In 2004, Trek Across Arctic Ice Saw Temps In 60s; In 2025, Arctic Report Card Shows Accelerating System Failure

In the summer of 2001, Ben Saunders, then just 23 years old, tried together with a friend to reach the North Pole. It was rough going over the ice, and they eventually turned back. But in 2003, Saunders made it to the Pole on his own. And in the spring of 2004, the freelance adventurer attempted a solo trip across the Pole from Cape Artichevsky in Siberia to Canada. Seventy-two days after starting out, he had to be rescued about 30 miles from Canada because open water blocked his way. He had trekked 599 miles, often without mittens or hat, logging temperatures as high as 15.5° Celsius (60° Fahrenheit) compared with two years previously when they had averaged 0.5°C (33°F). “The weather this year was the warmest since they began keeping records,” he told a reporter at the Ottawa Citizen before flying back to his U.K. home.

The warmest since they began keeping records. That 21-year-old remark, of course, has become the refrain of our age. Indeed, the week before Christmas, the Arctic Report Card 2025 — the 20th annual such report — was released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It pointed out that last year was the hottest ever recorded in the Arctic.

The scientists who put the report together concluded that the Arctic is getting wetter and stormier. To give just one example of a plethora of ensuing problems, this change in precipitation can create major problems for wildlife. Bison and caribou, for instance, break through the snow in winter to reach the plants they eat. But if rain falls atop snow, and then freezes, it can mean a thick layer of ice over the snow makes it difficult for the animals to break through, and they starve, as did a third of the Alaskan bison population in the winter of 2021-22.

For two decades, the Arctic Report Card has been the pre-eminent barometer of climate change in the region that should have worried everyone far more than it did. But for a good portion of those years, we had the legacy media and a big portion of social media amplifying the liars denying climate science. Twenty years ago, some deniers were still claiming that Arctic ice wasn’t dwindling but rather increasing. Today the fossil fuel interests that paid for those lies are looking at the melting Arctic as a source of more of the stuff the burning of which delivered us into our current predicament. The findings in the 2025 report make one thing unmistakably clear: the Arctic has passed the threshold of gradual change and entered a regime of systemic failure. This is a structural transformation of planetary climate dynamics — a transformation with direct, escalating consequences.

EDIT

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/1/5/2361361/-Arctic-Report-Card-2025-tells-us-for-the-20th-time-what-happens-in-the-Arctic-doesn-t-stay-there?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web