https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2019.1654269

What if the Arctic melts, and we lose the great white shield? Interview
with environmental policy expert Durwood Zaelke
Dan Drollette Jr.
Pages 239-246 | Published online: 30 Aug 2019
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ABSTRACT
In this interview, Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for
Governance & Sustainable Development, outlines the climate change problem
in the Arctic, tells of the increasing speed with which the ice is melting,
and outlines some possible solutions, ranging from relatively benign
approaches to methods that call for increasingly more intrusive tinkering
with the planet.

KEYWORDS: Geoengineering, climate change, Arctic, sea ice, melting,
permafrost, methane, greenhouse
Durwood ZaelkeAs the rate of melting of the Arctic sea ice goes up, other
processes have sped up as well – including the pace of the thawing of the
permafrost, the release of more methane, nitrous oxides, and other
greenhouse gasses, and the possible changing of the jet stream. Some
climate policy experts contend that the loss of this “great white shield”
in the Arctic could set in motion a dire cascade of effects.

Among this group is Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for
Governance & Sustainable Development, who tells the Bulletin’s Dan
Drollette Jr how his ideas evolved regarding what should be done. Zaelke
outlines the problem, tells of the increasing speed with which the ice is
melting, and outlines some of the possible solutions, ranging from soft and
relatively benign approaches to methods that call for increasingly more
intrusive tinkering with the planet – all to solve what is a man-made
problem in the first place. Zaelke says “I don’t like geoengineering. I’ve
avoided it and thought it did indeed present a moral hazard. But when I
look at the risk we’re now facing from the accelerating feedbacks in the
Arctic in particular and the existential threat that presents, I have to
say that geoengineering cannot be left off the table any longer.”

Dan Drollette Jr:
It seems that more climate scientists are accepting the idea that we might
have to do something about climate …

Durwood Zaelke:
Well, I’d say that we humans have already been doing an experiment on the
climate, but it’s not deliberate.

Drollette:
Okay, let me rephrase: They’re accepting the idea that we might have to do
some sort of purposeful human intervention to counteract anthropogenic
climate change.

Zaelke:
That’s more like it.

Drollette:
Though there’s an awful lot of people who still just don’t want to believe
the evidence that climate change is even occurring, let alone that humans
are the primary cause.

Zaelke:
Luckily, there are fewer and fewer of them – but there are still holdouts
struggling to admit the problem. They just don’t want to rethink their own
life, or the economic system. Which is what it will require.

It’s a pity, because we’re running out of time. And the whole challenge of
climate change today is really one of timing.

Drollette:
How so?

Zaelke:
We have an accelerating problem: Climate change is happening faster, and
bringing with it more changes and impacts today than there were yesterday.
And it will be faster still tomorrow; climate change is not a steady-state
phenomenon, but gets worse and worse day-by-day.

Meanwhile, our solutions are not on the same time scale. Yes, we’ll
eventually convince everyone that climate change is real and requires
drastic intervention. But by that time it’ll be too late.

Consequently, our challenge is not only to convince enough people that
climate change is real – and do so far enough in advance to do something
about it – but to show them that we have the solutions. And that if we move
fast enough, we’ll have an opportunity to avoid the worst consequences.

And there are a lot of climate change impacts that are baked in already. We
see it in the United States with our hurricanes and our floods and fires.
And the rest of the world sees it too, with typhoons and rising seas and
heat waves.

So, it’s not just about getting the message out; it’s a question of whether
we can speed up our solutions. You can’t solve a fast-moving, accelerating
problem with slow-moving solutions.

We’ve got to match our time scales, and we’ve got to do it fast.

Drollette:
Can you give me a big picture overview of some of these solutions?

Zaelke:
The IPCC’s (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Special Report on
Global Warming of 1.5°C from last October, 2018, tells us very clearly that
we need to start with three strategies for protecting the climate. (
https://www.ipcc.ch/2018/10/08/summary-for-policymakers-of-ipcc-special-report-on-global-warming-of-1-5c-approved-by-governments/)
The first one we all know, which is moving away from fossil fuels and their
emissions. Which we can do, by aggressive energy efficiency interventions
and shifting to clean energy. You might think of this first part – the
shifting to clean energy – as the management of carbon dioxide on the front
end. Bottom line: just don’t emit CO2. (And some people would put nukes in
that category of emission-free energy as well.)

The second thing that report tells us is that we have to reduce the
short-lived climate pollutants – which is an absolutely essential piece of
the solution, that the IPCC is addressing for the first time. These are
short-lived climate pollutants. They include black carbon, particulate
matter sometimes …

Drollette:
Black carbon would be soot, right? From burning wood, things like that?

Zaelke:
It’s particulate matter from the incomplete burning of wood, but also from
diesel and coal as well. (
https://www3.epa.gov/airquality/blackcarbon/basic.html) These fuels create
this material that is the second-largest contributor to climate change –
just behind carbon dioxide and probably neck-and-neck with methane. As a
short-lived climate pollutant, methane is 80 times more powerful in warming
the planet, molecule-for-molecule, than CO2 is. If you’re working on a
20-year time horizon, that is.

Then there’s also tropospheric ozone, or ground level ozone associated with
urban smog. Then finally you have the hydro-fluorocarbons, or HFCs, which
we’ve been reducing aggressively under the Montreal Protocol through the
Kigali Amendment. (
https://thebulletin.org/2019/01/global-agreement-addressing-ozone-depletion-will-also-bring-large-climate-benefits/
)

These make up the package of short-lived climate pollutants, which we’ve
absolutely got to deal with.

Drollette:
So, reducing carbon dioxide emissions and short-lived climate pollutants
makes for two strategies for protecting the climate. What’s the third?

Zaelke:
We have to figure out how to reduce the existing CO2 that we’ve already put
into the atmosphere, on a much faster time scale than the natural carbon
cycle does it. Consequently, carbon dioxide removal strategies are
essential, if you want to stay within the carbon budget of 1.5 or even 2
degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. That includes as a starting
point the brilliant technology of photosynthesis. We’ve actually got a
strategy that works. If we stopped cutting down our forests and destroying
our grasslands and our wetlands, and started protecting our kelp forests,
we could stop emitting a lot of pollution and enhance our carbon sinks –
the things that pull CO2 out of the atmosphere. We could go a step further
and expand the possibilities of biomass (plant and vegetable matter) to put
more and more CO2 back into the soil. And such “soft” geoengineering
processes include enhancing soil carbon through photosynthesis.

Then we also have mechanical, or “hard” solutions for pulling CO2 out of
the atmosphere. These include things like the artificial trees that Klaus
Lackner has been working on at Arizona State University. (
https://cnce.engineering.asu.edu/klaus-lackner/)

And Climeworks in Switzerland (https://www.climeworks.com) has been
pioneering the field of CO2 direct reductions from the ambient atmosphere.

In the same category there are companies like Blue Planet Cement (
http://www.blueplanet-ltd.com), which are capturing CO2 at the smokestack
and turning it into a viable product – in their case, lightweight-cement
building materials. They’ve even poured some at the San Francisco airport
extension in the last few years. Again, there are ways of treating the
existing CO2, to pull it out of the atmosphere.

Now, the things I’m taking about here, in this third category, they’re
about managing CO2 on what I think of as the back end. The idea is that
carbon dioxide is already out there in the atmosphere – or you’ve already
committed to pumping it into the atmosphere – so let’s remove as much as we
can, so it’s not harming the climate.

But it’s important to note that it may well be that even all these
approaches added together may not be sufficient to keep us at the target of
1.5 degrees of global warming.

And of course we’re not doing all of them. When you look at reality, we’re
a long way from keeping average global temperatures from rising 1.5
degrees, or even 2 degree Celsius. When you face up to that, you have to
say: “We’d better look at other strategies.”

That’s especially evident when you look at the accelerating warming in the
Arctic, which I think is the weakest link in the chain of climate
protection. The Arctic has such a profound role on regulating global
climate, in so many ways.

Let’s start with the expansive Arctic sea ice, which acts as a great white
shield sending incoming solar radiation safely back to space.

Drollette:
“Great white shield” is a nice turn of phrase.

Zaelke:
It’s very apt; the Arctic sea ice has functioned that way for a long time,
helping keep the Arctic cold by reflecting sunlight back out to space. If
we lose that ice, then the incoming solar radiation will be encountering
darker oceans, which more readily absorb it. This warms the oceans, which
then warms the atmosphere above the oceans and accelerates the melt of even
more Arctic sea ice. It becomes a self-reinforcing feedback loop.

And because of things like that, we’re down today to only about one percent
of the normal amount of multi-year strong ice – the thick ice that acts as
a sort of glue that holds the Arctic together, and helps keep the region
cold. When that’s gone, then we will only have the thin, honeycombed,
first-year ice left – which is much more fragile and more susceptible to
faster melting and to the breakup from cyclonic winds and waves that we
anticipate increasing in the Arctic as well.

So, the endgame of Arctic sea ice is not going to be a slow, gradual melt;
it’s going to be this chaotic surge of wind and waves that break up what’s
left – the fragile first-year ice. Which then goes out to sea where it
melts much more quickly. (
https://thebulletin.org/2018/10/climate-report-understates-threat/)

And you lose that defensive shield.

To give you a sense of the numbers, let me just cite one Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences paper (https://www.pnas.org/content/111/9/3322)
by Veerabhadran Ramanathan and others that calculates that the loss of
Arctic sea ice between 1979 and 2011 added 6.4 watts per square meter to
Arctic warming. That’s about 25 percent more CO2 added when you average
this globally. That’s a big hit for the climate system to take.

That means we could lose all the Arctic sea ice within 15 years, plus or
minus 10. And keep in mind that plus or minus part; when you have a 15-year
horizon, it could well be minus 10. Which works out to five years.

Drollette:
Five years before all the Arctic sea ice is gone?

Zaelke:
Five years.

Everything suggests that the system is moving faster and faster. To think
that we’re going to be lucky and get that plus 10 – for a total of 25 years
from now – is probably not realistic. The scientists say the best guess is
15 years, but it really could be a lot less.

And when we lose all that ice, we’re going to get multiples of the warming
that we saw through 2011. That’s going to accelerate the positive feedbacks
that melt permafrost. When you melt permafrost, you’re releasing carbon
dioxide, super pollutants like methane, or short-lived climate pollutants
and nitrous oxide emissions. A recent paper in Atmospheric Chemistry and
Physics just a couple weeks ago using low-level aerial flights calculated
that nitrous oxide emissions from melting permafrost were much, much higher
than previously thought. (https://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/19/4257/2019/)

This is not good.

The start of the loss of permafrost is another indication of the wicked
cascade that we’re facing as we lose the Arctic Sea ice. Permafrost has
much more stored climate emissions in it than we already had put up in the
atmosphere.

It’s game over if that happens.

Drollette:
Taken together, what does it all mean?

Zaelke:
When we look at these trends, we realize that everything we’ve learned over
half a century of studies shows that the climate problem is getting worse
faster than we thought before. Everything shows that the positive feedbacks
are kicking in, and we’ve had no luck yet in finding something in the
natural system that’s going to slow them down.

We thought for a while that maybe the increased amount of carbon dioxide
would enhance plant growth, and that would accelerate the photosynthetic
reduction in the atmosphere.

But that didn’t happen.

In fact, we now think that the warming that’s caused by the extra CO2 may
actually damage the crops.

And once again, the problem is accelerating while our solutions are not –
and our political will is still fractured. That is in large part today
because the United States lacks leadership on this point, but it’s also
because other countries have challenges replacing their coal-based
economies too …

When you look at the critical role of the Arctic and you look at how fast
we’re losing the sea ice, and how fast we’re accelerating the melting of
the permafrost, and changing the jet stream – these are all very difficult
impacts to slow down after we’ve lost all the Arctic sea ice. I am at this
point in my evolution of climate solutions beginning to focus on what’s
called geoengineering. Now this is not a well-defined term. It’s a loose
collection of ideas about intervening in the climate system. Some we call
soft geoengineering.

Drollette:
I was going to ask you to explain the concept a bit more.

Zaelke:
Soft geoengineering consists of efforts that are scalable and reversible.
You try something, and if it works, you do more. If it has impacts that are
not tolerable you do less and you shut it down, or reverse it. In other
words, we have control over soft geoengineering. We may not even want to
use that term, but for the moment, let’s continue with that.

A good example that people typically put in this category is biochar, which
is a technology I like. It’s technically biochar pyrolysis, or the heating
of animal or vegetable matter under conditions of low oxygen, so that you
turn it into a fine-grain charcoal that can go in the ground as a soil
amendment to enhance the growth of plants. That puts more carbon
immediately into the soil and locks it in the ground. Then the enhanced
growth of plants puts even more CO2 into the soil. It’s a very good
strategy, definitely scalable, that had been in use for centuries in Brazil
before the arrival of the first Portuguese explorers – who called it terra
preta de Indio, or the “dark earth of the Indians.”

Drollette:
And just to keep things clear, this is an example of soft geoengineering,
an area which itself is about managing CO2 on the back end – removing as
much carbon as we can and locking it in the soil, so it’s not harming the
climate?

Zaelke:
Right. And it has so far – over a period of hundreds of years of testing –
been benign and incredibly helpful. So, my advice is that we accelerate the
use of biochar as fast as we possibly can.

Looking more directly at the Arctic, there are two strategies for restoring
polar ice that are scalable and reversible if they should have unintended
consequences.

One is by Leslie Fields and her group, called Ice911. (
https://www.ice911.org/) The idea is to put a silica coating on the
fragile, first-year ice to enhance the regrowth of multi-year ice – the
strong ice that can keep the white shield in place. You start with a small
area. If it works, you do more, and you monitor the impacts to see if
there’s a problem. But because silica is a naturally occurring substance,
we would not expect it to have any adverse impacts. But nevertheless, you
want to monitor it – this is the way we do these kinds of experiments.

Then there’s the strategy that has been taken up by Sir David King in his
new initiative at Cambridge University. (
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/cambridge-scientists-radical-ways-to-stop-climate-change-a8907766.html)
This idea has been around for a while in various forms, but what he’s
promoting is a situation where you have wind-powered pumps in the Arctic
that pump sea water up onto the fragile first-year ice to regrow multi-year
ice. Now you would need a lot of those small windmills pumping water up –
but again, it’s scalable, reversible, and if it works you should do more.

Drollette:
Now is this the “brightening the clouds above the poles” idea that the BBC
News was talking about recently – about pumping sea water up and out into
fine nozzles to get particles of salt into the clouds? (
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48069663)

Zaelke:
No, no, that’s something else, where you have these wind-powered autonomous
ships sailing the oceans that pump sea water up into the sky. That
nucleates the type of clouds that can help with climate change. Clouds are
hugely important in regulating climate; they’re about negative 25 watts per
square meter. Compared to the warming that we’re experiencing just from
preindustrial times, which was about three watts per square meter.

But if we mess with the clouds in the wrong way, some computer models have
predicted it could have very devastating impacts on climate. Which could be
happening already, as we see the poleward migration of the extra tropical
clouds.

But spraying sea water is another good example of the idea that if it
works, you do more.

Drollette:
What are some of the other types of geoengineering out there?

Zaelke:
Then you get to what we could think of as “hard” geoengineering. At that
point, you’re looking at continental-scale projects, and things that are
harder to reverse in a time frame that would prevent the adverse impacts.
In that category, generally, the focus is on solar radiation management
from aerosols: Can you shoot reflective particles into space and have that
reflective force cool the climate?

We know it works; we had a natural experiment in the form of the emission
of sulfate particles by Mount Pinatubo in the early 1990s, which when it
erupted spewed reflective particles of sulfate into the atmosphere and
subsequently cooled the planet by a couple of degrees Celsius for a fair
number of years.

So, we know that this approach has the potential to work. But what we don’t
know is how it will affect weather systems locally. Would it reduce the
Asian monsoons? If you mess with the monsoons, you’re messing with
agriculture for tens or hundreds of millions of people. It’s a risk you
have to be incredibly careful about.

It’s getting to the edge of weather modification, which is considered an
illegal means of war in one of our treaties. You have to be careful that
you know what you’re doing from the scientific side, but also from the
political side …

But let me change this back to the science for a second. We’re at the point
where I think it’s essential that we start experimenting with all types of
geoengineering, because if we can’t save the Arctic, then arguably, we
can’t save the climate system.

If the Arctic is the weakest link in the chain of climate protection – and
I have very strong evidence indicating that’s the case – then we have to
find a way to save the Arctic sea ice. And “save” at this point means
saving and regrowing strong multi-year ice so we build that shield back up,
and we slow the melting of the permafrost and that self-reinforcing
feedback loop that that caused. We really have to think of the special
emergency in the Arctic and the special strategies we need. My
recommendation would be to deploy the soft geoengineering immediately along
with the other strategies that we mentioned, such as bringing down at the
front end the amount of CO2 and short-lived pollutants that are emitted.

And then, when political leaders fully appreciate the scale and the
immediacy of the climate emergency, they’re likely going to want to deploy
the faster strategies – the geoengineering strategies that have the
advantage, we believe, of speed. We can move them faster to save the Arctic.

Now again, this is not yet the dominant position of the field, but I think
it’s a malpractice by scientists and policy makers not to focus on the
Arctic, not to start studying the geoengineering solutions. The National
Academy of Sciences has a new effort on this. Sir David King has his new
effort just a few weeks ago at Cambridge. Leslie Field and others are
working on it.

Drollette:
Just so it is clear when you talk about the three different steps to reduce
the problem. You’re saying that we should be reducing CO2 emissions,
cutting back on the emission of short-lived climate pollutants – and when
it comes to geoengineering, we should be getting into the soft
geoengineering first, because it is scalable and reversible?

Zaelke:
Yes.

Drollette:
And then save the hard engineering for later?

Zaelke:
Well, what I’m saying is that the three strategies in the IPCC 1.5 Report
are all underway, and they’re all ready to be accelerated. Go flat out with
those. That’s the Green New Deal, that’s where we need to focus so much of
our attention. But then we also need to do soft geoengineering: It’s
scalable, it’s reversible, and we need to start it soon, so we can
accelerate. A lot of that will be in the category of carbon dioxide removal
anyway, which is the third lever for the 1.5 report.

Then I’m also saying that we have to accelerate our experiments with the
hard geoengineering. We have to know exactly what hard geoengineering can
and cannot do, and what its consequences are. Because when the climate
emergency manifests itself even further, there will be the possibility of
rogue nations saying: “We can’t tolerate this. We’re going to shoot up
sulfates rockets or have eye-level atmospheric flights that disperse
sulfates, and too bad for the rest of you. We’re going to try it because we
can’t feed our population, we can’t save our shoreline.” There are the
possibilities of having this spin out of control in the governance side.

But if we do it right, it can be hugely beneficial.

Again, my proposal is to study this now in a much more aggressive way.
Right now, we are not experimenting the way we should with something that
might be the most important medicine that the world has to cure us of
climate impacts.

Yes, I’m saying start with the soft geoengineering, because it’s benign in
most cases and it’s reversible in all cases – that’s its categorical
definition.

But also pay attention now to the potential to use the harder
geoengineering, because if that’s the only way to save the Arctic, we’d
better have it in our arsenal ready to go when that decision is made.

Drollette:
Okay. Here’s a question that I’ve asked climate scientist David Keith of
Harvard University. Do you consider hard geoengineering a last-ditch
emergency operation? Or is it something fundamentally different?

Zaelke:
Well, I think we’re so close to that last-ditch moment that we better be
ready; you need your Manhattan Project to be ready. You hope you don’t have
to deploy it, but you’d better be ready to do it in the safest possible way.

And if it turns out in the initial experiments to be less risky than we
think, then we should be deploying it right now, because the impacts we’re
suffering now are very long-lasting. You can’t put the genie back in the
bottle from the warming of the oceans, except on a multi-century time
scale. You can’t put the glaciers back, or the Greenland ice sheets. These
things are underway, and it’s going to take more heroic efforts.

It’s somewhat like pain medication – if you don’t stay ahead of your pain,
what happens is you need a really big hit to bring you back into relative
comfort.

We have to be ready, to have something ready to blast out.

If you look at the forecasts that Exxon-Mobil has for the use of its
products for the next 25 years, they show their investors that more fossil
fuels are going to be sold, because more people are coming into the world.
And they’re going to be richer and they’re going to buy more oil and gas.
If those projections prove true, then the transition to the climate-neutral
moment is going to take longer. We’re still fighting that incredible legacy
with the fossil fuel companies, despite the weakness that they’re showing
because of their earlier deceptions regarding the science.

Drollette:
How cost-effective is hard geoengineering when compared to things like
reducing emissions?

Zaelke:
I don’t know. We all have different estimates of what things will cost; you
have a learning curve with any technology. We always try to project what
the costs will be initially, but then as you learn and develop at scale,
the price goes way down. So I can’t answer this precisely, but I think that
the cost is minor compared to the damage that can be avoided. The cost to
the world of losing the Arctic, and then having the permafrost melt, moves
us into climate chaos where you have water shortages, food shortages, mass
migration, political instability, and further movement to despotic
governance – where the strong man will come in under the guise of restoring
order and start suspending civil liberties, squeezing out democracy, and
civilization starts to unravel. (
https://thebulletin.org/2016/11/brian-schmidt-climate-change-is-a-real-existential-threat-that-should-be-dealt-with-immediately/)
This is one all-too-possible scenario, if we’re not successful.

You can see through history how this has happened. You can see the
darkening shadows that show how it’s beginning to happen now. If this
scenario is to be avoided, we’d better get all of our tools ready and study
them. If geoengineering in the hard form of injection of particulates that
can reflect heat proves to be too dangerous, let’s find that out right now
and move on to something else.

Drollette:
One thing I wasn’t entirely clear on – if you’re talking about hard
geoengineering reflecting heat, that’s considered to be tinkering with the
planet’s albedo, right? Is that correct?

Zaelke:
Yeah.

Drollette:
Does that do anything to deal with ocean acidification, or is it completely
unrelated?

Zaelke:
No, it doesn’t. So you’re right, it doesn’t solve the underlying problem.
It’s a way of dealing with the symptoms. Again, heat is one of the
important things we want to manage, but dealing with CO2-caused ocean
acidification is something else that we need. To do that, we need very
aggressive carbon dioxide removal because under Boyle’s Law, we’re going to
end up with out-gassing from carbon dioxide from the oceans – and that’s
what you want to remove the acidification. But then you’re going to have
more and more work to do pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere. It can be done
and the strategies are getting better and better and are more cost
effective on the CO2 removal side. That’s probably one of the brightest
spots right now in climate protection – carbon dioxide removal.

Drollette:
At least one climate scientist I have spoken with has said that one of the
problems with hard geoengineering is that once you start, you can’t stop.
He compared it to being in an emergency room living on life support solely
with the help of a machine. You can’t ever unplug the thing. Is that a good
way of describing the situation?

Zaelke:
It is a good way, and that’s one of the things we have to study very
carefully. Can we do a regional version of sulfates in the Arctic, that has
less of the risk that he described? I think that is a very serious risk,
and we would not like to be in a position where we’re held hostage to
indefinite injection of these reflective particles. We simply don’t know.
Nor do we know if we can we do a little of it. Maybe a piece of it? But the
point is well-taken that if you think that’s the solution, and you don’t do
the other parts, then the warming keeps going up even as you mask it
further. Then you unmask it and you’re going to get a big burst.

But if you’re doing some well-managed particulate that’s reflecting heat
while you’re reducing your temperature through these other strategies –
such as coordinating the injection of sulfates into the Arctic air with the
Ice911 effort and with Sir David King’s effort on windmills that pump the
water up – than maybe that can succeed. We simply don’t know the answer to
that question yet.

That’s why further experimentation, and further study, has got to look at
that exact scenario … It’s a pretty frightening possibility that the
methane bomb from the Arctic along with CO2 and nitrous oxide is going to
be disastrous. And it’s going to happen sooner than people think.

Believe me, I don’t like geoengineering. I’ve avoided it and thought it did
indeed present a moral hazard. But when I look at the risk we’re now facing
from the accelerating feedbacks in the Arctic in particular and the
existential threat that presents, I have to say that geoengineering cannot
be left off the table any longer.

It is wrong not to study it. It is malpractice not to be ready. If it has
the potential to help us, we better be ready to deploy it as soon as the
yogurt hits the fan … Then when they [political leaders] see the urgency,
they’re going to ask the scientists and the policy-makers: “What is the
fastest lever I can pull that will keep my country and the world from
climate chaos?”

We better know what that answer is.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

1. Old vs young sea ice over 33 years.

Sea ice age coverage map for (a) March 1985 and (b) March 2018. (c) Sea ice
age coverage by year, 1985–2018. (Perovich D., et al. (2018) Sea Ice, in
ARCTIC REPORT CARD 2018, 28.) Image courtesy of the Institute for
Governance & Sustainable Development’s “Prime on Polar Warming,” under
Creative Commons license.


Display full size
2. Melting permafrost.

Thawing permafrost as seen in the Gates of the Arctic National Park,
Alaska. A recent study found that melting permafrost in the Arctic may be
releasing 12 times as much nitrous oxide, a powerful greenhouse gas, into
the atmosphere as previously thought. (According to the EPA, nitrous oxide
is 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide.) Public domain image,
courtesy of US National Park Service. More information on thawing
permafrost in the Arctic at
https://e360.yale.edu/digest/melting-permafrost-releasing-high-levels-of-nitrous-oxide-a-potent-greenhouse-gas


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Funding
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