I’ve been asked before, often frequently in fact*, about how depressing it must be to be a climate scientist. And I usually waffle something about how, my job is very interesting and that there’s always hope out there somewhere. Like many people working in the climate space, I’m aware of the multiplicity of research out there suggesting that hope is essential for action, and so that’s what I try to emphasise.
And it is not inaccurate in fact, my job really is fascinating! And very often I get buried in learning something new and often surprising that is incredibly rewarding. I’m also surrounded by thoughtful, creative and incredibly smart and supportive colleagues. It’s a stimulating environment (both metaphorically and literally) and I’m learning new stuff all the time. It can sometimes be surprisingly fun. Occasionally, I’m even fortunate enough to go to Greenland.
I’m sure that working in an emergency department or as a war photographer or social worker in a deprived community is considerably tougher mentally than how I have it..
On the other hand, Kimberley Miner’s piece resonated. Especially this year, where there have just been *so many* extreme events – including some that have a direct bearing on my own work. It has been exhausting keeping on top of what’s going on – and trying to communicate the impacts of that often feels like a moral duty as much as a part of my job. But it’s not always easy to cross that boundary. I rarely talk about my work in a social context (certainly if not with other scientists), it’s not exactly conducive to a party atmosphere. But I know police officers, social workers, soldiers and medics who are the same, I do not think climate scientists are alone in this respect.
I think she is also correct to point out that long working hours, stress, competition for resources and simple exhaustion don’t help. Given the academic environment, many of us work too much and don’t take the time to rest and recuperate. (Yes, I’m also writing this on a Sunday morning, where I’m also going through emails, editing comments on a paper and preparing for a new student to start next week…). It’s hard to keep perspective and emotions under control under those circumstances.
So what about the solutions?
Well, again I’d echo the original piece. Find the time and places that give you rest .
I jealously guard the time each week when I go out in my kayak on the Øresund, a sport I’ve enjoyed since my teens acquired a new urgency in preventing burn-out (particularly during the COVID times). It’s also often the time I get my best ideas and can work through issues that are bothering me to find the right way forward.
And then, to continue a theme of posts this summer, it’s also about focusing on what can I do to feel empowered again. And I think this is also correct:
“After decades of working to convince the public that climate change is real, … we need to work on solutions…. The current generation of climate scientists needs to move on from education and advocacy to providing solutions for mitigation, adaptation and resilience. The best treatment for climate grief, .. is knowing you’ve made a contribution to reducing emissions or building resilience.”
But it’s important to remember too that many of us became climate scientists because we found it deeply interesting to work to understand the earth’s processes. Even if science has an even better understanding now, there is still much motivation in taking that deep dive.
At home, our own family lifestyle is in constant improvement to reduce our impact. The usual stuff: car free, vegetarian towards vegan lifestyle, train rather than plane as much as possible. This autumn, I’m adding a new wildflower patch to my garden to encourage the insects and pollinators even more. Individual actions won’t save the world or prevent the climate crisis alone, but they can help us to feel more in control and motivated.
Il faut cultiver notre jardin.
Voltaire
And a new update pointing at an interesting piece about how to incorporate this into an educational context with “critical hope”, which is sort of what I’m talking about here too.
This is where the notion of “critical hope” emerges as a compelling concept to explore.
Critical hope embodies an educational paradigm rooted in the art of envisioning and living an alternative narrative to the status quo.
This paradigm is fortified by a comprehensive scrutiny of our current predicament – urging learners and educators to not only understand the challenges we face but also to actively participate in reshaping our collective future.
I like this framing, but I do think we also have to remember that personal accountability and individual change is not going to solve the climate crisis. For that we need governaments and municipalities as well as business on board and, crucially, leading.
*There’s a whole other conversation we could have about how it’s very often women researchers who are asked about their feelings. Though I would also point out that for example, my colleague at GEUS Jason Box has also been open about this in this piece.
This is a lightly edited and expanded post in response to a Reuters fact checking query. I gather one of the usual suspects (in the place formerly known as the birdsite) has been spreading misinformation and confusion about the magestic Petermann Glacier in Northern Greenland. So here’s a few thoughts. The TL;DR is in the title, but if you want to know why it’s not growing, how we know it’s not growing and what it means, read on…
But, that’s not why it is a glacier of choice for a section of the climate (denier) community. It behaves very much like any ice shelf; that is, it calves a large iceberg, but as the glacier is still flowing from areas of accumulation to areas where melt and calving balance it, so the front continues moving forward to roughly it’s previous position, before calving another large iceberg. This is a well understood cylce but it also means that if you cherry pick your starting and ending dates you can indeed show that the front is “advancing”. However, this is not the same as the glacier “growing”. Let’s take a look.
It is one of the only remaining ice shelves in Greenland – all of the others have collapsed and not regrown and there is good reason to suspect Petermann is also on the same trajectory. I had a student a few years ago who showed the ice shelf itself is thinning, and that it was unlikely to remain stable for long. We never managed to publish it, though a publication from Eric Rignot’s group that came out earlier this year largely shows the same things we found. The cycle of calving and advance is quite clear in their Figure 1a, as is the retreat of the grounding line – the point at which the glacier starts to float. This is significant because as the glacier gets thinner, the grounding line will likely retreat inland.
So does NASA Worldview imagery show that Petermann glacier has been growing at roughly 3 metres per day for the past 11 years? (As intimated by a number of accounts on the internet.)
No it does not.
You can play a semantic trick here though. Satellite imagery shows that the front of the glacier has been moving forward for the past 11 years (note that it doesn’t move much in winter, it’s mostly a summer feature after the sea ice has broken up). Compare these two images which I grabbed from DMI’s satellite picture archive around the coast of Greenland, in it the glacier terminus does appear to be ahead in 2022 compared to 2012.
But the choice of 2012 is a trick as a large calving event occurred on the 16th July 2012, after a previous large one in 2010, so the glacier was more or less at it’s minimum in recent years if you choose 2012 as a starting position.
This is of course the difference between noise and signal and a similar trick to choosing to start your temperature curve in 2016 for example, right after a big El Nino event.
After the glacier calves a large iceberg the glacier behind continues to push ice out through the channel. The ice still flows and the front eventually moves back to roughly the same position it was in before the calving. However that does not mean the glacier is “growing”.
A glacier only grows if it gains more glacier ice each year than it loses.
Glaciers lose ice in 3 ways: they melt at the surface and this runs off the glacier; they can calve icebergs off – at a glacier like Petermann, this may only happen every few years; or, they can be melted from underneath by warm ocean water.
If these three mass budget terms added together are bigger than the amount of snow falling each year then the glacier will shrink. If more snow falls than is lost by these three processes, then the glacier is growing.
At Petermann glacier all three ways to lose ice are happening. We have seen the calving, the surface melt and runoff is clearly visible in the satellite image below and the thinning of the glacier (ocean melt as well as stretching as the ice flows) has been measured by satellites and radar measurements.
We can therefore check how much this net ice change budget is by using GRACE satellite data. GRACE measures change in mass by gravimetry and the data, processed by DTU Space colleagues, is displayed on our polar portal website here: http://polarportal.dk/en/greenland/mass-and-height-change/
And it shows that this region of Greenland has lost ice every single year since 2002 when the satellite was launched.
This is not a surprise, a paper by Jeremie Mouginet et al. all the way back in 2019 estimated that Petermann glacier alone had lost 56 Gt of ice for the period 1972 to 2017. Most of this ice has been lost since the late 1990s. Their estimate agrees well with results presented in Mankoff et al., 2021, who update their dataset each week and show that there is pretty steady net ice loss from Petermann from both calving and surface melt that continues to the present day.
So the Petermann Glacier is not growing, even if the front is advancing. But the satellite pictures of the glacier do tell us something about the local conditions of the glacier. Petermann glacier is in a long narrow fjord in a region where there is a lot of sea ice. This is probably why the ice shelf has survived so long when many other similar ice shelves have collapsed and disappeared over the last 30 years or so. 50 years ago there were a lot more ice shelves in Greenland and across the whole of the Arctic. Most of them have now gone.
The figure below (from Hill et al., 2018 https://tc.copernicus.org/articles/12/3243/2018/) shows all the places where there used to be floating ice tongues, only Petermann, Ryder glacier (which is significantly shorter now than it was in the 1990s) and 79 North remain in Northern Greenland with some floating bits of Storstrømmen also technically still counting as shelves in the east.
Given the thinning that has been recorded at the Petermann Shelf, it’s probably only a matter of time before this magestic glacier also loses its shelf. And there are two ways that might go. It might follow the path of Sermeq Kujalleq, previously known as Jakobshavn Isbræ. The fairly dramatic collapse of which over a few months in 2002 was a massive wake-up call to the glaciology community that things can change very fast indeed and they may not be reversible.
Or it may retreat in a more low-key way, like the relatively nearby glacier C.H. Ostenfeld where the ice shelf indeed was more ice tongue like* and slowly fragmented and washed out the fjord over several years.
It’s not very easy to say which path Petermann will take, it may even take a hybrid between the two, with first slow disintegration like Ostenfeld, with a more rapid collapse like Sermeq Kujalleq as the grounding line approaches.
Time will, unfortunately, almost certainly tell.
And now back to the day job..
*An ice shelf and an ice tongue are similar but not quite the same, I would call Petermann an ice shelf whereas C H Ostenfeld was rather tongue like by the time it collapsed, though the others in nrthern Greenland are and were definitely more shelf like. See for example this spectacular image of the Erebus ice tongue in Antarctica. Glacier tongues still exist in Antarctica but with the loss of Ostenfeld, they are now non-existent in Greenland.
We are expanding quite rapidly at DMI currently – part of a strategic plan to ensure that we are primed for a generational shift at DMI, but also reflecting some of the themes I touched on yesterday – an expansion into climate services and the development of new machine learning based models and advanced statistical techniques for weather and climaet applications. Note also that the remote sensing part of NCKF
UPDATE: A new position advert has been added:
0) Climate Scientist with Focus on Decadal Climate Prediction
Our sister units also have some interesting postings out that would also crossover with the work we do in our section on the climate of Denmark and Greenland.
4) Remote sensing and/or machine learning specialist for automated sea ice classification from satellite data – building on the very successful project ASIP