De-Icing the Facts on Climate Change: The High Costs of Arctic Melting
There is much talk these days about the missteps of climate change prognosticators (note to report writers, fact checkers and copyeditors are well worth the investment), but a Pew report released last week seeks to pour warm water on the newly emboldened doubters: a melting Arctic could cost $2.4 trillion by 2050.
The Pew Charitable Trusts Environment Group said the report — with a dateline of Iqaluit, Nanavut, Canada — for the first time quantifies the global cost of an Arctic that’s increasingly unable to adequately cool the climate.
Using a complicated figure to calculate the dollar estimates, researchers conclude that this region is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the earth. It could be what authors say is essentially a “feedback loop” caused by the loss of heat-reflecting sea ice and snow, which leads to more warming, more melting, and so on.
“Putting a dollar figure on the Arctic’s climate services allows us to better understand both the region’s immense importance and the enormous price we will pay if the ice is lost,” Dr. Eban Goodstein, co-author of the report, said in a statement. He’s an economist who directs the Bard Center for Environmental Policy at Bard College in New York. “At the mid-range of our estimates,” he said, “the cumulative cost of the melting Arctic in the next 40 years is equivalent to the annual gross domestic products of Germany, Russia and the United Kingdom combined.”