Global warming: what if it was too late?

The scientific news we get from the polar regions has not been very good for some time now. The North Pole can be considered as the barometer of the climatic state of our earth. It provides valuable insight into how rising global temperatures are actually affecting the ecosystem.

The latest data collected will be no exception. Quite the contrary. Instead of bringing a note of hope, they come to confirm a trend now deeply entrenched and which could well be worse than expected.

In any case, this is what atmospheric physicist and head of the MOSAIC expedition, Markus Rex, affirms in the light of the results obtained during the largest scientific mission in the polar region to date. The sea ice is melting and it is melting faster and faster in worrying proportions. We have known this for a while. What we knew a little less, however, is that it is less and less able to replenish itself due to too hot temperatures. It therefore becomes very difficult to protect it. The scope of this study was very broad and covered many areas such as the atmosphere, the ocean, the ice floes and ecosystems among others in order to assess as precisely and rigorously as possible the level of threat that weighs on our heads.

Based on the conclusions of this international study carried out over a year in the Arctic, Markus Rex asks a very simple question: is it too late? To this question, he answered yesterday, Tuesday June 15, 2021 during a press conference in Berlin and in the presence of the German Minister of Education and Research, Anja Karliczek,: “Only the evaluation of the next years will determine whether we can still save the Arctic sea ice present year-round through consistent climate protection, or whether we have already passed this important tipping point in the climate system ” . Employing war vocabulary to evoke the possibility that we have gone too far and crossed the red line from which it will no longer be possible for us to go back, he states this: "The disappearance of the summer sea ice in the Arctic is one of the first mines in the minefield, one of the first tipping points we trigger when we push warming too far. One can really wonder if we have not already walked on this mine and already triggered the start of the explosion ” . To continue in the warrior imagery, like any large-scale explosion, the damage is significant and crossing the limit will only accelerate the process. We could then witness the "disappearance of the Greenland ice sheet or the thawing of ever larger areas of the Arctic permafrost" . Markus Rex was also alarmed by the state of the ancient glaciers, adding: "Today we also do not know if we can save the barrier reef".

So many signs that show that the sanction should not be long in coming any longer and the hope of an armistice is rapidly receding.