Brave New Arctic

Subtitled 'the untold story of the melting north', I was curious to see if the work of Peter Wadhams on this topic reviewed last summer was featured – it was not. I sent the author an enquiry, and he had evidently not seen this book, which covers much of the same ground – hence the story has in fact been told. However, this does not make the book any less interesting as it tells the story of the author's career as a climatologist focusing on the Arctic since the early 1980s. A fundamental question is the extent to which change can be accounted for by natural variability, which gives rise to fundamental disagreements in interpreting the data: connections and feedbacks are complex and open to a variety of interpretations. The author gives a candid account of how he was gradually persuaded of anthropogenic global warming in the Arctic and develops his theory of the Arctic death spiral on the basis that a radical transformation is underway: surface temperatures over the Arctic as a whole are rising twice as quickly compared with the rest of the globe.

Serreze gives a lucid explanation of the role of the North Atlantic Oscillation and its relationship to the Arctic Oscillation in terms of air flows, eventually concluding that these effects were superimposed on more general warming expressed as Arctic amplification, as predicted by climate models. His illustrations and charts document the disappearance of ice both at the pole and in glaciers. The warming effects can also be seen in terms of shrub cover and the increased prevalence of rain on ice leading to widespread deaths among migrating deer. By the end of 2012, the human fingerprint in the Arctic had become clear beyond all the other factors, although the picture is still very complex. Looking ahead, the author concludes that the Arctic Ocean will become free of ice in late summer – the only question is when (feedback loops make this less predictable). At this point one might have expected him to recommend a more activist stance, but he remains the cautious scientist eager to discover more while emphasising the importance of his research area. In this respect, Wadhams is much more radical, recommending immediate mitigating action as described in his article in Issue 124.