Arctic Thaw Would Cost Half of World's Annual Earnings

If Arctic soils melt and release frozen carbon, the impact would cost almost half the world’s annual gross domestic product, researchers say.

The melting permafrost in the Arctic could cost the world dearly.  New research calculates that the economic damage that would flow from loss of permafrost and the increased emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) would add up to US$43 trillion. 

This is very nearly the estimated combined gross domestic product last year of the US, China, Japan, Germany, the UK, France, and Brazil.

And, British and US scientists say, this would be in addition to at least $300 tn of economic damage linked to other consequences of climate change.

The attempt to put a cumulative economic value on natural changes in climate that have yet to happen is part of the bid to get governments to take climate change seriously.  In the latest attempt to cost the impact of rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, and the continuous rise in global average temperatures, all as a consequence of fossil fuel combustion and other human action, the economist Chris Hope of the University of Cambridge and the polar expert Kevin Schaefer of the University of Colorado have turned their sights on the Arctic.

The Arctic is the fastest-warming region of the planet.  It was once much warmer, and its now-frozen soils are home to huge quantities of vegetation that never had a chance to decompose.

Increased risk
The two scientists report in Nature Climate Change that if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise as they are doing now, the thaw of the permafrost and the loss of the ice caps could release 1,700 billion metric tons of carbon now locked in as frozen organic matter.

What would follow would include a higher chance of catastrophic floods, wind storms, heat waves and drought, the accelerated melting of the Greenland (and West Antarctic) ice sheets, rising sea levels, the loss of agricultural land and rising energy demand as more and more people began to depend on air conditioning.

Read more at Arctic Thaw Would Cost Half of World's Annual Earnings