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The Arctic tundra has tipped over into a source of atmospheric carbon, with the region now emitting more carbon dioxide than it can store, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported last week.
“When including the impact of increased wildfire activity, the Arctic tundra region has shifted from storing carbon in the soil to becoming a carbon dioxide source,” the agency said last week in a synopsis of its 2024 Arctic Report Card. “Circumpolar wildfire emissions have averaged 207 million tons of carbon per year since 2003.”
With that finding and many others, “this year’s report paints a clear and urgent picture of the Arctic’s evolving conditions,” said NOAA Administrator Richard Spinrad. “We are seeing impacts of warming in real time in the Arctic, and it’s a call to action.”
NOAA released its annual report card just days before Climate Central reported that climate change brought at least one extra week of temperatures above freezing to about 20% of Canada’s 289 weather regions between 2014 and 2023. Vancouver saw 19 extra days above freezing, Toronto 13, Montreal six, Calgary five, and Ottawa four.
“Canadian winters are warmer than ever and the pace of change is alarming to say the least,” said Philippe Marquis, two-time Olympian and coach of Canada’s national freestyle ski team, in an email circulated by Climate Central.
“As a freestyle skier (and now coach), I’ve seen first-hand how athletes and sports organizations suffer, both in terms of economic impacts and logistical burdens,” Marquis wrote. “If we don’t accelerate our energy transition away from fossil fuels, we’re on the verge of losing important dollars for our national economy, but most importantly a tradition of beloved Canadian activities.”
Warming winters “have a range of impacts for people, ecosystems, and industries,” Climate Central adds. “Warmer temperatures affect snow accumulation and ice coverage, with significant consequences for winter sports and activities—and the people who make a living from them.”
The executive summary of the NOAA report said wildfires across North American permafrost regions have been increasing over a span of decades and are now “an urgent, annual concern” for Arctic residents. “These changes together are pushing the Arctic into uncharted territory,” the agency warned, contributing to the global atmospheric load of both carbon dioxide and methane (CH4), a shorter-lived greenhouse gas that is 84 times more potent than CO2 over a 20-year span.
“Both powerful heat-trapping gases, the transition to acting as a source for both CO2 and CH4 is of global concern as societies struggle to rein in emissions and align with the international Paris Agreement goal to limit warming,” NOAA wrote.
The report card, part of an annual series dating back to 2015, is the last that NOAA will produce before Donald Trump returns to the White House January 20. Trump has been threatening to dismantle the agency, undercut its research, and commercialize a national weather service on which many millions of Americans rely each day.
NOAA reported that:
• Annual surface air temperatures in the Arctic were the second-warmest since 1900, Alaskan permafrost temperatures were the second-warmest on record, and the last nine years have been the region’s nine warmest ever documented.
• Although the region saw above-average snow accumulation last winter, “the snow season was the shortest in 26 years over portions of central and eastern Arctic Canada. Arctic snow melt is occurring one to two weeks earlier than historical conditions throughout May and June.”
• A heatwave in early August, 2024 “set all-time record daily temperatures in several northern Alaska and Canada communities,” and the summer of 2024 was the region’s wettest on record.
• Arctic Ocean regions that are ice-free in August have been warming at a rate of 0.5°C per decade since 1982. Sea ice extent, with a “profound influence” on the Arctic environment, hit its sixth-lowest over the 45 years when satellite records have been available.
• Migratory caribou herds across the Arctic tundra have declined 65% over the last two to three decades, with “previously large inland herds” seeing the steepest declines.
“The Arctic today looks really different than the Arctic of a couple of decades ago,” said Twila Moon, lead editor of the report card and deputy lead scientist at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.
“But because we understand climate change, and we know that we’re continuing to put heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, we haven’t gotten to something that is a ‘new normal’,” she added. “We’re not going to stabilize at what we’ve termed here as a kind of a ‘new regime’ for the Arctic. It’s going to continue to see rapid change and really new conditions into the future.”
