing fast enough, says Sand. Emission reduction scenarios also rely heavily on carbon capture and storage (CCS), which would reduce emissions from fossil fuel burning and bridge the transition to a low-carbon economy. But the technology, which he himself has been involved in, is moving too slowly. I first met him during a visit to Svalbard, when he told me about a carbon capture and storage project, designed to capture emissions from Longyearbjen’s power station underground. He confirmed in Tromso that it has never been put into action.

Global warming, Sand says, is the most serious challenge of our time. This has to be reflected in political priorities. Governments have to create economic incentives to speed up change.

Salve Dahle, Chairman of the conference steering committee and master of ceremonies sporting a sealskin bow tie.

US special representative ex-Admiral Robert Papp indicated dealing with climate change would be one of the key policy drivers when the USA takes over the Chair of the Arctic Council, the international body that coordinates Arctic affairs, in April.

The Chair of the US Arctic Research Commission Fran Ulmer says a carbon tax would be the best way forward, to encourage industry and consumers to save energy and cut emissions.  But she acknowledged the reluctance of governments to impose decisions that could upset their voters at the next election. That is the reality we face as countries weigh up their pledges for the November climate conference in Paris.

If polar bears had a vote…