This is the first study that puts a dollar value on global warming in the arctic. Pew estimated the climate cooling value from the loss of snow, ice and permafrost, and converted those values and the estimated methane releases to carbon emissions equivalents. This was then multiplied by a "social cost of carbon" including cost of climate change on agriculture, energy production, water availability, sea level rise and flooding.

The report estimates that in 2010 alone, arctic melting will warm the earth an amount equivalent to 40 percent of all US industrial emissions, or building 500 new coal burning power plants. The Pew Group expects that the annual costs of global warming in the arctic will rise to $2.4 trillion dollars US by 2050.