[00:00:08] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find out. Temperate zones and tropic climbs and true currents and thriving seas.
Winds blowing through breathing trees and strongholds on safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find. Yeah.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: Hello, k squid listeners. It's every other Sunday again, and you're listening to sustainability now, a bi weekly case good radio show focused on environment, sustainability and social justice in the Bonre Bay region, California, and the world. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. As the Earth gets warmer, the world's glaciers get smaller. Land based glaciers in the earth's polar regions hold enormous quantities of water, and as they melt, the runoff is raising sea levels and disrupting ocean systems such as the Gulf Stream. The obvious solution is for us to drastically reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. But even if we were to do that, the Earth would continue to warm and the glaciers would continue to melt. Is there anything we can do to slow the melt? There are growing number of proposals to intervene in earth systems called geoengineering as a way to moderate climate change. My guest today is research Professor John Moore, who is a glaciologist in Rovaniemi, Finland, at the University of Lapland's University of the Arctic. His solution to slowing glacier melt is a construction of barriers at glaciers underwater bases in order to slow or prevent flows of warmer ocean water from carving away at the ice.
Professor John Moore, thank you for being my guest on sustainability now.
[00:01:55] Speaker C: Pleasure to be here.
[00:01:56] Speaker B: Okay, let's begin with some background. First of all, what does a glaciologist do, and how did you get into the business?
[00:02:05] Speaker C: So, a glaciologist, it studies the frozen earth, whether that's sea ice, land ice, or permafrost. But mostly, I think people are engaged in looking at the big ice sheets and glaciers, and that might be drilling ice cores and looking at the history preserved in the ice sheet over 100,000 years. It can be surveying with radars and satellites or traditional surveying methods, how fast the ice is moving and whether it's getting thinner. And then also it's about performing simulations and modeling the future, what we might expect the ice sheets to look like in a hundred years time or 10,000 years time. And I got into this purely accidentally. A friend of mine who was a geophysicist joined the British Antarctic Survey and said, this is great fun. You should come along. And I was working in the oil business at the time, doing geophysical surveys, and they had no vacancies for geophysicists, but they said to me, well, we'd quite like to hire you as a glaciologist and I said, well, okay, great, yes. And then I frantically went to read some books in the library about what glaciology was and what did it mean to work on these huge ice shelves and places where you read about Shackleton and Scott in the olden days.
[00:03:37] Speaker B: Was this before you got your graduate degrees or afterwards?
[00:03:42] Speaker C: No, that was before. So I did my PhD with British Antarctic Survey and I that involved a couple of summer seasons, but they're basically six month expeditions away from the UK where you're in a tent. In those days it was just with one other guy and you would spend one year, we did about 1000 miles of snow scooter traversing over the Antarctic peninsula. And interestingly, the ice shelf where we started no longer exists. That disappeared after I started doing my, my research on it. So in a sense, ive observed at firsthand the glaciers disappearing.
[00:04:27] Speaker B: I guess its lucky you werent on it when it started to disappear.
[00:04:31] Speaker C: Further north did go in that first season and some people that were planning to work on that, they had to hastily reorganize their field season.
[00:04:41] Speaker B: How long ago was that?
[00:04:42] Speaker C: That was 19, 85.
[00:04:47] Speaker B: 40 years ago. What is the University of the Arctic?
[00:04:51] Speaker C: So this is a, I think a really interesting organization of about 200 universities and smaller colleges. And most of these people are in the Arctic itself, about two thirds of them, and I'm not counting any in Russia at the moment because they are sort of suspended due to the Ukraine war.
But this is, is a very uniquely structured governance. It doesn't model itself on anything in particular. It was kind of made up as it went along. But the idea is to provide a voice for particularly the indigenous communities in the Arctic, so that their motto is by the north, for the north. And that is reflected very strongly in its a kind of recognition of this alternative perspective of the indigenous knowledge as well as traditional western knowledge. And I think it makes a very nice kind of archetype of how to do knowledge co production, which is very much the kind of thing that's in fashion in many strands, but it's actually something that has worked for the last 20 years or so in practice. So I hope that it could be something that could be a bit of a model for other places as well.
[00:06:10] Speaker B: Is it based at the University of Lapland?
[00:06:13] Speaker C: Well, the secretariat is in the University of Lapland, yes, but as I said, this is a sort of virtual organization, so it has Congress. The last one was in Boda in June in Norway, and so there was about, I think about 5000 people came there. And there are new members coming all the time, and they have this.
It's almost like a UN thing when it comes to doing the governing sort of resolutions and how they want to allow new candidate members to be in there or to have new areas of focused research.
Kind of everything has to be agreed in a very democratic way. Nate?
[00:06:56] Speaker B: Well, I think almost everyone who pays attention to climate change knows the world's glaciers are melting and that sea levels are rising. What essentially is the problem? I mean, how serious the threat to earth and human systems is this melting? And you can also talk about what's causing it.
[00:07:12] Speaker C: Glaciers are kind of important on every scale. We want to think about from local villages that rely on them as a source of water in the summer as the ice melts, and often other sources of water disappear during the warm periods. For example, parts of Pakistan, in northern Pakistan like that, to much larger scale things, where we talk about the impacts of the melting ice on global sea levels. And that global sea level rise is perhaps the largest single impact of climate warming that we've got now. So if you go back to about the 1980s, the amount of snow that fell on the ice sheets was pretty much in balance with the amount that melted every year, always carved off as icebergs. But that's changed. So now sea levels are rising by something like 3 year year. And not all of that is due to ice melting, but a very significant amount is because already the oceans are expanding just because they are getting warmer and the density decreases with temperature. But more and more is coming from this mass loss, both in Greenland initially throughout the nineties and the two thousands, and it's been accelerating. And in Greenland, you got a lot of surface melting in the lower levels as well as the carving of icebergs. In Antarctica, you don't get so much surface melting because the air temperature is still pretty cold, but the waters are much warmer, the deeper waters that are in contact around the coast. And these waters are causing rapid melting at the bottom of the, say, a kilometre deep, where the ice starts to go afloat as it flows off the continent. And this, as I said, is one of the main impacts of sea level rise. If the sea levels rise by about a meter, the protection that you would need around the world for the coastlines to avoid the waves damaging them and things like that is about $40 billion per year. So that's 1 meter of sea level rise. So in sort of north american terms, it's a billion dollars per inch per year. And that's going to be the cost.
[00:09:40] Speaker B: Of maintaining the coast that's for the entire coast. A billion a year.
[00:09:45] Speaker C: A billion dollars per year per inch of rising. So that continues throughout. It's not like you, you know, you don't put a finger in the dike and the job's done. That's you have to keep raising all the dikes around the world or building up new harbors or nuclear power stations next to the coast, etcetera. All of those things add up. But in addition to that, you have countries like Bangladesh, or the small island states and the Pacific and indian oceans, and those are existentially threatened by rising seas. So there's something like 200 million people will be deplaced because their homes will be below high tide. If the sea levels rise by a meter, of course these numbers add up. If sea levels rise by 2 meters, then you get much more damage as well. So these 200 million people will have to go somewhere. And a large part of those will be accommodated mostly in the global south, because a lot of these places are already in the global south and people don't like to travel halfway around the world. But significant numbers certainly dwarfing the present number of climate refugees or migrants, that are certainly big, big problems in the EU and arguably led to Brexit. Those numbers are going to be 100 times bigger in 100 years time. And personally, I worry about the viability of western civilization under such threats, because simply the rise of populism and that, say, the world becoming fragmented into hostile units doesn't bode well just to go.
[00:11:33] Speaker B: Back to that 200 million, that's primarily Bangladesh, right? Since it's mostly Bangladesh, as I recall, is mostly delta.
[00:11:41] Speaker C: Yeah, well, there's a lot from Bangladesh. But you have to think that coastal cities around the world are growing much faster, populations as a whole. For example, Shanghai. The interesting thing about cities in China is the really, estate is so expensive that people are demanding that areas can be built on that have previously been prevented because they know that they're susceptible to flood damage, you know, or they've been reclaimed from the sea. And so they're demanding to put houses in places that are super risky, even with present day conditions. And things will get worse, because in addition to the mean sea level rising, the threat of extreme events increases by a factor of ten for every foot of additional mean sea level. So a flood that was a once in a hundred year flood becomes a once in a ten year flood if sea levels only rise by a foot or so. And of course, the coastal defenses, such as they are around the world, are built for those extremes. And city planning, city architecture, the street layout, etcetera, is designed for those more or less hundred year events. But if those hundred year events become decade, then the whole thing's out of the window.
[00:13:04] Speaker B: Yeah, I know there's been some talk in the last year or two about one of the land based ice shelves, I think, collapsing or something like that, into the ocean, which would lead to a very sudden rise in sea level. Or do I have that wrong? Is this a floating ice shelf? Maybe you can talk a little bit about the physics of that.
[00:13:24] Speaker C: There's a chain of reasoning that you have to go through. And of course, any floating ice is already displacing a volume of sea level, so directly a floating sea ice or an ice shelf. And by an ice shelf, I mean the glaciers that flow off the land, and they might be 2 km or to 1 km thick, and they go onto the sea. And of course the sea water is starting to thin them, but they're still hundreds of meters thick until you get to the edge of the ice shelf, where the action of tides and, and the waves, etc, tends to break them and carve off these giant icebergs that can be the size of Rhode island or something like that. So these ice shelves are either floating completely free, in which case there's no big deal for sea level, because they don't do very much to the inland ice. They just a kind of fringe. But in key areas, a lot of ice shelves hit submarine hills and a butt against them. And this provides a pressure on the ice that's flowing onto the ice shelf and from the inland part of Antarctica or greenhouse. And this back pressure is a buttressing effect on the inland ice. And the real problem is that when you accelerate this melting, especially underneath these floating ice shelves, which can be the size of, say, you know, the country of Wales or some small states in the US, these are huge areas of ice in contact with this warm water. And the warm water can melt up to 100 meters per year of ice. And that ice has to be replaced by the stuff flowing off from the continent. But if more is being melted than is being replaced, then the ice shelf thins until eventually it no longer hits these ocean mountains that are sticking up into the ice shell. And thats taking away the prop, the buttress thats holding back that inland ice. And if you haven't got that, then it's like a ball rolling down the hill. The ice flows down the hill much, much faster, accelerating, depositing more and more ice into the ocean. And that ice, of course, as soon as it starts to float, it's raising sea level. And the point is, it doesn't have to melt where it is, next to the Antarctic. These icebergs drift north with the current. So effectively, you're getting a lot more melting because the ice is being melted in northern latitudes, away from the Antarctic, than it is if it's just nearby the coast. And these vulnerable ice shelves can be very crucial for the future sea level. There's one glacier called Thwaites Glacier, which some people came up with this idea that this was the Domesday glacier, because that basin contains about. Well, about 70 sea level, if it all melted, and 1 sea level is 362 gigatons of ice. These mind bogglingly huge amounts of ice we're talking about now, that ice shelf, that fringing ice shelf looks terrible when you see it in the satellite image. It's cracked. It's broken. It looks like the thing is being shredded because the ice is accelerating faster and faster, and that acceleration is kind of ripping it to pieces as well. And it's like, hanging on with its fingertips. There's a few, very few areas where these submarine mountains are still holding it back, and it's way, way, way below sea level. It's a kilometer deeper than sea level, where it starts to go afloat, and it gets deeper, further inland, even deeper. And this is very unstable. We know this. There is no stopping it. When the slope is getting deeper away from the coast, you can't do anything. So it's a question of once it starts to go, it's, you know, it's gone, baby, gone. It just no stopping it. So that's the big worry that you have these essentially irreversible tipping point type behaviors. And we expect that some parts of the Antarctic, the West Antarctic, will go around about one and a half degrees above the pre industrial. So basically, it could go any time now.
[00:17:57] Speaker B: Yeah, we're there right now. You're listening to sustainability now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz, and my guest today is research professor John Moore, who studies glaciers at the University of the Arctic and Lapland University in Rovaniemi, Finland. So we were just talking about the sort of the disaster, the doomsday scenario of the Thwaites glacier. One of the things occurs to me is that, of course, if the glacier melt is gradual, the sea level rising a millimeter a year, people are not going to really respond very quickly, even though they see the water coming up their driveway. If something like this happens, if this goes all of a sudden, then you do get a rather significant let's say wave propagating through the oceans, and the flooding would take place very, very quickly, which then, of course, would motivate some kind of response, but it would be probably too little, too late.
[00:18:52] Speaker C: Well, yeah, we know from the geological record that at the end of the last ice age, the sea level rose by 20 meters in 400 years. So that's 5 meters a year. That was, of course, catastrophic for any kind of coastal civilization like we are at the moment. Those ice sheets were not the present day Antarctic. They were places like the Laurentide ice sheet in North America. So they are a bit different. But what we believe, and you have to remember, we haven't directly observed an ice sheet collapsing, thank God, at the moment.
But what we believe from these kind of computer simulations and the theory that we have about how ice flows, uh, which very well explains what's happening, in a sense, ice is quite a simple material to simulate. It's, it's not complicated, like rocks with all different minerals. It's a kind of mono mineralic rock. So we are fairly confident that we understand what's happening with ice sheets. It's relatively simple to, to grasp those parameters that you need. However, the observations are so sensitive to the small scale topography of what's going on underneath the one or 2 km thick ice in Antarctica that we can only sense by flying planes with radars over them. So it's great along the track of the plane, you have very detailed picture of how thick the ice is and the structure. But the plane, of course, is flying. The closest it can do a zigzag is around half a kilometre or a kilometre between them. And even that, if you might miss a small hump, that can be really critical. So, Thwaites glacier. I like to think of it as if you're on a climb and you suddenly slip, and somehow your fingers managed to grab hold of another little thing half a meter below where you were holding on. And you can be stable there for a little bit, but not so long, and you might slip down another way. So that's how this thing is likely to retreat, as a sort of stepwise progression onto small kind of metastable conditions as it goes further in the land. But nevertheless, we think, we expect, and the models suggest, that when this thing starts to go, then you can certainly get rates well in excess of 1 meter per century and perhaps even two or 3 meters per century of global sea level rise. So the only way to basically kind of do something about it is, in a sense, you've removed the control knob which is the amount of radiating forcing, the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. When you get to this point where it's all about the geometry, it's no longer listening or no longer feeling how much that radiative forcing is doing because it's being affected by the ocean. I and the heat in the ocean was put there hundreds of years ago, so it's more difficult to control. You have to look for other tools that might be available to try to stabilize them instead.
[00:22:08] Speaker B: Nate, can you say something about the impact of this melting on ocean circulation systems? I'm thinking here in particular about things like the Gulf Stream.
[00:22:17] Speaker C: Yes, that's a good point. We know that the Gulf Stream, the Atlantic meridian, will overturning circulation as it's more scientific name that's slowing down. And one of the reasons it's slowing down is likely because the surface waters are getting less dense, they're getting fresher over time. And some of this could be because of the increased melt from, from Greenland. So there can be a lot of nasty surprises. In Finland, there's a saying, there's no nice surprises in an old house. And to me, that's how you can think of the climate system. There aren't any nice surprises in this thing. Suddenly we went, oh, that's a relief. Weren't expecting it. Now it's actually quite okay. Everything is super linked together, so it's sure if you change something, you're going to have impacts rambling through the whole system. And unfortunately, climate models are not very reliable when it comes to these radically different regimes that you might go into, because obviously the climate models are trained on what's seen with observations that only go back really reliably for 50 years or something like that, especially if we're talking about deep ocean type properties. So for sure, there can be unforeseen consequences.
[00:23:39] Speaker B: Okay, now you've proposed a method of reducing the rate of glacier melting, which is what I read about in the New York Times. So can you tell us how it would work and how long it would take? Know what it would cost and its effectiveness?
[00:23:56] Speaker C: Right. Well, those questions are, unsurprisingly very active areas of research at the moment.
We dont know all of the answers. What ive been trying to say is that given the magnitude of the problem, the trillions of dollars that sea level rise from collapsing ice sheets will have its worth spending a little bit to see if there are any other tools in the box that might be useful. So the particular nice thing about sea level rise compared with some of the other mega problems of climate change is that these deep, warm waters, which are the fundamental cause of the rapid drawdown, say, of the Thwaites glacier and other glaciers, is that these warm waters are channeled in troughs in the seafloor to relatively few places, just a handful of places in Antarctica and Greenland. And so instead of dealing with, say, tens of thousands of kilometres of global coastline and protecting that, you could do something about the hundreds of kilometers of these troughs that allow the deep, warm water to access the ice sheet and most of the ice that's dangerous. This marine ice sheet instability that Thwaites is the poster child glacier of those glaciers are just a few handfuls that are like fingers of fast flowing ice going down around the coast of Antarctica and Greenland. So again, it makes the problem very scalable. Instead of this tens of thousands of square of kilometers of coastline, you're down to hundreds of kilometers of dealing with it. So our concept was that we could try to block that channel that's feeding the deep, warm water to a depth of maybe a couple of hundred meters above the sea floor. So you kind of be filling in the channel, like kids do when they're playing with streams going down onto the beach and they're making a dam there. So it's not something that needs to extend all the way to the surface, because the surface waters are cold and they're not causing very much melt. These are fresh waters, whereas the deep waters come from the tropical Pacific, where it was evaporating more water, and they get salty and they sink down, and then they are occupying this bottom part of the sea floor, the continental sea floor, say 500 meters deep. So if you could prevent that water coming in with some kind of temporary barrier that if there was any unforeseen problems, you could remove fairly easily. You could allow that warm water to just rise a little bit because you were blocking off some parts of where it would otherwise go. And if you calculate how much that warm water level would rise by, it's of the order of a few inches. So it's actually raising the level, very little of the world's warm water, if you like, at these depths, but it's blocking it where it's going into the vulnerable glaciers. And the way we would do that, or the way that we talking with engineers came up with, is that you have a foundation, a concrete foundation, onto the sea bed, probably a sandy sedimentary bed. And there are well tested ways of providing anchoring in those conditions. And then from those anchors, you have a buoyant curtain that's floating in the sea wall, in the sea for 100 or 200 meters above that ocean floor and that curtain, the buoyancy resists the current of these deep waters flowing against it. And we have some measurements of how big those flows are and how much forces we expect. And it can be done with completely standard stuff, like, for example, even fiberglass tubes. Six inch diameter tubes provide enough strength and buoyancy for the elements between the curtain panel. And originally, we thought to make these panels out of some very inert plastic. But we then came up with lots of people who said, no, that's really bad. Of course it's bad. We don't want microplastics going anywhere into an environment like this. And actually, the engineers said, we're the first people to say, no, we shouldn't do it with plastic. They want to make an entirely biodegradable option. So something that can be made from either things like canvas and hemp or perhaps even woven seaweed that could be in there. The lifetime would probably be less, maybe 20 years of these panels, but they would need to be replaceable and expected to be replaced of the order of a decade or two, because they might be damaged by icebergs or whatever, things like that. And you would need to put that there for at least a couple of hundred years to have that there until, hopefully, our wiser descendants have sucked out enough CO2 that we are back to the temperatures around, let's say, the middle of the 20th century, when the ice shells were in equilibrium with those radiative forcing conditions.
[00:29:53] Speaker B: You're listening to sustainability now. My name is Ronnie Lipschitz. I'm your host, and my guest today is research Professor John Moore from the University of Lapland's University of the Arctic. And we've just been talking about his proposal to slow down the intrusion of warm subsurface ocean currents that are melting the bases of glaciers in Antarctica. I think that's the right way to frame it. Where does this stand in terms of research, in terms of pilot projects and the like?
[00:30:28] Speaker C: Okay, so your original questions actually were very on the nose, because, of course, what we would really like to know is, what would be the utility of it? How much sea level would you prevent or delay as a result of these curtains? Because, of course, the ocean temperatures continue to rise. There is that huge inertia in the ocean system. Things won't stay as they are. So we're trying to do simulations with the world's best ice sheet models and ocean models to understand what we think, how stable the glaciers would be with such a thing. And you could say some people have written that, oh, well, you can't stabilize it. You can delay collapse, say, of Thwaites glacier. But even given these huge numbers of damage that you're talking about, even a failure, let's say, let's say you delay sea level rise by 50 cm for 200 years, well, that still averts avoids $2 trillion of damage around the world. So as failures go, it's not necessarily a bad failure. If you're, instead of stopping the supertanker, you slow it down a little bit to get people out of the way, something like that. So that might be one end where you don't have a perfect success. You just simply slow this thing down a bit. But we don't know for sure how effective this might be. We don't know how it would work in conjunction with potentially other interventions that might also amplify the particular parts that are vulnerable. You know, it's sort of targeted to, like, repair some of the damage in the ice shelves. Can we sort of glue it back together again in different ways by, you know, collecting more snow, even with snow fences sort of filling up the holes in a natural way, it's all about really helping nature, nature's natural processes to heal itself where it needs, needs where we are in terms of experiments, we have Cambridge University engineering department and also in Chicago University that are doing simulations with detailed computer and also physical tank tests.
So there's a room with a big long tank and a little model of how a curtain might look. And you change the currents and you look at things like how stable the curtain is. We don't want it to be like a flag that's going to whip itself to pieces, you know, in these kinds of currents. Next year we will have some testing with Cambridge. There's a couple of PhD students there that will be taking, say, a desktop out into the river cam and pulling it behind a boat, or at least trying to look at what forces there might be on a meter scale. We're working with norwegian university, and I won't go into too much details of it, but we want to, in a few years, do a test in a field of prototype devices at the ten to 100 meters scale, you know, building up gradually and learning as we go and looking for red flags. Of course, if every design we can make flaps itself to pieces like a flag, then, you know, it's off the table. But the engineers are reasonably confident you can play around with where the buoyancy is. If you think about cars and aerodynamics in a way you want to do the opposite of that. You want to make the thing as effective a block as possible. So putting spoilers or shaping flow, shaping things in front or on top of the curtain that help to effectively amplify the effectiveness of this curtain. We will, if everything goes well, then want to move on to, say, a kilometre scale in a few years, probably in Svalbard, which is norwegian sovereignty land. A lot of key partners are in Norway. So you notice that we're not going to Antarctica to do this here. In a sense, the road to Antarctica goes through the Arctic, because basically, it's a thousand times cheaper to do things in the Arctic. On the other hand, of course, the Arctic has its peoples and they have their rights, and there's nothing can be done there without their active collaboration, not merely, you know, acquiescence. They need to be active partners in anything, in any intervention that gets done there. So it's something we've been discussing a lot with various groups in Greenland, and our position is that we will not do anything in Greenland until the Greenlanders want to invite us in, because they might see benefits in the stewardship of the ice sheet there, and it can help them, especially if we can, at the same time as this engineering and the science, we want to develop governance and economics models about who might pay for this, what mechanism needs to be developed. And I think that something a little bit analogous to the protection of old growth forests, or, say, the Amazon rainforest, whereby in a way, people are paid to preserve the forest. At the moment, it's done by paying people not to cut down trees, but it would be different for the ice sheets, where people would actually have to actively conserve. It's not a question of telling everyone to keep their hands off the ice sheet of, but actually getting people's hands on. Otherwise it's going to go away. We have to do something. And again, so that's something that probably is going to be the slowest part of this whole thing with the engineers think that we might be ready in a decade with a curtain, say, 100 km size for Thwaites glacier, if the learning process and the step by step goes well. But the governance and the who pays for this thing is likely to be a lot more fraught. And longer term, we can point to.
[00:37:06] Speaker B: The UN framework Convention on Climate Change, which is now 30 years on. Why don't we go on to another horrifying topic? Another terrain affected by rising global temperatures is permafrost, the layer of frozen earth that covers much of the polar regions. And you've called russian permafrost a ticking time bomb. Can you tell us why?
[00:37:28] Speaker C: Well, the simple answer is there's more carbon stored in the top three metres of the permafrost than there is in the atmosphere at the moment. So in a sense, if that permafrost melts and that carbon is liberated in the form of carbon dioxide or methane, again, it's game over on mitigation, because that's just going to dwarf the amount of man made emissions, potentially. So can we do anything about it? Because, of course, the Arctic is warming at about four times the rate of the global mean temperatures, and that's pretty serious. So large areas of the permafrost could be lost over the next hundred years or so, and that's a significant problem.
[00:38:15] Speaker B: What do we see happening so far?
[00:38:18] Speaker C: Well, you get various things like these big craters appearing out of nowhere in the. In the permafrost, and these are where you get the thawing of the surface layers and the say there's huge amounts of methane in a pocket and that's just released. So you get this hole suddenly a bit like a sink hole. You also find that melt, the summer is thawing more and more permafrost. So the, the lakes are getting deeper and bigger and much more active. So this permafrost, that's very inert and has been stable for, you know, since the ice age, is becoming less stable. So infrastructure, railways, roads, etc, are being damaged, housing, etcetera. But I think, of course, those are important small scale impacts, but the big impact is how much greenhouse gases could be released.
[00:39:21] Speaker B: I was actually wondering about the rate right now, the rate of methane emission as a result of melting permafrost. What does that look like?
[00:39:31] Speaker C: Yeah, permafrost is actually supremely difficult to monitor because you can't really tell where it is. So a lot of these things are just models, even in the present time. What's good is things like these new satellites monitoring methane emissions directly. And I think we should get some much better numbers. So, like in a lot of models, just assume that methane is basically 1% of CO2 emissions. But of course that's a horrible approximation to make. Much better to have observations.
[00:40:05] Speaker B: You're listening to sustainability now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. My guest today is research professor John Moore from the University of Lapland, where he is a part of the University of the Arctic. And we've just been talking about the melting of permafrost and the emission of methane into the atmosphere, which is the amount isn't well known. But John has mentioned that there are new satellites that are going to be monitoring methane emissions, so we may learn something about that in 2021.
You co authored a paper with a title, mitigation of arctic permafrost carbon loss through statospheric aerosol geoengineering. What does that mean and how would that work?
[00:40:48] Speaker C: So this was a computer simulation of what permafrost would look like under a climate whereby you lowered global temperatures from those expected under this horrible RCP 8.5 scenario. Business as usual, greenhouse gas emissions down to the Paris level, RCP 2.5, the Paris 2015 agreements are more or less that, RCP 4.5. And we looked at how particularly what would happen to the permafrost, because that's a key element in the whole system. And the difference that you get is something like 30%. You get 30% more permafrost preserved if you do that, compared with just this horrible business as usual scenario. Now, that scenario, that stratospheric aerosol injection, was done in computer models that put in a layer of, so two sulfur dioxide into the lower stratosphere, say about 20 km altitude, and it's designed to mimic what happened with Mount Pinatubo in 1991, but at about one quarter of a Pinatubo per year, and that was kept up for about 100 years. And that is in a sense, the popular or the well known kind of geoengineering that people generally refer to. So these models are, or this method, we know it's effective because volcanoes do cool the climate, as Pinatubo did. And the climate models, because they are pretty good, they do show that it would have the desired effect in a way of lowering the temperatures. The more of this sulfur dioxide you put into the air, the more the temperatures are cooled relative to the greenhouse gases there. These days, there are more sophisticated kinds of scenario for aerosol injections. For example, you might want to target the polar areas, the Antarctic and the Arctic. And there's no sense to put this stuff into the atmosphere, which reflects back sunlight when it's the polar night. So you would only want to do that in the spring and the summer, and you would only want to do it, say, north of 60 degrees north or south of 60 degrees south. And so the simulations like that have also been done. People are trying to find out, is there any good way of doing this? Because of course, everybody is very averse to tinkering with the air that you breathe. I mean, this is an obvious negative in a sense.
[00:43:44] Speaker B: Well, you're an advocate of geoengineering, I gather.
[00:43:49] Speaker C: No.
[00:43:50] Speaker B: Okay, well, that's good, because this is suggested in some of the articles I've readdeveloped, so I think it's important, such.
[00:43:58] Speaker C: An important distinction to make, between, I think only a crazy person would be an advocate of geoengineering. I'm very much an advocate of geoengineering research.
Can we determine, are there any tools in the box that might be useful? It may well be. And the reason I got into geoengineering research was to kill it. I thought I would find the magic bullet, you know, the silver bullethouse that killed this zombie, and people would stop talking about geoengineering, and pretty much everyone I know in the field got into it for the same motivation. It's the natural gut reaction to think we already screwed up in so many ways. How can this be a good idea?
[00:44:41] Speaker B: Well, I mean, my sort of response, or thought about this, is that you're tinkering with one element of what is a very complex, interconnected set of systems, right? It's not just atmosphere, it's land and oceans, and focusing on one particular element. And so the uncertainty factors are really high, I would think, in that. And how do you think about that?
[00:45:07] Speaker C: Yeah, I think you have to look at it as a risk risk. So there are absolutely for sure risks of do nothing, or just follow the.
[00:45:18] Speaker B: Paris accords, which of course, we're still uncertain about. Right. The risks of doing nothing as well. Right?
[00:45:25] Speaker C: Yeah. So, in a sense, I mean, think about stuff like vaccinations. The human body is an incredibly complex system, and here you are, just injecting you with one particular antibody, and hoping for the best. Yes, there are risks, or equally an analogy that's used very much, and I think it makes a lot of sense, is things like chemotherapy, it's a terrible thing. No one would choose chemotherapy, but given the alternatives, which are likely premature death, then people are willing to consider it. For example, the case of the smoker, that's ignored the doctor for 30 years, and then hes told hes got cancer, is he just going to say, okay, ill stop smoking, or is he going to want to know what else is the alternatives? Can anything else be done, even if its a bit risky? And I think thats where we are now. In a sense, geoengineering can act as a sort of, if you imagine wheeling the patient into the surgery, and is still awake, and he sees all this array of horrible tools there, waiting on tables, he might well wish he'd seen those 30 years earlier, and perhaps, you know, with the benefit of hindsight given up. So that's, in a way, where we are with geoengineering, it's a risk, risk. And as I have tried to explain a lot about the uncertainties in the models of where we are in the future, once we get outside of our envelope of experience that the models have been trained on, we really are in uncharted terrain. Once we cross some of the tipping points, like collapsing of the ice sheets, etcetera, we're really into an entirely different planet, actually. And the other point that I think is really an important one, is to consider the global south. So these peoples have, by and large, not been responsible for the position that the climate's in at the moment, but they are by unfortunate acts of geography bearing the brunt of it, and also much of the global south. And I always use the example of China, because I worked there for ten years. China became the richest country in the world. Its population quadrupled, along with its wealth, about two and a half thousand years ago, because they effectively invented irrigation and dams. So they controlled nature's destructive force through flooding, and instead preserved those waters through the rest of the year in a more controlled way. And their philosophy, I can't obviously speak for the whole China, but there is this picture of humans and nature as being one. There is no us and them. It is the one hand clapping. It is that the nature is, in a sense, tended like a garden. Otherwise it's unsustainable for the way that we are. And I think that's actually how we have to look at the whole earth these days. We are stewards, we are responsible for what has happened, and we have to take responsibility for what? For our actions, especially in the future, for the benefit of our descendants and for the vast majority of the people on this planet that have next to no say in what happens.
[00:48:58] Speaker B: Well, as a last thought, you talked about that scientists and engineers would do nothing in Greenland without the consent of the Greenlanders. How might this extend then, to global, more global projects? How would you get consent?
[00:49:15] Speaker C: I think one of the key things is trusted actors that can convey information for people, and that's why University of the Arctic is so unique, I think, globally, I don't know of any other organization that has that level of trustworthiness within a kind of a minority, marginalized set of peoples, like in the Arctic. But I don't know. I think in the global south, scientists and the United nations in particular, have high levels of trust, certainly relative to politicians and things and other groups. I'm hopeful that if we can find a governance model, and I think tons of social scientists are working on that for sure now, but it will be a slow process.
I think that there is hope, there has to be hope that something can be done. And I don't think in practice you would need the active consent of every single person on the planet, because unfortunately, the way it works, the big countries can take control if you like, but if there was people have modeled or simulated, what kinds of behavior could introduce some sort of global geoengineering, and it could be done with a significant fraction of the planet on board, even if it was not anything like 100%.
[00:50:46] Speaker B: Well, it's been a very interesting conversation. Is there anything else that you want to add to it?
[00:50:52] Speaker C: Well, yeah, in a sense that we've talked only about isheet and the SaI, the stratospheric aerosol, but we, for example, we're working with, looking at trying to evaluate 61 different ideas for interventions in the Arctic and the northern high Latitudes. And the indigenous groups are doing a parallel process to this. And only by looking at all of these ideas and trying to see across a whole suite of different parameters how they might be acceptable in terms of are they useful and are they acceptable, and then together we might be able to find some combination of tools in the box that might be useful. Already you have in Australia with the Great Barrier Reef, there is a very publicly accepted program of brightening the sky to try to cool the waters around the Great Barrier Reef with the thing, a technique called marine cloud brightening. And in a sense, the problem with geoengineering is that there's a lot of supply, but not very much demand. If you can find something that people care about and is worth preserving, like the Great Barrier Reef obviously is, people very quickly can say, well of course you can spray sea salt above it. Yes, it's in the ocean. What's unnatural about that? Yes, go ahead. And presumably, or hopefully in that kind of way, in a sort of step by step way, people might think, yes, the ice sheets are something that we should preserve, the permafrost is something we should preserve and maybe take it in a step by step way, instead of let's release a quarter of a pinatubo a year from Ceylon, or, you know, Sri Lanka or somewhere around the tropics. That's a huge step for anyone to take a. But this step by step approach might go easier.
[00:52:47] Speaker B: Well, thank you Doctor Moore, for being my guest on sustainability.
[00:52:50] Speaker C: Now, thank you very much for having me it's been a pleasure.
[00:52:53] Speaker B: You've been listening to a sustainability now interview with research professor John Moore, who works at the Arctic center of the University of Lapland in Rovaniemi, Finland. If you'd like to listen to previous shows, you can find
[email protected] sustainabilitynow and Spotify YouTube and Pocketcasts, among other podcast sites. So thanks for listening, and thanks to all the staff and volunteers who make Ksquid, your community radio station and keep it going. And so, until next, every other Sunday. Sustainability now.
[00:53:32] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find now.
Tropic climbs through currents and thriving seas, winds blowing through breathing trees, strongholds on safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find. Yeah, good plan.
