COAL + ICE Podcast - Ep2: What Polar Ice Is Telling Us

Ep2: What Polar Ice Is Telling Us

02/08/22 • 30 min

Polar ice has a story to tell. Trapped in it are clues to the past -- dirt and dust, and air -- going back a million years . From this, climate scientists can figure out what was happening during past ice ages and warm periods. In each case, it all came down to carbon -- how much carbon dioxide was in the air. And we're now at CO2 levels last seen in the Pliocene Epoch -- 2.5 to 5 million years ago, long before modern humans walked the earth. Sure, we call ourselves homo sapiens, but glaciologist Martin Siegert says we're heading toward a 'stupid warm' future, and it's time to get smart. He lays it all out here -- what's happening, what the ice is telling us, and what we need to do now.
Martin Siegert is a glaciologist with three decades of experience, including research in Antarctica., a professor, and co-director of the Grantham Institute - Climate Change and Environment, at Imperial College London (UK).

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Ep1: Burning Up: The Climate Challenge

We're awfully good at burning things up in the name of progress -- coal, oil, gas, Amazon rain forests. We're not as good at factoring in the real cost of those choices, on our health, and on the health of the planet.
In this first episode of the COAL+ICE podcast, top climate journalists talk about what these choices look like where they live -- in China, South Africa and Brazil -- and what's being done, and needs to be done, to bend the curve on climate change.
Joining host Mary Kay Magistad are:
Ma Tianjie, program director in Beijing of China Dialogue, a non-profit online platform that focuses on the environment and climate change, especially as related to China. He was previously with Greenpeace, as program director for Mainland China.
Tunicia Phillips, an award-winning environment, climate and business reporter with South Africa's Mail & Guardian investigative weekly.

Jon Watts is global environment editor for The Guardian newspaper in the UK. He's a former correspondent for The Guardian in China, Brazil and Japan, and author of the book "When a BIllion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind or Destroy It," about the environmental impact of China's rapid development. Jon is now spending a year in Brazil's Amazon, writing another book.

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Ep3: Himalayas' Melting Glaciers Impact Billions

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Anjal Prakash has been studying all of this for more than two decades, helping both rural and urban communities adapt to climate change and its increasing drought, floods, and wilder storms and cyclones. He's research director and an adjunct associate professor at the Bharti Institute of Public Policy, at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, in India.

COAL + ICE Podcast - Ep2: What Polar Ice Is Telling Us

Transcript

COAL+ICE Podcast, Ep2: What Polar Ice is Telling Us

Feb. 8, 2022

If you ever get a chance to walk on a polar ice sheet, do it.

(Sound of crunching footsteps on ice)

The vast, white, rolling landscape is a world all its own – though it’s very much part of our world, impacted by what we do, impacting us with how it reacts.

And the ice melting at an alarming rate. It’s turning into waterfalls, like this one, in Greenland.