Antarctic climate futures: how Terra incognita becomes Terra clima

Abstract

The Antarctic has come to be considered a place of climate change, both in parallel to broader global understandings of anthropogenic climate change and in response to previous conceptions of the Antarctic as blank, empty, scientific or peaceful. This article shows how a place becomes irresistibly linked to a global discourse through concerted effort as well as technoscientific ways of thinking about nature. Further, this paper demonstrates how the apparently blank Antarctic becomes inscribed with and saturated by popular imaginations, as well as the ways Antarctic actors trouble, confound and are made to fall into line with the tropes of global climate catastrophe. To do this, the article reviews recent scientific research in the Antarctic as ways in which nature – including penguins, ice and flowering plants – inscribe their response to climate change on the continent, as well as some data that “confounds” the narrative of Antarctic warming, melting and collapsing. The article concludes with an analysis of policy considerations that this analysis engenders.

Keywords:

• Antarctic
• climate
• science
• policy

Acknowledgements

I gratefully thank the following for their thoughtful advice and assistance for this article: Sheila Hellerman, Alan Hemmings, Tina Tin, Fabiana Li, Juan F. Salazar and an anonymous reviewer.

Notes

¹ IPCC 2007: Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

² Hayashi, “Antarctica Question in the United Nations.”

³ Some nations have claimed territory in Antarctica; these claims are frozen under the 1959 Antarctic Treaty. O’Reilly, “Tectonic History and Gondwanan Geopolitics.”

⁴ Bloom, Gender on Ice; Byrd, Little America; Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World; Fuchs, Of Ice and Men; Templeton, A Wise Adventure; Worsley, Endurance.

⁵ Miller and Reill, Visions of Empire.

⁶ Carter, The Road to Botany Bay.

⁷ Bloom, Gender on Ice.

⁸ Gurney, Below the Convergence.

⁹ Gurney, Below the Convergence.

¹⁰ Fuchs, Of Ice and Men; Templeton, A Wise Adventure.

¹¹ Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed, 39.

¹² Brown, The Last Wilderness; Green, Improbable Eden.

¹³ Wait, “Chemistry and Stratification.”

¹⁴ Wynne, “Misunderstood Misunderstanding.”

¹⁵ Latour, Pandora’s Hope.

¹⁶ To be clear: there is a strong, longstanding scientific consensus that the earth is warming due to human activities (IPCC 2007, Oreskes 2007). This paper is in accord with this. What this paper is looking at, and what researchers sometimes have difficulty with, is the more local scales of global climate change – what is going to happen to this particular piece of shoreline, how will this specific ecosystem respond to warming, acidification, sea level rise and so on, and finally, what are some of the lesser known or even unknown variables that can confound scientific predictions?

¹⁷ Humanity does not need to worry about a total melt of Antarctic ice, which would nearly flood the earth. If the Antarctic melted that much, the atmosphere and global temperature would have long exceeded the ability to support human life. However, a more likely scenario that could be considered plausible by policy-makers is about 5 m of sea level rise from the Antarctic (Alley and Whillans 1991; Bamber et al. 2009; Lythe, Vaughan, and Bedmap Consortium 2001), which is, though smaller, still society- and environment-changing.

¹⁸ Rott, “Rapid Collapse of Northern Larsen Ice Shelf.”

¹⁹ Scambos, “Glacier Acceleration and Thinning”; Thomas, “Accelerated Ice Discharge.”

²⁰ Alley, “Ice-Sheet and Sea-Level Changes.”

²¹ Chen, “Accelerated Antarctic Ice Loss”; Rignot, “Recent Antarctic Ice Mass Loss”; Velicogna, “Increasing Rates of Ice Mass Loss.”

²² Rignot, “Acceleration of the Contribution of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets.”

²³ Conway, “Switch of Flow Direction.”

²⁴ Raffles, “Mother Nature’s Melting Pot”; Helmreich, “How Scientists Think”; Collier, “Biosecurity.”

²⁵ Smith et al. “Pelagic-Benthic Coupling, Food Banks and Climate Change on the West Antarctic Peninsula Shelf.”

²⁶ Hughes, “The Non-Native Chironomid Eretmoptera Murphyi”; Convey, “Recent Range Expansions”; Convey, “The Establishment of a New Ecological Guild.”

²⁷ Jenouvrier, “Effects of Climate Change.”

²⁸ Vaughan, “Recent Rapid Regional Climate Warming.”

²⁹ Lynch, “Spatially Integrated Assessment.”

³⁰ Lynch, “Spatially Integrated Assessment.”

³¹ Parkinson and Cavalieri, “Antarctic Sea Ice Variability.”

³² O’Donnell, “Improved Methods for PCA-Based Reconstructions”; Steig, “Warming of the Antartic Ice-Sheet Surface.”

³³ Hastrup, The Social Life of Climate Change Models

³⁴ O’Reilly, “Characterizing Uncertainty in Expert Assessments.”

³⁵ Brysse et al. “Climate Change Prediction: Erring on the Side of Least Drama?”

³⁶ Some parties want to move forward with continent-wide climate policies in the Antarctic, others are willfully deaf to the discussion in the Antarctic Treaty Meetings, and a few have governmental directive to stymie any climate-related practices in the Antarctic. Since the system is consensus-based, discussions tend to begin very idealistic and get sculpted down to small fragments of agreed-upon language, actions or goals.

³⁷ ATCM 2010.

³⁸ I am an advisor to the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition.

³⁹ The World Bank and the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative, “On Thin Ice: How Cutting Pollution Can Slow Warming and Save Lives.”

⁴⁰ Flanner, “Present Day Climate Forcing.”

⁴¹ Black carbon is an interesting Antarctic climate topic for several reasons. First, concerned people within the Antarctic community usually focus on atmospheric emissions such as carbon dioxide. These emissions come from wealthy, developed states and rapidly developing urban areas. Black carbon emissions are coming from poor people in developing countries. It is important to note that this should not shift the climate burden further on already vulnerable communities. Instead, a culturally appropriate black carbon initiative could include replacing conventional cookstoves with the already designed, ultralow-emission cookstoves. When low-emission cookstoves are used, there are dramatic, tangible human health impacts for people living in homes that used traditional fuel stoves and technologies, including decreased infant mortality and reduced cases of some cancers, such as lung cancer (Wilkinson et al. 2009). Cookstove replacement projects elsewhere have been shown to reduce total work hours involved in harvesting cookstove fuel materials, a job typically performed by young women (Hanna, Esther, and Michael 2012). However, it is crucial to address the complexity of technology replacement and relationships with food and cooking: externally imposed technofixes are not necessarily adopted with open arms. In a hypothetical black carbon initiative, to use development lingo, there would be “co-benefits” to far southern hemisphere people’s health and workloads and to the stability of the Antarctic ice sheet.

⁴² Sanchez and Njaastad, “Future Challenges in Environmental Management;” Tin, “Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.”

⁴³ COMNAP, 2013.

⁴⁴ Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen?