Nine of the 16 major tipping points are in Earth’s polar regions, which play a key role in stabilising global climate. As cryosphere scientists who study the world’s icy places, we have seen firsthand how rapidly they are changing, with the Arctic warming faster than anywhere else on the planet.
At this critical time, the UK is hosting some world-leading climate meetings. London Climate Action Week convened thousands of people seeking to combat the climate crisis. Many will travel on to Exeter University’s Tipping Points conference with inspiring calls for accelerated global climate action ringing in their ears.
Yet between these two big conferences, the threat of tipping points triggered by a collapsing Arctic has provided cover for a conference in Cambridge on a small, but growing conversation almost as scary as tipping points themselves.
“It’s time to talk about climate change solutions,” says the team behind Arctic Repair 2025. We agree, but not with the ideas they put forward.
The gathering centers on “climate engineering interventions” billed as protecting the Arctic from global warming. Attention is focussed on alarming activities, including stratospheric aerosol injection – where particle pollution is released high in the air to reflect sunlight and create a cooling effect – or ‘space mirrors’ to bounce the sun’s rays away from the Earth.
The Arctic is in dire need of protection, as are Antarctica and mountain glaciers. The current level of warming is not safe for the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. We will likely see days and weeks when Arctic sea ice disappears completely before 2050, or even by 2030. Glaciers around the world are set to lose about 40% of their ice compared to 2020, although twice as much ice can be saved by limiting warming to 1.5°C.
Ice loss in the Arctic and other icy regions affects us all, with serious widespread effects from sea-level rise, desertification, floods and wildfires.
But our research and that of our peers tells us that ‘climate engineering’ is not the way to protect the Earth’s coldest places from rapid heating. At their theoretical best, these projects might mask some warming. At worst, they bring new threats to us all, especially the most vulnerable.
Language like ‘Arctic repair’ or ‘climate restoration’ suggests these technologies could return the planet to a previous, ‘natural’ climate state. In reality, they would further distort our climate because they don’t address the core problem: heat-trapping gases from burning fossil fuels and other human activity. Even “engineering” implies a greater level of control over the Earth’s climate than these projects can hope for.
These interventions are as much a solution for climate change as sticking duct tape on a leaking water tank threatening to burst, while water keeps pouring in. Even if the tape somehow sticks temporarily, the threat itself keeps growing.
The scientists supporting these schemes represent a vanishingly small minority, akin to the climate skeptics of the early 1990’s. By comparison, over 500 researchers and 2000 organizations have signed a global non-use letter. And a recent debate in Westminster was triggered after 160,000 people signed a petition calling for these interventions to be made illegal.
The world has limited resources and now even less time to address root causes. The latest Indicators of Global Climate Change update warns that the remaining carbon budget for the 1.5°C target may be exhausted in three years. In this time of urgency, climate engineering is a dangerous distraction. It’s jarring to declare “it’s time to talk about solutions” and imply that these highly experimental and risk-laden technologies are equal to the real solutions scientists have been offering for decades.
An entire IPCC 2022 report provided an inventory of robust solutions, with fully costed and achievable timelines. The world-leading academics assembled by Exeter University prioritise fossil fuel phaseout and emissions reductions as our best chance of avoiding triggering tipping points. And even if climate engineering proponents agree deep decarbonisation is a priority, that does not prevent vested interests from exploiting the theoretical promise of this technology to delay the necessary phaseout of fossil fuels.
It is time to act on climate change solutions and move faster on delivering net zero. Over 250 scientists recently reaffirmed it in their open letter to the president of Brazil, asking him to “champion a fast, fair, effective, and full phaseout of fossil fuels” when hosting the next round of UN climate negotiations later this year.
Without that, no amount of duct tape can protect the Arctic and the world from the impacts of global warming.
About authors:
Dr Sian Henley is the Deputy Head of the Global Change Research Institute at the University of Edinburgh
Dr James Kirkham is the Ambition on Melting Ice Chief Science Advisor and Coordinator
Dr Twila Moon is the Deputy Lead Scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder, and former Lecturer at Bristol University
