“These currently elevated rates of ice melting may signal that those vital arteries from the heart of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet have been ruptured,” said one researcher. “Is it too late to stop the bleeding?”
The human-caused climate crisis is pushing crucial glaciers in Antarctica to lose ice at a rate not seen in more than 5,000 years, according to a new study published Thursday.
Researchers at the University of Maine, the British Antarctic Survey, and Imperial College London found that the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could cause global sea level rise of up to 3.4 meters, or over 11 feet, in the next several centuries due to their accelerated rate of ice loss.
“That the present-day rate of glacier retreat that has doubled over the past 30 years is, indeed, unprecedented.”
The glaciers—one of which, the Thwaites, has been called the “doomsday glacier” by climate scientists because of its potential to raise sea levels—are positioned in a way that allows increasingly warm ocean water to flow beneath them and erode the ice sheet from the base, causing “runaway ice loss,” the University of Maine team said in a statement.
The researchers examined penguin bones and seashells on ancient Antarctic beaches in order to analyze changes in local sea levels since the mid-Holocene period, 5,500 years ago.
Sea levels were higher and glaciers were smaller during the mid-Holocene, as the climate of the planet was warmer than it is today.
Since then, according to the study published in Nature Geoscience, relative sea levels have fallen steadily and the Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers have stayed relatively stable—until recent decades.
Ice loss was likely accelerated just prior to the mid-Holocene, and since then, the rate of relative decrease in sea levels over the past 5,500 years was almost five times smaller than it is in present day, due to “recent rapid ice mass loss,” according to the scientists.
“That the present-day rate of glacier retreat that has doubled over the past 30 years is, indeed, unprecedented,” wrote Caroline Brogan, a science reporter at Imperial College.
With the Thwaites spanning an area of more than 74,000 square miles and the Pine Island glacier spanning more than 62,600 square miles, the rapid ice loss of the two glaciers could cause major rises in sea levels around the globe.
Dylan Rood of Imperial College’s Department of Earth Science and Engineering, a co-author of the study, likened the two glaciers to arteries that have burst.
“These currently elevated rates of ice melting may signal that those vital arteries from the heart of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet have been ruptured, leading to accelerating flow into the ocean that is potentially disastrous for future global sea level in a warming world,” said Rood. “Is it too late to stop the bleeding?”
The study follows increasingly urgent calls from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the International Energy Agency, and climate scientists around the world for an end to fossil fuel extraction, which is needed to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and limit the average global temperature from rising more than 1.5°C above preindustrial levels.
Scientists have warned that the accelerated melting of the Thwaites glacier is likely irreversible.
“We’re going into unknown territory,” Scott Braddock, a researcher at University of Maine, toldScience News. “We don’t have an analog to compare what’s going on today with what happened in the past.”
A court ruled this week that the California Endangered Species Act (CESA) can apply to invertebrates, including insects.
This means legal protections will be in place for four native, endangered bumblebee species in California.
The decision marks the end of a court battle between conservation groups and a consortium of large-scale industrial agricultural interests.
An estimated 28% of all bumblebees in North America are at risk of extinction, with consequences for ecosystems and crops, as one-third of food production depends on pollinators.
A California court has ruled that state legislation on endangered species can apply to invertebrates. The decision this week by the Third District Court of Appeal means insects, including four endangered native Californian bumblebee species and the monarch butterfly, will receive much-needed protection under the California Endangered Species Act.
“We are celebrating today’s decision that insects and other invertebrates are eligible for protection under CESA,” Sarina Jepsen, director of endangered species at the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, said in a press release. “The Court’s decision allows California to protect some of its most endangered pollinators, a step which will contribute to the resilience of the state’s native ecosystems and farms.”
In 2018, the Xerces Society, the Center for Food Safety (CFS), and Defenders of Wildlife petitioned the state of California to list four species of native bumblebees as endangered under CESA.
The California Fish and Game Commission voted to begin the process of listing these bees as endangered in 2019, but were then sued by a “consortium of California’s large scale industrial agricultural interests,” according to a Xerces Society press release. The trial court sided with the agricultural consortium, and the conservation groups appealed that decision in 2021. The decision this week marks a win for the conservation groups.
The four species are the western bumblebee (Bombus occidentalis), whose relative abundance has declined by 84%; the Suckley cuckoo bumblebee (Bombus suckleyi) which is considered critically endangered on the IUCN Red List and whose range has shrunk by 58%; the Crotch’s bumblebee (Bombus crotchii), now found in just 20% of its historical range; and Franklin’s bumblebee (Bombus franklini) which, despite extensive annual surveys, has not been seen since 2006.
Photo by Jiří Mikoláš
According to California law, protections under the CESA mean that public agencies should not approve projects that would “jeopardize the continued existence” of any endangered or threatened species or adversely modify their habitat. These species are also protected from being removed from the wild or killed.
“It is a great day for California’s bumble bees!” said Pamela Flick, California program director with Defenders of Wildlife.
Sam Joyce, a certified law student with the Stanford Environmental Law Clinic who argued the case in the Third District, said the CESA is an important tool to protect and restore endangered species. He said the court’s ruling “ensures that CESA will fulfill its purpose of conserving ‘any endangered species’ by protecting the full range of California’s biodiversity, including terrestrial invertebrates.”
The IUCN’s Bumble Bee Specialist Group reports that 28% of all bumblebees in North America are at risk of extinction. Alarming on its own, this decline may also have consequences for ecosystems and crops, as one-third of food production depends on pollinators like bees.
“With one out of every three bites of food we eat coming from a crop pollinated by bees, this court decision is critical to protecting our food supply,” said Rebecca Spector, West Coast director at the Center for Food Safety. “The decision clarifies that insects such as bees qualify for protections under CESA, which are necessary to ensure that populations of endangered species can survive and thrive.”
A series of legal rights has emerged in recent years as if from nothing, and each has become thickened with all sorts of rules and exceptions.
It used to be that the only employment law was, in practice, the law relating to strikes. Half a century later, we have a generalised system of individual employment law.
The main book collecting employment law regulations runs to a tightly-printed 3,000 pages and weighs over two kilogrammes.
Extinction
We did not use to have any information law: now we have the Data Protection Act, the Freedom of Information Act, a specialist enforcement body and an appeals tribunal.
Immigration law has grown from a tiny area, the reserve of a few dozen specialists to provisions so complicated that even the judges complain.
“Immigration law is a total nightmare,” said immigration judge Nicholas Easterman in 2017. “I don’t suppose the judges know any more about it than the appellants who come before them.”
But while these areas have grown, environmental law has seen no similar expansion.
In Britain there is still no system of environmental law despite half a century of growing public awareness of environmental degradations, of species extinction and the poisoning of the rivers and seas.
Regulating
We have hints of it: in the criminal law for example, when lawyers defend protesters.
When central or local government makes a decision which has an environmental impact that decision can be judicially reviewed in the High Court.
The First-Tier Tribunal contains an Environmental Chamber which hears appeals by business after they have been fined under regulations dealing with eco-design, single user carrier bags, waste, etc.
But these hints fall short of constituting a proper system of environmental justice, in which the people who pollute and poison our world can, for example, have their property removed from them.
Often the problem is said to be one of “standing”. In other words, that unless and until trees and mountains can sue in their own name, then no-one will be able to restrict the decisions made by government in planning and regulating industry.
Interference
And it is true that this absence hampers lawyers: destroy a creature’s habitat and the harm to them will aways be greater than the second-hand suffering done to the people who care for nature.
Yet, standing is only a part of the problem. Over the past 25 years, the group of charities who have been empowered to bring judicial review cases has widened. But it remains true that most such claims are brought, fought hard, and lost.
Until we can sue and expropriate the worst of the polluters, it is hard to see how business will feel any pressure to change.
The answer is not a cadre of judges willing to be bolder in their application of judicial review. For that is a remedy against government.
And most damage to the environment is done by businesses rather than the state, and if a company pollutes the air or the water or contributes to global warming, the citizen has almost no meaningful redress against them.
More than a century ago, Victorian judges developed the idea of a private nuisance, a harm which happens when one person causes an unreasonable interference to the use and enjoyment of a person’s property.
Neoliberalism
Yet a claim in nuisance cannot only be brough by a landowner. Imagine, the owner of a commercial forest which has been damaged by acid rain. Who would the owner sue?
The time between an act of environmental destruction and its consequences may be protracted. The distance between the release of a pollutant and the harm it causes may be hundreds of miles. What, if the polluter is outside the United Kingdom? Nuisance assumes that pollution is incapable of crossing borders.
After fifty years of growing public consciousness we should have – but no court has actually recognised – a system of economic wrongs – “torts” – done against nature, and a series of remedies including both compensation and confiscation.
Only then would there be the intellectual infrastructure so that claims brought in the name of trees or mountains would have effect. But that would only be the first step. And its creation now would be too late.
The irony is that for the last forty years, we have lived through a political moment – “neoliberalism” – which has been open to the creation of new laws.
Right
Under neoliberalism, the whole of existence is understood as an opportunity for the creation of markets – in water, in housing, in utilities – which require rules and people to enforce them.
No mechanism has been accepted for changing how business behave, except through market creation, and business regulation and reward. The vast majority of people are left out of these dynamics.
Think of the European Union Emissions Trading System (EEUTS), the main policy mechanism of the EU for resisting climate change which was set up in 2005 to use market solutions to prevent global warming.
Although this is “European law”, UK politicians enthusiastically supported these proposals. On Britain’s departure from the European Union, a UK Emissions Trading Scheme was drawn up, closely modelled on it.
The idea was that 10,000 or so factories, power stations, and similar companies responsible for around half the EU’s CO2 emissions would each be permitted a certain maximum volume of greenhouses gases which they could release. If they wanted to produce more than their cap, they would have to buy the right to produce extra carbon.
Punishment
States give companies a carbon budget which they are entitled to trade. The scheme has therefore worked via a series of subsidies to business – like so much supposed regulation in recent years.
Companies have been provided with an asset – a hypothetical entitlement to produce greenhouse gases – which they can sell on the market.
So, between 2008 and 2015, cement producers were gifted between over 5 billion euros of windfall profits; and this to the European representatives of a commercial sector which produces one in twelve of all carbon emissions worldwide.
The point was not to prevent emissions but to enrich those who held property. An OECD report found in 2018, that the firms within the scheme had on average 16 percent more fixed revenues than they would have had they never been regulated.
The scheme has been widely criticised: initially for oversupplying emissions allowance, causing the price of carbon so low that there was no punishment for polluters.
Cement
It has incentivised false accounting: by rewarding companies which make promises to plant trees – even if there is no prospect of them being planted, or to invest in technology to suck carbon out of the atmosphere, even where that technology does not exist; or by buying up the nominal credits arising from the legacy of old industrial technologies and washing them through the system repeatedly, in order to allow business to keep on expanding.
The verdict on the EEUTS appears to be that it caused a one-off reduction of around ten percent in European carbon emissions but that, despite repeated attempts to tighten it, the scheme has diminishing effect every year.
A fall of ten percent in carbon emissions is not to be dismissed; but the EU’s carbon reduction goal is to reach 40 percent within eight years.
The problem with the EEUTS, and with its British counterpart, is that there is no mechanism for the citizen to complain, say, if a cement company misses its carbon targets.
Polluters
It is left to the same governments to enforce which ignore commercial fraud and money laundering, which prosecute people who are overpaid welfare benefits but refuse to prosecute businesses when they have taken millions in grants to which they were not entitled.
Under the EEUTS and under all the Regulations made over the past 40 years, mere voters are not parties to the litigation; we cannot demand that a business be fined or have its property taken away because of its reckless stewardship of its environmental resources.
Perhaps there is a debate to be a had about whether we as a society truly want to make citizens enforcers. There are things to be learned from the way in which employment law has grown at just the same time that trade union have been weakened, a balance is needed between the law and social movements.
But until we can sue and expropriate the worst of the polluters, it is hard to see how business will feel any pressure to change.
