8598642366_9cd33a2225_o_0.jpeg

This photo is a mosaic image of sea ice in the Beaufort Sea, created by the Digital Mapping System (DMS) instrument aboard the NASA IceBridge P-3B. The dark area in the middle of the image is open water seen through a lead, or opening, in the ice. Light blue areas are thick sea ice and dark blue areas are thinner ice formed as water in the lead refreezes. Leads are formed when cracks develop in sea ice as it moves in response to wind and ocean currents.

(NASA)

CLEVELAND, Ohio - How can one person change the Earth's climate?

U.S. and German researchers have found that for every metric ton of carbon dioxide a person produces, 3 square meters of summer sea ice disappears in the Arctic. The average American produces roughly 20 metric tons of carbon dioxide in a lifetime, according to The Guardian.

What could lead to a metric ton of carbon dioxide? That's roughly a round-trip flight from New York to Europe, or a 2,500-mile car ride, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

The research was coordinated by Dirk Notz, with the Max-Planck Institute of Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, and Julienne Stroeve with the data center, a senior research scientist with a doctorate from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The research published in ScienceMag, titled "Observed Arctic sea ice loss directly follows anthropogenic CO 2 emission," was conducted in the hopes of broadening the public's understanding of individual contributions to climate change.

Retreating Arctic sea ice is one of the major direct indicators of anthropogenic climate change: "Over the past 40 years, the Arctic's summer ice cover has shrunk by more than half," says the data center, "Climate model simulations predict that the remaining half will be gone by mid-century unless greenhouse gas emissions are reduced rapidly."

More disconcerting, multiple studies have shown climate models actually underestimate Arctic sea ice loss. To address this issue, both Notz and Stroeve derived their algorithm for the future evolution of Arctic summer ice directly from the observational record (for both sea-ice coverage and sea surface temperatures) between 1935 and 2015.

The scientists found a direct, linear relationship between carbon dioxide emissions and the extent of summer Arctic sea ice.

"...For each ton of carbon dioxide emission, the climate warms a bit. To compensate for this warming, the sea ice edge moves northward to a region with less incoming solar radiation," Notz says. "This then causes the sea ice area to shrink. Simple geometric reasons cause these processes to combine to the observed linearity."

Global collaborations to mitigate climate change may not even fix the problem of shrinking Arctic sea ice.

The Paris Agreement, implemented Nov. 4, 2016, coordinated by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, aims at keeping global warming less than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. 126 parties have already ratified the agreement, out of the 197 parties in the convention.

The 2-degree Celsius threshold is still too warm and not sufficient to allow summer Arctic ice to survive for long, the recent study found.

However, the Paris Agreement does include plans of pushing further, keeping global temperatures at just 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Summer Arctic sea ice does have a chance of lasting longer-term with this lower emission scenario.

However, carbon dioxide emissions, one of the most abundant greenhouse gases, aren't projected to slow down anytime soon, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

IPCC carbon dioxide emissions using different projections: higher and lower future emissions.

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