In theory, the water down there, isolated from the rest of the world for millions of years, could be home to ancient microbes that could offer clues about everything from the origins of life on earth to the possibility of life in space.

It’s been rough going so far, but American scientists say they finally have their “eureka” moment.

Last month, they brought up samples of water and sediment from sub-glacial Lake Whillans, not far from the South Pole.

Now they’ve tested those samples and they’ve announced that they do indeed contain living bacteria.

The scientists haven’t published their results yet, or established whether the microbes are unique. But they say they’re convinced that their results are clean, meaning the bacteria they found weren’t introduced by the drilling process itself.

Lead researcher John Priscu of Montana State University told the New York Times that they still need to find out what the microbes are and how they make a living. But for now, he told the Times they’ve gotten their first glimpse of what has been a completely unknown ecosystem.

Soot from diesel engines and coal smoke was a main culprit in the recent Beijing smog crisis.

Now a new report says soot is also a much bigger contributor to global warming than had been thought.

Host Marco Werman gets the latest on soot from The World’s environment Editor Peter Thomson.

MARCO WERMAN: Remember the blanket of smog that smothered Beijing a few days ago?

It caused a massive public health crisis, not to mention a wave of anger across the city.

A big part of the problem was soot from diesel exhaust and coal smoke.

And the nasty effects of soot aren’t just a problem for the residents of Beijing.

Soot also is a huge contributor to global warming.

So says a new scientific study that came out yesterday.

The World’s environment editor Peter Thomson is here now. So, a lot of people have been suffering the health effects of soot for decades, Peter, all the way back to the Victorian era and Charles Dickens in England. Now the whole planet is feeling effects as well. Explain this.

PETER THOMSON: Yeah, well, scientists have known for a long time that soot has a powerful warming effect on the atmosphere. Some of that’s fairly simple physics. Soot particles are black—in fact another term scientists use for soot is “black carbon”—and it can have a lot of surface area. So it just absorbs a lot of light and heat that might otherwise just be radiated back into space. But there’s been a lot of uncertainty over just how much soot from things like diesel engines and the burning of things like wood and coal contributes to climate change.

Well, now a group of nearly 30 scientists from around the world has done an exhaustive analysis—pardon the pun but it’s actually an apt description of a report that runs 230 pages in the latest issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research. So they’ve done this exhaustive analysis of sources and impacts of soot and they’ve found that at least in the short run, soot particles are the second-biggest source of global warming today.

WERMAN: Wow!

THOMSON: Number two in impact after carbon dioxide, and twice as big an impact as most climate scientists had figured before.

WERMAN: Double the impact—that’s shocking!

THOMSON: Well, yes and no. Like I said, this is something that scientists have been concerned about for a long time, but they’ve had a hard time pinning down the details because the science of soot and what produces it is extremely complex. And I should add that this study still leaves a lot of those questions unanswered. But having said that, at least one prominent scientist had ballparked soot as the number two contributor to global warming as far back as 2008. A lot of folks said then that his study was way too limited to be useful, but this study clearly vindicates that one in a big way.

WERMAN: So now that we know this, Peter, how does it help us? I mean, what can we do with the information?

THOMSON: Well, it tells us a couple of things. One is that one of the biggest contributors to global warming, at least in the short term, is relatively easy to deal with. Soot, like you said, is sort of the classic industrial age pollution—you mentioned Victorian England, where smog from factories is sort of the iconic image of the industrial revolution. It comes from burning coal, and diesel fuel. Another big source is wood smoke from cook stoves and burning of forests in the tropics and elsewhere. And we know how to stop these things—like they say, “we have the technology.” I mean there’s clear evidence of this in the fact that soot emissions are way down in the western world but still very high in developing countries. The difference is technology. So compared to the challenges of cutting carbon dioxide and methane pollution, which we’re clearly having a very hard time dealing with, getting rid of most of the world’s sources of soot would be a fairly simple fix. One of the authors of this study called it a “no-brainer.” And it could reduce the rate of warming of the atmosphere at least a bit and buy us some time while we deal with those bigger challenges.

WERMAN: And of course there’d be a big public health benefit I would imagine.

THOMSON: Yeah, that’s the second thing, and another reason that study author called getting rid of it a “no-brainer.” It’s kind of an environmental two-fer. In fact that scientist I mentioned earlier, who did the 2008 study on the warming effects of soot—his name is V. Ramanathan and our science correspondent Rhitu Chatterjee reported a couple of years ago on his efforts to introduce new cookstoves to rural communities in India as a way to hit those two birds with one stone—to cut down on respiratory diseases locally but also really reduce global soot pollution.

So this study really drives home the dual benefits of getting rid of sources of soot.

WERMAN: Alright, The World’s environment editor Peter Thomson. Thank you.

THOMSON: You’re welcome Marco.

WERMAN: We have a link to that new study on soot and climate—all 232 pages of it—on the web. You can also hear Rhitu Chatterjee’s story on soot and cookstoves in India. That’s at the world dot org.

From record Arctic ice melt to freak storms, droughts and heat waves, 2012 was the year when climate change became almost daily news. The World’s environment editor Peter Thomson joins host Marco Werman for a look back at the year just ended and ahead at what to watch for in 2013.

MARCO WERMAN: There’s a somewhat reassuring image online this New Years day. I’m looking at it now, it’s a satellite image taken yesterday of the top of the world locked up in ice, from the southern tip of Greenland to the Bering Sea.

That’s the way things should look up there this time of year.

But it was a much more disturbing picture just a few months ago… when the Arctic ice cap reached record lows.

The unprecedented ice melt was one of the biggest environmental stories of a year.

And that’s saying something in a year where environmental news often pushed wars, economic crises and even a presidential election off the front pages.

Here with us now for a look back at 2012 and ahead to 2013 is The World’s environment editor, Peter Thomson.

So how are you going to remember the year that’s just finished, Peter?

PETER THOMSON: Well Marco I remember sitting here with you almost exactly a year ago and predicting that 2012 would be the year in which climate change really stopped being mostly a slowly-developing story and started becoming daily news. Now I wasn’t going too far out on a limb. That prediction was based on trends of the past few years in which it was becoming clear that climate change was moving faster than just about anyone had imagined just a few years before and was starting to really affect the daily lives of people around the world. But of course I had no idea what the year would actually have in store.

I mean, just looking here at the US. We had that bizarre March heat wave, which sped up spring by several weeks and started setting off alarm bells about climate change around the country. Then starting in June we had the massive heat wave and drought that dried up crops all across the middle of the country. And of course in the fall we had Sandy. It was a storm that many weather watchers say was the most bizarre and damaging that they’ve ever seen.

And as you mentioned at the top, we also had the unprecedented melting of ice in both the Arctic Ocean and Greenland.

WERMAN: And Peter, I have to say I noticed a real change in the way these kinds of stories were reported. In the past it was rare for news reports to draw a direct connection between extreme weather events like the ones you were talking about in the US and climate change. But last year it seemed journalists were a lot less hesitant to at least raise the question.

THOMSON: Yeah, and that’s really the result of two converging trends. One is that these previously weird and rare weather events are just becoming more common. And that roughly fits the pattern that scientists have been telling us to expect. So in effect, the real world is starting to look more and more like the forecasts, which of course reduces the doubt about the science. Then on the other hand, the science itself is becoming much better and scientists are starting to be able to tease out the influence of climate change on particular weather events.

Of course no one can say “this weather event was caused by climate change…” It’s more a matter of how much climate change is influencing the weather. Although I think we can say for just about certain that the melting in the Arctic IS the result of climate change. And as we’ve reported, that warming may well be playing a role in some of these other weird weather events around the world.

WERMAN: So let’s look ahead to the remaining 364 days of 2013. What are some of the big stories you’ll be watching?

THOMSON: Well climate of course is still going to be huge, as it will be for the rest of our lives. And that’s actually one of the big challenges, for journalists, is how to cover a story that’s immensely important but also at some point just sort of fades into the fabric of our lives and becomes sort of the new normal. So we have to find ways to tell small slices of the story along with the big picture.

WERMAN: Now one slice of that story that a lot of people have been watching is the proposed Keystone pipeline. What’s going on there?

THOMSON: Yeah, that’s coming back around for a very important decision in the next few months. You remember that a year ago president Obama basically put it on ice by ordering a new environmental review of the project. The state department needs to sign off on it because the pipeline from the tar sands of Alberta would cross into the US on its way to the Gulf of Mexico. Climate activists have basically drawn a big line in the sand over that and it will be interesting to see what happens in light of a couple of big changes from a year ago.

One of course is that President Obama is no longer facing reelection, so the politics are very different. Then there’s the fact that the secretary of state, who has to rule on the plan, is likely to be John Kerry, and Kerry has been a leading voice in the senate on pushing for action on climate change. So his ruling on Keystone will tell us a lot about whether or not he and the president will bring a new emphasis on climate to the second Obama administration.

WERMAN: And what about you Peter, what are some of the environment stories that your curiosity’s really driving you toward this year.

THOMSON: Well I’m going to be looking more and more for stories on the struggle to find solutions to the climate crisis, which in effect mostly means stories about innovations in energy. The world is still pretty much in gridlock when it comes to big picture of international agreements to cut climate pollution but there are really interesting things happening around the world in energy policy and technology, from place like Ireland and Japan to even to places like Ghana. So we’re going to try to get to as many of these hopeful stories as we can.

So stay tuned.

WERMAN: The World’s environment editor Peter Thomson, thanks.

THOMSON: Thank you Marco…

WERMAN: You can see that map of the Arctic we mentioned, and hear highlights from our 2012 environmental coverage, at the world dot org.

You can also read Peter’s latest blog post, inspired by our interview last week on the environmental challenges facing reindeer herders in the far north.

It’s a look back at the lessons from his first reporting trip to the Arctic 15 years ago.

That’s all at the world dot org.

Highlights: The World Environment 2012

Hear the Docs:
Living on Earth: In Search of Caribou in Alaska’s Arctic Wildlife Refuge
Living on Earth: Oil & Eskimos on Alaska’s North Slope

Marco Werman’s Christmas week conversation with Jonathan Mazower of Survival International about the importance of real-life reindeer for many northern people brought a flashback to my own trip to the far north 15 years ago to report on reindeer (also known as caribou), oil, native people and a rapidly changing Arctic for the public radio program Living on Earth.

It was my first visit to Alaska, and took me farther away from “civlization” than I had ever been, and it had a profound impact on how I see and experience the world. It also provided a searing reminder of a reporting lesson that anyone aspiring to make a mark in journalism needs to learn and remember: Keep your mind open to unexpected opportunities, and never be afraid to ditch your plan or even your material if something better presents itself.

I was heading to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge with a small group of US House members, and we stopped off along the way at Arctic Village, a tiny outpost about 200 miles north of Fairbanks and just south of the refuge that was home to a small community of Gwitch’in Indians.

We were greeted there by town elders, treated to a ceremony of traditional dancing and singing, and provided opportunities to interview elders and activists about their campaign against oil drilling in ANWR, which they were concerned would disrupt the migration route of the Porcupine caribou herd, on which they depended heavily for their survival.

When the official proceedings were all done I thought I had what I needed for a nice scene evoking the life and ways of the Gwitch’in, and the importance to them of the caribou, and I relaxed with the rest of the group to talk informally and wait for the smaller bush planes that would take us up over the Brooks Range and down to the coastal plain of the Arctic Ocean.

Then a Gwitch’in man emerged out of the crowd, introduced himself as Kenneth Frank, and asked me to accompany him across the village on his ATV to his home. I was hesitant–the plane was already late and I’d been told by our group leader not to stray far. And like I said, I thought I had what I’d come for. I didn’t want to miss my plane or hold up the group. But Kenneth wouldn’t take no for an answer. And he reminded me of the obvious–this was a tiny town, I couldn’t help but hear my plane, and it wasn’t going to leave without me. Especially since it was late June, north of the Arctic Circle. Even if the planes could only fly in the daytime, it was always daytime here this time of year.

So I hopped on and Kenneth took me to his house on the outskirts of town, about five minutes away. We parked his ATV outside the door of his simple, one-story house, went inside and were immediately overwhelmed with a heavy, meaty smell. His wife Caroline was cooking a caribou heart for dinner.

Elsewhere, caribou hide parkas hung on hooks. Snowshoes laced with caribou sinews were stacked against a wall. Kenneth pulled out a box of hunting equipment–knives, traps, lures–all made of caribou parts. Even the tools to hunt caribou were made from caribou. The many parts of the caribou were woven through nearly every part of their lives, from food to clothing to music. Virtually nothing went to waste. And Kenneth and Caroline told me that caribou underlay nearly every part of the Gwitch’ins’ culture–a very fragile culture, which they told me would be put at even greater risk if oil drilling in ANWR disturbed the caribou, which studies had strongly suggested it would.

What I had seen and heard back at the community center was a lovely and skillful performance of Gwitch’in culture, and strong, poished arguments for the importance of a healthy caribou herd in ANWR and against oil drilling. It would’ve made a fine scene in the radio doc I was planning to produce. But what I experienced in Kenneth and Caroline’s home was the lived experience of a family whose very existence was inextricable from the caribou. It was real life, not a performance, not part of a lobbying campaign. I felt stupid for not immediately jumping at Kenneth’s invitation, and grateful for his insistence. And when I went home to produce the documentary, the Gwitch’in section was all Kenneth and Caroline. I didn’t use a second of tape from the official program. And of course I still got on that plane.

It’s a lesson I try to relay to every reporter I send out in to the field and that I remind myself of whenever I get out of from behind my desk for my own reporting. And it’s a lesson for my non-working life as well. Sure, keep your wits about you, but–Be open to the unexpected. Don’t get unnecessarily hung up on plans and protocol. Reach for that outstretched hand–you never know where it might lead you.

***

Marco’s reindeer interview was also a reminder for me of how slow we are to change our ways when it comes to the “economic development” imperative, and the terrible choices people often face between tradition and “progress.”

The other part of my reporting project on that 1997 trip north was a companion documentary on oil and Eskimos. In the last decade or so, the Arctic has experienced the most extreme warming of any place on the planet. Ice is melting, permafrost is thawing, the habitats and migration routes of animals that native communities depend on are being altered, towns are slumping into the ground and falling into the sea. Cultures, communities, ecosystems and entire hemispheric weather patterns are at stake.

This process of change was already underway even 15 years ago, when I visited Eskimo communities wrestling with the benefits and costs of oil drilling on Alaska’s North Slope. Scientists knew it. The Eskimos themselves knew it. Even a few politicians knew it, including Bruce Babbitt, the US Interior Secretary at the time, whom I interviewed about the connection between oil drilling and climate change right there on the tundra.

But as a society, we couldn’t say no to petroleum development there back then, and we still can’t say no today. Even though there’s a direct and obvious connection between the oil and gas we pump out from beneath the tundra and the sea and the warming atmosphere that’s rapidly transforming life in the far north. We know it, we understand it, and yet we continue to do it. Because there is a real benefit to it. Because we think we can minimize the harm, or that the tradeoffs are worth it. Because we’ve convinced ourselves that at least for now, there are no alternatives.

It was terrible to see back then the wrenching contradictions between the undeniable benefits that oil and oil wealth had brought to North Slope Eskimo communities and the very real damage getting and burning all that oil was doing to the region’s environment and local traditional culture, and it’s terrible now to think about how much starker those contradictions have become in the 15 years since.

One of the most exhilarating moments of my entire two-week reporting trip to Alaska that year was climbing through a hole in the tundra with an Eskimo woman named Dora Ita, down a ladder descending through 3+ feet of soil into a hollowed out vault carved out of the permafrost below, filled with frozen geese, caribou parts and arctic char. It was an ice cellar, Eskimos’ traditional method for storing their harvests from the short Arctic summers through the long, frigid Arctic winter.

Earlier this year I read about how, as the Arctic permafrost thaws and slumps, ice cellars around the region are caving in. I remembered my visit with Dora and her family–via an oil-fueled helicopter, felt tremendously fortunate to have been able to experience the other-worldliness of an ice cellar, and felt a tiny personal loss at the news. But I also realized I could never come close to knowing the loss that the Eskimos themselves feel as the only world they’ve ever known melts, slumps and disappears around them.

The violent storm blasted the southern part of the island nation earlier this week before moving out to sea.

But now forecasters are warning that Bopha might take a turn back toward land and hit the country again, farther to the north.

It would be a 1-2 punch for a country that gets way more than its share of natural disasters, from tropical storms to mention earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

But typhoon Bopha seemed to come almost out of nowhere. It came outside of the usual typhoon season and hit a part of the country that’s off the usual storm track.

It was the country’s strongest storm of the year when it hit earlier this week. Combine that with a hilly landscape ravaged by mining and a population unprepared for a storm, and the awful result is more than 400 dead, nearly as many missing, and more than 300-thousand homeless.

Survivors told of chaos as the storm hit.

“We were hearing loud winds that night,” one man said. “We didn’t know where to run, the winds and the rain brought by the typhoon were so strong.”

Others told of shards of metal roofing being hurled through the air like machetes.

Officials in Compostela Valley, one of the worst hit provinces on the island of Mindanao, were considering mass graves for unclaimed bodies because of health concerns.

Officials have confirmed more than 250 dead in just that one region as rescuers continued to dig through mud and debris today in search of more bodies and any possible trapped survivors.

Philippines president Benigno Aquino III visited the region on Friday and promised to find ways to avoid a similar disaster in the future.

The country’s interior minister pointed to allegations of illegal mining and haphazard building on dangerous terrain, both of which are common in the region.

One thing most seem in agreement on is that the storm was highly unusual for this time of year and this part of the Philippines.

“For almost 50 years in New Bataan,” another survivor said, “this is the first time we’ve experienced such tragedy.”

The storm came amid of a rash of highly unusual extreme weather events around the world this year, and barely more than a month since another freak storm, hurricane Sandy, hit the US east coast, causing tens of billions of dollars in damage.

No one can definitively tie these or any other extreme weather events to climate change, but scientists say they’re the kind of thing the world can expect more of as the atmosphere warms.

And the question of a link was clearly on the mind of the Philippines’ envoy to the UN climate summit in Qatar this week.

On Thursday, envoy Naderev Sano delivered an impassioned plea to his fellow negotiators.

“There is massive and widespread devastation back at home,” Sano to the global gathering. “Hundreds of thousands of people have been rendered homeless, and the ordeal is far from over…. We have never had a typhoon like Bopha, which has wreaked havoc in a part of the country that has never seen a storm line this in half a century.

“And heart-breaking tragedies like this (are) not unique to the Philippines. I appeal to the whole world, I appeal to the leaders all over the world, to open our eyes to the stark reality that we face,” Sano said.

Sano’s plea and the unfolding disaster back in the Philippines don’t seem to have dissolved any of the gridlock at the Doha climate talk. As in years past, the meeting went far past its deadline, with negotiators struggling to achieve consensus on even the modest goals on the table.

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LISA MULLINS: 2012 is on target to be one of the ten warmest years on record.

That’s the word from the U-N’s World Meteorological Organization.

That estimate comes as we close out a year that saw record heat waves across the US and Europe, and record ice melt in the Arctic.

It continues a trend of unusually hot years going back more than a decade.

And it’s led the organization’s chief to declare that “climate change is taking place before our eyes.”

The report comes just as the latest annual global climate summit gets underway in Doha, Qatar.

The World’s environment editor Peter Thomson joins us now, and I know that you want to talk about this meeting in Doha, but there are other issues in the news, some of them fairly troubling, I should say. Please bring us up to date.

PETER THOMSON: Yeah, let’s see, where to begin on climate related news…

One new report is telling us that global carbon dioxide emissions hit another new record last year. CO2 of course is the most important greenhouse gas. Overall emissions are rising about 3% a year these days and that’s about three times as fast as they were growing in the 1990s.

Then there’s sea levels. Another new report has just found that on average, sea levels are rising about 60% faster than the UN predicted just five years ago.

Back on temperatures for a minute, that report from the World Meteorological Organization shows that global average temperatures over the last decade or so are up nearly half a degree Celsius over the benchmark that scientists use, which is the average of the 30 years between 1961-1990. You might remember that the world’s governments agreed back in 2009 to cap global warming at 2 degrees Celsius, that’s about three and a half degrees Fahrenheit, in order to avoid really calamitous warming. Well, as we reported here on The World last week, a new World Bank report projects that without really big changes we’re headed for a rise of at least 4 degrees Celsius by 2100. That’s more than seven degrees Fahrenheit.

Finally, there was a loud warning this week from a number of fronts on the growing threat of methane seeping out of the permafrost and under the sea beds of the Arctic and subarctic as that region warms up very quickly. Methane is an extremely powerful greenhouse gas, and we’re actually going to hear more about that on the program tomorrow.

Anyway, so overall, things on the climate front are not looking good!

MULLINS: Which means negotiators in Doha, Qatar for the world climate summit this year have their hands full. What are they going to do?

THOMSON: Well, hopefully they’ll do more than tread water, which is what many people say they’ve been doing the last few years. The whole UN climate process has pretty much been on life support since that big meeting in Copenhagen three years ago.

You probably remember there were huge expectations for a strong new global agreement on capping emissions back then. Instead the summit managed just a last-minute sort of face-saving agreement of basic principles. Then last year in Durban, South Africa, countries at least committed to draw up a new treaty which would then go into effect in 2020. Some saw that as showing sort of a new resolve, others say it was just continuing to kick the can down the road.

But in any case, this year’s conference is focused mostly on starting to put some flesh on the bones of those skeletal agreements from the last few years. So we might end up with some progress on, for instance, how to pay for a fund to help the poorest countries deal with climate change, perhaps on how all countries can reliably monitor and report their carbon emissions, so everybody can know reliably what everybody else is doing. But generally, it’s probably going to be really incremental stuff.

MULLINS: Peter, I know that one of the big stumbling blocks has been the schism between developed and developing countries over who should do how much to cut greenhouse pollution. Is that still the case?

THOMSON: Ah yeah, pretty much just as much as ever. The two biggest players of course are the U.S. and China. The U.S. is the biggest historical polluter, China the biggest current polluter. They’ve been inching ever so slowly closer over the last few years but nothing close to what would bring about a breakthrough, and certainly nothing close to what scientists are telling us we have to do to tackle this quickly escalating crisis.

MULLINS: OK, thanks very much. The World’s environment editor Peter Thomson.

THOMSON: Thanks, Lisa.

That’s what the British oil giant BP has agreed to pay Thursday to settle federal criminal charges stemming from its massive 2010 oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

The World’s Environment Editor Peter Thomson has been following this developing story as well as the rest of the week’s environmental news and he speaks with host Aaron Schachter.

Schachter: Peter, this is a fairly dramatic development in this long-running story about the Gulf oil disaster. What do we know?

Thomson: Well, what we know is that BP will plead guilty to a host of federal criminal charges related to that explosion and blowout at the deepwater horizon drilling rig in April of 2010. You probably remember that 11 people were killed in that explosion… and that of course oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico for almost three months… A lot of folks have called it the country’s worst ever environmental disaster… and it brought an avalanche of lawsuits and criminal charges.

So today BP has agreed, as you said, to pay four and a half billion dollars. It’s being called a record settlement. It includes 1.3 billion in criminal fines with the rest going to government agencies like the securities and exchange commission. The charges that BP is pleading guilty to include 11 felony counts of misconduct or neglect and two misdemeanors related to environmental laws.

Schachter: OK, now Peter, aside from the 11 deaths in this case, no one has really been able to quantify the environmental damage, but there’ve been a lot of comparisons to the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989. How do the penalties BP will be paying stack up against what Exxon ultimately paid?

Thomson: It looks like it’s going to be a lot more in this case. Exxon paid a billion dollar criminal fine for that disaster. With inflation that works out to be about 1.8 billion today, so in that straight up comparison, it looks like BP will end up paying more than twice the fine that Exxon paid.

Schachter: OK, so we have a settlement. Will that actually settle things?

Thomson: Well no, actually, not at all. The settlement will still have to be approved by a federal judge. But even that wouldn’t be the end of the story. For one thing, it looks like two BP employees will face manslaughter charges over the deaths in the disaster, and there are also tens of thousands of civil suits that the company admits will likely cost it many billions of dollars more. It also faces possible fines under the Clean Water Act that could run in the neighborhood of 20 billion dollars.

Schachter: OK, we’re talking about big money, big story, but not the only environmental news this week…

Thomson: Well no, of course not. Since Sandy and the election a lot of folks have been watching to see whether president Obama would stake out a more aggressive position on climate change. Well he finally spoke about it at some length at his White House press conference yesterday…and unlike his forceful comments on other topics, he’s still playing this very close to the vest. On the one hand he’s clearly been paying pretty close attention to some of the science, and he made it clear that he was going to be personally involved in the search for ways to make political and technological progress. So that’s a big change for him but he also made clear that wasn’t going to do anything that would harm the economy or didn’t have broad public support.

Schachter: Is there any way to do that, really?

Thomson: Well any policies that would make a really big difference on carbon emissions would have a huge impact on the economy and generate huge blowback, so it’s really hard to see how he could satisfy those criteria while also breaking this political stalemate we’re in

Schachter: OK, Peter, at least the president is talking about climate change, which hasn’t happened for quite a while. Do you think the president gets what many scientists are saying is the gravity of the climate challenge, or is it just another issue for him?

Thomson: Well, politically, it is an incredibly difficult issue, and a president has to balance a huge number of priorities of course–even a president who doesn’t have to run for re-election. But frankly, I still don’t think he quite gets what scientists are saying is the urgency of the problem. And it’s interesting, because there was a strong message about that urgency this week in something else that made a lot of news for other reasons, and that was the International Energy Agency’s new world energy report. The headline for most folks in that report was that based on current trends US is likely to overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s biggest oil producer within just a few years. And that would be a huge development. But for me the much bigger news for me in the same report was that based on those same trends, the world is going to blow past the international target for carbon dioxide, for limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius. So the world’s leading international energy agency says we’re on a totally unsustainable energy path, and I think that even after Sandy and his re-election, the president and the country as a whole still really haven’t really gotten that message.

Schachter: The World’s environment editor Peter Thomson. We have video of President Obama’s comments on climate change at yesterday’s press conference at theworld.org. Peter, thanks.

Thomson: Thanks, Aaron.

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For all of this seemingly interminable campaign season, it was the elephant in the room, the huge issue that no one—not the candidates and in large part not the media—was talking about. Until suddenly, catastrophically, it thrust itself into the campaign in a way that could even alter the outcome.

No one can with certainty “blame” Hurricane/“Superstorm” Sandy on climate change. But as I said in my on-air interview this week with our host Lisa Mullins, climate change almost certainly aided and abetted the storm’s assault, through higher ocean temperatures, rising sea levels and perhaps even the influence of a much warmer Arctic on weather patterns in North America and the North Atlantic.

It’s a connection many in the media are exploring, and that even some politicians in our climate-change-acknowledgment-averse country are raising as well. Most prominent among them, Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York, whose shellacking by Sandy this week led him to break his neutrality in the presidential election and make a last-minute endorsement of President Obama, largely on the grounds of the president’s stronger position on climate change. Bloomberg is popular among independents, so it’s an endorsement that could well affect the outcome of an extremely tight race.

One of the ironies of Bloomberg’s endorsement though, is that the president still isn’t talking about climate. Neither is Romney. Neither candidate seems to feel there’s any political advantage in taking it on one way or the other, still.

That’s a huge failure of political leadership. But you can’t just blame the candidates. They get to decide what they’ll say, but they don’t get to decide what they’ll be asked. That’s our job—journalists. And almost universally, the journalists who have access to the candidates these days aren’t asking about climate. Which reflects the fact that at least as much as the candidates, journalists in general—especially political journalists—still don’t understand the seriousness of the climate crisis.

There are many reasons for this. One is the sheer complexity of the issue and the paradoxical breadth and subtlety of its impacts. Another is a journalism business which these days provides little time or support for going deep or thinking big, or for reporters stepping aside for a bit to explore anything beyond the bounds of their beat. And then there’s the deep-seated journalism culture whose default approach to a topic—especially one in which the reporter or outlet has little experience—is “balance,” even if that sometimes produces a false balance that distorts the reality of a subject.

Journalism in this country has finally, largely, gotten over that last problem when it comes to the science of climate change. As the scientific and real-world evidence has piled up in the last few years, there’s a lot less of the “this scientist says this but this other scientist says the opposite so the truth must really be somewhere in the middle or we really still just don’t know” approach that plagued most reporting on the issue for years.

But a powerful cover story in this week’s Phoenix, Boston’s alt-weekly, rips into journalists for a new and perhaps even more serious failure. The lengthy piece by Wen Stephenson, who’s held senior positions at The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, and NPR and PBS programs, argues that having finally come to terms with the reality of climate change, the mainstream media is still failing to come to terms with its seriousness.

“This is more than an environmental crisis,” Stephenson writes. “It’s an existential threat, and it should be treated like one, without fear of sounding alarmist, rather than covered as just another special interest, something only environmentalists care about. And it should be treated as a central issue in this election, regardless of whether the candidates or the political media are talking about it.”

It’s a bracing challenge to his own journalism community, and Stephenson pulls no punches in going after colleagues and friends in the business by name.

He continues:

What’s needed now is crisis-level coverage. And you guys know how to cover a crisis. In the weeks and months — nay, years — following 9/11, all sorts of stories made the front pages and homepages and newscasts that never would have been assigned otherwise. The same was true before and after the Iraq invasion, and in the months following the 2008 financial meltdown. In a crisis, the criteria for top news is markedly altered, as long as a story sheds light on the crisis topic. In crisis coverage, there’s an assumption that readers want and deserve to know as much as possible. In crisis coverage, you “flood the zone.” You shift resources. You make hard choices.

The climate crisis is the biggest story of this, or any, generation — so why the hell aren’t you flooding the climate “zone,” putting it on the front pages and leading newscasts with it every day? Or even once a week? Why aren’t you looking constantly at how the implications of climate change and its impact pervade almost any topic — not just environment and energy stories?

…At the end of the day, I think we agree, a journalist’s ultimate responsibility is to the public. And yet, by that measure, you are failing. You are failing to treat the greatest crisis we’ve ever faced like the crisis that it is. Why?

It’s a must-read for anyone who is a journalist, or knows a journalist, or consumes journalism, or just lives in the country that bears the largest cumulative responsibility for climate change of any on the planet.

One can only hope that it makes its way onto the desks of hundreds of powerful editors and publishers around the country. And that maybe it even makes its way onto the desk of the next President of the United States.

The region is still mired in a transportation nightmare. Fights have broken out as people wait in long lines at gas stations. And the power is still not back in many affected areas.

This is the kind of scenario that those who study climate change say may be more frequent in the future.

The connections between Hurricane Sandy and climate change are murky, to be sure.

But with much of his still city flooded and paralyzed by the storm, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg found the links to climate change strong enough that he was compelled to come out and endorse President Obama’s bid for re-election yesterday.

The main reason, Bloomberg said, was the president’s stronger record on fighting climate change.

We’ve been covering the major candidates’ stands on climate change here on The World throughout the campaign, but in light of the events of this week we thought it would be helpful to revisit the issue on last time with The World’s environment editor Peter Thomson.

Peter, remind us what President Obama’s and Mitt Romney’s positions are on climate change.

PETER THOMSON: Well, unless you’ve been paying extremely close attention you’d be hard pressed to identify that either candidate has a position on climate change. And that’s one of the ironies of Mayor Bloomberg’s endorsement of President Obama, because even after Sandy, even as the media are all over the storm’s possible links to climate change, the president still hasn’t mentioned it explicitly. You will find a lot about climate change on the Obama campaign’s website, but as far as I’ve heard right up to this afternoon, there’s been nothing about it in the president’s stump speeches.

You won’t hear anything about it in Mitt Romney’s speeches either, and I could only find one single reference to climate on his campaign website, and that’s actually a quote about from a journalist about how much attention Obama is likely to give the issue if he’s reelected, which of course implies that that’s a bad thing.

This is the same tone Romney took in the only mention of the issue that I know of in any of his major campaign speeches, and that was his acceptance speech at the republican convention. That’s when he took this somewhat mocking swipe at the president:

MITT ROMNEY: “President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and to heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family.”

THOMSON: So you’ll hear there Romney was pretty much dismissing the concern about rising sea levels. But we actually know that one of the things that did contribute to Sandy’s destruction was rising sea levels off the east coast. So tackling that problem might actually help a lot of families in the future. But Mitt Romney has sort of backed himself into a corner on this issue and so far he doesn’t seem to be trying to talk himself out of that corner.

MULLINS: OK, so when Mitt Romney does talk seriously about climate change, what does he say he’s going to do?

THOMSON: Well like so much else with Romney, it’s shifted significantly over the years. When he was governor here in Massachusetts he said he accepted the mainstream science on climate change, that is that it is happening and humans are in large part responsible, and he even supported some local measures to start dealing with carbon emissions.

But he’s backpedalled since then. He still says he believes the world is warming but that he’s not sure how much humans have to do with that. He’s criticized the Obama’s effort to start cutting carbon emissions through that cap and trade program that failed so spectacularly in Congress. It’s certainly clear that he doesn’t think that this is a pressing issue.

MULLINS: So Peter, let’s turn to President Obama now. What does he say that he will do about climate change if he’s reelected?

THOMSON: Well like I said at the top, he has also said next to nothing about climate change in this campaign. And that’s a big change from his first campaign and his first couple of years in office. Clearly with the collapse of the cap and trade bill and the continued weakness of the economy he and his political advisors have made a calculated decision to downplay the issue.

But I should say that unlike Romney, he did make one positive reference to it in his convention speech:

OBAMA: “Climate change is not a hoax. More droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke. They are a threat to our children’s future. And in this election, you can do something about it.”

THOMSON: And despite that cap and trade fiasco, Obama has fairly quietly started to do something about it. He cut a deal with car makers to roughly double fuel efficiency over the next 10 years or so. He’s also signaled that the EPA might start regulating carbon emissions, which would also be a big deal.

And finally, he’s famously put a lot of emphasis on developing new clean energy resources. In fact since “climate” started becoming more of a dirty word in American politics again, clean energy has basically become the proxy that the administration uses to talk about the issue.

MULLINS: So Peter, what is the bottom line, to the extent that we know it now, on how much Hurricane Sandy has changed the playing field in terms of political discussions on climate change?

THOMSON: Well of course that remains to be seen, but it is possible that Sandy really will end up changing the politics of this issue, sort of the way that Katrina did in 2005. And it is possible that Romney could do a sort of “Nixon to China” pivot on this issue, and with his strong free-market credentials sort of take a very strong position on climate change. I suspect that given his political trajectory and the rest of the politics if he does get elected, that is very unlikely.

Obama of course has a record of some accomplishment on the issue, and I think freed up from having to be reelected he will take a stronger position on this. And I imagine that if he is reelected, very soon after the election you will hear him start talking about Sandy, and climate change, and making it much more of a priority.

MULLINS: Thank you. The World’s environment editor Peter Thomson. Thanks again.

THOMSON: Thanks, Lisa.

Host Lisa Mullins talks about the candidates’ positions with The World’s environment editor Peter Thomson.

Power failures and transportation gridlock continue to plague much of the northeastern United States Tuesday as what’s now being called “post-tropical cyclone Sandy” moves inland.

The swath of destruction being left by Sandy comes as just the latest in a wave of extreme weather events around the world in the last couple of years.

That’s led many people to wonder whether it’s more than just a string of bad luck.

The World’s environment editor Peter Thomson is here in the studio with me now…

Peter, are scientists seeing the fingerprints of climate change on Sandy?

Thomson: Well, Lisa just about every climate scientist you’ll talk to will say “no,” but many would add “no–but.”

Climate change almost certainly did not cause hurricane Sandy to form. We know that climate change is starting to affect the way storms behave, but most climate models are pretty clear in telling us that it won’t affect the frequency of tropical storms.

So no, no fingerprints, no smoking gun. But to stick with that analogy for a minute, Lisa, a good prosecutor might well make a solid case for charging climate with aiding and abetting in the case of Sandy.

Mullins: Meaning circumstantial evidence?

Thomson: Yeah, I mean to begin with, what many climate scientists are saying is that the entire context in which weather takes place is changing as the atmosphere warms up. James Hansen of NASA compares it to loading the dice. A warmer atmosphere, he says, is increasing the likelihood of extreme events, and perhaps increasing the severity of those events when they do happen.

Now, in this particular case, its likely that warmer ocean temperatures in the Atlantic contributed at least in part to the strength of Sandy. I mean, temperatures in the North Atlantic this fall are several degrees Fahrenheit above normal. And that almost certainly added strength to a storm that of course might well have happened any way.

It’s important to add that again, no one can say for sure that this year’s higher temperatures in the Atlantic are a result of climate change, but the level of scientific certainty that that’s what’s causing oceans to warm up is pretty high.

Mullins: So Peter, there was, as you well know, more to this storm than there might have been to conventional hurricanes. We heard an awful lot about those big weather systems that blocked way north and forced it toward the coastline. Forecasters are saying this is extremely unusual. So what are we to make of that?

Thomson: Well yeah, this is where the emerging climate science gets really interesting… Those weather maps we’ve all been seeing have this big blocking high to the east and this huge dip in the jet stream to the west and it turns out that pattern looks an awful lot like what was predicted by a really interesting paper published earlier this year in the journal Geophysical research letters… It showed that warming in the Arctic, like what we saw this summer, is resulting in big disruptions in weather much farther south, including often pushing waves of the jet stream way down into the temperate zones, like where this storm is happening. It also found a close correlation between a warming arctic and an increase in the kind of “blocking” systems that forced Sandy toward land.

And it turns out that that same kind of big blocking system has been associated with several extreme weather events over the last couple of years… including the massive 2010 drought in Russia and even the bizarre heat wave we had here in the US last March.

I do need to say of course that these kinds of blocks aren’t new, but this report showed some pretty compelling evidence that the warming arctic is formation of these kinds of blocks and these kinds of big dips in the jet stream that are starting to play havoc with our weather all the way down here.

Mullins: The World’s Environment editor Peter Thomson…. Thanks very much.

You can find a link to that study on arctic warming at the world dot org. Peter, thanks again.

Before Monday’s debate, please be sure to check under your desk, on the back of one of your briefing notebook or on the burrito wrapper in your wastebasket from last night’s dinner—anywhere and everywhere in your office—for that sticky note with that other big foreign policy question you wanted to ask Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney. The one about the threats to global stability, economic security and the US national interest from climate change.

I’m sure you meant to ask it. I’m sure that as a veteran Washington journalist and network news host you understand the dire economic and geopolitical consequences of climate change. You know the likelihood that it will unleash waves of millions of destabilizing climate refugees, that it’s likely to wreak havoc on the global food and water supplies, that it’s already alerting patterns of diseases, that its rising sea levels, stronger storms and longer droughts will cost global economies untold billions, that the Pentagon considers it a “threat multiplier” in unstable parts of the world, and that all of this is already locked in and will only get much, much worse if the US and the rest of the world don’t change course on greenhouse gas emissions very soon.

And I’m sure you also understand the consequences of the lack of attention to this unprecedented global crisis in the presidential campaign and debates so far—that it can only contribute to the confusion of American voters on the issue and the perception abroad of the US as failing to help address the problem in a way commensurate with its responsibility for creating it; that the US will become the object of increasing international resentment and hostility, and the dangerous implications this presents for our place in the world.

So I’m hoping the reports that you don’t intend to bring up the issue at Monday’s debate merely reflect an oversight brought on by the exhaustion and stress of preparing for an event of this magnitude, or that maybe you even felt that you didn’t need to mention it in the run-up to the debate, that the issue was so huge and obvious that everyone would assume it would be on your list of pressing foreign policy issues.

But please, make sure the issue doesn’t get lost in the fray, as seems to have happened with Candy Crowley in the second debate. Make one last pass through your office before you head to that stage in Boca Raton Monday. Find that question. Ask it. Don’t let the men who would be president ride out the rest of the campaign without telling the world how they’ll address the huge global threat of climate change.

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It’s called “Sun Song,” and was put together by radio producer Barrett Golding for the program I worked for at the time, PRI’s Living on Earth.

Barrett was and is one of the great, old-school, truly independent voices of public radio, and he called this wild and weird sound “natural radio.”

You can hear the piece at hearingvoices.com/news/best-of-bg/. Scroll about halfway down the page to find the audio.

Radiation values in the van Allen Belts... or Beetle? (US National Space Data Center)

No lie!

And then there’s this plain old but nonetheless elegant 2-D rendering of your garden variety AP8 MIN omnidirectional proton flux >=1MeV, which diagrams radiation values in a part of the magnetosphere known as the van Allen Belts.

I had hoped to talk with Mr. van Allen himself to be sure it wasn’t actually a drawing of some kind of beetle, but he’s been unavailable since 2006.

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Magnetosphere (NASA rendition)

We hear a lot about the fragility of life on earth these days…

The impact of 7 billion-plus people is putting huge stresses on the natural systems that we depend on.

But at least some of the vital systems that protect our planet are largely beyond our ability to mess with.

And that’s a strangely reassuring idea to The World’s environment editor Peter Thomson…

He got to thinking about it, when he heard a newly recorded piece of sound.

That’s it, that’s the sound.

It’s not crickets. It’s not whales.

Nope, this loopy song has been around a lot longer than either of them.

Bear with me for a minute, I will let you know what it is, but let me work my way around to it.

Life is biology. And without really trying, we’ve invented millions of ways to mess with the earth’s basic biological processes… We’re seeing the results in mass extinctions and the destruction of ecosystems.

We’re even messing with the earth’s basic chemistry, from the atmosphere to the oceans.

But the physical forces that helped make life blossom? Well, here we finally may have found something that can’t be touched by human hands

Take, for instance, the earth’s magnetic field.

Our planet has a big iron core, and as the earth spins, it creates a powerful magnetic field that extends = into space and forms a sort of protective bubble around the planet. It’s called the Magnetosphere, and although you can’t see it, scientists draw it as kind of a big donut tucked around the earth.

It deflects most of the charged particles blasting off the sun. Without it, that solar wind would basically blow away much of our atmosphere.

And here’s where that weird, loopy sound comes in…

In August, NASA launched a couple of satellites to study the area where the earth’s magnetic field meets the solar wind. And it turns out that a lot of those charged particles create radio waves that can be captured and turned into sound.

Long been recording these sounds from earth, but NASA says these are the best recordings ever of what they call “chorus.”

It’s physics at work. It’s part of the reason we’re here. And as far as we know, it’s largely impervious to human impact.

And as someone who covers those other impacts every day, it’s nice to know there are some things we can’t wreck. And that as long as the earth keeps spinning, it’ll also keep making its weird and wonderful music.

There’s no way around it–we report on an awful lot of bad news here on The World.

But every now and then something just jaw-droppingly fabulous comes across our desks—the kind of thing that makes you excited about the world again.

We just heard from Hamish Low, who was ecstatic about an unusual ancient black oak tree. Well, it happened again this morning, also, in our editorial meeting here at The World, to our environment editor Peter Thomson.

He was trawling the BBC’s website and he came across a slideshow of incredibly vivid, high-resolution images of marine zooplankton.

We’ve got a link to it on The World dot org, and when you see these pictures you also might just stop what you’re doing and absorb their astonishing beauty.

Peter’s here in the studio now… They’re colourful, they’re interesting, but what grabbed you about these pictures?

THOMSON: Well you just said it, Aaron, I mean it’s the incredible beauty of these really tiny organisms. And they’re incredibly complex, and you can see that in these photographs. We’re talking about things that in some cases are a millimeter long and smaller, down to almost nanometers. And when you see them in these amazing high-res pictures, they look every bit as complex as the biggest animals on earth. You can see their organs, you can see their eyes, their jointed bodies and legs. Many of them also have these really vivid colors, these blues and greens and pinks and this kind of eerie translucent shimmer to them. They’re really just totally amazing.

SCHACHTER: And where did these images come from?

Research ship "Tara" in New York City, February 2012. (Photo: Peter Thomson)

THOMSON: Well, let me back up for a minute, if I may. I was in New York last winter and I walking around lower Manhattan with my daughter, and I saw this very strange looking sailboat tied up at a dock in Battery Park City. It’s hull was all metal and it was rounded at the top instead of angular, and it had almost no deck space–it was almost entirely enclosed. And instead of a delicate little name inscribed on the stern like most sailboats have it had the name TARA etched in a big orange stripe on the bow. It was clearly a ship meant for some kind of marine research in very unforgiving conditions, and I found a small sign on the dock that said indeed that’s what it was, that it had been conducting scientific and educational voyages around the world.

It sounded very cool and I took a picture and made a mental note of it, and then I of course forgot about it as I went off to try to find my daughter a hot chocolate, because it was freezing out.

SCHACHTER: Of course!

THOMSON: Well, it turns out that this is where those images came from, the ones I found this morning. Tara is a 120-foot French sailing ship that’s been traveling the world’s oceans for years chronicling various facets of the marine environment and how that’s changing. And it’s latest mission was a 2-1/2 year, 70-thousand mile journey to nearly every part of the global ocean researching plankton. And part of that project was to photograph what they found in this incredible detail.

SCHACHTER: Yeah, OK, now you’re an environment guy, you’re a science guy… Plankton? I mean come on, it’s plankton! What’s the big deal?

THOMSON: Well, they’re cool, as someone who’s interested in science and the environment, but they’re more than that. They’re these really tiny organisms that mostly just float around in the water. There’s zooplankton that are animals, and phytoplankton that are plants, and they’re all different kinds of creatures from crustaceans and mollusks to diatoms, which are algae with these beautiful little glass shells, almost, and there are zillions of them in the oceans and they’re incredibly important to both to global food chain and the atmosphere. Most of the bigger organisms that eat things in the sea, including us, ultimately are eating plankton of various kinds that have come up the food chain and turned into the protein that we eat out of the ocean.

They are also—scientists say the phytoplankton are also responsible for producing roughly half of the oxygen in the atmosphere that keeps us and all other oxygen-breathing organisms, which is pretty much everything, alive.

SCHACHTER: And so Tara was out there doing what?

THOMSON: Well they set out to try to document just what’s out there, in terms of the numbers and kinds of plankton, and what they found was almost as amazing as the creatures themselves. They took more than 30-thousand water samples and from those they recorded a million and a half difference species, which is way more than we knew existed beforehand. And of course even in sailing 70-thousand miles they only covered a tiny fraction of the total volume of the sea, so you can imagine that there are likely millions more species that have yet to be documented.

SCHACHTER: So, basically—plankton, they’re more than pretty pictures?

THOMSON: Yeah! But there are some really pretty pictures, and you can see them on our website, The World dot org.

SCHACHTER: That’s right. It’s always fun what gets different people excited.

THOMSON: (Laughs)

SCHACHTER: That’s The World’s Peter Thomson. Thank you!

THOMSON: Thanks, Aaron.

Arctic sea ice extent on 19 August 2012 (orange line shows the 1979-2000 median) (Image: NSIDC)

Ice cover in the Arctic looks headed for a record low this summer.

Host Marco Werman speaks with The World’s environment editor Peter Thomson about what’s going on up there and what it might mean for the rest of the world.

There’s a striking new map up on the website of the National Snow and Ice Data Center today.

I’m looking at it right now and you can too, at the world dot org…

The map shows a blob of white surrounded by a sea of blue ringed by an orange line.

The white blob represents the size of the Arctic ice cap as of yesterday.

The orange line shows the median size of that same ice cap on the same date from 1979 to 2000.

And the blue in between is the difference, where the ice cap has been replaced by an area of open ocean bigger than Alaska, Texas and California combined.

It’s a snapshot of how quickly things are changing in the Arctic and in particular how much ice has been lost this year.

The World’s environment editor Peter Thomson is in the studio with me. Peter, experts are describing what’s going on in the Arctic this year as “unprecedented” and “record breaking.” What’s going on?

THOMSON: Well, like you said, it’s really striking, Marco. The ice cover as of yesterday is more than 30 percent smaller than that late 20th century average for the same date. It’s almost 10% below the previous record low for the date, set back in 2007. And it’s likely headed for an all-time low this year, at least a record as long as we’ve been keeping records.

As for what’s going on, in two simple words, it’s global warming. Scientists say there’s just no doubt about it. They’ve run all kinds of computer models looking at every conceivable factor, and nothing explains this rapid disappearance of summer ice in the Arctic other than the rise in global temperatures due to carbon dioxide pollution in the atmosphere.

WERMAN: So, we’ve been hearing a lot about rising sea levels due to global warming. Is all this melting ice going to contribute to that?

THOMSON: Well actually it’s not, I mean at least not directly. The Arctic ice cap is different from most of the ice in Antarctica and Greenland, in that it’s already floating, which means that when it melts it doesn’t have much effect on overall sea levels.

But what’s got scientists concerned is that it does have really important indirect impacts on sea levels.

The big thing is what they call the “albedo effect,” which is another way of saying how much solar radiation the ice and water reflect or absorb. And the difference is striking. It turns out that in the Arctic, ice reflects about 80% of solar radiation, but the dark open ocean water absorbs 90% of it . So instead of sending all that heat back into space, the open ocean where the ice used to be is absorbing it and warming up.

And that can affect sea levels in a number of important ways. As the water warms up, it expands, and it will have a modest impact on sea levels. And then over time, the water transfers some of its heat to the atmosphere. That warms up the air and can help melt ice in places like Greenland. And then there’s the growing likelihood that warming sea water is essentially helping to melt Greenland’s glaciers from below, which in turn is speeding up the flow of ice into the sea…. And that also raises sea levels.

WERMAN: So what about life in the Arctic? How is this ice loss affecting people and wildlife up there?

THOMSON: Well one of the most immediate impacts, Marco, is on creatures that depend on the ice for hunting, which includes both polar bears and people. And that changing albedo effect I mentioned is helping to warm the air up there, which in turn is causing permafrost to thaw out. That leads to all kinds of problems for local ecosystems and human communities.

But it’s important to remember that Arctic communities aren’t the only ones who’ll be affected by this. Some scientists refer to the Arctic as “the world’s refrigerator,” and as it warms up, that’s going to effect weather all around the world. In fact, Marco, there’s some evidence that changes in the Arctic could already be affecting weather today—this summer—including perhaps the big drought and that record heat here in the US this summer. Of course the whole climate system is enormously complex, it’s hard to draw a direct connection, but it seems likely that what’s going on up there is affecting what we’re experiencing down here.

WERMAN: Now the last big UN report on climate change, back in 2007, predicted we’d see an entirely ice-free Arctic some summer by around the year 2100. So take this news of ice melt today and put that in context of those predictions.

THOMSON: Well, it’s changed. A lot. After the record warm summer of 2007 scientists moved that estimate up to somewhere between 2030 and 2040. There’s no consensus estimate now, but one scientist at a major British polar research center told our colleagues at the BBC last week that he thinks we may see at least our first ice-free day in the Arctic for by the end of this decade. Eighty years sooner than we thought just a few years ago.

WERMAN: Extraordinary. The World’s environment editor Peter Thomson. Thanks very much.

THOMSON: Thanks, Marco.