A Farewell To Ice: A Report From the Arctic by Peter Wadham -- book review
Reading A Farewell to Ice
I found A Farewell To Ice, a book, by Peter Wadhams after I read an article in the Guardian, that reported on a prediction for the first ice free summer in the Arctic. It said “this coming summer or the next”. I was actually shocked. This was a significant assessment, and under represented. What surprised me most was the book's language. Something had changed in the science culture if this Cambridge professor was telling us that we needed to pull our socks up. When I studied geology in 1988, there was little concern for the consequences of our actions on the Environment.
"Now urgent action is needed if we are to save ourselves from the consequences." I didn't need to read this book to be convinced that the world was heating up. The changes were accelerating. I saw it in people's eyes, how we had become afraid to look each other in the eyes in this part of the world with its exponential growth. Our behaviour had changed, the mores. Expectations were different.
I have mostly read and heard of the beautiful Arctic relying on second hand knowledge. The State of the Multiyear ice is critical. It is the backbone of the Ice Giant. The Arctic Ice Mass has changed from being a continent of ice in its own right, to being a mass of floes that bob about, being pushed around by the ocean currents, the winds, and each other.
A Farewell To Ice documented a career of going to the Arctic where we won't all go. It documented that the ice mass had declined from being one single ocean sized bridge of ice in 1970 to an armada of self-contained floes! The continent of ice was once an impassable barrier except to the strongest of the ice strengthened ships. The ice was fused to the ground, but it detached in the summer of 2005. A solid mass of ice, where scientists once built bases on ice that was 50 metres thick, could no long hold them. The ice mass became fractured by leads, gaps down to the ocean water, where the sunlight can get in to warm the ocean water. The Arctic Ocean system had begun to retain more heat. Accelerating changes were documented.
That Mars could have held life was once a heretical view. So was the view that the Earth revolved around the sun, and that we couldn't sail off the edge of the world. More recently the scientists couldn't believe that the earth's crust might move and shift underneath us with continental drift, but this is firmly embedded in geological science now.
A Farewell To Ice documented how the models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) accounted for observational data. They didn't. These models used hindcast projections, which were based on estimated past data, not actual observations. These models didn't use any acceleration. Acceleration rates make models take on lives of their own, and the models need very long time horizons to be meaningful. The modelers and the IPCC wanted to be seen as impartial observers, not making value judgments, not wanting to be labeled as alarmist.
A computer model cannot contain all of the relevant information about a scenario. It makes assumptions, and we, the humans, make allowances for the assumptions. The brain is a computer making models and predictions. A Farewell to Ice also documented the author's own predictions based on observations and reading others' research and communications. All the observations say that the changes are accelerating, and the ice free summer will arrive. It doesn't matter when. We can't make the ice come back. It is like the death of one's parents.
"The main reason is the dismal failure of most models to reproduce the present state of the Arctic ice in summer."
"We are injecting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere far faster than any known natural event even an extreme one like an asteroid impact."
Throughout the geological record, there were events that pumped carbon dioxide from one part of the carbon cycle to another. The current rate of acceleration of carbon flowing into the atmosphere was not found in the geological record. We humans are explorers. We seek things out. We haven't found evidence yet in the geological record of similar exponential changes that have contributed to historical events.
"People hanging on to familiar habits in the face of the changing conditions may have been fatal for them." This was certainly the case on Easter Island. They didn't realise that their population was outstripping their resources. Or when they did, it was too late. The habitat crashed, and the population crashed. This is our present danger, with species dropping like, well, dead budgies.
Climate Sensitivity
Glacial and interglacial periods were controlled by the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. A glacial period had 180 parts per million (ppm) carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere. It switched over to an interglacial climate when the concentration of carbon dioxide rose to 280 ppm. The difference in the temperatures was 7.8 degrees. It is like how our bodies maintain a steady heat, that can vary by a degree, depending on whether we are asleep, awake, or sick. The climate system had a temperature differential of 7.8 degrees Celsius. This was the Climate Sensitivity. The atmosphere at this time of writing contained 410 ppm carbon dioxide. The rate of carbon dioxide increase is accelerating.
The Changing Ice Mass
In 2005 "... for the first time the summer ice cover was fully detached from the land masses of Siberia and Alaska, through it clung to the coasts of Greenland and the Canadian Archipelago." Fram and Admundsen, the famous historical explorers, spent years of their lives trying to get over the ice mass and to the North Pole. Now they would need boats, and not dog sleds. In 2007, the ice was at the lowest minimim ice extent ever recorded by satellites. This was discussed by Stroeve from the National Snow Ice and Data Centre. The Arctic Ice Mass was declining, and this was verified by other peer-reviewed research.
The Arctic’s rapidly shrinking sea ice cover: a research synthesis Stroeve et al 2011: A Review
Arctic sea ice variability and trends, 1979-2010, Cavalieri and Parkinson: a review
The Beaufort Gyre was the birthplace of the Multiyear Ice Floe. A gyre is what the oceanographers call the motion of the water around an ocean or part of an ocean. In the Arctic Ocean, it was called the Beaufort Gyre. The Gyre switched or flipped its rotation from one direction to another. In one phase of circulation, the floes in the ocean got pushed around by the currents, and jammed up against each other. The ice mass got reinforced to be thicker and stronger with a complex system of buttresses and keels on its bottom. The Gyre actually sucked in the sea ice from outside of the basin of the Arctic Ocean. The past ice was so thick that the keels scoured the ocean floor, and these relicts of the last Ice Age, old sea ice scour marks, were still apparent in the sonar mapping. This amazed me. But this particular year, the Gyre flipped over. The currents switched direction, and the multiyear ice floes began to escape out of the straits, to float out to the Greenland and Barents Seas. Since then the Beaufort Gyre has collapsed. No one knows if it will start up again.
The Arctic Death Spiral
"Clearly this simple extrapolation technique should not be used to make predictions about the winter months, for much may happen in the next few decades to change the state of the Arctic during winter. It is also clear that the summer trend [of the sea ice melting] has slowed down for in September 2016 and 2017 the sea ice did not disappear." Let's hope so. The Ice Giant says to me that it will not give up its influence without a fight, and another mechanism is at work here, while the icy breath of the dragon is still cold enough to freeze the water.
"What has contributed to this recent accelerated decline. The multi-year ice has almost all gone, and even if the Arctic atmospheric circulation suddenly changes, there is not time within the next year or two for ice freshly retained in the Arctic to reach substantially greater thicknesses." When the ice free summer arrives, it means that all of the multiyear ice floes present now will be gone.
Chimneys
Peter Wadhams was on the oceanography team that discovered the ocean Chimneys in the Greenland Sea. They described cylinders of slowly rotating ocean water that went down from the surface of the water to a depth of 2,500 metres.
"The quantity of plankton inside a chimney in winter, per unit area of sea surface, is as great as that observed in spring and summer. The reason is that the whole 2,500 metre column of water has the same density, so plankton can rise towards the surface and sink for great distances, all without effort, in search of nourishment. Even though it is dark in winter, a convecting chimney can support more life than a similar area of normal ocean." He also talks about there being fewer chimneys already than there were in the Greenland Sea than when they were first documented in 1985. Is this a factor in the decline of the plankton?
After I started to write this article, I searched for some of the papers in Wadhams' footnotes because it would help me to understand his argument.
Polyakov Recent changes in the Arctic multiyear sea-ice coverage and the likely causes.
Bulletin of American Meteorological Society 2012
Polyakov helpfully tells us about the research of David Butman. Butman reports that the rivers in the United States are "supersaturated" with carbon dioxide compared to the atmosphere. The increase in precipitation caused by climate change will create a cycle that leads to increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the waterways and subsequently the atmosphere.
“Thus, the rapid loss of sea ice in response to the atmospheric and oceanic forcing of the past decade appears to have introduced some degree of irreversibility-at least over time scales of several years-into the loss of Multiyear Ice [MYI].” -- Polyakov
In his conclusion, Polyakov states: “The fact that the rate of MYI recovery observed in recent years shows a delay relative to thermodynamic forcing indicates that MYI is resistant to recovery. However, the relative roles of dynamic and thermodynamic factors in recent changes of the arctic MYI cover remains to be determined. Quantifying these roles is a high priority if we are to develop reliable forecasts of the future state of arctic ice coverage.”
Nobody can tell how much time that there is left for the Arctic. Once the multiyear floes are gone, there are too many variables to predict what will happen next. It will only be seasonal ice for some time.
Kwok, Outflow of Arctic Ocean Sea Ice into the Greenland and Barents Seas: 1979-2007
Length of time series: 29 years.
I called it Ice Exodus, in Journal of Climate, 2008
Over this time series, the report documented the Beaufort Gyre, and how it switched from one phase to the other. The Arctic Ocean sucked the ice in from the Greenland Sea when the Gyre was in one phase. This the phase where the floes were ground together into each other, and they became thicker and stronger, and developed keels and buttresses. When the ice was one floe, the sea ice used to be all stuck together and really strong, so there was no way that it could actually escape out of the basin of the Arctic Ocean. It had too many keels, so it was like this giant plug in the bath. But then the Gyre fliped, and by complicated and interrelated processes, the floe melted, and broke up. The smaller floes got smaller and smoother, the floe broke up and floated away. The switched direction of the ocean currents alowed the floes to escape the Arctic Ocean through the straits and out to the world's oceans. Truly this was a remarkable finding.
They concluded that in 2008 the large loss of ice mass and ice extent may suggest that Arctic sea ice had entered a state of being particularly vulnerable to anomalous atmospheric forcing. This meant that it had become resistant to recovery.
Peter Wadhams has spent most of his life doing Arctic stuff: going there, leading expeditions, writing reports, and analysing data. For all of his life, the atmosphere has been heating up. He presented his life's work to show that we need to remove the carbon from the atmosphere. When the value of a barrel of oil is worth more being left in the ground adding value to the future instead of Borrowing from the future, we might leave it in the ground. There are many externalities to the barrel of oil that are not included in its cost price. The cost to the environment and the extinction of all human beings and our society is worth more than $100 for a barrel of oil. Then the technology to remove carbon might be revalued as well.
It seems to me like the Earth's systems have all this coal and petroleum, like insurance, to keep the carbon cycle working. If we don't treat our carbon cycle like the thing that keeps us alive, then we have got nothing. A live planet is a planet with a working carbon cycle, or else we will become like Venus and Mars. Maybe we are just pawns, being used by life itself, in its game with itself, the frost and the fire giants. Even though they are bigger than us, we have got their notice, I can tell you that!
Solutions: There are a diverse range of technical solutions to the problem of the carbon. Everything is related to everything else. The more carbon that we can sequester back in the ground, the better off we are. We will stop borrowing from the Future, and add value instead to the future. I think of something like a Kickstarter project that launches a website with the range of solutions, and a picture, a scenario of how likely are these things to happen while we still worship our technology that is enslaved to plastic, tied to the present cost of a barrel of oil. As a business, it raises money to put back into the development of the technology to remove the carbon out of the air. We need to be thinking about increasing all these known numbers of pathways so that the carbon goes back to the ground, making coal, and petroleum, and sinking it back into the ground. The carbon sinks should be us, and we are not doing it. Even more recently I saw a headline that claimed that the climate models don't contain enough feedback loops for precipitation!
The cost of a barrel of oil is a myth. A barrel of oil has no value in and of itself. It is a unit. When we can understand that not all externalities are included in the cost price of a barrel of oil, people might start asking questions. Can we as a civilisation last as long as a thousand years until the atmosphere cools down? Who knows? Modelers don't use thousand year time horizons. The models break down. Predictive Power = nil and falling.
All my life, I've watched the Environment change. More urban development, more people, fewer trees, decreasing biodiversity, all accelerating. I do not see understanding and recognition for the nature of the exponential growth as it is happening around us. This is a climate emergency. The fish know. The kangaroos know. The budgies know.They are dead.
If I had seen this continent of ice in all of its majesty, my geologist brain would think unconsciously of how it had come to be. Then it would notice, it's going away now, what could possibly make that happen? I would be wanting to get as many people as I could involved and interested in helping me nut out this thorny problem. Because I haven't even arrived at the part yet of why all this carbon removing technology is not seen as investing in our future. As adding value to the future instead of Borrowing from the Future.
I wanted to go to the Arctic to watch the sea ice freeze. It sounded like a fascinating process. The Frazil crystals forming, tiny ice crystals sparkling in the water, turning into grease ice, forming the nilas like the skin of an elephant, sugar ice, pancake ice! Round as plates floating in the water, turning into first year floes, and finally the multiyear floes. But there might not be time for me to go and see this lovely stuff. The Arctic is our global air conditioning that we all share. It is a common good, and we do not value this prize. It is becoming unstable, and its future is uncertain.
I found A Farewell To Ice, a book, by Peter Wadhams after I read an article in the Guardian, that reported on a prediction for the first ice free summer in the Arctic. It said “this coming summer or the next”. I was actually shocked. This was a significant assessment, and under represented. What surprised me most was the book's language. Something had changed in the science culture if this Cambridge professor was telling us that we needed to pull our socks up. When I studied geology in 1988, there was little concern for the consequences of our actions on the Environment.
"Now urgent action is needed if we are to save ourselves from the consequences." I didn't need to read this book to be convinced that the world was heating up. The changes were accelerating. I saw it in people's eyes, how we had become afraid to look each other in the eyes in this part of the world with its exponential growth. Our behaviour had changed, the mores. Expectations were different.
I have mostly read and heard of the beautiful Arctic relying on second hand knowledge. The State of the Multiyear ice is critical. It is the backbone of the Ice Giant. The Arctic Ice Mass has changed from being a continent of ice in its own right, to being a mass of floes that bob about, being pushed around by the ocean currents, the winds, and each other.
A Farewell To Ice documented a career of going to the Arctic where we won't all go. It documented that the ice mass had declined from being one single ocean sized bridge of ice in 1970 to an armada of self-contained floes! The continent of ice was once an impassable barrier except to the strongest of the ice strengthened ships. The ice was fused to the ground, but it detached in the summer of 2005. A solid mass of ice, where scientists once built bases on ice that was 50 metres thick, could no long hold them. The ice mass became fractured by leads, gaps down to the ocean water, where the sunlight can get in to warm the ocean water. The Arctic Ocean system had begun to retain more heat. Accelerating changes were documented.
That Mars could have held life was once a heretical view. So was the view that the Earth revolved around the sun, and that we couldn't sail off the edge of the world. More recently the scientists couldn't believe that the earth's crust might move and shift underneath us with continental drift, but this is firmly embedded in geological science now.
A Farewell To Ice documented how the models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) accounted for observational data. They didn't. These models used hindcast projections, which were based on estimated past data, not actual observations. These models didn't use any acceleration. Acceleration rates make models take on lives of their own, and the models need very long time horizons to be meaningful. The modelers and the IPCC wanted to be seen as impartial observers, not making value judgments, not wanting to be labeled as alarmist.
A computer model cannot contain all of the relevant information about a scenario. It makes assumptions, and we, the humans, make allowances for the assumptions. The brain is a computer making models and predictions. A Farewell to Ice also documented the author's own predictions based on observations and reading others' research and communications. All the observations say that the changes are accelerating, and the ice free summer will arrive. It doesn't matter when. We can't make the ice come back. It is like the death of one's parents.
"The main reason is the dismal failure of most models to reproduce the present state of the Arctic ice in summer."
"We are injecting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere far faster than any known natural event even an extreme one like an asteroid impact."
Throughout the geological record, there were events that pumped carbon dioxide from one part of the carbon cycle to another. The current rate of acceleration of carbon flowing into the atmosphere was not found in the geological record. We humans are explorers. We seek things out. We haven't found evidence yet in the geological record of similar exponential changes that have contributed to historical events.
"People hanging on to familiar habits in the face of the changing conditions may have been fatal for them." This was certainly the case on Easter Island. They didn't realise that their population was outstripping their resources. Or when they did, it was too late. The habitat crashed, and the population crashed. This is our present danger, with species dropping like, well, dead budgies.
Climate Sensitivity
Glacial and interglacial periods were controlled by the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. A glacial period had 180 parts per million (ppm) carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere. It switched over to an interglacial climate when the concentration of carbon dioxide rose to 280 ppm. The difference in the temperatures was 7.8 degrees. It is like how our bodies maintain a steady heat, that can vary by a degree, depending on whether we are asleep, awake, or sick. The climate system had a temperature differential of 7.8 degrees Celsius. This was the Climate Sensitivity. The atmosphere at this time of writing contained 410 ppm carbon dioxide. The rate of carbon dioxide increase is accelerating.
The Changing Ice Mass
In 2005 "... for the first time the summer ice cover was fully detached from the land masses of Siberia and Alaska, through it clung to the coasts of Greenland and the Canadian Archipelago." Fram and Admundsen, the famous historical explorers, spent years of their lives trying to get over the ice mass and to the North Pole. Now they would need boats, and not dog sleds. In 2007, the ice was at the lowest minimim ice extent ever recorded by satellites. This was discussed by Stroeve from the National Snow Ice and Data Centre. The Arctic Ice Mass was declining, and this was verified by other peer-reviewed research.
The Arctic’s rapidly shrinking sea ice cover: a research synthesis Stroeve et al 2011: A Review
Arctic sea ice variability and trends, 1979-2010, Cavalieri and Parkinson: a review
The Beaufort Gyre was the birthplace of the Multiyear Ice Floe. A gyre is what the oceanographers call the motion of the water around an ocean or part of an ocean. In the Arctic Ocean, it was called the Beaufort Gyre. The Gyre switched or flipped its rotation from one direction to another. In one phase of circulation, the floes in the ocean got pushed around by the currents, and jammed up against each other. The ice mass got reinforced to be thicker and stronger with a complex system of buttresses and keels on its bottom. The Gyre actually sucked in the sea ice from outside of the basin of the Arctic Ocean. The past ice was so thick that the keels scoured the ocean floor, and these relicts of the last Ice Age, old sea ice scour marks, were still apparent in the sonar mapping. This amazed me. But this particular year, the Gyre flipped over. The currents switched direction, and the multiyear ice floes began to escape out of the straits, to float out to the Greenland and Barents Seas. Since then the Beaufort Gyre has collapsed. No one knows if it will start up again.
The Arctic Death Spiral
"Clearly this simple extrapolation technique should not be used to make predictions about the winter months, for much may happen in the next few decades to change the state of the Arctic during winter. It is also clear that the summer trend [of the sea ice melting] has slowed down for in September 2016 and 2017 the sea ice did not disappear." Let's hope so. The Ice Giant says to me that it will not give up its influence without a fight, and another mechanism is at work here, while the icy breath of the dragon is still cold enough to freeze the water.
"What has contributed to this recent accelerated decline. The multi-year ice has almost all gone, and even if the Arctic atmospheric circulation suddenly changes, there is not time within the next year or two for ice freshly retained in the Arctic to reach substantially greater thicknesses." When the ice free summer arrives, it means that all of the multiyear ice floes present now will be gone.
Chimneys
Peter Wadhams was on the oceanography team that discovered the ocean Chimneys in the Greenland Sea. They described cylinders of slowly rotating ocean water that went down from the surface of the water to a depth of 2,500 metres.
"The quantity of plankton inside a chimney in winter, per unit area of sea surface, is as great as that observed in spring and summer. The reason is that the whole 2,500 metre column of water has the same density, so plankton can rise towards the surface and sink for great distances, all without effort, in search of nourishment. Even though it is dark in winter, a convecting chimney can support more life than a similar area of normal ocean." He also talks about there being fewer chimneys already than there were in the Greenland Sea than when they were first documented in 1985. Is this a factor in the decline of the plankton?
After I started to write this article, I searched for some of the papers in Wadhams' footnotes because it would help me to understand his argument.
Polyakov Recent changes in the Arctic multiyear sea-ice coverage and the likely causes.
Bulletin of American Meteorological Society 2012
Polyakov helpfully tells us about the research of David Butman. Butman reports that the rivers in the United States are "supersaturated" with carbon dioxide compared to the atmosphere. The increase in precipitation caused by climate change will create a cycle that leads to increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the waterways and subsequently the atmosphere.
“Thus, the rapid loss of sea ice in response to the atmospheric and oceanic forcing of the past decade appears to have introduced some degree of irreversibility-at least over time scales of several years-into the loss of Multiyear Ice [MYI].” -- Polyakov
In his conclusion, Polyakov states: “The fact that the rate of MYI recovery observed in recent years shows a delay relative to thermodynamic forcing indicates that MYI is resistant to recovery. However, the relative roles of dynamic and thermodynamic factors in recent changes of the arctic MYI cover remains to be determined. Quantifying these roles is a high priority if we are to develop reliable forecasts of the future state of arctic ice coverage.”
Nobody can tell how much time that there is left for the Arctic. Once the multiyear floes are gone, there are too many variables to predict what will happen next. It will only be seasonal ice for some time.
Kwok, Outflow of Arctic Ocean Sea Ice into the Greenland and Barents Seas: 1979-2007
Length of time series: 29 years.
I called it Ice Exodus, in Journal of Climate, 2008
Over this time series, the report documented the Beaufort Gyre, and how it switched from one phase to the other. The Arctic Ocean sucked the ice in from the Greenland Sea when the Gyre was in one phase. This the phase where the floes were ground together into each other, and they became thicker and stronger, and developed keels and buttresses. When the ice was one floe, the sea ice used to be all stuck together and really strong, so there was no way that it could actually escape out of the basin of the Arctic Ocean. It had too many keels, so it was like this giant plug in the bath. But then the Gyre fliped, and by complicated and interrelated processes, the floe melted, and broke up. The smaller floes got smaller and smoother, the floe broke up and floated away. The switched direction of the ocean currents alowed the floes to escape the Arctic Ocean through the straits and out to the world's oceans. Truly this was a remarkable finding.
They concluded that in 2008 the large loss of ice mass and ice extent may suggest that Arctic sea ice had entered a state of being particularly vulnerable to anomalous atmospheric forcing. This meant that it had become resistant to recovery.
Peter Wadhams has spent most of his life doing Arctic stuff: going there, leading expeditions, writing reports, and analysing data. For all of his life, the atmosphere has been heating up. He presented his life's work to show that we need to remove the carbon from the atmosphere. When the value of a barrel of oil is worth more being left in the ground adding value to the future instead of Borrowing from the future, we might leave it in the ground. There are many externalities to the barrel of oil that are not included in its cost price. The cost to the environment and the extinction of all human beings and our society is worth more than $100 for a barrel of oil. Then the technology to remove carbon might be revalued as well.
It seems to me like the Earth's systems have all this coal and petroleum, like insurance, to keep the carbon cycle working. If we don't treat our carbon cycle like the thing that keeps us alive, then we have got nothing. A live planet is a planet with a working carbon cycle, or else we will become like Venus and Mars. Maybe we are just pawns, being used by life itself, in its game with itself, the frost and the fire giants. Even though they are bigger than us, we have got their notice, I can tell you that!
Solutions: There are a diverse range of technical solutions to the problem of the carbon. Everything is related to everything else. The more carbon that we can sequester back in the ground, the better off we are. We will stop borrowing from the Future, and add value instead to the future. I think of something like a Kickstarter project that launches a website with the range of solutions, and a picture, a scenario of how likely are these things to happen while we still worship our technology that is enslaved to plastic, tied to the present cost of a barrel of oil. As a business, it raises money to put back into the development of the technology to remove the carbon out of the air. We need to be thinking about increasing all these known numbers of pathways so that the carbon goes back to the ground, making coal, and petroleum, and sinking it back into the ground. The carbon sinks should be us, and we are not doing it. Even more recently I saw a headline that claimed that the climate models don't contain enough feedback loops for precipitation!
The cost of a barrel of oil is a myth. A barrel of oil has no value in and of itself. It is a unit. When we can understand that not all externalities are included in the cost price of a barrel of oil, people might start asking questions. Can we as a civilisation last as long as a thousand years until the atmosphere cools down? Who knows? Modelers don't use thousand year time horizons. The models break down. Predictive Power = nil and falling.
All my life, I've watched the Environment change. More urban development, more people, fewer trees, decreasing biodiversity, all accelerating. I do not see understanding and recognition for the nature of the exponential growth as it is happening around us. This is a climate emergency. The fish know. The kangaroos know. The budgies know.They are dead.
If I had seen this continent of ice in all of its majesty, my geologist brain would think unconsciously of how it had come to be. Then it would notice, it's going away now, what could possibly make that happen? I would be wanting to get as many people as I could involved and interested in helping me nut out this thorny problem. Because I haven't even arrived at the part yet of why all this carbon removing technology is not seen as investing in our future. As adding value to the future instead of Borrowing from the Future.
I wanted to go to the Arctic to watch the sea ice freeze. It sounded like a fascinating process. The Frazil crystals forming, tiny ice crystals sparkling in the water, turning into grease ice, forming the nilas like the skin of an elephant, sugar ice, pancake ice! Round as plates floating in the water, turning into first year floes, and finally the multiyear floes. But there might not be time for me to go and see this lovely stuff. The Arctic is our global air conditioning that we all share. It is a common good, and we do not value this prize. It is becoming unstable, and its future is uncertain.