Forget the damage US President Donald Trump’s “reciprocal tariffs” will do to the international trade system or slowing global growth. The real threat to global economic activity is his decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, ignore the Climate Crisis and promise to dramatically increase oil and gas production.

The Arctic was warming twice as fast as the rest of the world in 2020, but that accelerated to four times fast by 2023 and according to the latest research, parts of the Arctic is now warming seven times faster than the rest of the world.

That means the world’s permafrost will disappear almost entirely by 2100 or earlier, releasing “hundreds of gigatonnes” of the 800-1,000 gigatonnes of primordial CO₂ trapped in the ice – twice the amount of CO₂ released by all of humanity since the dawn of history. Humanity is currently releasing around 37 gigatonnes of CO₂ into the air each year.

As bne IntelliNews has reported, global warming is accelerating, and according to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), both the 1.5C and 2C increases in temperature above the pre-industrial baseline targets have already been missed. According to the latest IPCC sixth report the world is on course to see temperatures increase by 2.7C-3.1C by 2100, which will result in cataclysmic ecological disasters.

Even in the best case scenario, where governments stick to the inadequate pledges made at the last two COP meetings in the UAE and Baku, the planet will warm by 2.4C, that will pass various trigger points that could start a cascade of interlinked ecological disasters.

Moreover, even if by some miracle, the governments of the world went into emergency mode and halted emissions, that are currently at record levels and still rising, to keep the temperature increase to 1.5C – something that is still in theory possible – it's already too late for the permafrost. The melting of the permafrost is now locked in by various by the feedback loops already established, even if the rest of the planet starts to cool again.

In the 1.5C increase scenario, snow and glacier cover would be reduced, but the permafrost in northern Russia and Canada would stay intact as well as the Arctic sea summer ice. This scenario has already been missed.

In the 3C increase scenario, now the most likely case, Russia’s permafrost is reduced to leave the very oldest formations in the northwest territories which can reach over 1,000m underground. But Canada and Greenland are almost entirely cleared of permafrost and all of the summer sea ice disappears, which will only accelerate warming further.

The frozen earth of the north has trapped rotting vegetation in the ice for between 100,000 and up to 2mn years that will finally be exposed to the atmosphere again. It has trapped an estimated 800-1,000 gigatonnes of CO₂ and the 80-times more damaging methane, of which “a large proportion” would be released to the atmosphere, according to a United Nations Environment Programme report in 2012. The amount released remains vague, but in its last report in 2021, the IPCC confirmed that permafrost regions hold 1,460-1,600 gigatonnes of organic carbon and “depending on thaw conditions, this could release hundreds of gigatonnes as CO₂ into the atmosphere.

Russia is currently 45% covered by permafrost, most of it in the northeast corner, but there are also considerable fields of permafrost in Canada and Greenland. As the gif shows, the permafrost coverage has been stable for the last four decades, and with a 1.5C increase that is some reduction, but a manageable amount.