Even capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius in line with the Paris climate treaty will not prevent the north pole's vast expanse of floating ice from melting away in September, they reported in Nature Communications. NASA handout photo obtained by Reuters
"It is too late to still protect the Arctic summer sea ice as a landscape and as a habitat," co-author Dirk Notz, a professor at the University of Hamburg's Institute of Oceanography, told AFP. "It can accelerate global warming by melting permafrost laden with greenhouse gases, and sea level rise by melting the Greenland ice sheet," lead author Seung-Ki Min, a researcher at Pohang University of Science and Technology in South Korea, told AFP.By contrast, melting sea ice has no discernible impact on sea levels because the ice is already in ocean water, like ice cubes in a glass.About 90 percent of the Sun's energy that hits white sea ice is reflected back into space.
An ice-free September in the 2030s "is a decade faster than in recent projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ", the UN's science advisory body, said Min. Min and his colleagues also calculated that human activity was responsible for up to 90 percent of the ice cap's shrinking, with only minor impacts from natural factors such as solar and volcanic activity.