Cutting human-driven greenhouse gas emissions is already proving tough in the North. Now, attention is turning to carbon within the land itself – an emissions problem that also needs solving and which could be hugely damaging.
Governments across Canada and the world have spent years trying to bring down the emissions we put out through our use of fossil fuels.
Yet targets are being missed and our world is still warming. As it does that, the likelihood increases that massive stores of carbon contained within our landscape will start to emerge into the air, making the overall problem worse.
Next week, scientists will gather in the Northwest Territories to talk about that.
Continue reading on Cabin Radio.
January 2025 was the warmest January on record, surpassing the previous record set by January 2024, according to satellite data from the EU’s Copernicus program. The findings were unexpected as ongoing La Niña conditions in the Pacific typically cool down global temperatures.
The global average surface air temperature for the month reached 1.75° Celsius (3.15° F) above pre-industrial levels. The most dramatic variation, up to 6°C (10.8°F), was concentrated in northern Canada, Russia and the Scandinavian countries.
The blast of cold that fueled record snowfall across Gulf Coast beaches last week was just the latest to transport frigid air that normally swirls above the North Pole to places much farther south — a phenomenon that researchers connect to a warming climate.
While scientists say that there is not evidence that extreme cold is becoming more frequent or intense, a growing body of research is finding that rising temperatures in the Arctic are weakening weather systems that normally trap the cold around the poles, making winter weather more chaotic. This shift is encouraging the erratic weather patterns high in the atmosphere that can cast chills even on regions with typically balmy climates, some research suggests, threatening to overwhelm communities not prepared for such frigid conditions.
Continue reading on The Washington Post.
Science columnist Torah Kachur says new research indicates the Canadian North is not as effective a carbon sink as once thought.
One of President Trump’s first actions this past week—and also in his first term—was to announce the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement. It is a step that is both misinformed and misguided. But how much difference will it make? Here’s what you need to know.
The Paris Agreement was adopted by 197 countries in December 2015 and has been the underpinning of international climate action for nearly a decade. The goals and strategies it sets out are critically important to maintaining a stable climate, which is the foundation of successful societies and economies. The Parties to the Paris Agreement are legally obliged to submit national climate plans, known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) every five years. However, the content and level of ambition of those NDCs are (as the framing “nationally determined” makes clear) up to the Party itself.
The Paris Agreement stipulates that any nation’s withdrawal takes effect one year after an official notice has been submitted to the Secretary-General of the United Nations. In the case of the United States, the earliest effective date of official withdrawal is, therefore, sometime in January 2026. After that, the country will not be bound by its obligations under the Paris Agreement. Those include the submission of NDCs every five years, accounting of progress toward commitments, the submission of biennial transparency reports, and the general obligation to provide climate finance. The United States will also lose, in particular, its right to vote on decisions within the governing body of the Paris Agreement, to nominate members to institutions serving the Paris Agreement, and to participate in emission trading under the Paris Agreement. However, as the United States submitted a new NDC and a biennial transparency report in December 2024, it is currently in compliance with the key obligations under the Paris Agreement.
The executive order of January 21, 2025 does not withdraw the US from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the 1992 treaty that established the international climate negotiation process. The language of the executive order indicates that this is deliberate—the US will retain its right to vote in the Conference of Parties, as well as its reporting obligations under the UNFCCC. This is possibly due to the fact that a withdrawal from the UNFCCC, a treaty ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1992, requires a two-thirds majority in the Senate. It is also notable that no action has been taken to withdraw the NDC submitted by the Biden Administration in December 2024.
The United States’ withdrawal makes maintaining—let alone enhancing—the ambition of emission reduction efforts across the world significantly more difficult. When a major emitter “free-rides,” it de-motivates ambition by others. However, although the U.S. has the second-highest GHG emissions in the world, and has always been a key player in global climate collaboration, it is important to bear in mind that 194 other countries representing approximately 90% of global emissions have not withdrawn from the Paris Agreement.
The executive order is targeted at stopping any U.S. climate finance contributions. This will mean that the new global climate finance goal of $1.3 trillion per year by 2030, agreed upon in Baku, has become much harder to achieve. This will impact the poorest countries directly, as well as degrading the international community’s trust in the effectiveness of the process.
President Trump also withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement during his first administration. Then, as now, one of the primary impacts was to create a leadership vacuum. In that case, that vacuum was largely filled by other nations, plus state, local, and business leaders. The resulting groundswell generated momentum that carried into the Biden Administration and the U.S. re-entry into the Paris Agreement. While much of that foundation remains strong, trends in the private sector have shifted, with a growing number of major corporations and financial institutions backing away from their climate commitments. Global geopolitics has also evolved, raising questions about what role other governments, in particular China, might play in reaction to the United States’ withdrawal from the international governance structures.
A third of the Arctic’s tundra, forests and wetlands have become a source of carbon emissions, a new study has found, as global heating ends thousands of years of carbon storage in parts of the frozen north.
For millennia, Arctic land ecosystems have acted as a deep-freeze for the planet’s carbon, holding vast amounts of potential emissions in the permafrost. But ecosystems in the region are increasingly becoming a contributor to global heating as they release more CO2 into the atmosphere with rising temperatures, a new study published in Nature Climate Change concluded.
After millennia as a carbon deep-freezer for the planet, regional hotspots and increasingly frequent wildfires in the northern latitudes have nearly canceled out that critical storage capacity in the permafrost region, according to a new study published in Nature Climate Change.
Read more on Permafrost Pathways.