Climate Is Taking On a Growing Role for Voters, Research Suggests

Concern about global warming is steady despite other crises, a survey found, and the number of voters who are deeply engaged on the issue is rising sharply.

By John Schwartz, The New York Times, Aug. 24, 2020

The number of Americans who feel passionately about climate change is rising sharply, and the issue appears likely to play a more important role in this year’s election than ever before, a new survey shows.

What’s more, despite the turmoil caused by overlapping national and global crises, support for action to curb climate change has not diminished. Backing for government to do more to deal with global warming, at 68 percent in May of 2018, was at the same level in 2020, according to the survey, issued Monday.

“People can walk and chew gum at the same time,” said Jon A. Krosnick, a professor of communication, political science and psychology at Stanford University and the leader of the project.

Many social scientists might have predicted a different result. A hypothesis in psychology called the “finite pool of worry” suggests that when people’s level of concern about one issue rises, concern about others tends to fall. Climate change, under such thinking, appeared to be a “luxury good” issue, the sort of thing that’s nice to have if you can afford it, but which gets pushed down the list of priorities in tough times.

The survey, the latest in a 23-year series, suggests that, instead, climate change has become important enough to Americans that it remains prominent despite the global coronavirus pandemic, with its rising death count in the United States, as well as the related national economic crisis, the pressures of self isolation brought on by the pandemic and a never-ending rush of other news.

The most striking part of the survey, Dr. Krosnick said, is the growth of a group he called the “issue public” around climate change.

An issue public is a community that feels an issue is extremely important to them personally. “They are the people who make things happen on the issue,” Dr. Krosnick said. That means, for example, making donations to lobbying groups, sending emails to lawmakers, attending rallies — and voting.

The issue public around climate change has grown tremendously over time, the survey suggests. In 2015, the group was 13 percent of the population. By 2020, it had nearly doubled to 25 percent.

Democratic candidates appear to be reaping the benefits of that shift. For instance, a wave of climate donors has flocked to former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. That’s a departure from 11 years ago, when some party leaders discouraged fund-raising based on climate change.

Dr. Krosnick said the issue public behind climate change, at 25 percent, was now the second-largest he has seen, trailing only the group focused on abortion, at 31 percent. By comparison, the group of American adults who are passionate about gun control generally hovers around 17 percent, and capital punishment weighs in at about 14 percent.

“I would never have predicted this 25 percent,” Dr. Krosnick said. He suggested that President Trump’s efforts to undermine climate science and government initiatives to deal with global warming could be behind the surge. “The Democrats just gained a significant number of people who are powerfully now inclined toward them on the issue,” Dr. Krosnick said. In an election that could, in battleground states, turn into a game of inches, the rise of a passionate community could make a difference, he said.

Of course, interest in an issue doesn’t necessarily translate into votes. That’s why environmental groups have been at the forefront of efforts to raise voter turnout and ensure the integrity of the election, said Myrna Pérez, director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU law school.

“Environmental groups are acutely aware of the fact that their agendas are not going to be accomplished if the vote is not free, fair and accessible,” Ms. Pérez said. “Reform generally is not going to happen unless our democracy is representative and robust and participatory — and the environmental groups are getting it.”

Dr. Krosnick’s survey supported the findings of an earlier one published in May by researchers at Yale University and George Mason University. In that project, 73 percent of those polled said that climate change was happening, which matches the highest level of acceptance previously measured by the survey, from 2019.

The new survey not only corroborates the earlier findings, but extends the period of polling through August as the compounding crises, along with the national tumult over racial injustice and the often-violent police response to demonstrations, dominated the news. What’s more, the results were remarkably consistent across all 10 weeks that the survey was conducted. Data was drawn from calls to 999 American adults, a process that started in May.

The survey was a joint project of Stanford, Resources for the Future, a Washington research group, and ReconMR, a survey research company.

Anthony Leiserowitz of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, which released the survey published in May, said the new polling showed that climate change was “not fading from people’s memories, it is not fading from their sense of importance just because other issues have arisen.”

A significant number of people have considered climate change, Dr. Leiserowitz said, and “pretty much made up their minds where they stand.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/24/climate/climate-change-survey-voters.html?smid=tw-nytclimate&smtyp=cur

Behavioral Contagion Could Spread the Benefits of a Carbon Tax

It’s not too late to fight climate change with a long-overdue policy that would have surprisingly broad impact, an economist says.

Op-ed by Robert H. Frank (Cornell University), The New York Times, August 19, 2020

The United States has been stalled in its approach to climate change, and with attention so heavily focused on the coronavirus pandemic, this may seem an inauspicious moment for action.

But the shock of the pandemic hasn’t merely upended people’s lives. It may also open doors to policy changes previously considered beyond reach. Economic analysis can help identify the most promising opportunities among them.

The economics of climate change is straightforward. Earth is warming both because greenhouse gases are costly to eliminate and because governments have permitted people to emit them into the atmosphere without penalty.

The classical remedy is a carbon tax, a fee on the carbon content of fossil fuels. Generally levied where fuels are extracted or imported, it discourages carbon emissions by making goods with larger carbon footprints more expensive. The World Bank reports that as of 2019, 57 local, regional and national governments have either enacted some form of carbon tax or plan to do so. When people must pay for their emissions, they quickly discover creative ways to reduce them.

Why, then, hasn’t the United States adopted a carbon tax? One hurdle is the fear that emissions would fall too slowly in response to a carbon tax, that more direct measures are needed. Another difficulty is that political leaders have reason to fear voter opposition to taxation of any kind. But there are persuasive rejoinders to both objections.

Regarding the first, critics are correct that a carbon tax alone won’t parry the climate threat. It is also true that as creatures of habit, humans tend to change their behavior only slowly, even in the face of significant financial incentives. But even small changes in behavior are greatly amplified by behavioral contagion — the social scientist’s term for how ideas and behaviors spread from person to person like infectious diseases. And if a carbon tax were to shift the behavior of some individuals now, those changes would quickly spread more widely.

]Smoking rates, for example, changed little in the short run even as cigarette taxes rose sharply, but that wasn’t the end of the story. The most powerful predictor of whether someone will smoke is the percentage of her friends who smoke. Most smokers stick with their habit in the face of higher taxes, but a small minority quit, and still others refrain from starting.

Every peer group that includes those people thus contains a smaller proportion of smokers, which influences still others to quit or refrain, and so on. This contagion process explains why the percentage of American adults who smoke has fallen by two-thirds since the mid-1960s.

Behavioral contagion would similarly amplify the effects of a carbon tax. By making solar power cheaper in comparison with fossil fuels, for example, the tax would initially encourage a small number of families to install solar panels on their rooftops. But as with cigarette taxes, it’s the indirect effects that really matter.

According to a 2012 study by the economists Bryan Bollinger and Kenneth Gillingham, a carbon tax that induced a family to install solar panels could be expected to stimulate a neighbor’s copycat installation within four months, on average. Let another four months pass, and each of these two will have spawned additional installations of their own, for a total of four.

At the end of just two years’ time, these figures suggest, the initial new installation will lead to 32 new installations. Contagion doesn’t stop there, either, since each of these families will have shared news about their projects with friends and family in other locations.

Behavioral contagion also has been shown to influence dietary choices. People often eat meat because they grew up with, and continue to live among, people for whom substantial meat consumption is the norm. Because meat has a large carbon footprint, a carbon tax would make it more expensive relative to plant-based foods.

The direct effect of this price change would be small. But as some people shifted the composition of their diets, others would find it easier to shift as well. In short order, these positive-feedback effects would produce more widespread shifts in eating habits. Behavioral contagion would similarly amplify initial responses to a carbon tax in virtually every other energy-intensive activity.

Even with such gains in prospect, many legislators remain unenthusiastic because they perceive a carbon tax as being unpopular with voters. Many families have been struggling to make ends meet, they might say, and the last thing they need is a stiff new tax on energy use. But this problem has a simple solution, which is to adopt what economists call a revenue-neutral design. Under one version, all revenue from the tax would be returned to consumers in the form of monthly rebate checks.

Because the wealthy consume much more energy than others, they would contribute a disproportionate share of the revenue from a carbon tax. The top 10 percent of all income recipients account for almost half of carbon emissions worldwide, an Oxfam International study has found.

Use patterns are less skewed in the United States, but here, too, the wealthy live in bigger houses, drive bigger cars and, at least when the pandemic isn’t raging, take many more trips to distant destinations. Even with equal rebates per capita, most people would get a monthly check for more than they’d paid that month in carbon taxes. Rebates could, of course, be distributed in a more progressive fashion.

Although low- and middle-income families would be net cash beneficiaries under this plan, the wealthy would pay more in tax each month than they would receive in rebates. Even so, prosperous voters would also come out ahead, on balance.

That’s both because they would benefit disproportionately from the resulting reductions in climate losses and because they would otherwise have to shoulder much of the tax burden of climate adaptation measures. In short, compelling evidence suggests that a carbon tax would improve life outcomes for rich and poor alike.

Had carbon taxes been widely adopted decades ago, the planet would not be facing a climate crisis today. Critics are correct that it is too late for this measure alone to defuse the climate threat. Having waited, it will now be necessary to spend trillions of additional dollars on green infrastructure and other mitigation measures.

But adopting a carbon tax even at this late date would greatly reduce both the cost of achieving climate stability and the time needed to achieve that goal.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/19/business/behavioral-contagion-carbon-tax.html?searchResultPosition=1

Is the carbon tax dead? Not yet, says this senator.

By Shannon Osaka, Grist, Aug. 10, 2020

For years, the idea of putting a price on carbon emissions seemed like a no-brainer — economists claimed that it would cut fossil fuel pollution quickly and efficiently, and at the same time, could even give money back to the American public. But lately the policy has fallen out of favor. Over the past few months, as Democrats have rolled out multiple comprehensive plans to slow down climate change and turbocharge renewable energy, the idea of a “carbon tax” has been notably absent.

One lawmaker doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo. On Friday, Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, introduced the “America’s Clean Future Fund Act,” which would set a steadily rising price on carbon dioxide emissions. The tax would start at $25 per metric ton of emissions (that’s the equivalent of about 22 cents extra per gallon of gasoline) and rise by $10 or more per year. Given the COVID-19 economic downturn, the bill suggests waiting to institute the price until “the U.S. economy is no longer in economic turmoil due to the current pandemic,” but no later than 2023.

According to an analysis by the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, a majority of the funds raised by the tax would be returned to low- and middle-income households in the form of rebates — the rest would be used to create a green bank for investments in clean energy, to finance carbon sequestration projects in farms and forests, and to provide support for laid-off fossil fuel workers and communities at risk of sea-level rise or extreme weather.

“This bill is one piece of a comprehensive solution required to combat and protect against climate change,” Durbin said in a statement.

Previous carbon tax proposals haven’t made it very far. According to the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, Durbin’s bill is the 10th carbon pricing bill proposed in Congress since 2018 — and four of them have had bipartisan sponsorship. Still, most Republicans haven’t shown much interest in climate legislation and, given the Republican-controlled Senate, none of these bills are likely to become law anytime soon. (In fact, the last viable attempt to pass a law with carbon pricing failed during the Obama Administration.)

Durbin’s bill stands in stark contrast to climate plans offered by former Vice President and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden as well as House Democrats. Biden’s plan, released last month, calls for $2 trillion in spending for clean energy initiatives and a transition to 100 percent clean electricity by 2035, but stops short of suggesting a carbon price. The House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, meanwhile, released a 538-page plan that devoted just two caveat-filled pages to a potential tax on emissions. “Carbon pricing is not a silver bullet,” they warned, adding that any potential tax must benefit low- and middle-income Americans.

The newly introduced plan satisfies that requirement — and indicates that the carbon tax isn’t dead yet on the political left. Durbin is the second highest-ranking Democrat in the Senate, which means that his plan could get an airing if Democrats manage to take control of Congress. And even though history hasn’t been kind to the carbon tax — attempts to pass one in Washington State failed twice, in 2016 and 2018 — the idea is still favored by a majority of Americans.

That includes a cadre of former Republican lawmakers and statesmen, who in 2018, launched an effort calling for a tax with 100-percent of its profits going to American taxpayers. The idea made it into legislation introduced in the House by two Florida representatives, one from each party.

As to whether future Democratic legislators will back a carbon price, or go whole hog on clean energy spending and regulations, it’s hard to say. And anyway, the party will first have to win in November.

https://grist.org/politics/is-the-carbon-tax-dead-not-yet-says-this-senator/

US could avoid 4.5M early deaths by fighting climate change, study finds

By Rebecca Beitsch, The Hill, August 5, 2020

The U.S. stands to avoid 4.5 million premature deaths if it works to keep global temperatures from rising by more than 2 degree Celsius, according to new research from Duke University.

The same study found working to limit climate change could prevent about 3.5 million hospitalizations and emergency room visits and approximately 300 million lost workdays in America.

“The avoided deaths are valued at more than $37 trillion. The avoided health care spending due to reduced hospitalizations and emergency room visits exceeds $37 billion, and the increased labor productivity is valued at more than $75 billion,” Drew Shindell, a professor at Duke University, told lawmakers Wednesday. 

“On average, this amounts to over $700 billion per year in benefits to the U.S. from improved health and labor alone, far more than the cost of the energy transition.”

Shindell, who conducted the study alongside researchers at NASA, unveiled the findings during a House Oversight Committee hearing on the economic and health consequences of climate change. 

The study aimed to show the benefits to the U.S. if the nation sticks with the goal of the Paris Climate Accord, which President Trump has formally moved to leave. The U.S. cannot officially exit the agreement until Nov. 4 — the day after the presidential election.

Shindell encouraged committee members to transition away from fossil fuels, a move that would help ease climate change while also spurring health benefits from reduced air pollution.

The benefits could be seen in the relatively short term.

“Roughly 1.4 million lives could be saved from improved air quality during the next 20 years. As we’ve seen with the coronavirus lockdowns in many places, air pollution responds immediately to emissions reductions,” he said. 

“Our work shows that action now means benefits now.”

Democrats have introduced a number of bills to combat climate change, but they’ve failed to get much traction.

The House passed a $1.5 trillion green infrastructure package in July, but the Republican-led Senate isn’t expected to take it up.

Just one day earlier, the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis unveiled its road map for solving the climate crisis.

Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) said lawmakers need to focus on tackling the problem despite the current coronavirus pandemic.

“Handling one crisis does not negate our responsibility to face another.

Global Methane Emissions Reach a Record High

Scientists expect emissions, driven by fossil fuels and agriculture, to continue rising rapidly.

By Hiroko Tabuchi, The New York Times, July 14, 2020

Global emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, soared to a record high in 2017, the most recent year for which worldwide data are available, researchers said Tuesday.

And they warned that the rise — driven by fossil fuel leaks and agriculture — would most certainly continue despite the economic slowdown from the coronavirus crisis, which is bad news for efforts to limit global warming and its grave effects.

The latest findings, published on Tuesday in two scientific journals, underscore how methane presents a growing threat, even as the world finds some success in reining in carbon dioxide emissions, the most abundant greenhouse gas and the main cause of global warning.

“There’s a hint that we might be able to reach peak carbon dioxide emissions very soon. But we don’t appear to be even close to peak methane,” said Rob Jackson, an earth scientist at Stanford University who heads the Global Carbon Project, which conducted the research. “It isn’t going down in agriculture, it isn’t going down with fossil fuel use.”

“There’s a hint that we might be able to reach peak carbon dioxide emissions very soon. But we don’t appear to be even close to peak methane,” said Rob Jackson, an earth scientist at Stanford University who heads the Global Carbon Project, which conducted the research. “It isn’t going down in agriculture, it isn’t going down with fossil fuel use.”

Scientists warn that if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise on the current trajectory, the world has little hope of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or even 2 degrees Celsius. If the world warms beyond that, tens of millions of people could be exposed to life-threatening heat waves, freshwater shortages and coastal flooding from sea level rise.

Methane, a colorless, odorless gas that is the main component of natural gas, is a powerful greenhouse gas that traps the sun’s heat, warming the earth 86 times as much as the same mass of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.

And while the coronavirus pandemic led to a large temporary dropin carbon dioxide emissions as much transportation and industry ground to a halt, there are signs methane emissions have not dropped nearly as much, Dr. Jackson said.

“We’re still producing food. We’re still producing natural gas,” he said. “If we continue to release methane as we have done in recent decades, we have no chance.”

Overall, global methane emissions are up 9 percent from the early 2000s, according to the latest findings, and human activity is responsible for more than half of those emissions. Raising livestock like cattle and sheep, which burp copious amounts of methane, is a major source of methane emissions, as is coal mining, which releases methane from deep within the rock.

Methane also leaks from oil and gas wells, pipelines, distribution lines and even the gas stoves in our homes, and from landfills. The rest comes from natural sources, like wetlands.

Of the anthropogenic emissions, agriculture makes up about two-thirds, while fossil fuels contribute most of the rest. The increase in emissions between 2000-17, though, came equally from agriculture, which rose nearly 11 percent from the 2000-06 average, and fossil fuels, which rose nearly 15 percent.

Methane emissions grew quickest in three regions: Africa and the Middle East; China; and South Asia and Oceania, including Australia. A surge in coal use caused methane emissions to jump in China, while population growth and rising incomes have led to more emissions elsewhere, the scientists said.

The United States has led a significant rise in methane emissions from North America. About 80 percent of the total increase for the region was driven by fossil fuels, underscoring the environmental fallout of America’s shale boom.

Curbing methane emissions will require better plugging leaks and other fugitive emissions from oil and gas infrastructure, like wells and pipelines, which are a major source of methane emissions, the scientists said. It will also require an overhaul of agriculture, especially cattle and rice farming, two large sources of methane emissions. 

A big question mark is the contribution of natural sources of methane emissions, like wetlands, mud volcanoes and permafrost. Natural methane emissions have been relatively unchanged from 2000-17, albeit with large uncertainties.

There are fears, for example, that thawing permafrost in the Arctic could start releasing large quantities of methane into the atmosphere, further accelerating climate change. For now, scientists have found little evidence of increasing methane emissions in the Arctic, though they warn that could change as warming intensifies. Scientists have warned that the Arctic region is warming at more than twice the rate of the rest of the planet.

“The key message is that methane concentrations and emissions are still rising, and we know the main cause,” said Marielle Saunois, a scientist at the Laboratory for Climate and Environmental Sciences in France, and a member of the research team. “This is not the right path.”

Rapid Arctic meltdown in Siberia alarms scientists

By Isabelle Khurshudyan, Andrew Freedman and Brady Dennis

The Washington Post, July 3, 2020

Alexander Deyev can still taste the smoke from last year’s wildfires that blanketed the towns near his home in southeastern Siberia, and he is dreading their return.

“It just felt like you couldn’t breathe at all,” said Deyev, 32, who lives in Irkutsk, a Siberian region along Lake Baikal, just north of the Mongolian border.

But already this year, fires in the spring arrived earlier and with more ferocity, government officials have said. In the territory where Deyev lives, fires were three times as large this April as the year before. And the hot, dry summer lies ahead.

Much of the world remains consumed with the deadly novel coronavirus. The United States, crippled by the pandemic, is in the throes of a divisive presidential campaign and protests over racial inequality. But at the top of the globe, the Arctic is enduring its own summer of discontent.

Wildfires are raging amid ­record-breaking temperatures. Permafrost is thawing, infrastructure is crumbling and sea ice is dramatically vanishing.

Radical warming in Siberia leaves millions on unstable ground

In Siberia and across much of the Arctic, profound changes are unfolding more rapidly than scientists anticipated only a few years ago. Shifts that once seemed decades away are happening now, with potentially global implications.

“We always expected the Arctic to change faster than the rest of the globe,” said Walt Meier, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “But I don’t think anyone expected the changes to happen as fast as we are seeing them happen.”

Vladimir Romanovsky, a researcher at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, said the pace, severity and extent of the changes are surprising even to many researchers who study the region for a living. Predictions for how quickly the Arctic would warm that once seemed extreme “underestimate what is going on in reality,” he said. The temperatures occurring in the High Arctic during the past 15 years were not predicted to occur for 70 more years, he said.

Neither Dallas nor Houston has hit 100 degrees yet this year, but in one of the coldest regions of the world, Siberia’s “Pole of Cold,” the mercury climbed to 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit (38 Celsius) on June 20.

If confirmed, the record-breaker in the remote Siberian town of Verkhoyansk, about 3,000 miles east of Moscow, would stand as the highest temperature in the Arctic since record-keeping began in 1885.

The triple-digit record was not a freak event, either, but instead part of a searing heat wave. Verkhoyansk saw 11 straight days with a high temperature of 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 Celsius) or above, according to Rick Thoman, a climate scientist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. The average June high at that location is just 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 Celsius).

This week, Ust’-Olenek, Russia, about 450 miles north of the Arctic Circle, recorded a temperature of 93.7 degrees (34.3 Celsius), about 40 degrees above average for the date. On May 22, the Siberian town of Khatanga, located well north of the Arctic Circle, recorded a temperature of 78 degrees Fahrenheit — about 46 degrees above normal.

Much of Siberia experienced an exceptionally mild winter, followed by a warmer-than- average spring, and it has been among the most unusually warm regions of the world during 2020. During May, parts of Siberia saw an average monthly temperature that was a staggering 18 degrees Fahrenheit (10 Celsius) above average for the month, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

“To me, these are kind of the key ingredients of things you expect in a warming climate,” Freja Vamborg, a senior scientist at Copernicus, said of the recent heat records, coupled with prolonged months of higher-than-average temperatures.

Dangerous new hot zones are spreading around the world

The persistent warmth has helped to fuel wildfires, eviscerate sea ice and destabilize homes and other buildings constructed on thawing permafrost. It allegedly even contributed to a massive fuel spill in Norilsk in late May that prompted Russian President Vladimir Putin to declare a state of emergency in the environmentally sensitive region.

Already, sea ice in the vicinity of Siberia is running at record-low levels for any year since reliable satellite monitoring began in 1979.

Scientists have long maintained that the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. But in reality, the region is now warming at nearly three times the global average. Data from NASA shows that since 1970, the Arctic has warmed by an average of 5.3 degrees (2.94 Celsius), compared with the global average of 1.71 degrees (0.95 Celsius) during the same period. Scientists refer to the phenomenon as “Arctic amplification.”

The melting of snow and ice earlier in the spring exposes darker land surfaces and ocean waters. This switches these areas from being net reflectors of incoming solar radiation to heat absorbers, which further increases land and sea temperatures. That means more warmth in the air, more melting of snow and ice, and drying of vegetation in a way that creates more fuel for wildfires.

What happens in the Arctic matters for the rest of the globe. Greenland ice melt is already the biggest contributor to sea-level rise worldwide, studies show. The loss of Arctic sea ice is also thought to be leading to more-
extreme weather patterns far outside the Arctic, in a complex series of ripple effects that may be partly responsible for extreme heat and precipitation events that have claimed thousands of lives in recent years.

The fires that have erupted in Siberia this summer have been massive, sending out plumes of smoke that have covered a swath of land spanning about 1,000 miles at times. While much of the fire activity has occurred in the Sakha Republic, known for such blazes, scientists are observing more fires farther north, above the Arctic Circle, in peatlands and tundra.

“This seems to be a new pattern,” said Jessica McCarty, a researcher at Miami University in Ohio. In past years, fires “were sparse if not unheard of in these regions.”

One concern is that such fires could be destabilizing peatlands and permafrost — the carbon-rich frozen soil that covers nearly a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere’s land mass, stretching across large parts of Alaska, Canada, Siberia and Greenland.

Merritt Turetsky, director of the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said fires in Siberia are burning “in areas where we expect permafrost to be more vulnerable.” Typically, these fires would break out in July and August, but this year they spiked in May, a sign of the unusual heat and early snow melt.

Turetsky said the fires are removing the blanket of vegetation that covers permafrost, making it more vulnerable to melting.

Satellite observations of Arctic wildfires in June also showed that fires this year are emitting more greenhouse gases than the record Arctic fires in 2019, according to Mark Parrington, who tracks wildfires around the world with the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service.

Some of these blazes appear to be what are known as “zombie fires,” which survive the winter season smoldering underground only to erupt again once snow and ice melts the following spring. Similar fires have been observed in Alaska this summer.

Ted Schuur, a professor at Northern Arizona University who researches permafrost emissions, said the rapid warming is turning the Arctic into a net emitter of greenhouse gases — a disconcerting shift that threatens to dramatically hasten global warming. The unusually mild conditions in Siberia are particularly worrisome, as the region is home to the largest zone of continuous permafrost in the world.

There has long been concern throughout the scientific community that the approximately 1,460 billion to 1,600 billion metric tons of organic carbon stored in frozen Arctic soils, from Russia to Alaska to Canada, could be released as the permafrost melts. That is almost twice the amount of greenhouse gases trapped in the atmosphere. Recent research by Schuur and others shows that warmer temperatures allow microbes within the soil to convert permafrost carbon into carbon dioxide and methane.

A report late last year that Schuur co-authored found that permafrost ecosystems could be releasing as much as 1.1 billion to 2.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year — nearly as much as the annual emissions of Japan and Russia in 2018, respectively.

“A decade ago we thought more of the permafrost would be resistant to change,” said Schuur. The more scientists look for destabilizing permafrost and an increase in greenhouse gas emissions, the more they find such evidence.

Rapid warming has altered their calculations. “We’re basically setting records in the Arctic year after year,” Schuur said. “These emissions are now adding to our climate change problem. What happens in Siberia is going to affect everything through the global climate system.”

Researchers have watched as the changes sweeping the Arctic threaten major infrastructure, including homes and cities in the region.

“Will roads, buildings, oil and gas pipelines be able to survive without emergency [interventions], due to permafrost degradation?” Alexander Fedorov, deputy director of the Melnikov Permafrost Institute in the regional capital of Yakutsk, said in an email. “One must live on stable lands. In Siberia and the Arctic, many settlements and infrastructure were built before global warming, before there were problems. The main thing is not to be late with the solutions, because many villages are located in dangerous and vulnerable areas.”

For all the disconcerting signals coming out of the Arctic right now, the potential for troubling events remains high in the coming months, Meier said.

Sea ice typically reaches its minimum in September, he noted. Ice melt accelerates in Greenland during June and July. Wildfires have the potential to worsen as summer drags on. Intense summer storms can cause permafrost degradation and worsen coastal erosion.

“Certainly, 2020 is a strange year all around, for a lot of reasons beyond climate,” Meier said. “But it’s certainly setting up to be an extreme year in the Arctic.”

That might seem like a distant problem to the rest of the world. But those who study the Arctic insist the rest of us should pay close attention.

“When we develop a fever, it’s a sign. It’s a warning sign that something is wrong and we stop and we take note,” Turetsky said. “Literally, the Arctic is on fire. It has a fever right now, and so it’s a good warning sign that we need to stop, take note and figure out what’s going on.”

To see photos: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/rapid-arctic-meltdown-in-siberia-alarms-scientists/2020/07/03/4c1bd6a6-bbaa-11ea-bdaf-a129f921026f_story.html