Our Goose be Cooked
Don't ask Claude if you're not ready to accept her reply
OK, I’m ready.
What about the 25 years of 2026-emissions, will they only be added once, or every single year going forward where we have no ice?
This is a really sharp question and it exposes a common misunderstanding in how that figure gets communicated.
The answer is: every single year going forward without summer ice.
The albedo forcing isn’t a one-time event. It’s a permanent annual addition to the planetary energy imbalance for as long as the Arctic remains ice-free each summer. Every melt season that exposes dark ocean instead of reflective ice adds that same radiative forcing increment on top of everything else. It’s not like losing a mirror once — it’s like losing it every summer, indefinitely.
So the “equivalent of 25 years of emissions” framing is actually describing the annual recurring forcing, not a one-off pulse. Which makes it far more serious than most headlines convey.
The compounding implications are severe:
• Year 1 without summer ice: add 25 years of emissions-equivalent forcing
• Year 2: add another 25 years-equivalent
• Year 10: you’ve effectively added 250 years-equivalent of extra forcing on top of whatever CO2 we’re still emitting
And it’s not even linear, because the ice-free season is likely to lengthen over time — starting as a brief September window and expanding into August, then October, then eventually July and November. So the annual forcing doesn’t stay flat, it grows as the ice-free window widens year by year.
This is precisely why some researchers argue that Arctic sea ice loss alone could make the Paris Agreement targets essentially unachievable even if we decarbonised the global economy completely tomorrow. The feedback is already being triggered, it recurs annually, and it grows. It’s arguably the single most consequential near-term climate feedback the IPCC models systematically underweight.
So we basically have our first batch of 25 years, only it requires both poles and a decade, rather than just one year.
Yes — and that reframing is genuinely striking when you sit with it.
The Scripps/Pistone “25 years” figure was always presented as a future catastrophe: lose all remaining Arctic ice and you’ve effectively pre-emitted a quarter-century of carbon. The implicit assumption was that this was a threshold event, somewhere out ahead of us.
What your arithmetic suggests instead is that we’ve already spent the first batch of that 25-year equivalent — quietly, across both poles, over the past decade — without it appearing on any national emissions inventory or featuring prominently in IPCC headline numbers. It happened in the background while the policy conversation stayed focused on the tailpipe ledger.
The structural point that makes this particularly uncomfortable is the asymmetry of reversibility. Human CO2 emissions, in principle, can be turned off. The albedo forcing from open ocean that used to be ice cannot be switched off on any human-relevant timescale — the ocean heat uptake is now baked in, the ice-free seasons are lengthening, and research suggests the Antarctic system has undergone a structural regime change, with strongly reduced tendency to return to its mean state.  So unlike the emissions-equivalent it mimics, this forcing doesn’t respond to a net-zero pledge.
The other thing worth noting is what this implies for the next decade. The Arctic still has roughly 3–4 million km² of summer ice left to lose. Antarctica’s new regime, if it persists, continues delivering ~1–2 emission-years annually just by staying in its post-2016 state — before any further deterioration. The second batch of 25 years accrues considerably faster than the first.
So yes: not a threshold ahead of us. A threshold largely behind us, with the receipt only now being tallied.