Arctic scientist Keith Larson details our future with climate change
"I'm not inspired so much by those individual kinds of people anymore. I'm inspired by a generation of people."
Here’s a fascinating conversation with Keith Larson PhD, an evolutionary ecologist based at the Climate Impacts Research Centre in the arctic circle in Abisko, Sweden, about what our future looks like with climate change.
Keith, you’ve been studying this for quite some time. Just being your friend and hearing about all the field work that you've done over the years, it seems like you've been witnessing the impacts of climate change on the animals you’ve been studying like birds for a very, very long time.
It seems like only just very recently have we really started to wrap our heads around the fact that humans are also inhabiting this planet as well. There are impacts on us as well.
Before it really started becoming something that was part of the larger international dialogue, that being climate change. Before then, when did you start noticing in your own career that climate change was going to be a really big problem?
I'm a scientist. I've been a scientist for 30 years. I work in the Arctic. I've worked in the Arctic, and in the tropics. It's quite a nice contrast. I primarily look at how organisms whether it be plants or animals, maybe birds, insects, things like that, how they adapt or don't adapt to our changing climate.
Honestly, I didn't really understand the scope of the problem until I moved to the Arctic in 2013. Again, I lived in the North of Alaska many years ago, but I didn't realize kind of the scale of the problem, the difficulty of the problem, and how rapidly things were changing until I moved here in 2013.
I would say the main thing that drove that the point when I became a public figure in terms of communicating climate change science. I had known that the climate was changing for a long time. I mean, that changing in the sense of being changed by humans, okay? The climate has always changed.
So, when a climate change skeptic says, "Well, the climate has always changed," that is absolutely true there, right? But the difference is what we've done in the last century in terms of burning fossil fuels is we've altered the climate in a way that's very rapid. That now, since the 1990s, early 2000s, has really emerged into being a very clear picture. The Arctic is where this climate change is taking place right now. It's not in the future. We talk about people who live on islands in the Pacific or in the Indian Ocean. They're very concerned, because the sea level is rising. Well, that's a future event. It might be very near term, but the climate is actually changing now, here, and it has been changing here for a decade or more.
It’s things like the Alpine glaciers melting and disappearing; the permafrost, the permanently frozen soil thawing and releasing carbon into the atmosphere on top of the carbon that we're already putting there through burning fossil fuels; the melting of the Arctic sea ice; the melting of the Greenland ice sheet; all of these things are happening now.
They've been happening clearly for at least two decades in a way that's obvious.
That's not something that we could say, "Well, maybe it's humans, maybe it's natural variation." Sometime in the late '80s and early 1990s, this story really started to emerge as being clearly linked to human behavior.
So I would say what brought me to this story in terms of a personal understanding of the depth of it, the importance of it, and the gravity of it literally was when I was asked to start communicating the story to the public. What that meant was I had to zoom out from the very narrow focus of my research, and understand how my research was connected to whole ecosystems, how it was connected to the reindeer that the Sámi indigenous people in Sweden make a livelihood from. It meant that I had to understand how permafrost, for example, affects infrastructure for native villages in Alaska, in First Nation villages in Canada, for example.
So, I had to start zooming out and thinking about this more from a macro perspective. Science typically doesn't ask us to do that. It's when you have to learn to communicate the science that you're forced to do that.
So how bad is it really then? You're capable of getting people to understand the issue. I think that we're seeing a lot of adoption, kind of like, "Okay, we understand that this is a problem. Now let's start tackling it."
It begs the question, how big is the problem? On one end, I hear people saying, "Climate emergency," and then on the other I hear, "Oh, well, it might not be so bad to have Norwegian Pinot Noir."
These problems seem distant and abstract to most people, and I totally understand that. Truthfully, for many people who are affluent, they are going to be able to weather this much easier than other people. Right now, by the middle of the century, much of the middle latitudes say in the tropical regions and subtropical regions will have daily summer temperatures above 50˚C / 122 ˚F, which will make those regions uninhabitable. Now, we're talking about billions of people that live there.
Now, of course, if you live in Abisko, which is 200 kilometers / 124 miles north of the Arctic Circle in Sweden, in a country with a national healthcare system, that has free education, including university education, a social safety network - we can feel pretty safe here. But on the other hand, there are billions of people on a daily basis who can't choose what type of light bulb to put in the light socket or what kind of food to eat.
I mean, I just ate an avocado for dinner tonight. Okay, when I lived in Alaska 20 years ago, the concept of an avocado was something that was tropical. It wasn't something that you would buy, even in an extremely developed country at a high latitude like Abisko. I'm at 68 degrees North.
I think that in terms of trying to get across the gravity of the climate situation, the closest thing I could say is imagine that right now, you were in a horrific car accident. I mean, you got a massive injury to your chest. Your heart and your lungs are shredded. You've got multiple injuries all over your body. You get taken into an emergency room where you have one of the best teams of trauma doctors in the world. Those trauma doctors are the scientists, okay, in this analogy. Those trauma doctors come in there, and they start working on your broken foot.
That's where we're at right now.
Again, for many people in the world, if you're in your 60s or 70s, it may not be something that you are going to be tremendously concerned about. But if you are in your 20s right now, even if you live in the most affluent countries, you have to ask yourself, first of all, "Where do you think those billions of people who live in the regions that will become uninhabitable in your lifetime, where are they going to go?" They're going to come to where we live now. They have a right too, because we created a climate for them that meant that their homes were places where they could no longer grow food. They could no longer be safe. We created more conflict. Of course, for many people, that sounds like gloom and doom, but I mean, the good news is, is that this is a completely solvable problem.
I mean, if climate change was the kind of natural variability climate change that's caused by changes in solar activity or volcanic activity, we might not have any ability to deal with that. But the fact is, this is really a human caused problem, and we have the tools we need to solve it. So, I think that everybody is going to have to kind of reconcile where they are on that continuum of feeling distant or too close to this problem. But at the end of the day, nobody goes to IKEA, pulls something off the shelf and ask themselves, "How is this going to affect my unborn grandchildren?" Nobody asks themselves that.
But on the other hand, we're living in a world right now where the choices that we make today and the choices that were made by us, our parents, and our grandparents are going to have impacts on generations of people for literally hundreds, if not thousands of years. We've changed our climate so profoundly, there will not be another ice age for maybe 200,000, maybe 400,000 years, because we put so much carbon in the atmosphere. That's how long it takes for it to be naturally cycled out and put back underground.
Thanks for explaining that - okay, so we've put a lot of carbon in the atmosphere, how did that happen? But also, does plastic pollution play into this?
Kind of part one for my next question is, can you just give us a primer on why it matters that we put this much carbon into the atmosphere?
Part two, I think there's a lot of confusion around what ‘climate change’ actually means, and what ‘environmental change’ is, and how to kind of frame those concepts in our minds. It's like when we're talking about climate change, are we also talking about all the trash everywhere and recycling; or is this just a confusion that kind of came about over the years because pollution is what we see? So, two questions there.
'Climate change,’ in the modern human sense of what we have caused, climate change is caused by humans largely by burning or using fossil fuels, okay? So, there are other things besides burning fossil fuels that put carbon in the atmosphere like making, for example, cement, like growing large herds of livestock, like growing rice. These are sources of carbon dioxide. These are sources of methane. These are sources of nitrous oxide, which are greenhouse gases. We've known, thanks to basically, over a century and a half, 150 years of science that starts with a woman named Eunice Foote in the 1850s, I believe, who was the first person to actually describe the greenhouse effect, okay?
And then there was a whole series of scientists over the next 150 years that kind of understood what the greenhouse effect was and then human's role in enhancing the greenhouse effect by putting more carbon there. So, climate change is essentially, carbon pollution from human activity. So, imagine you dig up coal, you burn it, where does it go? It doesn't go back underground, it goes in the atmosphere. When it goes in the atmosphere, although it looks transparent, when the sun's energy comes through the atmosphere, that greenhouse gas or that carbon dioxide in this case, traps more of that heat and would be otherwise.
I can tell you that we use things like ice cores from Antarctica. We use sediment cores from the ocean to reconstruct the climate, going back hundreds of thousands, even millions of years. We can definitely say that there was no time in the last two to three million years, where the carbon dioxide levels were as high as they are now. They typically were not much higher than about 280 parts per million, which, of course, is just a unit that makes no sense. But just to put that into perspective, we've burned so much fossil fuel since the Industrial Revolution that we're sitting at today around 417 parts per million. That carbon is going to be there for hundreds and thousands of years. So, climate change is caused by humans.
And then environmental change is caused by humans. So, think about, for example, when we spill oil and we cause an oil spill. That kills a coral reef, or it kills a plant community along the coast, or it kills fish. But also, of course, deforestation, that's environmental change. I mean, today, human beings dig up more sand and blow up more rock through mining for sand, for cement, for gravel, for minerals, than all of the rivers in the world combined, put out into the ocean in terms of erosion, in terms of sediment that's transported by a river.
So, imagine, if you were to take all the rivers on the planet and they all move sediment from the land to lakes in the ocean. Today, we dig up more material, we turn over more material on land than all of the rivers combined. So, that's environmental change. But the dirty secret to this whole thing is that even if we stop changing the climate today, because we put so much carbon in the atmosphere, we put so much carbon in the ocean, the ocean absorbs so much heat. The oceans absorbs about 90% of the heat generated by the carbon we put in the atmosphere. So, the oceans have done us a big favor.
So we've done so much that even if we turn off all the fossil fuels today, and we started making cement in a smart way which we have the technology to do, and if we started growing our food in a smarter way which we have the technology to do… if we did all of those things, the problem is, is the planet, the biosphere, Gaia will continue to react to that carbon pollution and will continue to change. So, that means that for example, all of this permafrost in the Northern Hemisphere will continue to thaw and release carbon that will be brought down by microbes in the soil, then will be emitted as carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere for thousands and thousands of years.
So, there's an interaction between climate change and environmental change, which causes more environmental change. We call those feedbacks. We call those planetary feedbacks. So, that's the real devil in the room in terms of how we deal with it. I mean, we can build electric cars. We can create public transportation systems. We can grow meat in a laboratory now for people who want to eat meat. We could eat insects if we choose to eat insects. We can grow food in different ways.
We can make an iPhone that will last for 20 years if we want to, where we simply can replace the battery when it needs to be replaced. We have amazing capacity as human beings, but the really difficult part is to undo what we've already done. That's the difficult thing. Think about it, how do you bring back species that are extinct?
Jurassic Park.
I know exactly. How do you reforest the Amazon; or Indonesia, when Indonesia has been turned into a palm oil plantation? It's not impossible, but it's much more difficult than some of these other things. Right now, these are the big questions.
Keith, is this in part because none of us are 200 or 300 years old, in the sense that we don't know what it was like before? Many of us were born, '60s, '70s, '80s, or later right?
Yeah.
We have no memory of a world where we weren't driving cars around or the Industrial Revolution, right?
Absolutely.
I mean, so these timescales are so large that what we think is normal, perhaps, on a planetary level isn't normal at all?
I think that's absolutely one of the factors. I mean, that's what we kind of call the shifting baseline. I mean, how many of us have an immediate relative that died of smallpox? So now, we have a whole generation of people now who don't want to vaccinate their children. So, I mean, when I was born in 1968, the Amazon rainforest was largely intact, okay? I've been to some pretty amazing places in my life as a scientist. So, I have a real sense of loss that many people don't, even if you watch David Attenborough on BBC or PBS. So, I think that there's this shifting baseline because each generation is disconnected from the way the world used to be.
When you get older, you get more conservative and think everything in the past was better. But somehow, that doesn't carry over from generation to generation, other than that sentiment that ‘my music is better’ than the new music or my technology is better than the old technology, all those kinds of things. So, I think that's certainly part of it. I think that most people, at least those who have the ability to make decisions, the affluent people, are just not living close enough to the problem.
I mean, honestly, for most of us, if avocados just all of a sudden became a lot more expensive, we would have alternatives. But for most people in the world, most of the people who are living on very low incomes, who are subsistence farmers, people who are working three or four jobs, single parents - they don't have a lot of alternatives. You know what? Even if they're living in a place that's changing rapidly, whether it be through climate change, environmental change, human conflict, they don't have time to be concerned about those things because they're just trying to survive.
So, there's this conundrum that if you're affluent and you're kind of sheltered from these problems, you kind of suffer from the shifting baseline. And then if you're living in, say, Sub-Saharan Africa, why would you care about climate change when you're just trying to put food on the table and survive? You're hoping one of your children might be able to get an education.
Right. That seems to be the major problem with the environmental movement as it stands, because a lot of the people that find themselves a part of it have kind of already reached a certain point on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, where they can think about helping the environment because they can put food on the table, right? So, in the environmental movement as we know it, we're mostly looking at people from developed countries who had the privilege, accessibility, and education to learn about it, and to understand greenhouse gas effect, etc.
It also kind of feels like it's just a lot of people yelling at each other. There's a lot of anger, right? We're in the 11th hour, there's no time to lose. The analogy that you gave me, I got chills about you're on the operating table, and someone's working on your foot when they should be working on your chest, right?
If it's really that big of a problem, I just want to know why are we still stuck in this yelling and screaming at each other land when we need to implement solutions? So that's the first part of the question. Second part of the question is, do you have a sense of what solutions are needed? Is it really just everyone going plant-based, or is it really just EVs?
So, it’s a two-part question. Part one, just what is up with the current environmental movement? Because it seems like there's a lot of just yelling at each other and screaming, which I don't think really leads to problem solving. And then the second is, what do we actually have to do? What realistically can be done to address climate change, right now?
I think for the first part of your question, if you think about the environmental movement the way we think about politics, was a political system really invented for people to be in politics for 80 years or 50 years in office in the Senate or in Parliament, where they basically become a full time politician or basically they become beholden to special interests? I think in the environmental movement and many different types of NGOs globally, lobbying organizations, we've all become beholden to...
I mean, look, my research is funded by the Swedish Research Council. I depend on them. We hear all the time about environmental groups taking money that one person says is greenwashing because it's coming from Shell. Another person says, "Well, at least they're using the money to do the right thing." It's all a distraction. Because the thing is, if we solve problems, we should move on to the next one. So, I don't really see how do we actually hold politicians accountable if they're career jobs?
If a politician says they're going to do something, "We're going to cut greenhouse gas emissions in our country by 50%. These are the tools that we're going to do it. Let's say creating public transportation infrastructure for where it's feasible. And then we will buy people's diesel in benzene cars and get EV cars in rural areas where people don't have access to it. We'll reinvigorate rural healthcare systems. We'll reinvigorate our education system." When a politician says those kinds of things, if they don't do it, we just need to fire them, and then just move on to the next person until we create an atmosphere where there's some accountability.
Because right now, whether it's the environmental movement or whether it's politics, I feel like there's not a heck of a lot of accountability. So, I think that's my personal experience of being an environmentalist, being somebody who might be considered quite left wing, someone who comes from the United States who lives in Sweden. That's kind of my perspective as a 51-year-old male, White person with a PhD. So, I expect that there are people who disagree with me, and I can accept that. I'm willing to change my opinion, but I don't know. I've lived in a lot of countries around the world. I feel like that's kind of a right view about it, that we have not created and demanded an accountability within society that actually benefits us.
In terms of getting the public to care about the environment or to care about any particular issue, whether it be their own health, I mean, how is it that you could have poor people in the United States protesting against Obamacare? People who didn't have healthcare protesting about having access to healthcare, how is that possible? Well, it's possible because we just don't invest in education. Education is something that affluent people get.
So, in my opinion, one of the problems that we have is that these are not quick fix solutions. It'll take decades of hiring politicians and firing politicians before the message is clear in terms of accountability. It will take equally long in terms of decades to educate the public to value science as a way of evaluating evidence for making important policy decisions, say, about health care or about the environment or about climate or about technological issues. So, it's not easy.
This is the thing where I think why so many people who are passionate about the environment or passionate about climate change, plastic issues, gender, social, or income justice, is that we feel like we know the problem right now. The answer cannot come too quickly. I think it's just how the earth works in terms of geologic times. We work in terms of a species that lives for, let's say, 70 to 80 years. Somehow in that process of using fossil fuels to become the most affluent and developed humanity has ever been in our history, somehow, we didn't apply that equally to everybody in terms of that affluence.
For me, affluence isn't necessarily money. It's about education. It's about happiness. It's about access to food. It's about access to healthcare. It's access to the things that create a quality of life, and we just haven't done that. Some countries have done better than others, I will have to say, but we have a long way to go in every country.
So we basically created a moment in time, where there's a bunch of people yelling and screaming that the house is burning, and then we have a ton of people who are still trying to put food on the table. People are saying, “This matters over here, the house is burning.” And others are saying, "Look, I would rather eat than have a house." Right? So, this is… wow. So, in that sense, what I'm hearing from you is more political participation is necessary and accountability, governmentally speaking. I couldn't agree with you more on that. So, that's like number one on the things that we need to do to realistically address climate change now in our lifetimes. What's two through five?
Yeah. I mean, think about it right now with the COVID situation and the previous financial crisis. I mean, essentially, the people who are saving people's lives - the doctors, the nurses, the primary caregivers, the paramedics, the firefighters, the police officers, the people who pick up our trash, our school teachers - how come those people are so poorly paid and so overworked? Why does a student think that a sports star or a movie star is so important? I enjoy movies, and I enjoy sports. But why do people think it's so important that we could justify paying those people so much money and yet we go every day to school, wherever we go every day, to the doctor's office, somebody picks up our trash every day? We don't value those people in a more significant way. I don't get that.
Yeah, I don't either. What I think is amazing about your answers here is that a scientist who specializes in communicating with people about climate change is telling me that the way that we solve climate change is through government accountability, and through actually supporting the people that matter in society, education, equal pay, and things like that. I mean, so far, you've been giving me social issues that we need to tackle for something that a lot of people understand is a scientific problem, which I think is fascinating here.
Because we support a system that reinforces gender inequity, cultural and social inequity, racism, all of those things. So, for me, there's no way we're going to tackle climate change in a meaningful way if we can't care about each other. As a man, what I realize as being in a position of power, of privilege, the biggest problem is... I can say I care about women's issues or I can say I care about human rights. But at the end of the day, what happens if women get the equal pay to me or they have the equal opportunity for the same job I am applying for? It essentially means that I'm giving up power. That is very hard for anybody to do, man or woman, one country versus another, one race or culture versus another. Giving up power is very difficult. We see that everywhere, it's just natural.
So essentially, we have a situation where there is a gender, there are certain groups of people that control a lot of power. It's not that we need to overthrow those people. We just need to create a system that allows them to basically share, to create equity, and to realize that in science when I have an equal number of women colleagues, science is even better than it was when it was only men.
Usually, at this point in the conversation when I'm speaking with you about it or with other friends, people say, "Well, those terrible people who have been in power who are racist and just disgusting in their view of the world, those people are getting older, right?" People say, "Hey, let's just hope that the next generations can kind of carry the torch." What do you see in the 40 and under crowd that gets you really excited about the future? Is there hope? Because up until now, we know kind of what screwed up the world, right? It was enough people turning an eye to all the CO2 going into the atmosphere, right? It was enough people wanting to hold on to power. Missed commitments, failed agreements, right?
I mean, this has been going on and people have been talking about environmental change, climate change for quite some time, right? There have been good people that have been fighting the good fight. You're around students a lot at the Climate Impacts Research Center. What do you see in the 40-and-under crowd that makes you excited about what we can look forward to in the future? Who's going to be taking the torch and fixing this?
Well, let me just make one comment about something you've said first, and then I'll answer the question.
I don't think it does any good to blame any generation. We're just in the situation that we're at. I mean, the people in the world that have the most abhorrent views to what you would consider a socially acceptable thing, those people are a product of something. Now, what inspires me about the young generation is that they have nothing to lose. We can see it when we see people like Greta Thunberg. We can see it in the students strike movements. We can see the Fridays For Future groups. We can see the Extinction Rebellion. Young people realize that the situation, although it may not be dire for them individually in the short term, is dire for humanity. They've got nothing to lose. They're the most politically liberated force on the planet right now.
The good news is if you study history a little bit, anytime there's been a social movement where 3.5% of any population revolted against a system, they achieve their objectives. We see problems as if it's 100%. We have to solve climate change 100% right now, but no, the reality is, we only need 3.5% of the population of Sweden, of the United States, of Canada, of China, we only have 3.5% of those people that say, "This is not acceptable. We demand an alternative." So, for me, that is what's so inspiring, because there are people who realize that I think for the first time in any generation.
There was a report that came out on April 17th about how the North Pole is going to kind of fully melt for the first time this September. I'm sure you're familiar with it. There's these reports about how the great barrier reef is already dead, right? There's really bleak reporting. I mean, wildfires in Australia, there are “animals strewn across the charred landscape,” right? This is all very scary stuff, right?
We're seeing that today. What you told me earlier was that this is going to kind of continue to happen regardless because we put a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere. What can we do now that makes it a little bit better apart in terms of addressing the social problems that we can see? We know that voter registration and tackling social issues and inequities in our society, sure. But we're also seeing wildfires, extreme heat waves in Europe, heat waves everywhere, right?
So, what can we do realistically now that's really going to put a dent in this? Because it's bad now. I mean, people are scared now. These headlines seem to only be more and more and more and more, right? So, what do you tell people when they ask you, "Well, what can we do?"
Well, what we can do is realize that first of all... I mean, the reason why I use the analogy of the person in the emergency room is not to make you feel that it's hopeless, but to feel like if you understand the scope of the problem and that's what doctors do normally. So, the triage doctors go in there, they make a quick assessment. They first make sure that there's no bleeding. They first make sure that the airway is functioning. They tackle those things before they tackle broken bones, before they tackle other types of injuries. So, they focus on what they call the ABCs, airway, breathing circulation.
So, in a sense, we have to figure out what the ABCs are for us individually, for our communities, for our countries, and for the planet. And then we need to focus on where we can work on those things. So, for example, I mean, ultimately, every time a politician says, "Oh, we're going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions," we didn't ask them, "Well, how are you going to do that?" If they say something that's nonsense like, "Oh, we're going to just tax petrol. We're going to tax diesel," then the next question should be, "Well, what are you going to do with that money? What alternatives are you going to create for people?" Because the reality is and there's a lot of social science that demonstrates that once we kind of learn behavior, it's very hard to change. So, alternatives have to be really easy.
Where I was in the South of Sweden, I took a train 24 hours with my family. I have two small children, 24 hours to the South of Sweden to meet my wife's family's from Germany. We took the train North to Sweden for Christmas. In Sweden, we have this tradition of taking sauna and we were at a public sauna. I was sitting next to a guy and everybody chats about their life, what they do. It turns out this guy lives in a town called Landskrona in Sweden, and he works in Malmö. It's about a one-hour drive. So, every day, this guy drove his car, went to work, spent eight hours at work, and drove an hour home. But if there was a car accident or a traffic jam, he would spend more time.
But when the local commuter train was established to where he lives, so he could just hop on the local commuter train. It wasn't jam packed like a New York City subway. He could sit down, use the free Wi-Fi, and work. He still had an hour commute. But that hour commute each way turned into two hours of work time, and he only spent six hours in the office. So, for me, that's an alternative to driving. So, we need to create opportunities for people. We need to create alternatives.
So even when you're lefty politician or you're Democratic or your Socialist politician says they're going to do something, ask them how. Ask them what they're going to do with the money or where they're going to get the money. What alternatives are you going to create for people?
Because one of the situations that we have in Europe, in the United States is that as the governments have come to realize that the gravity of the climate crisis, they go for these low hanging fruits like, "We'll just tax petrol on cars." Well, the problem is, is that if you live in rural areas where you don't have a local health care clinic, I have to drive 100 kilometers just to get to a health care clinic, not even a normal hospital. I have to go 250 kilometers to the hospital where my daughter was born. To see a specialist, I have to drive 500 kilometers. Now luckily, I can take a train.
But the point is many people in rural areas don't have that option. So, that means when you tax them, what do they do? Many people in rural areas live on extremely limited incomes compared to people who are affluent in urban areas, for example, where they have access to public transportation.
So, one thing that's happened is that we've seen that a lot of these kind of fringe alt-right groups have become mainstream. The way they become mainstream is toning down some of the hate messages, and then cranking up the support for people who have real grievances with their governments, like, "Hey, you tax us. I mean, we pay the most taxes of anybody where I live in Sweden more than anybody in Stockholm by far. Yet, we don't have good access to health care. We don't have good access to education. We don't have good access to grocery shopping and surfaces that people in urban area have. We pay a lot more in taxes." So, I think we need to listen and understand the problems.
So, when a politician says that they have a solution, we need to make sure that it really is a solution that has been well thought out. So, I know that's a long answer, but I mean, I get tired of hearing like, "Oh, let's just tax flights." Because if you don't say what you're going to do with the money, and you don't create an alternative for people who maybe... I mean, my best friend lives in New Zealand. Now, I don't need to go see her every five years or every year, I should say. But maybe every five years, I want to go see her or have her come visit us. So, I think, we live in a globally interconnected world, and we have to think about everybody. That's really hard. But at least at the local, regional, national level, it's a lot easier.
Right. So, it's ‘systems change,’ but ‘systems change’ looking at that local, regional, national level first, right? So, if we put in a train system in a country like the United States, then we're beginning to solve the problem. Maybe that's what we should tackle first before talking about electric planes, right? Is that kind of what you're saying, looking at ‘systems change’ on a local level?
Yeah, I think it all has to be interconnected. I mean, imagine in Europe, if all these so-called national airlines, which only are national in the sense of their names. what if they're receiving billions in bailouts? I mean, what if they were told that they had to become the national rail systems and their task is to basically build high speed rail that connects their capital to every capital in Europe? It connects all the major cities in their countries so that you don't need domestic flights to fly 200 kilometers / 124 miles.
We could do those things. We could demand that our public money that's being used in a time of crisis right now is used in a way that creates real solutions, but we're not doing that right now. We see a lot of it in the newspaper, at least if you read The Guardian or The New York Times and those kinds of newspapers, people writing opinion pieces like, "This is the time to use this money to create the Green Revolution." But I think it's also we have to think about the terms.
Because in the rural areas, maybe right or wrong, people don't care about climate change. But you know what? They do care about education for their children. They do care about being able to get to the hospital. So, we don't have to come up with a green eco message to convince them that climate change is real. We can think of green alternatives, for example, transportation that actually give them better access to healthcare and education, for example.
There's a lot of news about billionaires around the world investing in new carbon capture technologies or building blimps, instead of traditional airplanes like Zeppelin's. How do you evaluate those types of solutions? Because I think that there's always going to be people that approach this from a natural perspective, which would look like regenerative agriculture for instance. There are always going to be people that want to tackle it with tech.
How do you, Keith, look at the solutions? Are we kind of like running further away from the problem by trying to use technology to solve it, or is there a place for that new-fangled way of capturing CO2 out of the atmosphere?
I mean, planting trees and protecting forests and using regenerative agriculture and reorganizing how we do farming is a hell of a lot cheaper than sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere. Truthfully right now, it costs nothing to stop burning fossil fuels relative to what it costs to take it out of the atmosphere once we put it there. I mean, it's extraordinary. I mean, if somebody was to invent some simple technology that can suck CO2 out of the atmosphere, you know what? It's probably going to be something that harnesses the properties of something like algae or something like that. It's not going to be some techie machine. It's not going to happen.
We may get to the point in 30 or 40 or 50 years where we have no choice but to basically do everything possible. If we get to that point, there's not going to be that many people on the planet. The reason why people are going to be willing to spend so much money and do whatever it takes is because they're going to see that climate and the environment has them in the crosshairs like it has the poor people on our planet right now. I would like those billionaires to start paying taxes, okay? That's what I would like to see. But if they want to go off and invent some technology, it doesn't hurt anybody. But what does hurt people is when we put a misplaced belief that technology will save us from everything.
Protecting forests, planting new forests, using the technology in terms of agricultural technologies, regenerative agriculture, doing the different types of new farming methods, many of those new farming methods or old farming method actually, doing a lot of those things would just buy us a little bit more time and give us generationally the opportunity to think about what are the values that are most important to us, restructure how we educate people, restructure how we vote and hold politicians accountable. So, I think that the problem is, is that in this decade, we kind of are in a make-and-break situation. We're either going to make the right decisions in this decade or not.
This decade…
Yes, in this decade.
That seems very soon.
It’s right now.
It's right now.
It's not like December 31st, 2029. It's right now. I mean, the hope is the fact that we have a politically liberated force in young people right now if we get them to vote.
Is this why you switched into doing what you're doing, which is this type of climate change communication? It seems like you're speaking from personal experience about how much time you spent nowadays talking to people like me and spreading the word.
Yeah. Well, I think that what's happened is it became clear to me that I can make much more of a difference doing this, and I can publish scientific papers, which I still publish. I mean, somehow, whether you agree with me on everything that I've said or not, somehow, I've come to a worldview that's been informed by working in 13 countries. I've lived in almost 15 states in the United States. I've lived in a few provinces in Canada. I've lived in Oceania. I've lived briefly, at least on every continent except Antarctica. I've been around different indigenous people. I've lived in cities.
I've been around a lot of different places in the world and had lots of different friends and communities that I've experienced. Somehow that has shaped how I see the world right now. I don't know. I think that communication and sitting down at the dinner table with people and eating food and having conversations is just so much more valuable than me simply expecting that somebody is going to find my scientific paper published in a journal that's behind a paywall.
Yeah, so talking about that, something that I can't still wrap my head around as someone who specializes in this field is all the different ways that we're all going to be impacted by climate change. So, when I think about it, like okay, well, sea level rise, that means anyone who lives in the coast, right? Anyone that lives near the equator, right? Anyone that lives in a city where the aquifer has been tapped, so they have no access to clean, fresh water, right? Anyone who's going to experience crazy highs and crazy lows temperature wise. Even in Berlin, Germany, you're going to have a heatwave that will result in the deaths of vulnerable people, right?
So, when I started going through the list, it's overwhelming because you're like, "Well, everyone's affected by this, right?" I mean, there's different levels of exposure and risk. There are whole IPCC reports on just that alone. It's crazy to wrap your head around. And then also to look at these timelines, a lot of the timelines, I mean, people are predicting that we're going to have a water crisis in 2040, 2050. Some cities in South Africa, Mexico City, for instance, are already having water crisis now, right?
Look at the fires in Australia. I mean, this is the problem with climate models. It's not that they're wrong in kind of random directions, which would tell us are completely useless. It's just they tend not to be sensitive enough to actually what's really happening so that for example, the fires like we saw this last summer or winter, depending on which hemisphere you're from in Australia, those bushfires are the kinds of things that we predicted could happen in 2070 or 2100, and they're happening now.
Yeah.
The amount of permafrost that's thawing right now is stuff that we predicted a decade ago would be in 30, 40, 50 years, and it's happening now.
Keith, is ‘we’ within science circles only, or is this something that we've been able to see cross industries for a very long time and we're all just not doing anything about it? I tend to believe that humankind is on default good, right? If anything, it could be ignorance that lead us to this. But if we've been seeing this for so long, why is this still such a huge problem, if not more, the problem is even growing?
Well think about it this way. When we talk about the fact that we've warmed our planet by a degree since the beginning of Industrial Revolution, we all experience more than one-degree change within a 24-hour period in our lives. But what we don't realize is actually what the impact of one degree of change or one and a half degrees of change actually is on the planet in terms of sea level rise, in terms of ocean acidification, in terms of coral bleaching. I mean, remember, even if you're not a snorkeler or a scuba diver, coral reefs like mangroves are the nurseries for billions and billions and billions of fish that then wind up on our dinner tables.
So, the problem is, is that there's these two perspectives. One perspective is like, "Well, I have the air conditioner set to 20 degrees, but I don't realize that it's working a little bit harder year after year. When it breaks, I just buy a new one." It's not until my tires on my car melt into the road that one will realize that the gradual temperature increases just all of a sudden reached a tipping point.
So that's the difference is that we have these daily experiences in terms of temperature change, the seasonal experiences that we have in terms of temperature change or precipitation, snow, and rain. That doesn't give us a very good understanding of how our planet responds to, say, a continuous one degree of warming for decades or one degree going on one and a half degrees, going on two degrees, going on three degrees, going on four degrees. Let's not forget that when we talk about one degree Celsius, what we're talking about is a global surface temperature average.
Most people don't live on the ocean, the ocean is 71% of the planet's surface. So, when we subtract the ocean away in terms of the surface, actually the land temperatures of more than double that one degree. Of course, it's not equal everywhere because we don't have a flat planet. I mean, some people believe it's flat, I understand.
For the majority of us who don't live on a flat planet where it's a homogeneous surface, we know that there are places that are warmer. There's places that are colder. So, even though the temperatures are on average one degree warmer across the whole planet, the Arctic is two to three times as warm as that in that same time here. So, it's just too abstract honestly. It's not until we experience the crisis personally that we start to start asking the right questions. Even then, it takes a while.
So we're basically hindered in solving this because the basis for this is scientific, which means that you have a group of people who are very unwilling to say that something's totally right or totally true because of the scientific method, right? We have science backing. We have something that in many instances is difficult to see, right? You see the effects not being tied directly to the problem. So, you have more CO2 in the atmosphere, that means there's a drought in Sub-Saharan Africa, which means that a family can't eat, right? It's really difficult for people to trace that cause and effect, when it's such a global thing.
The people that are tracing that cause and effect happened to be scientists, so they can never really fully say this is true or false. So, we're just kind of like going into this cycle where we know there's a problem happening, but it's very difficult to say where it's coming from. We know that climate change is happening. There are whole fields of science now that try to attribute climate change to various occurrences…
It seems like there's hard problems to solve, Keith, but this one seems… where do you even start, right?
Yeah, I think one of the things, which is something I know you're extremely passionate about, which is also probably a major factor in both of those other things is our disconnection from nature. So, as we become more affluent, people in rural areas who are more connected to the land move towards the urban centers where you become more disconnected from the land. I mean, it's almost ludicrous how many times I've been asked by reporters, friends, and the public in the last couple of months, "Is the COVID situation solving the climate crisis because the air is cleaner in our cities right now?" or "I heard birds."
I saw an article from somebody who lives in Bristol right next to a motorway. They'd never heard bird singing in their yard before because they live next to a motorway that 24 hours a day makes so much noise. Part of the reason why is because young people are moving away from rural areas because they get a better life in urban area.
So, what do you think, Jenna, about that? Why don't you address that?
Yeah, so a few things. I think we look at this rural-urban divide. We think that it automatically means that you can't have nature. I think that the way that our cities are built now, that is true to a certain extent, right? If you live in New York City where I lived for 12 years, you could go to Central Park, you could go to Prospect Park. You could be in these beautiful, amazing, beautifully designed parks. That is your access to nature. Or you might take the ferry and you might be on the water going from Brooklyn to Manhattan. You'll be experiencing the East River.
A lot of people who live in cities won't say, "Oh, I don't have access to nature." It's just their definition of nature has changed. So, I think that the problem is, is that in my view, we haven't gotten creative enough. I'm not saying that it all has to be rooftop farms. But why is it that we built these giant glass boxes to work in? We couldn't think of something better?
I know that a balcony has been something we've seen in buildings since the beginning of time, right? So, yeah, it seems to me that we need to get a little bit more creative in how we define what a city looks like and what kind of city we want to live in. Really ask ourselves the question, if you do have the privilege to be able to design a place for humans to be in, why don't we design that so that nature is much more a part of that place, right? It's not that hard to plant a tree.
Look at the situation right now. With all these cities where things are shut down around the world, you don't have to tear out the streets for wildlife to become more a part of people's lives. I mean we should do that. We should tear the streets out and make it green and plant trees in our cities and green our cities, but-
Bike lanes.
We share something in common that we've both spent a part of our lives in Chicago. I remember when I was a kid, my grandmother lived in Niles, which is a suburb of Chicago. I remember when I was like a teenager, my sister and I would sneak out in the summertime of her house, and then we would just walk around the suburbia of Chicago. We would see coyotes and skunks, and raccoons, not just rats, but we would see literally those kind of animals in the alleys and on streets.
I reflect on it and I never thought of that as nature. I thought of nature is going to Yellowstone National Park. Now I see the world much differently because the city is nature, right? It's just a nature that's been highly manipulated to suit our needs.
Right. It seems like we need to have a new evaluation of needs. The reason why I keep on focusing on nature is that you can get people to care about nature, right? It's harder to say “care about climate change,” right? The more people that care about the environment, or want to see themselves in a place that is green, or want to have access to a soccer field to play soccer - that's what I'm talking about. That connection to being outside. I just think that we need to realize that our needs over time, we thought our needs were ‘making as much money as one possibly can,’ right?
So, you could retire, go on a cruise.
Why would you wait to live your life until you're in the last quarter of it? Let's get a little bit more creative around what our needs are. We're in a society right now where people have never felt so alone, just psychological issues, right? I mean, if we just revitalized our communities, and I don't mean to say it lightly - that takes a lot of work, right?
There are people who are just as passionate about making good communities as we are about the environment and climate change.
When I say ‘reconnect with nature,’ I don't just mean nature in terms of the environment, trees, animals. I also mean human nature. I think that we've lost the connection to human nature. I think we are unaware of how to supply our basic needs when it comes to community, family, access to healthy food. People have never been eating so terribly, right? I mean, just terrible food that gives you all these lifestyle diseases, right? Like you, I see that we're in the 11th hour. If there's going to be something that I think is going to inspire people to do the right thing when it comes to climate change, it's having that connection to nature.
As you said, in a sense if we're in the 11th hour, do you just jump in your diesel pickup truck and just slam the gas pedal and just drive as fast as you can; or do you just step out, sit down with friends, have dinner, cook food, garden, go birdwatching, whatever you like to do, go for a walk and just experience time in a different way? Because maybe we're not in our 11th hour. Maybe we're in our second hour and we just don't realize it, because the speed of how we're living our lives right now makes it feel like it's 11th hour and effectively it is because things are moving so fast. So, I think that it's really just time for us to just really reevaluate.
I mean, one of the hardest parts about living where I live is, is not the beauty of nature and being able to walk out my door and go skiing or hiking or running or canoeing in any direction. The hard part is that we're 2,500 kilometers / ,553 miles from the closest relative. So, with two small children, we never have an evening off. I live in a village where all the kids once they get to year nine in school have to be sent away to a boarding school. So, that means that there's no teenagers in this village who can babysit my children, imagine. So, it means that like being a parent here is pretty full on. Of course, I know that it's nowhere near as difficult.
I can't imagine what it'd be to be a single parent, for example, or be a parent that has to have three jobs to make a living. I am extremely lucky I live in a country where I have basically free kindergarten starting at year one for our children. So, yeah, but it's hard. It would be a lot easier if I had a community here, and we don't have that.
So that's probably the thing that I miss the most because I mean, I have the other nature, the mountains and the forests and the rivers and the birds and the plants and all of that amazing stuff. What I don't have is that community where people take care of each other in that meaningful way. Having spent a lot of time in Latin America, in different parts of Africa, where people live with extended family groups, where communities mean something very different than what we have, whether it be through their church, whether it be through farming, or whether it be whatever activities that they have. That's something that I recognize as highly deficient in my life here.
That really matters, right? That's what you're thinking about.
It's the only thing, I think. I'm not worried about humans destroying the planet. I'm worried about the fact that I don't understand what the future is going to look like, because it's just so unpredictable. I don't have climate anxiety.
Having kids, that's obviously concerning to you.
When I was a kid, I mean, the future, which was a privilege to even think about a future, but my future, I just thought like the world would be the same. We got better gadgets and some new music. That's what the world the future would look like.
I didn't know that 70% of vertebrate life would be wiped out in my lifetime. That we would go from having an Amazon Rainforest that was largely intact to what we have today to losing a significant portion of the Indo-Malay archipelagos, rain forests and replacing it with palm oil plantations. That the ocean would become so acidic and so warm that we would be seeing a significant portion of our coral reefs dying year after year. I didn't think that that was possible when I was a kid.
There was an environmental movement. We cared about big trees and old trees, but I didn't realize just the scale of the problem. I never thought that change would be that.
So now, the anxiety is that I don't really know, because the great thing is, is that we have a tremendous capacity to do the right thing. We also have tremendous capacity to do what we've been... business as usual, as they say.
Some skeptics may listen to a conversation like the one that we're having and say, "Well, that's just like a really pessimistic view, right? We're humans. We can invent things and we can figure it out. It's not all going to be like terrible, right?" But the predictions that we have for the effects of climate change that we can now not prevent that are going to happen anyways, like the North Pole melting entirely, right?
It seems like when people hear that, they're like, "No, no, no, it doesn't have to necessarily be that way. The future is going to be fine." I think one of the main critiques that the environmental movement gets is, "You're really pessimistic. You have no hope in human ingenuity. If we were able to land on the moon, we should be able to figure this out," I've heard.
What's your response to that when people tell you that? They're like, "Well, listen, humans are not all that bad. It can't be that bad, right?" How do you reconcile that with report saying that we're going to run into water wars in 2040, 2050?
Well, I mean, just like we talked about this shifting baseline issue, one of the things we can do is we can look at history. We can forget that it's only been a very relatively short period of time in human history, where people weren't eaten by predators, where diseases didn't just wipe out millions of people when they happened, when famines that were caused by droughts were not solvable.
A really interesting story that I read in Scientific American this winter was that Neil Armstrong had the privilege of inviting one person to Cape Canaveral to watch the moon launch. One of the people that he invited was Charles Lindbergh. Now, we know Charles Lindbergh for people who are aware of the history of flight that he was the first person to do a solo across the Atlantic Ocean. But most people who don't know that Charles Lindbergh when he got back from solo-ing across the Atlantic Ocean, he flew to Ohio, and he had dinner with the Wright brothers, the first people to fly.
So, there was one man in the 20th century, who basically had dinner with the Wright brothers, who were the first people to fly. He sat in a control room and watched us launch the first men to land on the moon.
We haven't put another man on the moon in 50 years. So, we had this very rapid technological change that was largely dependent on a Green Revolution, on the Fossil Fuel Revolution, the Cheap Energy Revolution that we had, and things are slowing down. I don't think that you have to be pessimistic to say that just because we can have a smartphone in our pockets today that's more powerful than the thing that landed on the moon that we're necessarily better off than our parents' generation.
I mean, young kids right now are not better off than their parents' generation. Somewhere, depending on what country in the world you lived in, in the Western part of the world, somewhere around the 2008, 2010, all of a sudden, we went from every generation being better off than their parents, with some exceptions, of course, to that not being the case anymore.
Again, it's not about being pessimistic. It's about saying, "Okay, what's the situation we have? What are the tools in the operating room that we have to fix the patient? And then going and doing it. Because I mean, there is an optimism there. I don't think that that optimism is senseless or naive, but there has to be some understanding of the patient in order to fix the patient. So, I think that you can call me a pessimist, but on the other hand, I wouldn't be doing the public outreach, the communication, the education, the teaching that I do if I felt that it was hopeless, because I don't.
I mean, I'm inspired by young people in ways I've never been inspired by people in my entire life. I mean, in the past, I was inspired by people that we might call heroes. I was inspired by people like Neil Armstrong or Charles Darwin, people who did these amazing things, or Amundson, going to the North Pole or the South Pole, but I'm not inspired so much by those individual kinds of people anymore. I'm inspired by a generation of people.
Thank you. Thank you for talking to me. I'm so excited for people to listen to you on this. You really did such a great job answering my questions. So, thank you for that.
Yeah. You know what? I think that nobody should feel stupid or think that people are stupid because they're skeptical. When we're young, we always think we're right. As you get older, it either becomes more entrenched, or your worldview just zooms out. You realize that an opinion is something that's important, but it has to be based on something. And then when somebody comes to you with something that really shakes your opinion to the core, you need to be excited about being wrong.
I think I told you this story, but I'll tell you one other thing. When Greta Thunberg came to Abisko like two or three years ago, and hang out with me and my students, I mean, I had no idea who she was really. She was just a friend of one of my students, or her family was a friend of one of my students. When they said they wanted to come up here and learn about climate change in their own country, I said, "Sure, why not?" When she came up here and I was talking about climate change, it wasn't that she was a know-it-all, but she knew things. She understood. She was passionate, but I had no idea that she was going to do a climate strike.
And then honestly, somebody told me, "Oh, did you hear that Greta Thunberg is doing this climate strike every Friday? She's standing out by herself in front of Parliament." Being a 51-year-old... Well, I wasn't 51. I was 49 at the time, I guess. But I was so typical like, "I know how everything works." I said, "She's never going to make a difference. Nobody's going to listen to her. She'll be standing out there until the sea level rises until she’s a skeleton floating in a life ring." That was what I thought. I made that joke to my family. And then of course, I'm wrong. You know what? I think that being an opinionated person is one thing, but not really appreciating the value of recognizing when you're wrong? Because it's quite liberating. •
By Jenna Matecki
Special thanks to the Climate Impacts Research Centre (photo above from them as well), Umeå University, and Jonas Lidström.
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