Ice melting is an key player in climate change, which is an existential risk and turns trade.

Global Warming Consequences and Threats to National Security and U.S. Foreign Policy

The DoD considers climate change as a threat to our national security and a complication to U.S. foreign policy. In 2016, The Center for Climate & Security stated the U.S. military has for years been a leader in addressing the risk to national security posed by climate change—a phenomenon that acts as a “threat multiplier,” exacerbating natural disasters, water, food and energy insecurities, contributing to conditions that can catalyze conflict, instability, and state failure, and exacerbating existing security risks … to U.S. national security, and potentially creating new ones.30

In particular, water and food scarcity leads to mass migrations, especially in parts of the world that are least prepared to adapt.31 Today, almost 785 million people do not have access to clean water and almost two billion lack access to adequate sanitation. It is reasonable to expect that this number may double.32 Climate change contributes to high tide flooding with severe storms surges in coastal regions. World-wide, between 340 million and 500 million people live on land that is projected to be below annual flood levels by 2050 and 2100, respectively. This scenario would create an enormous refugee crisis. These kinds of climate-enhanced disasters destabilize governments and fuel radicalization.33

The drought that led to the mass migrations in Darfur in the Sudan is largely regarded as triggering the first mass migrations that can be linked to climate change.34 Current violent conflicts, such as in Syria and Yemen, have been linked by several scholars to prolonged water scarcity.35 Climate change exacerbated severe drought in the Fertile Crescent, driving farmers to move to the cities, and helped trigger uprisings that eventually led to the Syrian civil war.36 , 37 To be sure, poor decisions on the part of the Syrian government also played an important role in this conflict. Still, this case represents a cautionary tale of how poor governance and climate change can exacerbate a natural phenomenon into a crisis, pitting the world's superpowers against one another.

There is also evidence that early investment in mitigation can save money in the long run. A 2019 report concluded that $1.8 trillion in mitigation investment by 2030 concentrated in just five selective areas would yield $7.1 trillion in benefits.38 An Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report estimates that the impact to just 22 economic sectors in the United States would cost about an additional $224 billion per year by 2090 if we maintain no mitigation action to address climate change.

While conflicts are often attributed to a combination of different causes, it is becoming more evident that future water insecurity will play a greater role in conflict situations.”43

Global warming also impairs the capability of our military to protect U.S. national interests. For example, 128 U.S. military bases are currently under threat from rising sea levels, especially in the Arctic. Infrastructure, such as bridges, roads, rail, ports, and aviation structures are required for DoD to move personnel and equipment in response to disasters as well as potential conflicts.

Responding to These Threats Using Emerging Technologies

The world's response to the growing climate crisis has been inadequate. Progress in mitigation has not been made fast enough. Experts say that the nations of the world are not on track to meet even the modest targets set in the Paris Accord to limit warming to 2°C. Additionally, current efforts will not be enough to prevent catastrophic damage to the climate, peoples and economies of the world.

It is time to consider steps that may provide additional time to develop more serious mitigation efforts and stretch out the cost of mitigation. Traditional geo-engineering approaches, such as Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI),44 are by design large-scale because they seek to offset the regional warming caused by greenhouse gases emissions. Once started, such interventions are difficult to stop because the injected aerosols stay in the stratosphere for years. If there are unintended consequences, models show that there is often a rebound and overshoot in temperature, called a termination effect.

There are emerging non-traditional technological solutions that can mitigate the damage caused by global warming and also diffuse tensions that threaten U.S. national security. One class of these technologies is Arctic Sea Ice Restoration (ASIR) that seeks to increase the reflectivity of sea ice during the summer months to prevent ice melt.45 It is local by design and therefore its impact is smaller and easier to control. The goal of ASIR is to break the sea ice reflectivity feedback loop and take advantage of the natural Arctic amplification to mitigate warming over a larger region. The aim is to slow global warming. These technological solutions have no demonstrated unintended consequences and are easily reversible.

To date, no major deployments of any geoengineering approach have been attempted. Several small demonstration projects, in laboratories or small-scale deployments, have been carried out along with some modeling efforts. Considerably more research, modeling and engineering studies are needed before these many different geoengineering approaches can be seriously considered for full scale deployment. Three ASIR approaches that have been proposed to date and are presented below. Since these approaches are local, they are easily reversible and have no known termination effects.

Scientist Leslie Field and colleagues46 have proposed a localized Arctic sea ice reflectivity restoration technology whose aim is to restore the Arctic ice's natural function of reflecting sunlight and thereby reducing warming of the ocean by reflecting solar radiation. The concept is to increase the reflectivity of young ice by applying a thin layer of reflective hollow silica-glass microspheres onto the surface of the ice. This treatment would increase the reflectivity of ice by about 50 percent, reducing the absorption of solar radiation that heats the ocean and causes more ice loss. The materials used in the treatment are reported to be nontoxic, consisting of silica (the primary material in sand, and most rocks). Biotoxicological testing to date, has shown no adverse impact on wildlife. A climate modeling study, designed to simulate the potential impact of the reflectivity modification scheme over the entire Arctic Ocean showed that yearly application of the material on the Arctic sea ice over the period 2000–2040 will cause ice volume to increase from 0.5 percent to 1 percent per year, with increased ice thickness of 20 cm to 1 m. The climate modeling also shows that a large part of the Arctic sees temperatures decreasing by more than 1.5°C after application.47 An Arctic-wide deployment, however, is simply a base case, but not a realistic scenario for deployment. Strategies for a targeted deployment of these microspheres in smaller areas, for example in the Fram Strait,48 through which much ice export has been seen in the past several decades, may be a key leverage point for ice restoration. The total cost of deployment could range from $1-5 billion per year while potentially averting trillions of dollars of climate-change-induced damages. Results from the modeling and the field work are promising, but more and larger field and modeling tests are required to understand fully the effects and consequences of this technique.

Another ASIR approach has been proposed by Steven Desch and colleagues. Wind-powered pumps would pump ocean water from underneath the ice to the top surface during the Arctic winter.49 The water would freeze, delaying or reducing the ice melt during the summer and, over time, could restore some of the ice pack to its original thickness and extent. Theoretically, the additional ice would decrease Arctic amplification and lessen the detrimental effects that were discussed earlier. The concept has conceptually developed a system that could increase the thickness of the ice by about 1 m over the course of an Arctic winter, representing about a 70 percent thickening of the ice. The scientists estimated that a system that could cover 10 percent of the Arctic Ocean spread over ten years would require one million devices annually and cost about $50 billion per year. To date this concept has been tested in laboratory setting and numerical simulations have been conducted.50 The wind-driven pumps are conceptual at this point and much engineering work is required to ensure that the devices would survive the harsh Arctic winter. This method is not as mature as the previous approach.

A third technology, called Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB), sprays nanoscale condensation nuclei into the marine boundary layer (<1000 meters in altitude) to make existing clouds brighter. Such brightening has the potential to keep large portions of the Arctic cooler. More research is necessary to evaluate the efficacy of such an approach as well as the potential for unintended consequences. A prototype MCB experiment was carried out recently in Australia to develop a technique that could potentially delay coral bleaching in the waters of the Great Barrier Reef.51

The costs of large-scale deployments of any ice restoration approach are difficult to predict accurately at present. Estimates of tens of billions of dollars annually, or roughly 0.1percent of GWP, have been suggested. While such costs are large, the avoidance of the staggering costs of damages due to global warming must be considered. Evaluating only the cost of climate-related disasters, it is estimated that in just a recent two-year period, 2016 through 2018, such disasters cost the world $650 billion. In North America alone, those costs were estimated to be $415 billion.52 Munich Re, the world's largest reinsurance firm, blamed climate change for $24 billion of losses in the California wildfires.53 , 54 Cost estimates for climate change-related disasters and associated infrastructure, agricultural, economic and human health impacts by 2040 are staggering. In just two decades from now, these costs have been estimated to be $54 trillion world-wide. This staggering cost projection suggests that timely and assertive restoration approaches, if proven safe and subject to appropriate governance, could be an effective tool to fight global warming while human societies seek to reduce greenhouse gases emissions.