UN Report: Permanent Damage to Earth’s Glaciers

 

Emma Ljuslin Furumark

 

Published 16:09

 

Current climate policies could reduce the ice mass of glaciers to less than 10 percent of current levels, according to researchers. Photo: Aftonbladet

Temporary temperature increases can cause permanent damage to Earth’s cryosphere.

This is according to a new UN report.

“If the cryosphere disappears, the entire planet is affected,” says glaciologist James Kirkham.

The report, published shortly before COP31 begins in Turkey, was authored by 80 researchers brought together by the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative (ICCI) and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). The researchers detail extensive and permanent losses of snow and ice within the cryosphere. This refutes a “persistent myth” that allowing Earth’s temperature to rise temporarily by 2 or 3 degrees would be manageable, reports The Guardian.

“Snow and ice react rapidly to every tenth of a degree of warming,” says Kirkham, lead author of the new report.

Melting six times faster

According to the newspaper, the report indicates that current climate policies—projected to lead to 2.8 degrees of global warming—would reduce glacier ice mass to less than 10 percent of current levels in the Rocky Mountains, the Alps, Iceland, and Scandinavia. If warming were limited to 1.5 degrees, in line with the Paris Agreement, approximately 20–35 percent of the ice mass would remain. Bill Hare, a climate scientist and CEO of the German climate research institute Climate Analytics, says:

“Ice sheets melting six times faster than they were 30 years ago; sea ice and mountain glaciers disappearing at record speed; sea levels rising inexorably; and the vital polar oceans becoming increasingly acidic. All of this is now irreversible on human timescales; all of it has global consequences; and all of it pushes the impacts of climate change beyond the limits of what we can adapt to.”

“They have damaged our world”

He adds:

“Every government minister and every executive in the fossil fuel industry who has ever succeeded in watering down climate action can read this report and see how their actions have fundamentally damaged the world we live in.”