Melting icebergs and Arctive tundra is releasing troubling amounts of climate-warming emissions.

Arctic Tundra Shifts to Source of Climate Pollution
Marianne Lavelle / Inside Climate News

WASHINGTON (December 11, 2024) —The icy region at the top of the globe, lashed by wildfire and pelted with increasingly heavy precipitation, has tipped into “uncharted territory,” scientists reported Tuesday.

The Arctic tundra has shifted from storing carbon in the soil to becoming a carbon dioxide source, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and its partner researchers concluded in their 19th annual Arctic Report Card.

As a result, the Arctic’s ability to help regulate Earth’s temperature is significantly compromised. Emissions from warming permafrost regions must be thought of as an increasing risk to a planet already being transformed by the overburden of fossil fuel pollution.

“This year’s report paints a clear and urgent picture of the Arctic’s evolving conditions,” said NOAA Administrator Richard Spinrad. “We are seeing impacts of warming in real time in the Arctic, and it’s a call to action.”

The final Arctic Report Card of President Joe Biden’s term injects uncertainty into the climate picture at the same time that NOAA and other U.S. science agencies head into an unknown future. President-elect Donald Trump, who does not view climate change as a serious threat, has pledged to slash the size of the federal government. His choice for budget director helped craft a roadmap, known as Project 2025, that describes NOAA as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry” and calls for the agency to be broken up, with most of its climate research ended.

Congress will have the final say on whether that vision is realized. So it was especially striking that NOAA delivered its big Arctic report at the 24th annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), held this year in the nation’s capital. The largest yearly gathering of Earth and space scientists, with more than 25,000 attendees from 100 countries, took place at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. Banners around the building heralded AGU24’s meeting theme and announced the question looming over the conference: What’s Next for Science.

Globral warming is driving polar bears to extinction.

A “New Normal” That Won’t Last
The Arctic Report Card contained a litany of records and near-records, as has become routine for the report. Surface air temperatures: second-warmest since 1900. Summer 2024: wettest ever in the Arctic. Sea ice extent: sixth-lowest on record. Tundra greenness: second-highest in the 25-year record of satellite observations. Shortest snow season on record.

But more important than any single record, the scientists wrote, was a shift into a phase that would be described as a new normal—although they do not expect it to last.

“The Arctic today looks really different than the Arctic of a couple of decades ago,” said Twila Moon, deputy lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, who served as the report card’s lead editor. “But because we understand climate change, and we know that we’re continuing to put heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, we haven’t gotten to something that is a ‘new normal.’ We’re not going to stabilize at what we’ve termed here as a kind of a ‘new regime’ for the Arctic. It’s going to continue to see rapid change and really new conditions into the future.”

One of the most dramatic changes documented in this year’s report was the shift of the tundra from carbon sink to carbon source. For millennia, the tundra has stored more carbon than it has released. And because warming stimulates plant productivity and growth, the uptake of carbon in the region has increased. But that uptake has been overwhelmed by the release of carbon, especially from wildfires.

Circumpolar wildfire emissions have averaged 207 million tons of carbon per year since 2003, the report said. That’s equivalent to the emissions of 200 coal power plants. So even when balanced against the impact of the increased greening of the tundra, the net effect is that the treeless region has been a sustained carbon source on average over the past 20 years.

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