The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet

by Jeff Goodell

The ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland continued their rapid decline. A new paper in the journal Nature Climate Change showed that accelerated melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, driven by warming of the Southern Ocean, is unavoidable for the rest of this century—even in the most optimistic scenario for reducing greenhouse gas pollution. As Kaitlin Naughten, a scientist at the British Antarctic Survey, stated bluntly: “It looks like we’ve lost control of the melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.” Another study estimated that Greenland is now losing about thirty million tons of ice per hour. As a result of this massive influx of cold fresh water, the Atlantic Ocean current that circulates heat and nutrients between the tropics and the poles, known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, is moving toward collapse.