John’s Blog/Newsletter: SEA LEVEL RISE NOW

The Arctic Heats Up More Ways Than One

Graphic Courtesy Maite Humpert / The Arctic Institute

On Saturday, Russia fired a nuclear-capable missile from the North Pole

The Arctic was heating up enough, but a new element was added on Saturday, August 24th. According to Forbes.com the Russians launched a missile capable of carrying a nuclear weapon, from a submarine at the North Pole (in the red target crosshairs).

Of course the Arctic was already heating up from climate change, at double or triple the average global warming rate. That’s the force melting the ice, both the frozen sea ice and the ice on land. It’s the latter that matters for sea level rise.

Then there was the diplomatic ‘heat up’ ten days ago with the story that President Trump wanted to buy the nation of Greenland from the Kingdom of Denmark which was immediately rejected by both governments. Almost certainly his interest included natural resources, particularly the rare earth minerals – something we need for modern electronics. Perhaps even more importantly, it was a way to counter the growing Chinese interest in Greenland. But for now, the controversy has just raised diplomatic heat.

Now with the missile launch, there’s a third “heating up.” As you can see on the map above, Russia is one of five nations whose sovereign lines meet at the North Pole – Canada, The United States, Norway, and Greenland (part of the Danish Kingdom) being the others. Finland, Iceland, and Sweden are the other three Arctic nations, defined as having territory within the Arctic Circle.

Over the last few years, Russia has taken the stance that it has exclusive claim to the North Pole. The claim is based on ambiguous issues about water depths (bathymetry) that connect a relatively shallow underwater area around the geographic north pole to their territory. As reported in a NY Times article in August 2007, they planted an underwater “flag” on the seabed at the North Pole as part of that territorial claim. Those rules establishing territorial limits come from the UN Convention on Law of the Sea, which is further complicated since the US still has not signed it, for going on four decades due to an inane stance by four Senators, but that’s a topic for another day. With the missile launch there is little doubt that Russia wants to redraw the territorial boundaries of the Arctic. That is a huge problem.

Overall the Arctic presents a very “high-stakes game” of strategy, which I recently wrote about here, China and U.S. Vie for Greater Greenland Presence. All eight Arctic nations will be involved. China (and Korea) are not legally involved, but have a major stake for global strategic reasons. For one, shipping traffic will continue to increase on the shorter northern route, as the Arctic Ocean continues to thaw.

But almost every nation now has an interest in the “high Arctic” due to implications for the global supply chain, the dramatic changes to world weather as the Arctic thaws, and now the potential hostile actions as Russia tries to change the map and China looks for a way to assert itself in the hot spot of the 21st Century.

This drama could heat up quickly. I will be there with a group in just two weeks and will report back with any new insights.

By John Englander August 27, 2019 Sea Level Rise

1 Comment

M. Makuye

- 5 years ago Reply

International shipping drives production. The EU, for example imports SE US wood (pellitized), continuing colonization.
Brazil and elsewhere increasingly produce both soy and cattle for exterior markets.
These practices – whether or not involving the toxic byproducts of mining, and deforestation or other disruptions of carbon sequestration, are all extractive – colonization.

I don’t refer to the process as it concerns anthropocentric intraspecies “injustices”, but as continued active momentum toward high ghg emission.

Movement of cities and human/domestic populations and habitat sequestration and eradication is a dangerous ecologically disruptive proposal, even if “inevitable.”

Modeling is showing that Amazonia’s ecological conversion has a high likelihood of reducing precipitation east of North American Rockies, where the cascading use of agriculture to drive human economic systems is another analogue of mining.
The problem is, of course, increased desertification.
Low albedo from forests is less associated with warming than with autotrophs absorbing wavelenghts for that sequestration, rather than reradiation trapped by a more IR-opaque atmosphere.

Considerable loss of antarctic ice will occur, and previous shutdown of North Atlantic oceanic circulation has considerable evidence.
I’d suspect that consequent retention of both more stable high pressure areas, and the obvious increased atmospheric mixing (equinoctial storms, etc) will reconfigure precipitation into different, more stable areas. A higher proportion of human sedentary cultures will either increase the resource/domestication colonization, or disperse into newly wetter systems.
Presumption that societies will remain stable is unwarranted.
In Gore’s famous phrasing, “saving our way of life”, is unlikely – although futile efforts such as I’ve outlined for prospective economists here, will be made.

While medicine and industrial change caused inordinate overbloom of human populations (understand that SARS, bird flus, MERS CoV, and other emergences [this is spelled correctly] would have taken China’s population and dense areas in many places on many continents, were it not for sociomedical strategies), they show that maximum functional human densities had already been reached, and that the temporary ecological release of medicine and industry have already occurred.

Genetic and molecular manipulations (with which I have a little familiarity, as the bases through which they work have to do with my interests), when done in the service of a singe large species , we can be assured, are disruptive as well, and are not selected for adaptive value – that requires organisms such as viruses and microorganisms with far greater influences than we can exert.