New reports find the Arctic to be the warmest it's been in millennia, and complex feedback loops mean this warming could continue unabated for decades to come. While the Arctic may feel like a distant place far removed from the concerns of daily life to many of us, the connections between melting sea ice, global ocean currents, and local weather patterns mean that the effects of a warmer Arctic are closer to home than we realize. It's cooler than cool this week as we discuss enthalpy of fusion, albedo, exploding methane in Siberia, and what it all might mean for our future.
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Thank you so much Nick for making this great transcript!
[0:00] Boom. All right, now. David.
[0:05] Yeah, Daniel?
[0:07] Now what's cooler than being ice cold?
[0:12] The frigid Arctic North and the resulting Arctic sea ice, of which the formation drives global weather patterns, keeping the jet stream in check in the air and the current of the ocean consistent beneath the seas, which supports the life of countless mammals, birds, and fish and serves as a regulator for human civilization and all life on this planet?
[0:31] Huh. Well, that might have been cooler than cool 100 years ago, David, but a paper published in "Nature Communications" recently found that Canada's Arctic is now warmer than it has ever been in the past 10,000 years, possibly even more than 100,000 years. In addition, between 1979 and the present, Arctic sea ice area has declined 40%, and a new study estimates that we will see an ice-free Arctic summer in just 20 years. Furthermore, that "Nature Communications" paper came on the heels of a new report from the United Nations, which estimates that humans have no power any longer to halt dramatic warming in the Arctic region, as up to 5 degrees Celsius increase is now baked in for 2050.
[1:14] All right. All right. All right. All right. I'm David Torcivia.
[1:24] I'm Daniel Forkner.
[1:25] And this is Ashes Ashes, a show about systemic issues, cracks in civilization, collapse of the environment, and if we're unlucky, the end of the world.
[1:35] But if we learn from all of this, maybe we can stop that. The world might be broken, but it doesn't have to be.
[1:47] Now, listeners, you might have already figured it out, but we are talking about a very cool topic today, going back to the very origins of this show, way back in episode 1, "Thin Ice." That's right. We're doing another deep dive into the Arctic seas of the north and looking at the sea ice that covers the top and drives so many of these patterns that we are dependent upon for, like I mentioned, the success of our civilization, and, to be quite frank, much of the life on this earth, and, unfortunately, how these patterns are getting disrupted as the earth heats up and the Arctic does so faster than anywhere else on this planet, but we'll get to that in just a little bit.
[2:29] Well, David, let's start by just defining again, for the listeners and for ourselves, what exactly is the Arctic? We have the Antarctic, which is the southernmost pole of the earth, and then we have the northern Arctic, and I think that's what we're focusing on today, mostly--again, right?--this area where we have sea ice, and this is getting a lot of attention, because a lot of that sea ice is disappearing, but what is considered the Arctic and how big is it?
[2:58] Well, the Arctic is actually sort of an interesting definition, Daniel. Maybe you've heard of the Arctic Circle or you've seen it on a globe--that ring that goes around the very tip top of the world, and it actually varies a little bit depending on the wobble of the earth. Typically it's around 66 to 67 degrees north of the equator, though oftentimes when we're talking about the Arctic in terms of weather, well, you typically use 80 degrees north, but that's aside from the point. But what the circle is is this is the point where anywhere north of this line in the Arctic--there also is an Arctic Circle on the bottom of the earth; anything south of that in the same context--but anything north of this circle in regards to the show that we're gonna be talking about, where we're really only discussing the Arctic and not the Antarctic, will have at least one day of the year where the sun never rises and at least one day of the year where the sun never sets, so this is a land of 24-hour sunlight and 24 hour.
[03:59] Mm-hmm.
[04:00] And so you can see immediately, even in the way that the sun affects this area, that this is a land of extremes, and consequently, extreme colds, and that is why it's so important to this larger conversation of the earth, of our weather, especially as the earth starts heating up.
[4:17] And it's useful for anybody who wants to visualize the Arctic Circle to find, like, a top-down map of this, because it's really hard to visualize if you're just looking at the typical map of the globe that you see where everything is kind of flat, but you start to see how close everything is when you have this top-down look at it, and the Arctic Circle, of course, goes around the Arctic Ocean, where we're gonna find the sea ice that we'll talk about, but it also includes almost all of Greenland, much of Northern Canada, Northern Alaska, all of Northern Russia, and the northern tips of Finland, Sweden, and Norway, so there's also quite a bit of land where people live that is included in this Arctic Circle.
[5:02] There's a town named Alert.
[5:04] I bet they just sleep all day. I bet they're the least alert people on the planet.
[5:08] Well, like, half the year they're least alert, 'cause they're hibernating, and then the other half of the year, they're totally alert, 'cause they're awake all day, because of the sun, you see.
[5:17] Um, and attached to this land, very often, is what's known as sea ice, or very often this ice will drift into what's known as the Central Arctic, kind of the very center of this Arctic Circle, and that sea ice has been getting a lot of attention recently because it's been disappearing, and it's now opening up, you know, for instance, shipping routes that have never been there before, because a lot of this sea ice extends from the coast of these land masses that are found in the Arctic Circle.
[5:47] Well, let's talk about this ice just for a second. I think there's this idea that there is solid land at the North Pole, that there's some sort of landmass there, and it's not.
[5:57] That's where you put the flag when you hike out to it for the first time.
[6:01] Exactly. No, there's nothing there but ice. There's no permanent land here at all like there is down south in the Antarctic. Instead, what we have here is semi-permanent ice. Some of this ice has been around for, at this point, centuries, but that's getting less and less common, and as Daniel mentions, at certain times, these passages open up that ships can now drive their way across the Arctic Ocean, which saves a lot of time in shipping. It's a huge thing. We'll get to it a little bit later. [6:30] But what's important to know is that this ice grows and shrinks throughout the year, so correspondingly, while we have these all-night times of the year when the temperature drops drastically in these areas, we see an explosion of sea ice, and it really basically covers the entire ocean up here from Canada all the way to Russia. But as the sun starts coming out more and more, and we eventually get to those extremely long 24-hour days of summer, well, this ice eventually begins to melt, and it thins out, and you find passages between this, which is how these ships are able to navigate across the Arctic. But this breathing that occurs is really important, because it drives a lot of the weather around the world, it drives a lot of the ocean currents, and it's important to know, though, that not all the ice melts. Even in the hottest parts of the summer, even after all this heat has entered this system, there is still some ice left over from all these previous years, and this is the very old, very thick, very important ice that acts as the center of this cooling. But increasingly, this permanent ice that weathers through through the summer is getting less and less and less and less, and soon we might, well, find ourselves at a point in the very near future when this ice is all gone, when the summer finds no more ice in the Arctic, and when that happens, well, we are in for some serious shit.
[7:57] Before we get to that, I want to just talk a little bit about how this ice is formed, because I think that's interesting, and then how this connects to the ocean currents that connect to basically the oceans of the entire globe. And so I was curious to learn the process of this sea ice formation, and there's actually quite a bit of things that influence how it forms and where and when, including the wind; the air temperature; the salinity of the water that impacts the ability for ice to form, which eventually crystallizes as freshwater, not saltwater; the roughness of the water impacts this ice formation; and also the shallowness or deepness of where it forms. And so typically--you know, I mentioned that the Arctic includes these landmasses, the northern parts of Canada, Russia, etc.--and a lot of the sea ice initially forms in these very shallow bays along these landmasses where this water is pretty shallow, it's pretty calm, the salinity is low, and these very small tendril-like or, like, tiny pancake-like ice starts to form, and that eventually gets picked up by Arctic currents, which carry it towards that central Arctic area where the ocean starts to get a little bit more rough, there's more waves, and these waves knock all this ice together. They start running into each other, layering on top of each other, forming eventually into that very thick ice pack that you find in that central Arctic region. [9:21] And you did mention the sun, you know, beating down on this ice and causing it to melt, and that's a big part of why all this is receding, but another part is that a lot of this small ice formation forming in what's known as the nursery, so to speak--those shallow areas I mentioned--well, a lot of that ice is no longer making it to the central Arctic. [9:41] There was a new paper that came out just a couple weeks ago that found 80% of all the sea ice that forms in the shallow Russian seas melts before it can get picked up by what's known as the transpolar drift, and that's a current that takes it out into deeper waters, so not only do we have this greenhouse effect of solar radiation applying more heat directly to ice that's already formed, but we're also seeing this ice take longer to form in the first place and having new obstacles to overcome.
[10:13] I'm just gonna jump right in, Daniel, with one of the most important points here, and if you take one thing away from this entire episode, it's this next section that I'm about to say. So we talked about this way back, over a year and a half ago, in the inaugural episode of Ashes Ashes. This was the main focus, I feel like, of that first episode, and this concept is something called albedo, and what albedo is is the--more or less--how reflective an object is. It's just how reflective it is of heat, of light, so things that are dark have a much lower albedo. That means they absorb more heat. And things that are light or silver or whatever are going to have a much higher albedo and reflect a lot of that heat back into the atmosphere and ultimately out into space. And this is something that is very intuitive. If you've ever been outside, you have a black shirt on, it's a hot day, the sun is beating down on you, the shirt is hot. You can feel. It's absorbing the sun's heat. You put on a white shirt, and all of a sudden, you're much cooler, because that heat is being reflected back off of you. It's not being absorbed into the material and then ultimately into your skin. [11:16] Well, it turns out that this exact same thing is happening here in the Arctic, and this ice is more or less having that same function as your shirt.
[11:27] This concept, David, I didn't really fully grasp it the first time we talked about this, but it really clicked for me recently, because I realized the albedo is expressed as a mathematical ratio, and I'm not good at math necessarily, but it helped me understand that this isn't just an abstract concept, but it has real, quantifiable characteristics, right? Like you said, it's a measure of reflectivity, but more specifically, it's the exact ratio of the amount of sunlight that gets reflected off a surface divided by the amount of sunlight that gets absorbed, and you can actually express this as a number between 0 and 1, 0 being completely absorbent, and then 1 being, I guess, like, if you had a perfect mirror, that would be an albedo of 1. And so this ocean ice, this sea ice in the Arctic typically has an albedo of somewhere between 0.5 and 0.7, in comparison to, I guess, just the open ocean, just plain water, having a much lower albedo of 0.06.
[12:34] Well, can you give us some context to what those numbers might mean, Daniel? Because trying to imagine absorbing heat or reflecting heat on ice or water, those don't mean anything to me, but, like, what would be, say, asphalt or concrete? Like...
[12:49] Yeah. Let me give you some comparisons, because like you said, literally every single thing on this earth has an albedo ratio, right?
[12:57] Mm-hmm.
[12:57] Forest cover has an albedo. Crops. Asphalt, like you mentioned. Charcoal has .04 albedo, so compared to...
[13:07] That seems like a very arbitrary thing to choose. Charcoal. Okay.
[13:09] Let's see here. Let me pull up the list. Desert sand: albedo of .4.
[13:18] [indistinct].
[13:18] Actually, I'm surprised by that. I would have thought it would be a little bit more reflective.
[13:22] Well, what about, like, a road? Like asphalt? Like I've, plenty times, going to the pool, and I've got nothing on my feet, and I burnt the shit out of them on the asphalt. I know it gets hot. What kind of albedo is that?
[13:35] Okay. Let's compare roads and surfaces. So new asphalt is around .04 to .05.
[13:43] So about the same as water.
[13:45] Right.
[13:47] That's what you said the ocean was, right?
[13:48] Yeah. If you were to walk along green grass, David, you could probably do it barefoot, because that albedo is .25, so almost five times greater reflectivity than asphalt, and you mentioned burning your feet on asphalt, David, but you'll notice, like, if you ever go to the pool on a hot summer day, you can walk along that concrete next to the pool, and you can usually do it without burning your feet, and that's because new concrete built with white cement has an albedo score of .7 to .8, so very reflective, so it's not absorbing nearly anywhere close to the amount of heat that that asphalt is, just basically because of its color.
[14:28] Well, that's actually a pretty good comparison, like, to very quickly get your head wrapped around the difference in reflectivity that we see between this white sea ice cover and the wide-open blue ocean, the asphalt, of course, being the ocean--and we know how absorbent and hot asphalt gets--and the cool, white cement being the same reflectivity as this white ice. That's a great illustration of albedo, Daniel. Hats off.
[14:54] Thank you, David.
[14:56] Okay. So here's why we're talking about albedo, because now that we've got a good grasp about what it is, how it works, and what it even actually feels like, we've got to start talking about why this is important, and so obviously if we're sitting here on this earth that is warming constantly, that is getting hotter every single moment because of all these things we're putting into the air--these greenhouse gases, this carbon dioxide--as well as the things that are naturally being released by this warming process, like methane deposits of the melting permafrost, which we'll briefly discuss later--all this stuff is adding up, and it's making the sun's rays that much more intense, and, of course, that puts more heat into the system, and the more heat we have in the system, well, that means the warmer it is and the harder it is for this ice to form in the first place, and we start getting this feedback loop, and this is where the albedo part comes in. So the Arctic and the Antarctic are sort of the control systems that regulate the rest of the earth's energy. All the heat rushes up into the North and the South, because this is, you know, entropy--we're going from these high-energy systems around the mid-latitudes and moving up towards the north, where there's less heat, where there's less energy, and it's dissipated there, and oftentimes, actually, lost back out into the atmosphere through radiative cooling. So--and a lot of that is driven by all this white reflectivity that's pushing it back out, or it's lost into the ocean here. The heat is--they're basically heat sinks. It's very important.
[16:21] Well, and David, I want to pause, 'cause I think it's important to point out how they are heat sinks, and a lot of that has to do with the ocean currents, right? I mentioned in the very early part of this episode, in the intro, that there's a study estimating now that we'll have an ice-free Arctic summer in just 20 years, which is an updated prediction, and one of the things they took into account that was missing from some earlier models was a process called the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation, which is basically a big convection cycle in the ocean, and this is a great example of how Earth's systems can function in cycles that really defy the human experience of time, you know, where we individually, we have this experience that climate cycles by the year. We have the four seasons, and then it resets. But this oscillation is one of the processes through which ocean temperatures change over decades. Specifically, in this oscillation, it trades off between surface waters being cold along the Pacific coast of the Americas and warm in the northern Arctic and coast of Australia, and then about every 30 years, that reverses. And so what they took into account is that one of that reversals is taking place right now, in which the Arctic is going to be experiencing warmer ocean currents, right? [17:35] But to bring it back to what you mentioned about how the Arctic is this heat sink and how it regulates, I guess, the heat buildup of, you know, the climate system all over the globe, these ocean currents are a huge part of that, because what happens is these warmer surface waters get carried up to the Arctic, and then, as that energy is dissipated, the water turns very cold, and it starts to sink, because higher-density material and fluid sinks while hotter, less dense material rises. It's the basic process of convection. If you have a fan in your home that you use to either cool you during the summer or warm the room during winter, you get the basic idea. And so, at the same time, while this cold water is falling to the bottom of the ocean in the Arctic regions, so is the salt, because that's also very dense--it's denser than freshwater--so you get this very cold, very saline water that hits the bottom of the ocean in these Arctic areas, and then it gets carried, through this convection process, all over the globe on the bottom of the ocean, where it then surges up at different coastlines, and this drives so many of the climate systems, like El Niño, El Niña, hurricanes, the jet stream, so all these oceans are connected, and then, of course, we're talking about this melting sea ice, and that causes more fresh water to enter the oceans through this melting--not just that sea ice, but also from glaciers, the increased river flow from landmasses where that melting snow on the top of mountains occurs faster, and all this has the immediate effect of warming the ocean, and what that results in is basically a deceleration of the amount of water that sinks to the bottom of the ocean as this very cold, very dense fluid, and that has the overall effect of weakening this global convection process that powers that great circulation of ocean layers across the globe, which will have unpredictable impacts on our weather systems that we've come to depend on.
[19:32] Yeah. Exactly. This is one of the big engines that drive so much of not only the ocean currents around the world but also the weather that those influent, and albedo is a huge part of this. So obviously these circulations that are encouraged by the rapid changes in temperature of the water are, if you have this big blanket over the water reflecting all this energy off, it's gonna slow that system down, it's gonna change how it works. But if we remove that blanket and we start heating up water directly, then things get all out of whack. They change dramatically from this stability that we've known at this point for thousands of years that have allowed civilization and life that's currently around us on Earth to flourish. So there are, of course, natural variations in this system, so every year, like we say, you have a melt season--and these seasons can vary a bit from year to year, but roughly more or less they coincide with spring through summer for the melt season, and then autumn and winter for the freeze season. Typically--I think this year we considered melt season beginning around March 1st, and it'll probably extend up until September, midway through, during which we'll start to see freezing for the first time, and this melting season actually has gotten longer by about five days every single year for the past couple decades, which, of course, means that we're starting to see less and less ice in the summer and less and less ice in the winter seasons, because we're having less time to cause this freeze and more time to allow all this ice to melt. [20:59] So that means we see less ice in this same process, and less ice means that we see a lower overall albedo of the entire Arctic, and we can think of the Arctic all as one thing absorbing energy from the sun, and if it has this big, white, reflective blanket over it, it's gonna reflect a lot more of that energy into space, but as that blanket gets smaller, and as that blanket gets smaller for longer parts of the year, well, the overall albedo of the Arctic is gonna get lower, and the lower it gets, the more energy is absorbed into the system that extends the melt season even more. We see more melts happening, and then the whole process repeats itself again next year, where we have an even longer melt season, where the albedo overall is even lower than it was in the past, and even more energy heats up the system. Of course, some summers are cooler than others. Some are warmer. Some have cloud covers. Some have snow cover. There's a lot of variables that are at play that don't make this a consistent step function that we can easily examine. It's very complicated science. There's a lot of modeling that happens here. But the overall trend absolutely is more melt, lower albedo, less ice, and that can be really bad.
[22:09] And what's interesting, David, is the albedo of the Arctic isn't lowering just because more of that blue ocean is exposed, absorbing that heat, but also the ice itself decreases in albedo the more it melts, because it turns out that older ice has a higher albedo than younger ice--it's more jagged; it reflects a lot more sunlight--whereas this younger ice that has to come back quickly is more smooth, and it also develops something called--I believe it's melt pools. So--and melt pools come from the melting of the ice, but also the melting of snow that accumulates on the top of this ice, and if that ice is very smooth, the water will accumulate in ponds and pools, and just like that blue ocean, that absorbs more heat than the reflective ice, which just further encourages more melting all around.
[22:58] And all of this is really bad, and do you know why that is, Daniel?
[23:02] Um...well, David, it's bad because, you know, more melting--we get more--we get less ice.
[23:12] Well, I mean, that's exactly right, but instead, maybe I should have said, "Do you know how bad this is?" And that's really, I think, the most interesting part of this albedo and the melting story, is the magnitude of change that it causes. So, I mean, this albedo absolutely is a huge factor, both in the water itself, first the ice, as well as the water that accumulates on this ice, like you mentioned, and you can also have positive albedo events, like if you have a late snow that covers the ice. Snow can actually act as a sort of blanket. It raises the albedo even more. It acts as a thermal insulation layer. So you can have these types of things, but all that aside, albedo--the lower it is, the more warming you're gonna get; the higher it is, the less warming you're gonna get. But here's the thing--even more than the albedo. So, obviously, already the water is gonna heat up faster than the ice is, because it's darker and it's absorbing more energy, right? But the equation doesn't end there. It gets much, much worse, and let me tell you why. Let me introduce you to a concept, Daniel, called the enthalpy of fusion.
[24:13] Mm.
[24:14] "Enthalpy." It sounds like I have a lisp.
[24:18] "Enthalpy." Is that related to entropy?
[24:20] I don't know.
[24:23] Let me introduce you to a concept, David, called entropy of fission.
[24:27] What is entropy of fission?
[24:29] I don't know. I just--
[24:30] It sounds good. Is that a thing?
[24:36] Back to your enthalpy, David.
[24:38] So basically what this means is that when we have a phase change in a substance, we see different amounts of energy required to overcome these jumps. So ice is a solid. Water is a liquid. And let me just illustrate this with some numbers. Bear with me for a second. We'll get to this. But imagine that we have one kilogram, which is the same as one liter of water, okay?
[25:01] All right.
[25:01] And we're trying to heat it up from, like, 10 degrees Celsius to 30 degrees Celsius, so we're trying to raise it a total of 20 degrees Celsius.
[25:10] Okay.
[25:11] If we're doing this, we have to put into it 83.6 kilojoules of energy. Okay?
[25:18] Yeah. Yeah, that makes about sense. That's what I came up with.
[25:21] The only thing you need to know is we're raising it 20 degrees Celsius. It's gonna take 83.6 kilojoules to do that. Okay. Now let's look at exactly the same amount of ice--we're talking one kilogram of ice--and we're gonna raise this ice block from 0 degrees Celsius to 20 degrees Celsius, so exactly the same. We're raising it 20 degrees Celsius.
[25:42] Right.
[25:43] How much energy do you think it would take to do that? I mean, intuitively, you would say, "Well..."
[25:47] 83 kilojoules.
[25:50] .6. Yeah, exactly, because it should be the same, and they're both water--just one is frozen and one is not. But that's not true. Ice is more resistant to this energy. It takes more energy to put into it in order to break these bonds apart and turn it into water. So it doesn't take 83.6 kilojoules to raise it 20 degrees; it takes 333.55 kilojoules to raise that same exact amount of matter the same temperature. So what we need to take away from this is that ice takes four times as much energy to warm 20 degrees--or whatever, one degree--than water does.
[26:27] Oh. I think I know where you're getting with this.
[26:29] What that means is that ice is much better at insulating the earth from all this energy entering it because it takes this much energy to turn ice, which is forming already, into water. But if we put that same amount of energy that raised this water that melted this ice into water, we won't see a jump of one degree; we'll see a jump of four degrees Celsius. And when it's that much warmer, we see dramatic changes in that ocean circulation that you talked about and the formation of new ice, what the freeze season becomes, and that's in addition to the dramatic jump in albedo that's happening. So when this ice is gone, we're basically getting rid of this huge battery that's been soaking up all this excess heat, and if we don't have that, then we're gonna see heating kick into overdrive, and that is what's coming very soon with something called the Blue Ocean Event.
[27:20] And the Blue Ocean Event is just the term for an event that scientists assume will be an important threshold in that process. It's defined by when the sea ice extent area is less than 1 million square kilometers. But that reminds me of something we talked about--I think it might have been episode 6, "Ocean Death," about how so much of the carbon dioxide that we emit gets absorbed by the ocean. It's an extraordinary amount. It's, like, a majority or a very significant percentage of the amount that we emit. But because the ocean absorbs it, we only get that greenhouse gas effect on, you know, the other half that we're putting directly into the atmosphere. But as the ocean loses its ability to absorb more and more CO2 because it becomes saturated, so to speak--the acidity gets too high--now all of a sudden we're emitting the same amount in terms of total output, but the effect becomes way more pronounced, because now it's all contributing to the greenhouse gas effect, and I guess it's kind of the same thing here with the Blue Ocean Event, where all this solar radiation that's coming into the earth is being absorbed by the ice, and it's kind of absorbing the consequences of that, but once that ice is gone, we will experience a warming acceleration that--what did you say, David? It's, like, five times greater or four times greater?
[28:45] Well, it's four times greater for the enthalpy jump, and then about twice as fast because of the albedo jump, so all told there, combines to eight times more energy entering the system.
[28:58] And then, of course, you know, it really is like a regenerative battery, that once you lose that, you can't get it back, because now that Arctic Ocean water's absorbing so much more heat that I'm guessing that the reason why this Blue Ocean Event threshold is so significant is because now it's going to be almost impossible for that sea ice to come back. It's gonna have to fight surface water temperatures that are just too great to overcome.
[29:22] Exactly. I mean, the ocean has been the great savior of humanity in the way that we've just completely gone over the top with our pollution. But so much of it has ended up being absorbed into the ocean. This carbon dioxide that's caused this acidification that we've talked about, which, if it had been pumped directly into the atmosphere--I think we talked about in that episode, it's something like 10 degrees of warming would have already been here right now, but fortunately, the ocean saved us there. Well, this ice is doing the same thing. It's bouncing back huge amounts of the sun's energy into the atmosphere instead of allowing it to accumulate in the ocean, allowing the ocean instead to accumulate some of our excess heat at the same time, which it's starting to slow down on its ability to do that. That means that we've seen pretty dramatic warming up to this point, but it is nothing--absolutely nothing--like we'll see when this Blue Ocean Event finally happens and the Arctic start warming up in a truly high gear. [30:16] And the Arctic is already warming up faster than anywhere else on the planet--dramatically so. In fact, there are some places that the UN has thrown up their hands at the IPCC and said, "Well, the Arctic is gonna be absolutely above 2 degrees Celsius, and it's likely, even if we stay under 2 degrees Celsius, the Arctic will hit 5 degrees Celsius above the average temperatures there," and they're just hoping that means that Blue Ocean Event won't eventually happen, but I think we all know it's baked in at this point, and the question becomes: when will this happen? And I've seen estimates all the way from the latter part of the century, optimistically--people were hoping in the 2070s--but more recently, the IPCC and other groups have said things more like the 2030s, and even more recently than that, a number of Arctic scientists, oceanographers, expect us to see these Blue Ocean Events somewhere in the 2020s, maybe even as early as next year. It really depends on what happens to happen over the summer. It only takes one bad summer, one bad melt season, to kick this off, and once we've passed that, that's a tipping point. There's no going back into this bold new future.
[31:25] Um, okay. That's pretty apocalyptic, David, but why don't we shift gears and just talk about how this fading sea ice is having direct impacts right now on our relationship to the Arctic as well as just how this receding of sea ice is kind of opening up the Arctic to new systems that previously have been completely locked out of this region? And one of the obvious things that's going on right now is the opening up of shipping lanes, right? And we talked about this in the very first episode, how people were planning to take advantage of low sea ice in the summer season of last year to start shipping cargo ships through this area that had previously always been covered up with ice, and that actually happened for the very first time last summer. The first ever container ship to ever do so traversed the Arctic between Asia and Europe, and for the purpose of--what do you think, David? Some kind of research? Some kind of scientific innovation?
[32:26] I don't know. Delivering iPhone cases.
[32:28] You're pretty close. Not the cases themselves, but the electronic goods. So there you have it. We have now conquered the Arctic, and the whole purpose is to deliver huge stacks of containers full of cheap electronics. Yay, humanity.
[32:46] Good. Awesome. That's a good use of all these dead polar bears.
[32:52] But David, it's not just commercial ships. In fact, the military--I say "the" military, but these are militaries around the world--have big plans for the Arctic.
[33:03] They're gonna nuke the whales.
[33:05] They won't be able to escape us now. But the U.S. Navy announced this January that it might send surface ships to the Arctic for the first time this summer, as opposed to just submarines and things like that. Late last year, NATO staged a military exercise in Arctic Norway that involved 40,000 troops. Great Britain is sending 800 commandos and four fighter jets to the Arctic to patrol for the next ten years. Russia is opening military bases on its borders with the Arctic. And I just find this all incredibly boring, David, because, like, if I were to imagine, like, a military presence in the Arctic, you know, it would have to be some secret base that was, like, physically on the North Pole, you know? Like...
[33:53] On that nonexistent landmass that we mentioned?
[33:56] Yeah. Well, that's why I find this a little dissatisfying, because I just imagined, like, maybe in the past, you know, you're an explorer, you're like, "I'm gonna be the first person to go visit the North Pole and put my flag down," and you get there, and, oh, you discover a secret military bunker, and they're like, "Oh, we got you. You can't reveal our secrets."
[34:14] Here's the entrance to Hollow Earth.
[34:16] Yeah. But no, we've just been waiting for this ice to melt so that we can patrol our ships and say, "Ha! I own the Arctic." And we're just driving the same tanks as we always have.
[34:29] I don't think we're driving tanks in the Arctic.
[34:31] No, I saw a photo of that NATO exercise, the 40,000 troops.
[34:35] But wasn't that on, like--on Baffin Island or some shit? I guess that's the Arctic.
[34:40] It was in, like, Northern Norway, but, again, the Arctic includes...
[34:43] The Arctic's only ice. There's nothing there. If it's not ice, it's not the Arctic. Yeah. Okay. You're right. But if we're talking about all these countries who are trying to take advantage of this system and the destruction that we're putting on this, I want to call out some hypocrites here, Daniel.
[34:58] Ooh.
[35:00] So we all...
[35:01] You're gonna get called out.
[35:02] Yeah. Sorry for our listeners from this place, but Scandinavia, at least in the United States, we see them as these very amazing countries that we want aspire to. They're happy and healthy, and they take care of everybody, and it's impossible to do that here because of whatever bullshit reason you want to make up. But Norway is one of the best-off of the Scandinavian nations in large part because of their extreme wealth, which comes from oil, and their giant sovereign national wealth fund that allows them to put all these policies into play that allows them to be green, they have more electric vehicles there than almost anywhere else in the world--in fact, I think oftentimes it's more expensive to buy an internal combustion engine vehicle there than it is an EV, but these green policies are put forward and made possible, for the most part, by this dirty oil money. And Norway has been trying to shrink away from this. They say, "We're gonna divest from all this oil. We're gonna be responsible and not be destroying the earth anymore." [36:04] Or at least that's what they said, because just last month, they decided they were gonna open an additional 90 sites, 50 of which are in the Arctic, to oil drilling. And so, in some sort of gross ironic twist of fate, this dramatic melt and destruction of the Arctic that we're seeing by our increased greenhouse gases that are warming the earth up, these greenhouse gases primarily from the burning of fossil fuels, is allowing us to enter the Arctic further to exploit it for even more oil, to extract that, burn it, and make the problem even worse. So, I mean, we have all these natural feedback loops that are occurring in the Arctic, right? This albedo affect, the enthalpy of fusion, these longer days--all these things adding up to make things even worse and worse, and we're like, "Well, hold the phone, nature. You think you can destroy the earth by yourself? Uh-uh. We're gonna do it even faster. Hold my beer." [37:05] And here we are opening up for more oil extraction to make this problem even worse, and I think that really says a lot about humanity--nothing good, unfortunately, but it is true that we're seeing a bonanza--people rushing in trying to exploit these resources, especially all this oil, which is only actually there in the first place because the Arctic, back when the carbon dioxide levels used to be much higher, or actually about the same as it was today, was a tropical paradise complete with palm trees and crocodiles, which eventually died and turned into this oil that we're now extracting. The cycle of life, it goes on, and we are doing our best to compress it down of what would normally have taken millions of years to occur into just a few thousand, maybe a few hundred, even. 'Cause if there's one thing that we do well, we do things faster.
[37:56] Well, David, to be fair, we're not the only species on this planet, okay? So check your anthro perspective. There other species that are rushing to take advantage of the new territory that is a warmer Arctic, and we actually mentioned this initially in episode 20, "Irresistible," that antimicrobial resistant episode about how our warming climate has expanded northward the range of ticks coming into new areas that they had never been able to enter before because of that frozen permafrost, but these ticks are traveling northward into Canada, and, in fact, doctors in Canada are still getting patients who are now contracting Lyme disease, but the doctors have no idea what it is, because Canadian doctors were never educated on it since the tick that carries it could never survive that far north until now.
[38:45] When you think about it, though, this is a really heartwarming story for ticks.
[38:48] It's like the coming home--you know, the brave new Arctic story for ticks. Manifest tick destiny.
[38:54] I'm trying to shake my anthro-centrism here.
[38:58] Well, to bring it back to anthro-centrism, you know, I think it's important to mention again how, when we think about the Arctic, you mentioned polar bears, and we've been talking about ice, and I guess that's kind of the image that a lot of people have in their head of just this barren wasteland, this ice desert, but, in fact, there is a ton of life that can be found in the Arctic. There are 4 million people that live and depend on the Arctic for their livelihoods, with the largest concentration occurring in Siberia, which is Northern Russia; those Nordic countries like Norway, Sweden, and Finland; and, of course, Alaska and Northern Canada. In addition, there are 21,000 species of plants, mammals, birds, fish, and more, and, David, I know you're a big fan of geese, right? And...
[39:47] I'm not. This is fake news. I'm anti-geese.
[39:51] Oh. Maybe I got my notes backwards, but--well, then you might want to avoid the Arctic, because 66% of the global goose population is found there.
[40:03] Fascinating, Daniel. Fascinating. Did you see the video of the walruses falling off cliffs?
[40:09] No. What?
[40:10] Everyone's freaking out about this. This is in the new "Our Planet" series, which just came out on Netflix and is the, like, "Blue Planet," but about how the global warming is killing the earth.
[40:24] Right.
[40:25] Narrated by Attenborough again.
[40:28]
[40:29] And this clip has everybody pissed off.
[40:32] Let me watch this.
[40:32] They said it's too controversial. Just watch it. Man: [40:37] One's gonna go. There's one right on the edge.
[40:43] Oh, no. Oh. Ooh. Oh, gosh. Man: [40:59] There's probably 200 or 300 dead walrus on about that half-mile stretch of beach here.
[41:03] Ooh. Man: [41:04] They're exhausted 'cause they have to swim 100 miles now to get to food, and then coming back here, 'cause it's the only place to sleep. They used to sleep on the ice, dive down, eat the food, sleep on the ice, [indistinct], and now they're swimming 100 miles coming to this place, climbing cliffs, and they're just exhausted and falling down and either being killed falling or just crushing each other 'cause there's several thousand crammed onto little tiny bits of beaches. Woman: [41:26] This is a sad reality of climate change. They'd be on the ice right now if they could be.
[41:32] These walruses normally would have had lots of ice to pull themselves up on, rest, live their lives happily, but instead, because of this loss of ice, they're now having to adapt the way they live. They have to climb these giant cliffs, find the land in the first place, and then, you know, a walrus body's not so much built for climbing, and lots of them are tragically falling off, they're crushing each other, they're dying on these rocky, horrible cliffs, and it's causing--it's a dramatic change in the way these walruses live their lives, and a lot of them are, unfortunately, not able to adapt to it and are dying, and this clip has these very graphic images of that happening. And the same thing too, Daniel, that we mentioned with this ice and the walruses' inability to climb on it, well, this has also disrupted polar bears, how they live. They also do not have a place to rest on the ice. They don't have these walruses who normally could have been prey, they're hunting the calves. That is not an option anymore, so you're seeing these emaciated polar bears work their way into human territory, eat out of dumps, things like that, and there's all these heartbreaking photos you can find online.
[42:40] Mm-hmm.
[42:41] And this is some of the tragic reality that we're seeing the natural world try to adapt to this rapidly warming Arctic.
[42:50] David, let's bring this discussion back real quick to a part of the Arctic that we didn't really cover, which is the permafrost, and like we mentioned, the Arctic is very big. It includes part of these land masses, and that's where we find this permafrost, which is essentially just frozen soil, specifically soil that is frozen for at least two years at a time. Typically this is permanently frozen soil. It has--you know, something like half of all the carbon on Earth is stored in this frozen soil, which microbes cannot get to, cannot break down, and that locking up of this carbon away from microbial activity prevents the conversion of that into methane. But I just want to mention a paper that came out recently that talks about methane in the atmosphere. [43:38] And so, in the late '90s and early 2000s, the level of methane entering the atmosphere plateaued, right? And overall levels stopped at around 1,700 parts per billion, and this was significant because the Paris Agreement in 2015 assumed that by now, in the present, that level would be decreasing, but in fact, a new paper has found it's done the opposite. In 2014, methane, for instance, was observed to have been increasing rapidly and was over 1,800 parts per billion by the end of that year, and no one knows why. It's possible that either methane has been increasingly outputted from biological sources, like meat production and environmental leaks, or it could be an increase from fossil fuel-burning, or it could be simply that feedbacks that break down methane in the atmosphere have slowed, but the other big potential possibility is thawing permafrost, but scientists really have no idea. [44:36] But what they are confident on is that warming is causing additional warming. And to bring it back to that intro of this episode, David, I mentioned that UN report that estimates that Arctic warming is now baked into the system. There's nothing we can do to avoid it, right? We're going to see a 5-degree-Celsius increase by 2050 in the Arctic, and potentially a 9-degree-Celsius increase by 2080, and that's if, you know, business continues as usual. If we were to somehow halt all greenhouse gas emissions today, the Arctic is still guaranteed to increase by 5 degrees Celsius at the end of this century. And what this means is that close to half of all permafrost is going to thaw, releasing huge amounts of methane and CO2, destroying any built infrastructure in the process...
[45:27] Which, again, I just want interject and remind everybody of our episode where we discussed the latest IPCC report and pointed out the fact that they specifically do not include all this released methane and CO2 from permafrost in their calculations, and this permafrost equals basically more or less about the same amount of carbon dioxide that we've released over the past few decades. It's a massive time bomb.
[45:54] Right, and when you mention "time bomb," David, one of the things--again, we're talking about methane, and that's one of the big concerns, is this thawing permafrost will result in this massive outputting of methane and other greenhouse gases, which will rapidly accelerate warming, but there are other things that thawing in permafrost can lead to, and one of those things that it can lead to is this soft ground that becomes very unstable and cannot support such landmasses as mountain slopes and the like, and this can cause infrastructure collapse and dramatic landslides, and I want to highlight this because it's a great example of another important concept with climate change and warming in general, which is that, because climate change impacts complex systems, this gradual warming that we experience can lead to non-gradual, very dramatic and immediate changes. And, for an example, there's an island about the size of Ireland that is found in Canada's Arctic Archipelajo.
[46:53] Pelago.
[46:54] Archipelago. And it's called Banks Island, and scientists have witnessed permafrost thawing there causing dramatic landslides at a rate that has increased 60 fold over the past 30 years and resulted in the loss of 100 million tons of ice. And what's important about this discovery is that it suggests there is a climate threshold that, once reached, I guess similar to that Blue Ocean Event we discussed, will cause the permafrost to soften enough for these very explosive landslides, and while no one lives on this island, it means that, as warming continues, as these trends move south, places where people do actively live could turn from stable to inhospitable and dangerous in a very short period of time.
[47:40] All this melting permafrost, Daniel, it doesn't just end there, though. You see all sorts of dramatic effects happening. One of my favorite ones are these things called pingos, which are basically giant lumps of frozen methane and other gases caught under this permafrost, and they are quite literally, now--just looks like a hill in the tundra, but many of these, as they warm, the methane gets trapped, it's trying to burst out, it's heating up, and then they explode. You see all these craters exploding across Siberia, just because of this trapped methane, and then, as that blows up, it releases this methane immediately into the air, and it leaves this really dramatic pockmarked landscape that shows in a very visual way just how dramatically we're heating up this soil, and how much gas is escaping, literally exploding out of the ground, because of this. But as we burst things out of the ground, we're also setting ourselves up for potentially dangerous things. We've talked about this in the past on this show in a couple episodes, actually, but there is a huge danger of frozen pathogens--things like anthrax, which are trapped in this permafrost--but then, as it thaws, as it explodes out, they're released into the atmosphere, and they are potentially infecting both local populations, like reindeer, as well as humans.
[48:53] Yeah. Something we mentioned, again, in that episode 20, "Irresistible," in 2016, there was an anthrax outbreak directly because of this thawing permafrost, which killed 2,300 reindeer, caused 100 people to become hospitalized, and actually resulted in one death.
[49:11] And that's just from a pathogen that we are aware of. There, of course, is the nightmare scenario where we release unknown pathogens for which we don't have any resistance built up into the world, and we end up in that apocalypse kind of situation. Always a positive outlook here on this show. But I don't want to get anybody's hopes up.
[49:29] Speaking of apocalyptic things, David, I mean, we touched on methane, but scientists have just figured out that melting permafrost is releasing nitrous oxide into the atmosphere. The sampling size was small. We still don't know the overall levels. We also don't have models to predict future emissions, but it's a little bit alarming, because nitrous oxide is 300 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2, and it can persist in the atmosphere for over a century. But I guess we will see. Well, David, it's about that time. About that time. What can we do?
[50:06] I've been dreading this for the entire episode, because--every now and then, we get one of these things where we just have to look at the state of the world, and these typically seem to be climate change episodes, but we just have to sort of throw our hands up in the--there isn't anything individually that we can do, Daniel, unfortunately. When we're talking about these Arctic warming things, like you mentioned, like the UN report suggested, a lot of it is baked in already. There's not a lot that we can do there. But what we can do, I guess, at this point is mitigate that damage, and this is something that absolutely won't come from individual action. It's not gonna be by switching to vegetarian, by not flying--these are all things we should be doing, but it's not gonna be enough. To get this changed, that prevents things from really, truly spiraling out of control and making things just bad instead of catastrophic, we're gonna need to see basically the globe mobilize and realize that we're not fucking around anymore, because if we continue to waste this time, well, then we might not have a human civilization into the next century. [51:11] That means that you, as somebody who now carries this knowledge, who understands these issues--both just in this episode, but throughout this show--it falls on all of us to tell others about this...
[51:23] Right.
[51:23] Because once we reach that critical awareness and that critical mass of, "Hey, hey, this is happening, this is what's happening, and this is what will happen if we don't do something," can we start getting people say, "Okay, well let's do something. Let's clamor for change." You know, the discussion about, "Is climate change real or not?" is long gone. Who cares?
[51:43] Well, David, I agree--I completely agree with you. That's actually what I was going to say about what we can do, because I think spreading awareness is important. I was actually--you know, I told you I ran into someone from the college that I went to who actually got their Ph.D. from the same university, and we were talking. They were asking me what I was doing. I mentioned the podcast. I mentioned that we cover climate change, and they looked at me, they stared at me, and they said, "What is climate change?" And, I mean, honestly, it really caught me off guard. [52:14] I was--you know, I said, "Well, what do you mean?" and they said, "Well, what is it? I mean, is it real? I mean, what's going on?" And, I mean, this was a genuine question from someone who got their Ph.D. from a major university and looked me in the eye and said, "I don't even know what climate change is." And so we still have--you know, despite the fact that this is something that has been known for well over a century at this point, has been documented over and over again, we're still fighting this misinformation and this lack of knowledge and education in our world, so, again, I totally agree with you, David, and I would just emphasize that point that there is a need to have these discussions. Maybe talk to your friends. Maybe one of your friends is someone who doesn't really understand the issue, doesn't understand how warming in the Arctic might connect to the world that we're living in down south, doesn't understand that our actions, our collective actions, have an impact on these global systems, and the more people that talk about it, the more people will care, the more we can collectivize around these and maybe have an impact.
[53:14] Well, and just to continue that one thought I was on, because I think this is important, climate deniers, they don't matter anymore. Most people already believe in climate change. Whatever. The thing that matters now is that people who are willing to sacrifice something to save the world, to save humanity, and those who are only content to wait and hope that science or technology or something will come in and save the day, and means they don't have to adjust their lifestyle in any way, and that will not prevent catastrophe from happening. We need to be realistic with ourselves. We need to be realistic when we approach our political leaders and say, "Hey," you know, "we need these things done, and we know they're gonna suck." [53:58] You know? No politician wants to go out there and say, "Yeah, we're gonna hurt the economy. We're gonna have to lower people's standards of living." But for many of us in the developed world, that is what it's gonna have to take if we want to save the world and let there be a world at all. That is where the new climate battle lines are being drawn right now. And so, as somebody who carries this knowledge now, you know, I'm sorry to put this heavy burden on you and everyone else who listens. This is something that I feel like I've been carrying for years--Daniel, I guess, as well. This is part of the reason why we have this show as a platform to try and spread this stuff. But you have to pass this information on. You have to be realistic with people, and realism right now, for a lot of people, compared to what they've been told in the media and stuff, sounds like fatalism, but it's not. It's the opposite. Realism that is realistic with this huge catastrophe that is looming ahead of us is the only way that we can have optimism, because that is the only chance we have of surviving this.
[54:54] I think you made a great point about holding our politicians accountable, but more than that, letting our politicians know that we understand it won't be easy, because it's one thing to demand from our leaders that they do something, whatever that something is, about climate change, but then to turn around and demand that we have unprecedented economic growth and that we bring all this business to our area, you're really asking an impossible task, right? And of course the politician is going to choose the route that gives people the most short-term benefits, right? Like you said, no politician wants to sacrifice their career by saying, "Look, I'm going to tackle climate change by shrinking the economy," and so that's an excellent point, that we all have to, in a way, share that burden by saying, "Look, we understand that if we're going to tackle this challenge, if we're going to go forward into a better world, we might have to give up some of the commodities that we've come to rely on, right? We may want to curb the shipping of containers full of electronic goods, you know, along shipping route in the Arctic. [56:03] But we are willing to make that sacrifice if it means we're moving towards a more sustainable, more self-sufficient world. And again, we've talked about this a million times, but there are so many benefits that would come from that direction. It's so easy to focus on the loss. It's so easy to say, "Well, you know, if we shrink the economy, I won't be making the same salary anymore," but remember that imagining loss is so much easier than imagining an unknown benefit that we will gain. [56:30] It's so hard to imagine that, in the process of building self-sufficient communities, communities that aren't dependent on this international commodities market driving the need for these unsustainable oil explorations and these shipping networks, that in that process, that community itself will get so many benefits that aren't present in the current economic structure. This is something that Claire mentioned last week in our episode about the relationship between landlords and tenants, "Rent Seekers." What they said was that in the process of organizing communities around a particular issue, all of a sudden, they didn't feel depressed anymore, they didn't feel lonely anymore, and I think we will discover similar benefits along the way towards paving a better world. Yes, it will be challenging, and yes, there will be sacrifices, but those sacrifices are merely the cost of something much better.
[57:25] A healthy and whole world, and healthy and whole lives for each and every one of us.
[57:29] A lot to think about, a lot to carry forward.
[57:32] As always, Daniel, but think about it and talk about it we hope you will. You can find more information on this episode, sources for everything we talked about, that tragic walrus video, and much more on our website at ashesashes.org.
[57:49] A lot of time and research goes into making these episodes possible, and we will never use ads to support this show, so if you like it, would like us to keep going, you, our listener, can support us by giving us a review, recommending us to a friend, and supporting us on patreon.com/ashesashescast. And in that process, we'll ship you a sticker. We also have an email address. It's [email protected]. We encourage you to send us your thoughts. We'll read them, and we appreciate them.
[58:22] We are also on all your favorite social media networks at AshesAshesCast, and we have a great Discord community that we'd love to see you join. You can find a link to that on our website. Just go to the top, "Community," and click on the Discord link, and we hope to see you there. Daniel and I are in there all the time as well as many other fantastic listeners. We've got another great show coming up next week, and we hope you'll tune in for that, but until then, this is Ashes Ashes.
[58:47] Bye.
[58:48] Bye-bye