Have we already passed the point of no return for Polar glaciers? Explore with top glaciologist Dr. Chris Stokes from Durham University UK. But first, Canadian fire expert Michael Flannigan reports on the latest giant outbreaks in the North. Tens of thousands evacuated. Unhealthy smoke covering Canada, US mid-West, New York to Georgia – reaching Greece and Ireland. We are living in the climate future already.
[Radio program contains Canadian news media clips from CBC Canada and Today]
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CLIMATE-BREATHING FIRE
MIKE FLANNIGAN
Canadian wildfires are back, starting early. The 2023 wildfire season in Canada burned an estimated 18.4 million hectares of land – over seven times the annual average. The majority of people in the Northwest Territories were evacuated. It was a gruesome year. Now the blazing nightmare is burning across northern Canada again. Unhealthy smoke already drifted down into the mid-West states, New York, and as far south as Georgia. Is this the new normal in the age of climate change?
I think the best expert on Canadian wildfires is Dr. Michael Flannigan. After a distinguished career at the University of Alberta, Mike is now British Columbia Research Chair in Predictive Services, Emergency Management and Fire Science at Thompson Rivers University. He is author or co-author on hundreds of peer-reviewed papers on forest fires.
Mike Flannigan was the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Wildland Fire. He’s taken on leadership roles with the US National Assessment on Global Change and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He’s pretty well-known in print, TV, and radio as the go-to-expert on wildfires.
Listen to or download this 25 minute interview with Mike Flannigan in CD Quality or Lo-Fi
SMOKE TALK
Let’s talk about wildfire smoke. Decades of cleaning up pollution smog for better health, this is being undone by toxic wildfire smoke in the new fire era. You don’t have to be in Canada to be part of the Canadian wildfires.
New research shows breathing smoke is more dangerous than we realized. It kills or can shorten lives. Already smoke from Canadian fires has reached the eastern United States. According to EU Copernicus satellite monitoring, smoke from the spring 2025 fires in Canada has already reached Europe. The plume can be seen from Greece to Ireland. But they say there is little health risk, because the smoke is too high to breath. It’s just a haze and nice sunsets I guess.
CARBON TALK
Experts used to tell us: “don’t count forest fire carbon in climate, because any carbon will be recaptured over time by regrowth”. Years ago in an interview Mike and I talked about regrowth. He told us very intense fires could sterilize the soil, and any place that re-burns within 5 years might prevent that forest coming back.
Even if regrowth recaptures some carbon, that takes years. Meanwhile massive wildfires add gigatons more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, affecting all kinds of systems, like glacial melt or rainfall. The great Boreal forest stretching around the world is changing from a net sink to a source of carbon.
MORE LARGE FIRES BURNING IN RUSSIA (Copernicus)
“Additionally, large wildfires have been burning in Russia’s Far Eastern Federal District since the beginning of April, with the most prominent fires occurring in the Republic of Buryatia and Zabaykalsky Krai to the east of Lake Baikal. Carbon emissions in the Far Eastern Federal District since the start of April are at their highest level for the period in question since 2018 at around 35 megatonnes of carbon. CAMS [Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service] forecasts in mid-May showed large smoke plumes being transported from Zaybaikalsky Krai towards north-eastern China and northern Japan, with some impacts on air quality in the region, and other plumes have been reaching the high Arctic. “
AGE OF SUPER FIRES
Twelve years ago I produced a YouTube video and radio show called “The Age of Super Fires”. I think we have arrived.
Scientists are talking about seeding the atmosphere with sulfur to reduce solar energy getting to the surface. That may be small beans compared to the atmospheric changes from these fires. Can we control super-fires in the North? Should we?
ALEX COMMENTS
Three things:
1. Last week, the Canadian fire clouds met a 2,000 mile wide front of Saharan dust (with dry air) covering Cuba, the Caribbean and most of Florida. Dust plus fire smoke is not good.
2. Big fires in places no one has heard of are becoming a global threat.
3. As our next guest Chris Stokes points out: fire ash lands on glaciers, further reducing reflectivity. The sun’s energy stays on surface instead of bouncing back toward space. The darker color speeds up glacier melt. This is another way global warming reinforces itself: heat = more fires = more smoke = darkening ice = more warming. As Polar regions continue to warm the remaining ice goes gray with ash. Greenland scientist Jason Box published pictures of that grayed landscape instead of pristine white snow and ice.
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SEA LEVEL = MASS MIGRATION
CHRIS STOKES
“… mass loss from ice sheets poses an existential threat to the world’s coastal populations, with an estimated10 one billion people inhabiting land less than 10 m above sea level and around 230 million living within 1 m.”
Sea level rise will cause “catastrophic inland migration”. Even 1.5 degrees C. of warming is not safe for glaciers. This new science comes from a team led by Professor Chris Stokes of Durham University in the UK. Dr. Stokes is glaciologist, publishing for the past 25 years on world glaciers in the distant past and future warming. He has over 200 research works and many book chapters.
We discuss a new paper led by Chris Stokes: “Warming of +1.5 °C is too high for polar ice sheets“. That was published in Communications Earth & Environment May 20, 2025. It is Open Access, free for you to read.
Listen to or download this 29 minute interview with Chris Stokes in CD Quality or Lo-Fi
According to this new paper, the rate of sea level rise per year is accelerating. In fact, the sea is rising 3 times faster than during the 1900’s. More of the increase comes from melting ice than expansion of ocean water as it heats. Most of that comes from Greenland (largest single source now) and Antarctica (largest source in the future by far). After reading and interviews, my take is that Greenland glaciers may predominate in sea level rise in the first stages, like coming decades, and then Antarctica.
The paper has these figure (which are handy for all of us to know):
“Global mean sea level (GMSL) increased by around 20 cm [7.8 inches] from 1901 to 2018, with the rate of change accelerating from ~1.4 mm year [0.05 inches] (1901–1990) to ~3.7 mm year [0.14 inches] (2006–2018) and, most recently, to 4.5 mm [0.17 inches] year (2023).”
PREVIOUS WARMING WORLD
Dr. Stokes has specialized in paleoglaciology, the study of past ice ages – coming and going. We need to go millions of years ago to find another time of fairly fast melting of polar ice (and land glaciers) – but likely nothing can compare to the speed humans are changing the atmosphere. Still there are valuable lessons to be learned from the past about the way ice disappears during heating. That is our future, so it is worth knowing.
One of the closest examples would be the Mid-Piacenzian Warm Period when carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were similar to today. The what?
According to Wikipedia:
“The Mid-Piacenzian Warm Period (mPWP) (prior to 2009 known as the Middle Pliocene Warm Period ), or the Pliocene Thermal Maximum, was an interval of warm climate during the Pliocene epoch that lasted from 3.3 to 3.0 million years ago (Ma).”
The Stokes et al paper says:
“Notwithstanding the inherent uncertainties of palaeo-records, they clearly indicate that if ice sheets are required to equilibrate to a world with global mean temperatures between +1.0 and +1.5 °C, and CO2 concentrations between 350 and 450 ppm, policymakers should prepare for several metres of GMSL-rise over centennial to millennial time-scales.”
There are differences of course. In some past “transition” periods as an ice age ends, melting at the Poles worked in opposite ways. For example, north Polar ice might be retreating, but Antarctica was gaining ice. Today, both are losing significant amounts of ice at the same time. We likely can’t go back too far for simulations of our future because (a) it gets harder and harder to measure what happened farther back and (b) the continents were in quite different positions, including all being connected into one super continent (Pangea). Some rocks of Antarctica spent time much closer to the Equator.
“Without adaptation, conservative estimates suggest that 20 cm of SLR by 2050 would lead to average global flood losses of US$1 trillion or more per year for the world’s 136 largest coastal cities.”
– Stokes et al.
MORE NEW ICE SCIENCE
New science from David Chandler and Norwegian colleagues finds – and I want to read in this short quote: “Notably, West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapse contributes over 4 M[eters]. sea-level rise in equilibrium ice sheet states with little (0.25 deg[rees] C) or even no ocean warming above present. Therefore, today we are likely already at (or almost at) an overshoot scenario, supporting recent studies warning of substantial irreversible ice loss with little or no further climate warming.”
Source: ““Antarctic Ice Sheet tipping in the last 800,000 years warns of future ice loss.” David M. Chandler in Communications E& Environment May 30, 2025. Open Access. David Chandler is from NORCE Research AS, Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research, Bergen, Norway.
AND
“Near-Term Future Sea-Level Projections Supported by Extrapolation of Tide-Gauge Observations” –
Jinping Wang et al. Geophysical Research Letters May 16, 2025
Is there a safe level of warming above pre-industrial Or do we have to try to return to the atmosphere of the Middle Ages?
READ ABOUT WARMING AND ICE in the Guardian here (with world-class environment reporter Damian Carrington, May 20).
BIO INFO ON DR. CHRIS STOKES
Chris grew up around Manchester. He began with geography, then saw glaciers in Sweden. They inspired him. Chris did his PhD at Sheffield reconstructing glaciers in past. He moved to Durham in 2007, one of largest groups of glacier research in UK.
Stokes’ specialty is glaciers and climate change. During the last ten years he refocused on modern day glaciology from small mountain glaciers to large ice sheets. More recently, he investigates how they may respond to future climate change.
Chris has battled skeptics on climate, and those who worry about the cost of mitigation. He finds that frustrating, the misinformation. Deniers and doubters can be a waste of time and distraction.
Chris began with intellectual curiosity. Glacier change and sea level rise is one of the grand challenges the world is facing. Sea level may be the largest and more impactful aspect of climate change, with millions living within one meter of sea level, and that one meter of rise could happen during our lifetimes, leading to mass migration and economic loss. This is irreversible.
Ten months ago Chris thought we were at 1.2 degrees C. warming, and 1.5 means big changes, and it become irreversible after 1.5 because we are committed no matter what we do. We must do all we can to limit warming to 1.5 degrees.
Why did the British find so much interest in the glaciers? Geography was partly invented by British and Scottish academics. They wondered why the landscape of the United Kingdom was formed, and perhaps were intrigued that most of the country was under the ice not that long ago…
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OVER AND OUT
Whatever circus politics and the stock market provide, wherever you hide in social media distractions or cable shows, there is another reality. With physics, long cycles, the whole biological tapestry, the real world is getting hotter, the sea higher. Fires, floods, drought get more extreme. Does that sound like a cranky Old Testament prophet of doom? Sorry, it is reality, measured by careful minds with a system controlling our delusions. It is science, and those are the rocks, trees, rivers, and currents of air. That is where we really live. That is where we are truly alive.
I’m Alex Smith. Radio Ecoshock is listener-supported radio, now 20 years on the air, and not stopping. Thank you for listening, and caring about our world.
Song: “When the Dragon Comes” – Lyrics by Alex Smith, AI music, Creative Commons copyright, free to use for non-commercial purposes.