Surviving the 21st Century - Julian Cribb
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Having just achieved the hottest three years in recorded history, humans are well on the way to returning the planet to the ice-free state it experienced when dinosaurs last ruled.
The result will be flooding on a Biblical scale, the progressive loss of most of the world’s great cities and coastlines, storms of appalling ferocity, vast dumps of rain and almost continual heatwaves in the most populated regions. Great rivers will empty, deserts will sprawl, wildfires, famine and drought will prevail. Extinctions will multiply and sea life suffer a major die off.
These are the conditions that science now agrees will accompany the loss of the Earth’s ice, that humans have now wilfully set in train.
“Global ice losses will likely continue with ongoing climate warming, culminating in an almost ice-free planet analogous to that which persisted throughout much of the Cretaceous,” an international team of scientists working for the Tibetan Laboratory of the China Academy of Sciences has warned.
“Given ongoing and anticipated global warming, reductions in Arctic and Antarctic ice are expected to continue, potentially leading to completely ice-free polar regions. Despite uncertainties in these predictions, we transition from a world with perennial glacier ice to one with only seasonal ice or shifting from a predominantly white winter planet to a blue one,” they added.
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| Loss of Arctic sea ice 2000-23. |
Indeed, the first ‘blue water event’ – an ice-free Arctic Ocean in summer – is predicted to occur as early as 2027, and almost certainly before 2030. Not only will the northern ice cap disperse, albeit briefly, but the loss of the reflective surface of the ice (albedo) and appearance of more dark ocean will significantly accelerate the Earth’s uptake of heat from the sun, pushing global heating into overdrive.
The last time the Earth was ice free was around 60 million years ago, shortly after the dinosaurs made their exit. At that time, scientists have found, a few embryonic glaciers appeared in the high mountains of the Antarctic. The rest of the planet was ice-free.
The 2025 State of the Cryosphere Report warns of “disaster for billions” resulting from human failure to control global heating, and the resulting universal loss of ice. “The European Alps, Scandinavia, North American Rockies and Iceland would lose at least half their ice at or below sustained global temperatures of +1°C, and nearly all ice at +2°C,” it states.
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| Global heating is already well beyond the tipping point for loss of the world’s glaciers |
Both polar ice caps are melting much faster than previously anticipated. The Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet, and the loss of its sea ice is accelerating the process. In the Antarctic, mighty glaciers such as the Thwaites, are proving more fragile and prone to collapse than their sheer mass suggests: this one ice river alone could discharge 50 billion tonnes of meltwater into the ocean, raising sea levels by 1.5-2 metres.
Meanwhile global warming in equatorial regions is driving vast undersea currents, like heated hose pipes, to dissolve the polar ice sheets. In the north the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) has lost over 5000 square kilometres of ice weighing a billion tonnes, since the mid-1980s. Every one of its glaciers has either thinned or retreated.
Using the Prudhoe Dome, in northern Greenland, as a thermostat, glaciologists have calculated that the last time it was ice-free was in the warm spell immediately following the end of the last ice age, about 7000 years ago. At that time local temperatures were up by +3-5 degrees – a level again likely to be reached by 2100. This points to the north of Greenland being ice-free again by the end of the century, pushing sea levels up by 7-8 metres on its own.
Worldwide, glaciers are providing science with an accurate, undeniable, measure of the extent and speed of global warming.
The latest global assessment finds they have been losing around 275 billion tonnes of ice every year since 2000. The rate of ice loss has increased by around 36 billion tonnes a year between the first and second decades of the current century.
Thousands of glaciers have already vanished. Around 750 more disappear each year. Local communities have held funeral ceremonies for their dying ice sheets.
Those who wish to observe the destruction can do so on the Global Glacier Casualty List. The 11 regions with the highest annual glacier melt rates between 2000-2023, measured in billion of tons per year, are:
- Alaska: 60.8.
- Greenland: 35.1.
- Arctic Northern Canada: 30.5.
- Southern Andes/region: 26.5.
- Southern Canadian Arctic: 23.1.
- Antarctica and sub-Antarctic islands: 16.9.
- Russian Arctic: 16.1.
- Svalbard and Jan Mayen, Norway: 13.7.
- Central Asia: 10.4.
- Western Canada and USA: 9.0.
- Iceland: 8.3.
Europe’s Alpine regions are due to reach ‘peak loss’ of their glaciers in the next eight years. In North America peak loss will occur in the 2040s.
Current climate action plans will, at best, restrain global warming to +2.7 degrees in 2100, at which temperature around 80% of the world’s glaciers will be gone. Under ‘business as usual’ greenhouse emissions, the glacial deathrate will be almost total.
Many societies, in their blinkered and self-centred ways, are indifferent to the loss of polar and glacial ice, its environment, birds and animals, However, what happens at the poles does not stay at the poles: every human will be affected.
Ice is the Earth’s air conditioner. When it shuts down, the planet faces relentless, baking heat on a scale that human engineering cannot overcome. As daily wet-bulb[i] thermometers creep past +32, humans and other large animals will die like flies.
Without its cooling influence, local climates will become more violent and acute. Whole ecosystems will die together with most of their plants and animals. Human food and water systems will collapse, taking economies and governments with them. Wars will break out and refugee movements become tidal. The world’s coastal cities will be flooded to the third storey of their skyscrapers.
That is the future now decreed by countries such as the US, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Brazil and, to a lesser degree, by China and India, thorough their pro-fossil energy policies.
The de-icing of planet Earth is a fatal human choice – to which there are alternatives, but from which, it seems, we are loath to turn aside.
Note
[i] Wet bulb temperatures are a combination of air temperature, humidity, radiant heat and air movement (eg wind). Humans reach their limit at body temperature and begin to cook.
Julian Cribb Articles
- Rivers of Death
- Unlike politicians, thermometers do not lie
- Welcome to BunkerWorld: Home of the rich and fearful
- Wisdom of the elders
- The black work of Big Oil
- Stealing the Breath of Life
- The Earth Uncloaked - a catastrophe in slow motion
- Australia issues ‘terrifying’ climate warning
- Military experts warn of climate wars
- Tackling the Earth Emergency
- A distracted world marches steadily towards catastrophe
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