Sadly I missed the advance publicity for this event, part of which looked like this:

I’ve belatedly discovered that on November 27th at Westminster Central Hall:

Ten of the UK’s leading experts briefed an invite-only audience of around 1,250 politicians and leaders from business, culture, faith, sport and the media with the latest implications for health, food, national security and the economy.

According to the National Emergency Briefing’s web site:

These briefings are the clearest, most up-to-date picture of the climate and nature crisis in Britain. For the first time, the UK’s top experts give one integrated, unfiltered account of the risks and the solutions. This is the baseline the national conversation must now start from. Every policymaker needs to see it.

The talks will be available on our YouTube channel in the coming days…

A 45 minute documentary is now in production for release early next spring.

Whilst we wait for the official videos, here’s a summary of the event via Dave Borlace’s “Just Have a Think” YouTube channel:

Lieutenant General (Ret’d) Richard Nugee CB CVO CBE spoke on “climate and national security”, and mentioned the Arctic in that context:

The Arctic is becoming a new flash point due to the climate crisis directly. You’ve heard how sea ice is receding and [the Arctic is warming] at four times the rate of the rest of the world. But let’s put that in a geopolitical context:

The Russian Duma has claimed [the Arctic Ocean] is a Russian internal sea, whereas we treat the Arctic as international waters. So there’s a risk of conflict over access, over resources and of course, over shipping routes. So the climate crisis is now shaping strategic and military competition.

The encouraging part is that what we need to do on climate also make Britain safer and more resilient. Take energy independence. Renewables, storage and a decentralised grid reduce our dependence on foreign oil and gas, and they are less vulnerable…

Some are using the threat from Russia to say “Let’s not worry about climate change now, or not at all”. But that’s a false choice. Tackling climate is central to our national resilience today. It’s part of our today’s security threat, not tomorrow’s.

According to the National Emergency Briefing web site once again:

81 MPs and 52 Peers signed up to attend, and many others arrived at the last minute without tickets.

Do you suppose that any of them were listening?

[Update – December 8th]

The “official” National Emergency Briefing videos are now arriving on YouTube. Here is Richard Nugee’s:

[Update – December 10th]

Another presentation at the National Emergency Briefing mentioning the Arctic was given by Professor Tim Lenton from the University of Exeter. Tim’s talk was on the topic of tipping points, and here’s the official video:

Here’s one of Tim’s slides, illustrating potential climate tipping points:

According to Tim:

We’ve heard about unprecedented warming of the Arctic. That’s causing a bunch of consequences, including the unprecedented melting of the Greenland ice sheet. We’ve got fresh water pouring off the Greenland ice sheet. That’s one of the things, along with that Arctic warming, that’s contributing to a measured slowdown in the great overturning circulation of the Atlantic Ocean, which we’ll come back to… because that’s the big risk for us if that tips…

This red thing is the surface current heading northwards transporting massive amounts of heat to where we are and giving us [in the UK] our nice, mild, equable climate, especially winters. But you see either side of Greenland, something happens called deep water formation. Those waters that are heading north, they’re losing heat and they’re evaporating fresh water to the atmosphere. That makes them colder and saltier and therefore denser. And either side of Greenland they get so dense that these waters sink from the top of the ocean to thousands of meters down. And that propels the blue path which is cold water heading back thousands of meters down in the bottom of the Atlantic and closing the loop. If you lose the deep water formation, you can tip off this great overturning…

Unfortunately this circulation can pass and does pass a tipping point in a bunch of the state of the art climate models that we run.

In this one it’s happened at around 2 °C of global warming. On the right you’re seeing a remarkable comeback of Arctic sea ice cover that happens if we cross this tipping point with sea ice reaching down to The Wash and covering most of the North Sea by February each winter.

To be continued…

[References]

The UK Ministry of Defence Climate Change and Sustainability Strategic Approach (2021)

The UK Ministry of Defence Strategic Defence Review (2025)

The 2025 Global Tipping Points report: https://global-tipping-points.org/

Lenton et al. (2019) – “Climate tipping points – too risky to bet against“

van Westen and Baatsen (2025) – https://doi.org/10.1029/2025GL114611