This year, Las Vegas, Nevada broke its all-time heat record, reaching 120° F.

The temperature was recorded at Harry Reid International Airport on July 7, 2024. That week, between July 6 and July 12, was the new hottest 7-day period on record, with an average high temperature of 117.5° F.

This is the daily reality for Vegas residents in the summer. Record-breaking temperatures are hard to bear, but so were all the hot days and nights that came before. Commuters frequently see temperatures above 120 flash on their vehicle dashboards, and outdoor workers struggle to do their daily tasks under the hot sun.

“There’s a disconnect between climate science and the people who live here,” says Woodwell Climate Research Associate, Monica Caparas. “Vegas residents know our summers are hot and unbearable. Understanding climate change is driving the extreme weather we’re experiencing is where the disconnect lies. ”

Caparas moved to Las Vegas as a child. She grew up there, left for college, and returned to settle into her adult life. Today, she works for Woodwell Climate’s Risk team remotely from her home in the city. Caparas knows the ins and outs of local life. These include Vegas’s rapid population expansion, the groups of people experiencing homelessness sheltering in underground stormwater infrastructure, and the heat that was unbearable before it started making headlines.

Experiencing climate change without shelter

Caparas’s work with the Risk team aims to provide communities like Las Vegas with an accurate picture of the climate-driven changes in their future. These “risk assessments” are provided through Woodwell Climate’s Just Access program, which uses the most accurate climate models, in collaboration with local knowledge, to anticipate future community safety threats. The analyses have brought to light growing threats from flooding, heat, storms, and more. The team provides assessments, free of charge, to states, cities, and countries across the world.

Just Access serves what Risk Program Director Christopher Schwalm calls “frontline communities.” The term describes groups of people who are over-exposed, under-resourced, underserved, historically marginalized, and therefore the most at-risk to the repercussions of climate change. In the risk assessment for Las Vegas, people experiencing homelessness are front and center.

“Between May 20th and the first week in July, about 20 people who were experiencing homelessness died of heat,” says Dr. Catrina Grigsby-Thedford, Executive Director of the Nevada Homeless Alliance (NHA) and community partner in Las Vegas.

The NHA estimates that almost 8,000 people are experiencing homelessness on any given night in southern Nevada. The number is only growing. Grigsby-Thedford says that this year’s unhoused population is up 1,300 people compared to 2023.

“Often our shelters are full,” Grigsby-Thedford says, “We’re limited by shelter beds and space.”

The NHA’s shelters do open all day in extreme heat, but so many people packed tightly together is still unsafe.

With nowhere to go, some seek shelter underground in Las Vegas’s stormwater infrastructure. While the tunnels are cooler out of the sun’s reach, they are at risk from flooding. Across the region, extreme precipitation is expected to increase by 12-14% by 2050, raising flood risk in the city and especially within the tunnels.

To combat lack of space and shelter, the NHA hosts 4-8 one-stop resource fairs per month. The events, called Project Homeless Connect, serve both people experiencing homelessness and low-income residents in Las Vegas. Grigsby-Thedford says these events “fill in gaps”—offering housing assistance, medical care, hygiene care, and other resources.

Despite all of this work, many unhoused people are hesitant to engage with organizations like the NHA. Grigsby-Thedford says “choice is often a challenge,” and that when people grow accustomed to the way things are, they often accept it and choose to stay.

Picturing risk

Building trust with communities, especially those predisposed to mistrust outside actors, is essential in this work. Which is why, Schwalm says, Woodwell Climate approaches risk work with the goal of “meet[ing] people where they are.”

That means “scoping,” the team’s word for listening to what community and government leaders want out of the risk analysis—what concerns they have, weak points they’ve identified, and what help might be needed post-analysis.

“Two-thirds of the time we spend from start to finish falls into this scoping idea, rather than doing analysis itself,” Schwalm says.

Scoping frames the data the risk team collects, as well as who their partners will be during the risk analysis process.

“We find people who are practical and recognize that there’s a problem,” Schwalm says, “We only work with communities who want to work with us.”

Following the scoping process, the Risk team compiles an analysis of extreme weather events and subsequent risks each community will face as climate change progresses.

“We perform a stress test of that particular geography to identify weak points,” Schwalm explains.

Then, the Risk team uses the most up-to-date climate models possible to predict changes in extreme weather and regional climate. By using predictive models, the team focuses efforts on what the future will hold, as opposed to using past strategies.

“We need to use the future to predict the future,” Schwalm says simply.

Making climate risk data accessible to all

Over the past three years, Just Access has provided 50 communities—that’s about a quarter billion people—with risk analyses. These communities span the U.S., Central and South America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. They’ve worked with countries, like the Democratic Republic of Congo, where they helped update the country’s National Adaptive Plan, states like Chiapas in Mexico, groups like Cree Nation in Canada, and other communities, now including Las Vegas.

Despite all of this work, though, Schwalm says there is still room to grow.

“Fifty communities is kind of only a drop in the bucket,” he says, “We’re not going to make a huge dent in this unless we move beyond working community-by-community.”

Two major roadblocks for Just Access are finite resources: time and money. Individual risk analyses require a lot of time and communication to address risks in relatively small areas.

The other obstacle, money, is something climate research could always use more of. Grants and donations are crucial in order for analyses to remain free, and those sometimes come with limitations.

“There’s a tension from the funder to work in a specific geography sometimes,” Schwalm says, “It’s a juggling act.”

Climate change can also be a politicized topic. In order to meet people where they are, sometimes the Risk team implements changes in language used to communicate with community leaders. This can be a change as simple as using “extreme weather” instead of “climate change.” As long as everyone in the room is ready to confront what the future holds, they’re all working on the same page towards the same goal.

“We’ve done red states, blue states, rural, urban,” Schwalm continues. “We’ve learned how to read the room.”

Creating the foundations for change

Woodwell Climate’s involvement in Las Vegas brings to light the way justice issues, like homelessness, interact with growing threats from climate change.

“In the Las Vegas risk assessment, we are focusing on the disproportionate impacts of the climate crisis on communities already facing systemic socio-economic inequity,” says Caparas. “We must think about intersectionality in order to address climate justice.”

Not only does climate change represent a current crisis for those experiencing homelessness, communities with fewer resources are now at greater risk of being made homeless by future climate-related disasters. Accurate climate risk information can support organizations like NHA as they develop strategies to serve people experiencing homelessness in a more extreme future.

Grigsby-Thedford says that NHA members, especially those with lived experience of homelessness who work as Lived X Consultants, are always looking to be involved in projects like the one Caparas leads.

“We always talk about weather in our meetings,” she says, “So this is perfect, someone’s actually doing research about this. Anything that impacts [Las Vegas’s homeless population], we want to make sure we’re involved in that.”

For the Las Vegas risk assessment, Caparas is working with the NHA and Southern Nevada Lived X Consultants to understand climate risks around cooling stations in public buildings, which are a vital, air-conditioned shelter when the heat index is too high. Grigsby-Thedford says there were many more cooling stations in 2023 and 2024 compared to previous years.

Caparas also forged a connection with Miguel Dávila Uzcátegui, Southern Nevada’s Regional Transportation Commission (RTC) Senior Planner and board member of Help Hope Home. Together, they are developing a database of flooding infrastructure and updating the city’s flooding model with future climate projections. The RTC will integrate the Risk team’s model into regional planning work, updating Las Vegas’s flooding and transportation infrastructure for community safety.

None of this work would have been possible without Caparas’s diligent bridge building between the scientific resources of Woodwell Climate and the needs of people in her own community. Those connections allow science to be informed first and foremost by those most affected by climate change.

“The people closest to the problem are the people closest to the solution,” says Grigsby-Thedford.

We can all agree 2023 was a weird year for weather, right? The United States set a record for the number of billion dollar weather disasters. A major Amazon River tributary reached its lowest water levels in a century during extreme drought. Extreme rain in Libya caused two dams to break, destroying homes and killing over 4,000 people.

And then, of course, there was the heat. 2023 was the hottest year on record. Countries around the world saw heat records fall month after month. The Arctic was hot. The ocean was hot. And debates swirl on about whether we’ve already passed critical warming thresholds.

So how do we put 2023 in context of the greater trend of warming? Here’s what some of Woodwell Climate’s scientists have to say about last year’s record-breaking events.

Did the models predict this?

The dramatic scenes of heat and extreme weather last year prompted many to ask why temperatures had seemingly spiked way above the trend line. Was this unexpected? Was it out of the range of what scientists had modeled? Woodwell Senior Scientist, Dr. Jennifer Francis says not entirely.

“Almost exactly a year ago,” says Francis, “we had just come out of three years of La Niñas and we came close to breaking global temperature records then, even though La Niñas tend to be cooler than neutral or El Niño years. And then along came the strong El Niño of 2023.”

El Niño and La Niña are two extremes of a natural phenomenon that impacts weather patterns across the Pacific, and around the world. In an El Niño year, the prevailing trade winds that normally push warmer waters into the western tropical Pacific—allowing cooler water to well up along the western coast of the Americas—are reversed, resulting in hotter ocean surface temperatures in the eastern equatorial Pacific. When the ocean is hotter than the air above it, that heat is released into the atmosphere, often making El Niño years record breaking ones for global temperatures.

“Last year’s spike looks a lot like the last big El Niño event in 2015-2016. It’s just that now the whole system is warmer. So to me, it wasn’t at all a surprise that we smashed the global temperature record in 2023,” says Francis.

The spike put global temperatures far above the average of climate model simulations, but that doesn’t mean the models didn’t account for it. Risk Program Associate Director, Dr. Zach Zobel, says that averages tend to smooth out natural year-to-year fluctuations, when in fact the upper and lower ranges of model predictions do encompass temperatures like the ones seen in 2023.

“It was well within the margin of error that you would expect for natural variations,” says Zobel.

How does ocean heat impact the climate?

One element of last year’s heat, one that wasn’t necessarily forecasted, was the simultaneous appearance of several ocean heat waves around the globe. The ocean absorbs the vast majority of heat trapped by greenhouse gasses, and that heat can be released under the right conditions. El Niño is one example, but in 2023 it coincided with other not-so-natural marine heat waves across the world.

“In pretty much every single ocean right now there are heat waves happening, which is something quite new,” says Francis.

A couple of dynamics could be driving this. One possibility is that, after three years of La Niñas, in which equatorial Pacific ocean temperatures were generally cooler than the air, the ocean simply absorbed a lot of heat, which was then primed to be released in an El Niño year. Another, Zobel suggests, could be recent shipping laws that required shipping vessels to eliminate sulfate emissions by 2023. Sulfates are a pollutant that may have been helping bounce back solar radiation, hiding the true extent of warming.

“Usually when there’s an El Niño, the eastern tropical Pacific is very warm, but it doesn’t actually drive up ocean temperatures everywhere,” says Zobel. “That was the biggest surprise to me: how warm the northern hemisphere of the Atlantic and Pacific were for most of last year and into 2024.”

Ocean heat waves are typically long-lived phenomena, lasting many months, and so can be a useful tool for meteorologists looking to predict 2024’s extreme weather events.

“The good news is that it provides some kind of long-term predictability about weather patterns in the upcoming year,” says Francis. “The bad news is that they tend to be unusual weather patterns, because those ocean heat waves aren’t usually there.”

Will next year be hotter?

So are we in for another, hotter year after this one? Risk Program Director Dr. Christopher Schwalm says it’s likely.

“Warming predictions for 2024 from leading scientists all forecast a higher level of warming this year than last year,” says Schwalm.

Already, March 2024, was the 10th month in a row to break temperature records. Zobel says it’s typical for the year following an El Niño peak to maintain high temperatures.

“Because the ocean spent a good amount of the year last year warmer than average, that energy is typically dispersed throughout the globe in the following year,” says Zobel. “So even though the tropical Pacific might return to normal, that energy is still in the system.”

However, atmospheric scientists are already seeing signs that El Niño is slowing down and flipping to its counterpart, La Niña, adding another layer of complexity to predictions for 2024.

“The 2024 hurricane season is a large concern,” says Zobel. “La Niña is a lot more conducive to tropical cyclone development. If we combine above average numbers with the amount of energy that storms have to feed on, it’ll be a shock to the system.”

What does this mean for 1.5?

In the discussions around 2023’s temperatures, one number dominates the conversation: 1.5 degrees C. This is the amount of warming countries around the world agreed to try to avoid surpassing, in accordance with the United Nations’ 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. Estimates from Berkeley Earth say that 2023 may have been the first year spent above that threshold.

This assertion may take several years to verify— one year spent physically above 1.5 degrees of warming does not indicate the UN threshold has been permanently passed. What scientists are looking for is a clear average trend line rising above 1.5 degrees C without coming back down, and for that you need several years of data. That, regrettably, creates a lag time between climate impacts and updating climate policy. But, for many, the debate around the arbitrary 1.5 degree goal has become a distraction. Schwalm says scientists and policy-makers should be focusing on urgently combating climate change whatever the numbers say.

“We are already living in a post-Paris Agreement reality,” says Schwalm. “The sooner we admit that and reimagine climate policy, the better.”

“Actual real world impacts are going to be there, whether we’re at 1.48 or 1.52,” says Zobel.

And Francis agrees. “There are so many indicators telling us that big changes are underfoot, that we are experiencing major climate change, but reaching 1.5 isn’t going to all of a sudden make those things worse. It’s just one more reminder we’re still on the wrong track and we’d better hurry up and do something.”

The way science is funded is hampering Earth System Models and may be skewing important climate predictions, according to a comment published in Nature Climate Change by Permafrost Pathways scientists at Woodwell Climate Research Center and an international team of modeling experts.

Emissions from thawing permafrost, frozen ground in the North that contains twice as much carbon as the atmosphere does and is thawing due to human-caused climate warming, are one of the largest uncertainties in future climate projections. But accurate representation of permafrost dynamics are missing from the major models that project future carbon emissions.

Expanding access to climate risk data

The community risk work in Kinshasa is one of over 20 successful risk assessments conducted as part of Woodwell Climate’s Just Access initiative. The project produces free, location-specific climate risk analysis for cities and regions both in the US and abroad. The hope is that, by providing free access to quality data— something often offered by private companies at prohibitively high costs — Just Access can facilitate adaptation planning for under-resourced communities.

“With Just Access, we want to remove the barrier of cost for communities that want to understand the long-term risks they are facing because of climate change,” says McGlinchey. “Often these communities are the ones already facing climate-related challenges that will worsen as the century goes on.”

Guided by a community’s particular concerns, Woodwell’s Risk team works with available data on key climate risks—flooding, heat, water scarcity, fire— and uses models to construct an image of how those events are likely to change as global temperatures climb. In the DRC, water is a core concern, both in its absence, causing drought and crop failure, and in its abundance.

“Heavy rains cause horrific flooding in the city of Mbandaka almost once or twice a year,” says Zambo. “In the capital, heavy rains are also destroying homes, roads, electrical structures, and internet connections.”

The most pressing risks vary from region to region. Across the world, in Acre, Brazil, Senior Scientist Emeritus Dr. Foster Brown says, “the word here is ‘heat.’” In Homer and Seldovia, Alaska, increasing wildfire days featured heavily.

But improvements in data availability and resolution, as well as refinements of climate models, have made it possible to replicate assessments for a variety of risks in places as distant and different from each other as Homer, Alaska and Kerala, India. Risk assessments can offer both region-wide crop yield estimates and street-level maps of flooding for a single city district to inform community planning.

It’s about building trust

Key to the success of municipal-level work are relationships with people like Zambo, who can offer insights into the needs of a community that can’t be approximated from the outside. Each community is different— in what information they need to make decisions, their level of technical expertise, their governmental capacity to implement changes, and in the ways they prefer to work.

So, with each new assessment, the Risk team starts from scratch, building new relationships and listening to community needs. This process takes double time on the international stage, where a history of superficial NGO and academic involvement can overshadow collaboration.

“A main goal with these reports is trust,” says Darcy Glenn, a Woodwell Climate research assistant who organized a risk assessment and workshop for Province 1 in Nepal last year with help from connections from her master’s program. “Building trust in the models, and trust in the methodology, and in us. That’s been our biggest hurdle when working with municipal leaders.”

Building that trust takes time. Province 1 was one of an early set of communities who worked with Woodwell Climate on risk assessments. While local leaders were interested in flooding and landslide risk information, what they really wanted was to increase the capacity of their own scientists and government employees to conduct climate modeling themselves. So the project was adapted to meet that need by tailoring a training workshop. The process took over a year to complete but Glenn says, that’s relationship-building time that can’t be rushed.

It also highlights the importance of pre-established long term connections in the places we work.

“It’s one thing to go into a new community by yourself, it’s another to go in with someone who has been there 30 years and can help navigate,” says Dr. Brown. “You have to look for the key people who can help make things happen.”

Within Brazil, Dr. Brown is now regarded as one of these “key people”. He has been living and working in Rio Branco for over 30 years and his credibility as a member of the community helped facilitate an assessment of extreme heat risk in the region. In the DRC, Zambo has been working with Woodwell Climate on various projects for over a decade. Without their expertise to bridge cultural and language gaps, completing projects in Brazil and the DRC would not have been possible.

Working for the Future

After getting risk information into the hands of communities, then comes the hard work of putting it to use. For Dr. Christopher Schwalm, Director of Woodwell Climate’s Risk Program, “the goal of the risk assessments is to give communities every potential tool we can to build resilience for themselves and future generations. With access to the right information, the next step in the adaptation planning process can begin.”

In Rio Branco, Dr. Brown says speaking to the changes people are already noticing has helped individuals connect better to the data. He’s been using the context of heat and fire alongside information from their report to strengthen conversations about existing forest and climate initiatives, authoring an alert for the tri-national “MAP” region (Madre de Dios in Peru, Acre in Brazil, and Pando in Bolivia) about heat conditions and the implications for this year’s fire season.

He has also been introducing the information from the report to the community in other ways— teaching and speaking at events. According to Dr. Brown, widespread understanding of both near- and long-term climate risks will become more important for all communities as climate change progresses and impacts each place differently. Cities and towns will need reliable information to help them practically plan for the future.

“We’re trying to get people to expand their time ranges and start thinking about the future. And this report has helped,” says Dr. Brown. “Because the people who are going to see 2100 are already here. What will we be able to tell them about their future?”

What can be done about permafrost thaw?

Monitor, model, and make sure Arctic communities have the support they need

With the Arctic warming 3 to 4 times faster than the rest of the world, permafrost thaw has become a significant climate threat. Scientists estimate that permafrost contains 1.4 trillion tonnes of carbon, an amount more than double what is currently in the Earth’s atmosphere. That carbon sink is stable as long as it stays frozen, but with recent and projected thaw, the organic matter in permafrost is breaking down and releasing carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, increasing the rate of climate change.

What we’re doing

Addressing this issue requires extensive data collection on permafrost emissions, as well as equitable strategies for adaptation by Arctic communities. To tackle this issue, Woodwell has partnered with the Arctic Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School, the Alaska Institute for Justice, and the Alaska Native Science Commission to connect experts in climate science, human rights, and public policy with frontline communities and high-level decision makers. The partnership is pioneering a six-year research program called Permafrost Pathways that will develop action plans to address the compounding impacts of permafrost thaw.

With the understanding that this needs to be a sustainable process with long-term impact, Permafrost Pathways’ scientists are expanding and coordinating a pan-Arctic carbon monitoring network to improve the accuracy of permafrost thaw emissions estimates. More precise measurements will fill critical data gaps and reduce uncertainties, so that permafrost emissions can be factored into global carbon budgets, climate models, targets, and measures for mitigation and adaptation. That, combined with high-resolution satellite and aircraft-based observations and advanced computer modeling, will allow for tracking the changing landscape in near real-time and more accurately projecting future emissions.

Permafrost Pathways is also collaborating with local communities to co-create Indigenous-led adaptation strategies. For many, relocation or infrastructure upgrades are needed urgently, but there is currently no process or resources to enable communities to move forward. With Arctic residents already feeling the brunt of climate change, the involvement of frontline communities is crucial in developing successful adaptation plans and effective policies.

What’s left to be done

Despite its big strides, Permafrost Pathways is still in its infancy and there is a long road ahead when it comes to tackling the complexity of permafrost thaw. Today, at least 192 countries, plus the European Union, have signed on to the Paris Agreement’s promise of reducing emissions to keep warming below 2 degrees C. But many emissions reduction goals do not include carbon released by permafrost thaw. The international community needs to take strong action to change this or else permafrost thaw could undermine climate goals.

In the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2021 report, permafrost thaw was named as an issue that should be included in carbon budgets and global reduction schedules, but often isn’t because there is not enough data on its climate impact. Continued support of data gathering programs like Permafrost Pathways will provide the international community, top country-level climate negotiators, and environmental ministers the knowledge needed to fix that oversight and start filling gaps.

In Arctic communities, permafrost thaw is already causing disasters like flooding, coastal erosion, and infrastructure damage. To combat this, national and international policy makers need to act now to integrate permafrost thaw into disaster policies and community-led adaptation frameworks. This will create clear planning and response procedures for future permafrost-related issues.

What you can do

Permafrost thaw is an issue that affects everyone. Understanding the local and global implications and sharing that information within immediate social circles as well as on social media platforms can help start conversations that spur action. The public also has the power to influence the development of climate policies by pressuring elected officials to tackle this serious issue.>

For more information about the issues surrounding permafrost thaw, read part one and part two in our Permafrost series. To stay informed and get involved, visit the Permafrost Pathways site.

The critical missing expense in global climate budgets

A major emitter is being left out of the global climate budget, and Arctic communities are already feeling the impacts

A 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report confirms that the Earth is on track to warm 1.5 degrees celsius by 2040. Warming beyond this will cause global issues like struggling coral reefs, catastrophic storms, and extreme heat waves. The international community has developed a global carbon budget that tracks how much carbon can be added to the atmosphere by human-caused emissions before we push warming past 1.5 and even 2 degrees. It functions much like a household budget— where spending more than you earn can jeopardize your stability and comfort.

With the carbon budget, that means balancing how much carbon is released into the atmosphere with how much is being stored by natural sinks. According to the IPCC, the world needs to wean itself off of “spending” down that budget as we rapidly approach 2 degrees of warming.

Permafrost is missing from the budget

But IPCC’s budget calculations aren’t factoring in a major source of emissions—permafrost thaw. Massive amounts of carbon are stored in frozen Arctic soils known as permafrost. As permafrost thaws, that carbon is released into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide and methane. Scientists estimate that emissions from permafrost thaw will range from 30 to 150 billion tons this century.

Despite being on par with top-emitting countries like India or the United States, permafrost thaw is not included in the global carbon budget. It has historically been excluded because of gaps in data that make existing estimates of emissions less precise. Dr. Max Holmes, President of Woodwell Climate Research Center, says it’s “especially alarming… that permafrost carbon is largely ignored in current climate change models.” That’s because permafrost thaw emissions could take up 25-40% of our remaining emissions budgeted to cap warming at 2°C. Imagine leaving the cost of rent out of your household budget. It doesn’t mean you don’t have to pay it, it just means you won’t be prepared when that bill arrives.

Excluding permafrost thaw also means that projections of the rate of warming will be off. The unaccounted carbon will speed up warming, reducing the amount of time we have to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

Permafrost thaw is already negatively impacting Arctic residents, especially Indigenous communities. In 2019, a Yup’ik community that has lived in Newtok, Alaska for hundreds of years had to begin moving to higher, volcanic ground because the thawing permafrost under their town was causing disastrous floods and sinking infrastructure. Woodwell Arctic program director and senior scientist, Dr. Sue Natali, who studies permafrost thaw in Yup’ik territory, says “it’s a place where permafrost is on the brink of thawing, and will be thawed by the end of the century, if not much sooner.”

Since permafrost spans multiple countries, it has been difficult to determine who should take responsibility for it. Consequently, there is currently little government framework for adaptation. The Yup’ik people had to reach out to a variety of government agencies and lived without plumbing for decades before the federal government finally awarded them support for relocation. The community paid a heavy price for it, though. Without proper policy in place to manage climate relocation, they had to bargain for government assistance, and in the end, turned ownership of the land they were leaving over to the U.S. government.

It took sixteen years from when Congress agreed to assist the Yup’ik community to when their promises were put into action. While scientists, like the ones spearheading Woodwell’s Permafrost Pathways program, are monitoring and modeling thaw to better prepare people for the damage it can cause, vulnerable communities do not have sixteen years to wait for assistance and relocation.

If permafrost thaw continues to be overlooked by government agencies, then it will remain difficult to prevent the Earth from warming beyond 2ºC and to support frontline communities most affected by it. Tackling permafrost thaw for both Arctic communities and the planet will require a coordinated international effort.

Looking for some background on Permafrost? Read the first piece in our permafrost series: “What is Permafrost?” To learn about what must be done to combat this issue, read part three: “What can be done about permafrost thaw?”

What is permafrost?

Centuries-old frozen soil is under threat from rapid warming

Thinking about climate change usually brings to mind dramatically melting ice caps and rising sea levels, but there’s another threat that’s caught the attention of climate scientists for its potential to be equally as disastrous—thawing permafrost.

Located anywhere between a few centimeters to 4,900ft below the Earth’s surface, permafrost is soil composed of sand, gravel, organic matter, and ice that has been frozen for at least two consecutive years. Some has been frozen for centuries or even millenia, and it’s this ancient permafrost in the Arctic that holds the greatest significance for climate change.

Arctic permafrost stretches across Alaska, Scandinavia, Russia, Iceland, and Canada, and can be found beneath the Arctic Ocean, the Arctic tundra, alpine forests, and boreal forests. It covers 15% of the land in the Northern Hemisphere and 3.6 million people live atop it. Scientists estimate that Arctic permafrost contains 1.4 trillion tonnes of carbon, an amount more than double what is currently in the Earth’s atmosphere. That carbon sink is stable as long as it stays frozen, but when it thaws, soil microbes break down the organic matter in permafrost and release carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, increasing the rate of climate change.

In many places, forests, plants, and peat act as protective insulation for Arctic permafrost. This insulation helps keep carbon-storing organic matter, like plants and animals, as well as bacteria and archaea, frozen in the permafrost. However, climate change is already causing the Arctic to warm three to four times faster than the rest of the planet.

In addition to rapid warming speeding decay, it also strips back permafrost’s protective layers with increasing fires and heavy summer rains that burn and erode away top soil layers, further accelerating thaw. In some places, permafrost thaws so abruptly that the ground can collapse. Developing infrastructure that requires deforestation and underground pipes further exposes permafrost to warming. Additionally, as sea ice melts, coastal Arctic permafrost is exposed to warmer waters. The combined result is extensive permafrost thaw across the region.

Researchers have been studying permafrost thaw to determine the size of the threat it poses. Methods such as placing soil moisture sensors in strategic locations and examining soil cores collected by drilling holes into the soil to document the different layers of permafrost help gauge the rate and extent of thaw.

In a recent TEDTalk, Dr. Sue Natali, Woodwell’s Arctic program director and senior scientist, cautioned that, “By the end of this century, greenhouse gas emissions from thawing permafrost may be on par with some of the world’s leading greenhouse-gas-emitting nations.”

There are already visible signs of vast permafrost thaw in the Arctic. Since ice is an essential part of the ground’s structural integrity, the soil becomes unstable when it thaws. This leads to dangerous situations like landslides, sinkholes, and destabilized infrastructure that threaten millions of people. Remote communities are particularly impacted, losing access to roads and sources of freshwater.

For both the carbon it threatens to release, and the destabilizing impacts it has on Arctic residents, permafrost thaw is a serious threat. One that, as the Arctic continues to warm, demands urgent attention and remediation.

Until now, that attention has been slow in coming. Read about why combatting permafrost thaw is such a complex issue in part two of our Permafrost series: “The critical missing expense in global climate budgets.”

oncoming storm front
A sudden flip in weather conditions—from a long hot and dry period to a parade of storms, for example, or from abnormally mild winter temperatures to extreme cold—can cause major disruptions to human activities, energy supplies, agriculture, and ecosystems. These shifts, dubbed “weather whiplash” events, are challenging to measure and define because of a lack of consistent definition. A new study demonstrates an approach to measuring the frequency of these events based on rapid changes in continent-wide weather regimes.

The study indicates that, while the frequency of whiplash events in recent decades has not changed substantially, future model projections indicate increases will occur as the globe continues to warm under a thicker blanket of greenhouse gasses. In particular, the researchers find whiplash will increase most during times when the Arctic is abnormally warm, and decrease when the Arctic is in a cold regime—something that will occur less often as the planet warms.

Examples of weather whiplash during 2022 so far include a long, hot, drought in western U.S. states during early summer that was broken by record-breaking flash flooding; exceptionally wet and cool conditions during June in the Pacific Northwest replaced by a heat wave in July; a record-warm early winter for most south-central states followed by a cooler-than-average January and February; and a spell of 67 consecutive hot, dry days in Dallas, TX, broken by the heaviest rains in a century.

“The spring and summer of 2022 have been plagued by weather whiplash events,” said lead author, Dr. Jennifer Francis, Senior Scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center. “A warming planet increases the likelihood of longer, more intense droughts and heat waves, and we’re also seeing these spells broken suddenly by heavy bouts of precipitation, which are also fueled by the climate crisis. These sudden shifts are highly disruptive to all sorts of human activities and wildlife, and our study indicates they’ll occur more frequently as we continue to burn fossil fuels and clear-cut forests, causing greenhouse gas concentrations to rise further.”

Co-author Judah Cohen, Principal Scientist at Verisk AER noted that these phenomena are tightly linked to regional warming in the Arctic.

“We know the Arctic region is experiencing the most rapid changes in the global climate system. Evidence is growing that these profound changes are contributing to more extreme weather events outside the Arctic, and this influence will only increase in the future,” said Dr. Cohen.