Arctic warming set to accelerate climate change, new study warns Fallout could add £54 trillion to global climate change bill

The thick layer of ‘permafrost’ covering most Arctic land is melting so fast it will set in motion a “feedback mechanism” that accelerates global warming, an alarming new study finds.

The acceleration could amplify the effect of climate change by about 5 per cent, adding as much as £54 trillion to the world’s total climate bill, it says.

Thick layers of permanently-frozen ground, known as permafrost, have built up across 23 million square kilometres of Arctic land , much of it several metres deep and hundreds of thousands of years old.

Large amounts of greenhouse gases

The permafrost contains huge amounts of the climate-warming greenhouse gases methane and carbon dioxide.

As it melts, these gases are released into the atmosphere, triggering a ‘feedback mechanism’ cycle of increased warming and further permafrost melting.

“The Arctic is an important barometer for climate change and this study is saying ‘guys, we need to do something pretty quickly,” said lead author Dmitry Yumashev, of Lancaster University.

‘Need to act more quickly’

“I’m frustrated and concerned that things are not happening fast enough to tackle climate change. Mitigation is costly but the benefits hugely outweigh the costs in the longer term,” he added.

He said he supported the Extinction Rebellion protests that have brought central London to a standstill and paid tribute to Greta Thunberg , the 16-year old Swedish activist who has inspired countless climate change marches by school children around the world in recent months.

The effects of thawing permafrost on Arctic land are being compounded by the melting of white heat-reflecting ice in the sea. This is creating another feedback mechanism – in which melting ice, leads to warming sea, which melts more ice, the study found.

Paris Agreement

The Arctic calculations are based on the pledges countries made to cut their carbon emissions in the Paris climate change agreement.

The researchers said permafrost was their biggest concern. That’s because the methane released when organic matter that has been frozen below the soil for centuries thaws and rots is a very potent greenhouse gas – trapping heat in the atmosphere about 20 times as effectively as CO2.

So far, at the current level of 1C of global warming since pre-industrial times, the effect of melting permafrost is relatively small, with 10 billion tonnes of carbon released. However, the amount is set to increase far faster once global warming exceeds 1.5C, the report warns.

On the current trajectory of at least 3C of warming by the end of the century, melting permafrost would release 280 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide and 3 billion tons of methane into the atmosphere, it calculated.

The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

The case of Greenland:

A separate new study spells further trouble for Arctic ice. This found that the Greenland ice sheet – the second largest in the world – has been melting at an even faster rate than previously feared.