Act fast to slow melting of polar ice, warns Gore
“We have to act and we have to act quickly because we don’t want to cross this tipping point,” the Nobel peace laureate and former US vice-president told a meeting of foreign ministers, experts and scientists from the most affected countries.
The meeting was held the day before a meeting of the Arctic Council of foreign ministers. The council members are the US, Russia, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Norway.
Dorthe Dahl Jensen, an expert from Denmark’s Niels Bohr Institute, told the conference in the Arctic town of Tromsoe that the need for a wake-up call was genuine for the polar and glacial regions.
“Antarctica and Greenland have been sleeping until now,” she said.
“Now they are awakening giants.”
She said if Greenland’s ice sheet melted, sea levels would rise 7m. If Antarctica melted, the rise would be up to 70m, she said.
Gore, who shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his campaign to draw attention to global warming, said there was a danger of permafrost melting.
He said that would thaw vast amounts of organic matter that micro-organisms would turn into climate-damaging methane gas, doubling current levels of climate gases.
“As difficult as this challenge is to solve now, it would be twice as difficult if you waited until this (permafrost) thawed,” he said.
Gore said carbon dioxide and methane remained the greatest challenges, but that another pollutant, black carbon — or soot — from diesel engines and fires was also a threat.
It blackens snow and ice, trapping heat and accelerating the melt.
However, Norwegian foreign minister Jonas Gahr Stoere, who co-hosted the meeting with Gore, said soot could be reduced quickly and regionally.
Stoere said the Tromsoe meetings were setting up a task force to draft a report on the melting of ice globally to the UN climate change conference in Co-penhagen in December.
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