[Scott] Coming up, we'll hear how warming is changing the Arctic with connections for the rest of us.

- That ice actually protects the very soft soils of the coastline.

And if that sea ice has a shorter season or is absent altogether, then when you do have a wind event or a storm event, then whole communities can wash into the ocean.

It's a big challenge.

- I really like the phrase global weirding because people say, wait, you just told me it might get stormy or colder with climate change, even though we're heating up the planet.

And that's true.

Of course, if we're adding water to the ocean, you have problems with salt water getting in fresh water, problems with sewer systems and septic systems.

Those are pretty extreme global impacts.

[Scott] Next on "Energy Switch," the causes and local and broader effects of a changing Arctic climate.

[Announcer] Major funding for this program was provided by Arizona State University.

Shaping global leaders, driving innovation, and transforming the future.

Arizona State, The New American University.

[upbeat music] - I'm Scott Tinker, and I'm an energy scientist.

I work in the field, lead research, speak around the world, write articles, and make films about energy.

This show brings together leading experts on vital topics in energy and climate.

They may have different perspectives, but my goal is to learn, and illuminate, and bring diverging views together towards solutions.

Welcome to the "Energy Switch."

The Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the planet.

Melting sea ice has opened northern shipping lanes, but exposes more water to the warming sun and is less protective of coastlines.

Melting land ice drains into the ocean and raises sea levels.

Falling permafrost destabilizes infrastructure built on it.

Changing weather in the Arctic can bring cold air south to the rest of us.

We'll look at these and other developments with two arctic experts.

Nancy Fresco is a research scientist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, with a background in biology and forest ecology.

A longtime Alaska resident, she spent decades in the Arctic.

Twila Moon is a research scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and deputy lead scientist at their National Snow and Ice Data Center with a special expertise in Greenland.

On this episode of "Energy Switch," arctic climate and its global importance.

Welcome, Nancy, Twila, glad you're here.

Why should our listeners even care about this subject?

What's the big deal?

- Well, for one thing, the globe is pretty small.

So if our glaciers are melting, your sea level is rising.

If our forests are burning, that carbon is going into your atmosphere.

So the fact that we're seeing tremendous change there, I think just matters to people on that emotional level as well.

- Sure.

Twila, what do you add?

- Well, I would agree.

It plays an incredible global role.

So the Arctic is part of our globe's water tower.

It's storing lots of water as ice for us.

It's also a global air conditioner, so it's helping to make sure we're cold.

And because we have a really connected climate system, all of these rapid changes in the Arctic are actually coming down and affecting our everyday lives, which people might be surprised about.

But I think just increases our interest in what's happening there and how we can play a role in it.

- Yeah, let's dive in.

I mean-- - Great.

- It's warming.

How much is the Arctic warming?

- So the Arctic is warming about three times as fast as the rest of the planet, but it depends a little bit on a few things, what geography you're looking at.

For example, if we were in Svalbard, Svalbard's warming about six or seven times faster than the planet.

It's also depends on the season.

Winter is warming faster than other seasons, so there's a lot of change happening very quickly.

- What do we actually do to gather temperature readings?

- Well, there are multiple ways we measure temperature, which is always good news that there's more than one way to measure a thing.

Depending on the kind of measurement you're looking at, you can use resources from satellites, from airplane flights, from instruments on the ground.

So there's a pretty wide variety, and we have a good temperature record in the Arctic that stretches 125 years.

- Why?

Why is the Arctic warming faster than other places?

- Well, there are multiple reasons.

One of which is the albedo effect, which is essentially based on the fact that when energy hits a white or light colored surface like ice or glaciers or snow, a lot of that heat energy is reflected.

Conversely, when it hits a dark surface like oceans or forests, more is absorbed.

So you get this feedback loop where the more you melt the ice and the snow, the shorter the ice and snow season, the more you have dark surfaces absorbing more heat.

So, so simply put, you have a positive feedback to warming.

But there, yeah, there, there are multiple reasons for it, and some of those have to do with complex circulation of air and ocean currents around the globe as well.

- Okay, yeah.

- Yeah.

Unfortunately, we do see ice melt and ice loss as something that is essentially happening globally and in the Arctic Ocean at September.

See, our minimum extent of sea ice that September extent is actually only about 50, 5-0% of what it was in the 1980s.

But not all sea ice is created equal.

Sea ice that sticks around year after year.

We call multi-year ice.

It starts to become thicker, and we actually have lost 95% of our older thicker ice in the Arctic Ocean as compared to the 1980s.

- And that's Circum-Arctic?

[Twila] That's considering the whole Arctic.

- Wow.

- And then you have the ice that sits on land.

Now land ice is formed from piling up snow, year after year, millennia after millennia.

That's the ice that is keeping things out of our ocean.

So sea ice doesn't influence sea level rise substantially.

Whereas our land ice, that's our global water tower, and we are seeing substantial changes there.

The Greenland ice sheet has now lost ice every year for the last 27 years.

That substantial, as we look at the last couple of decades, it's as if every single person on the globe is pouring their water bottle into the ocean every 15 minutes.

About, it's like losing almost four Olympic-sized swimming pools every second just from the Greenland ice sheet with a variety of impacts.

[Scott] What are those impacts?

- Well, you can imagine if you live close to where we're adding this cold, fresh water to the ocean, it changes the ecosystem.

If you think regionally, we can see instances where the Atlantic ocean isn't as good at capturing heat from the tropics and bringing it up to northern Europe.

So one of the impacts in Northern Europe might actually be some increased instances of storminess or coldness.

This is why I really like the phrase global weirding, because people say, wait, you just told me it might get stormier or colder with climate change, even though we're heating up the planet.

And that's true.

- What are the impacts on like components of the ocean or coasts?

- Well, working with coastal communities, which in Alaska are small, mostly Alaskan native communities located on like the west coast of Alaska, for example, if they have in the past had protective sea ice, in other words, sea ice, that goes right up to the land and is there for a longer season.

And is there during, for example, storm season when there might be higher winds or greater waves, that ice actually protects the very soft soils of the coastline.

And if that sea ice has a shorter season or is absent altogether, then when you do have a wind event or a storm event, you can have tremendous erosion.

And that's what we've been seeing in recent decades, which is extremely difficult for those rural communities that on the coast because the sea ice was protecting it and it's not anymore.

And also in conjunction with that, if the the ground, the soil at the coast is no longer frozen and gets hit by a storm, then whole banks, you know, whole communities can wash into the ocean.

It's a big challenge.

- So human impact.

What about on wildlife?

- There are a lot of ocean mammals that rely on sea ice in very particular ways.

They need to be able to get out on the ice.

And if the ice isn't there during the season when they need it for feeding or for breeding or to be able to rest from swimming.

I know from a human perspective, the idea of just resting on ice doesn't sound that great, but it's absolutely crucial for a lot of species.

- It would, it'd sound great if I was swimming in the Arctic.

I'll tell you that.

How about the sea routes?

Are are things, as the sea ice melts, are we seeing the, the routes across the Arctic open up and what are the effects of some of that?

- Yes, the changes in sea ice for the Arctic Ocean have meant very substantial changes for ship traffic.

The northern sea route goes along the coast of Russia.

That's where we're seeing kind of sea ice pull back sooner.

And Russia has been making substantial use of that northern sea route.

We are having record ship traffic there.

I was seeing that actually just September, 2025, China announced the beginning of a container ship route that will have multiple stops in UK and Europe.

South Korea has plans to start Arctic shipping along the northern sea route in 2026.

So a very big change in the use of the landscape and the presence of people and ships there, which of course has serious implications for search and rescue, for possible oil spills.

Russia moves a lot of liquid natural gas.

But then you also have sea routes that are on the North America side.

The northwest passage goes through Canada.

But what's interesting there is people have this same idea, if I'm losing sea ice, it must be getting easier to ship.

But in the northwest passage, you have sea ice that is now mobile, it's moving around more.

And so it gets caught in these choke points between islands.

And we've actually seen a reduction in the number of safe passage days in these parts of the northwest passage as compared to the northern sea route.

So change is definitely afoot very rapidly.

- What's permafrost?

Definitionally, what does it mean?

- It's frozen ground.

So very simply it's ground that is permanently frozen as the name would imply.

So very simply put, anywhere where the average temperature year round is below freezing.

Then even though you get thaw in the summertime, that deep, those deep layers will stay frozen.

[Scott] Is it thawing?

- Yes, it is.

It's absolutely thawing.

What people are mostly concerned about when they talk about permafrost are the very shallow layers that affect what plants are there on the surface, whether a tree can put down roots or not.

- So how deep are we talking, Nancy?

You say shallow, what does that mean?

- So shallow permafrost could be, it could be only six inches below the surface way up in the Arctic, really shallow.

And in places like that, that's not enough thaw for trees to put down roots, which is why there are no trees on the tundra.

Grasses can put roots there and you know, maybe some other vegetation, but nothing that needs a deep rooted system.

- Maybe it's not all bad, since.

Is deeper permafrost to the north opening up more possibilities for vegetation?

- The vegetation is changing and that's being measured.

It's being measured at places like Toolik Lake Field Station with long-term data, but it's also just being seen by people who live on the land.

Everyone's noticing it.

So the trees are marching north, the shrubs are marching north.

- Interesting.

- I think though it's, it's really important.

I mean, folks might be surprised to realize that if we take the whole northern hemisphere of the planet, about 25% of all of that land has permafrost underneath it.

It's really substantial.

And not only do we have permafrost thawing, we have other permafrost that is getting warmer.

So, in 2024, almost half of Alaska's permafrost temperatures were at record highs.

But as you see the development of shrubs or trees moving north, we call, we are experiencing over all what we call greening of the Arctic.

And I think people are really used to thinking of plants and green as just overall a positive thing.

But if that is not what your ecosystem's built on, it's not necessarily a positive thing.

Like Arctic migratory caribou, they have been really challenged by having more shrubs growing.

That's not what they eat.

And you can have shrubs and grasses that are out competing the lichens that these caribou depend on.

So we've seen large inland caribou herds having dramatic declines for a variety of reasons, including challenges with their food sources.

So greening of the Arctic doesn't necessarily mean good news.

- And people are challenged too.

I mean, I've heard people saying, you know, we're getting all these shrubs coming in and it's not what they're used to.

It's not what their traditions are built on.

And so that's not necessarily gonna be helpful.

- It's not that it's necessarily non-native invasive, it's just something that's coming.

It used to be the south and it's kind of marching north, - Right.

There's both.

There are some non-native invasive species coming in as well, but there's also, yes, something that it's essentially marching north-- - Interesting.

And how about on human infrastructure?

What are the effects of thawing of permafrost?

What do we see with that?

- It's an engineering challenge for sure.

And so anytime you start building, that disturbs the surface of the ground and that tends to accelerate that thaw because it's no longer shaded and protected.

And so the often the heat can reach those below ground layers even more quickly.

So you get accelerated thawing with engineering projects.

And then the projects themselves are challenged by varying temperatures of frozen ground and those seasonal shifts.

- Right.

So the impact isn't directly necessarily on a high percentage of humans, although it impacts those humans quite a bit, but the impacts of that are further than just the Arctic.

- Yeah, you can imagine you have pipelines that are moving resources.

Well, it's hard to build the infrastructure to keep a pipeline connected if the things that it's built on are gonna be sinking into the ground or moving around.

Communities in the Arctic rely on air travel, you know, being able to have a stable runway for your airplanes to land on, that is gonna stay flat and in the same place is gonna be a challenge.

There are all these ways in which we've built a really connected global community and global economy.

- Ports.

- Exactly.

So we're no longer thinking about impacts that just stay local.

- Got it.

Warming tends to encourage more fire weather.

Are we seeing that in the Arctic?

- Yes.

We have been seeing increases in wildfire in the Arctic.

2023 was a record Arctic wildfire season.

A lot of that because we had very intense record setting wildfires in Canada.

And one of the things that happens from those wildfires, of course, is the release of more heat trapping gases into our atmosphere.

So in 2023, those Canadian wildfires released more than twice as much heat trapping gases into the atmosphere than everything else that Canada was releasing, including from human action.

So in that case, Canadian wildfires, Arctic wildfires had as much missions just behind our top four global emitters, China, the U.S., India, Russia.

- Yeah, and, exactly, and it's the change in fire, not the existence of fire itself, because most of these are ecosystems that do naturally burn and they reset after burning.

But the fires are returning more frequently and they're bigger and they're hotter.

And when you alter the frequency of fire, it actually alters the whole landscape because you have on average less of the older forest, less of the older vegetation and more of the younger.

And there's nothing wrong with the young vegetation, but it's just a percentage issue.

And so the species that prefer the younger vegetation might be thriving, but those that prefer the older forests might suffer when you make those shifts.

- How about the bugs?

Are we seeing more insects and things or are they, what are the impacts on them?

- Yes, there are some species that seem to be moving northward as the protective limitations of a cold climate are removed.

Winter temperatures are changing even more quickly than annual average temperatures.

And you might think, well, that's great, you know, it used to be 50 below in Fairbanks in the winter.

Wouldn't you want it to be a little warmer?

Yes and no.

That 50 below will protect you from a lot of things that don't survive at 50 below.

So yeah, I recently did a study looking at a particular species of bark beetle that attacks spruce trees.

And there's a lot of concern when you have some, you know, something that's really decimating forests.

So that's just one example.

I think there are plenty of other examples that are probably on the cusp.

So there's a lot of ongoing research about invasives that might be at our doorstep.

- Yeah.

Is the warming in the Arctic impacting weather events down here in the lower 48, so to speak?

- There is no question that we, in the lower 48 across the globe, far from the Arctic, are influenced by the changes there.

We have increasing events where the ways our winds and air are moving can cause instances where we pull cold air down from the Arctic into southernly places and instances where we're pulling warm air up into the Arctic.

So this is another instance of this global weirding where you might say, hey, I'm experiencing an extreme cold event, that doesn't line up with climate change, but in fact it actually does.

- Yeah, I would agree that people get really confused when it's unusually cold and it's hard to wrap their heads around why that is also part of global weirding, as you say, yeah.

[Scott] Interesting.

- Unusual patterns.

- How do humans and other animals in the Arctic adapt to some of these changes?

What's their strategy?

Can they, and if so, how?

- I mean, yes, some things are easier to adapt to than others.

I would say humans, we as a species are incredibly adaptable.

And at some level, I'd say it's been our superpower.

The speed of the change is a challenge because this is extraordinarily rapid change to adapt to.

Having some degree of predictive capacity does help.

So that's where, you know, modeling and looking at the change that's going on right now, saying, okay, what's likely to happen in the next 10 years or in the next generation can help with that planning.

You know, some changes are a little easier to adapt to.

Others such as extreme coastal erosion are tremendously difficult.

You know, you're faced with really difficult decisions.

Do you move a whole community?

So small communities and large communities are working together to come up with adaptation plans, combining what they know, what community members know about change, what they're seeing, what they are learning from older members of their community, and combining that with more western science, what the models say.

And so some adaptation strategies are being written right now to try to accommodate that.

But there's some challenges that are just going to be tremendously difficult to adapt to.

- What's the good news?

[laughing] I mean, what's the silver lining?

Is there any in this kind of change?

- You know, I think focusing on the fact that humans are incredibly adaptable and that the planet as a whole is at least to some degree adaptable.

It is positive.

I'm often really inspired by people's ability to pivot and to invent and to come up with something new and say, oh, we can do it this way.

We're an imaginative species.

- Change gives opportunity, you know?

- Yes, and there are ways that we can prevent some of the harm that might have occurred.

Certain things you can be prepared for, you can have really powerful and interesting conversations.

There are people looking for, you know, new energy sources, new agricultural opportunities.

New development opportunities, new ports.

We are, we're a tremendously adaptable species, so it's not always focused on the negative, it's focused on innovation and trying to pivot.

- Right.

Thoughts on that, Twila?

- I think one of the, for me, one of the key pieces of good news is that as a global community, we have moved the needle on climate.

If we were sitting around this table two decades ago, we would be headed to a warmer future than the one we're headed to right now.

So we have to remember that we've already made a difference and we can continue to make a difference.

And so I often think we have to create the good news.

So these hazards are increasing and it's our work to create the good news of reducing our risk within them.

- Got it.

Got it.

Well, you get a chance to talk to 110 million households here for a second.

And, in a real kind of high level way, and this is an educated audience, what would you say to them?

What two or three things would you like to have our listeners and viewers take away?

- I think to start with anyone who is watching this program is part of the solution.

And the fact that people are watching is part of that hope that we were just talking about.

Because people are engaged and they're knowledgeable.

And I have this small piece of knowledge.

I live in Fairbanks, Alaska, I know a lot about Arctic climate change, but it is a big issue.

And the fact that people are educating themselves about it, learning about it, interested in it, is tremendously hopeful.

And you know, I love that fact in and of itself.

- Yeah.

Awesome.

Thank you.

- I would really encourage people to recognize that this is kind of the ultimate shared experience we're in when it comes to climate change.

Things are changing rapidly in the Arctic, but we're actually deeply connected to the Arctic.

And the good news about that is that it means that local action is global action.

So because these heat trapping gases all around us mix so quickly, your local action is also good for the Arctic.

And I think it's really helpful for people to remember that and avoid getting overwhelmed by many of these changes happening and find those people who you want to do things with, because that's how we really make changes ripple to.

Especially if you're feeling fearful or anxious or depressed, actually step into those conversations and actions with other people.

And that's gonna be an anecdote.

- Hmm.

That's fantastic.

Well, I've really enjoyed our conversation.

Thank you both for being here.

Scott Tinker, "Energy Switch."

Twila.

Thanks.

- Thank you.

- Really, really fun.

Thank you for all your share.

Nancy.

Thank you.

- Thank you so much.

- You bet.

[Scott] The Arctic is warming three times faster than the rest of the world.

One reason is reduced albedo, the amount of sunlight reflected back into the atmosphere.

When sea ice melts, it exposes more water, which absorbs sunlight and heat and melts more sea ice, creating a warming feedback loop.

There are a few benefits to this.

Northern shipping roots above Russia and Canada are opening in the summer, but many downsides, with less sea ice to protect Arctic coastlines, they're more prone to erosion.

The melting of land ice into the ocean is raising sea levels.

Permafrost is thawing, which destabilizes roads, runways, pipelines, and foundations built on it.

Thawing allows trees and shrubs to move north, which sounds good, but some animals and indigenous communities are struggling in a changed ecosystem.

Both guests were encouraged that we're working on solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions generally, and to adapt to a changing arctic climate.

[upbeat music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Narrator] Major funding provided by Arizona State University.

Home to the Thunderbird School of Global Management, redefining management education to empower transdisciplinary leaders.

Arizona State, The New American University.