[LINK] "Santa's Home Is Melting. Will We Ever Bring It Back?"

[rfmcdonald]

National Geographic's Tim Folger considers whether geoengineering could bring the Arctic icecap back.

Vast and white, easily visible from space, Earth’s Arctic ice cap seems such a permanent fixture—a frozen country at the top of the world—that the idea that it could ever vanish almost defies comprehension. But by the middle of the century most of it will in fact vanish, thanks to our burning of fossil fuels. The North Pole and most of the ocean around it will be free of sea ice in summer for the first time in thousands of years.

Will we ever bring the ice back?

That’s the question a team of researchers from Columbia University pondered in a presentation last week at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. It’s not as academic as it sounds. Most climate models suggest that our efforts to limit carbon dioxide emissions—starting with the steps agreed to in Paris on December 12—will not be enough to keep Earth from warming more than 2 degrees Celsius. To prevent even worse impacts than the loss of Arctic ice, by late in this century we’ll have to not only shut down emissions, but find a way to clean up massive amounts of carbon dioxide that we’ve already put in the atmosphere.

That technology, once developed, would give us the ability to cool the planet—which would put the future of the Arctic in play again. “The basic message,” says oceanographer Stephanie Pfirman of Columbia, “is that we will be able to bring the ice back as long as we bring the [planet’s] temperature down.”