Recent studies have shown that the Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet – which is already warming faster than experts would like to see. Now, war is making it harder for scientists to prepare us for what’s coming.
“The Russian invasion of Ukraine hampers the ability to adequately describe conditions across the Arctic, thus biasing the view on Arctic change,” said a study published Monday in the Nature Climate Change journal.
According to an earlier study published in the Communications Earth & Environment journal, the accelerated warming in the arctic is known as arctic amplification.
Authors of the study cited several observational datasets which cover the Arctic region for more than four decades.
TIME reported Monday that “it is increasingly clear that the rise in global temperature will exceed,” the global threshold of 2.7 degrees as outlined in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement by the 2030s. It also said the COP28 meeting in Dubai late last year provided some glimmers of hope, but not enough to quell concerns.
“The window of opportunity to forestall this event is about to close, as significant barriers including lack of financing and institutional capacity, and to say nothing of poverty, consumption, and lack of societal trust,” said the outlet.
Washington Post “Climate Coach” columnist Michael J. Coren even published a piece Tuesday that called for a “Green Sabbath” or a weekly day of rest from technology in order to mitigate climate change. FEMA also announced new disaster assistance measures Monday, citing “the increase of extreme weather events fueled by climate change.”
Now the new research about the impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine makes the climate situation seem even more dire. It explained that Russia has been excluded from international research since President Vladimir Putin called for an invasion of Ukraine.
“Russia is geographically the largest Arctic nation and is, hence, also one of eight nations within the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental forum for coordinated activities across the Arctic countries (https://arctic-council.org/),” said the study. “However, following the invasion of Ukraine, the work of the Arctic Council was first put on hold, and as currently resumed, it is only in part and without Russia.”
Siberia is one of the regions underrepresented, the researchers said.
This comes at a time when the Arctic is rapidly changing, they added. These ongoing changes are expected to have global consequences and in-person data collection is still needed to understand just what those consequences could be.
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Just this week, The Guardian reported that Siberian permafrost presents “a bizarre new pandemic threat,” in the form of ancient viruses that are now frozen but could be released as warming continues. They’re known as Methuselah microbes, or zombie viruses
“At the moment, analyses of pandemic threats focus on diseases that might emerge in southern regions and then spread north,” said geneticist Jean-Michel Claverie of Aix-Marseille University, according to The Guardian. “By contrast, little attention has been given to an outbreak that might emerge in the far north and then travel south – and that is an oversight, I believe. There are viruses up there that have the potential to infect humans and start a new disease outbreak.”
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