- How much more of the science do you want?
- I want a good amount of the science.
- Okay.
- I'm just a dumb actor, what do I know?
Soulpancake presents An Idiot's Guide to Climate Change.
Day Four, Greenland.
Mission? Fly on a helicopter
and successfully land on Jakobshavn Glacier.
And to educate us on all things climate change,
it's my good friend Gail the scientist.
Here it is, the big red bird.
If Tom Cruise were coming with us
where would he ride, on the wing there?
What's our carbon footprint of us
taking this helicopter ride?
- I don't know.
- I'm sure the fuel that you use in the helicopter
is made of entirely Impossible Burgers.
I'm kind of terrified to get on a helicopter.
The only other helicopter I've ever been in in my life
was in the movie The Meg,
but I'm strangely comforted by the fact
that the pilot looks like a wildling.
I'm scared!
Here we go!
Is there a cafe where we're landing?
And we're landing on glacier, wow!
I feel like I'm expecting the Mars Rover Curiosity
to roll over the top of the horizon.
This is incredible,
absolutely amazing.
I truly feel like I'm on another planet.
Why do you have a gun?
Crazy.
So, can you tell me where we are?
- We are in Greenland,
in one of the really large glaciers, Jakobshavn.
Everywhere the eye can see is a vista full of glacier.
And glaciers move, they're flowing,
so every year parts carve off,
that means bits come off.
- [Rainn] In this case into a fjord.
- [Gail] Into a fjord.
- [Rainn] And float down towards the ocean.
- [Gail] Then float down.
- People say that the glaciers of Greenland
is ground zero for climate change.
How dire is this?
- It's warming at about twice the rate
of the rest of the planet,
so the amplification of heat that's happening
in the Arctic is massive.
- That sounds terrible,
but how does it affect us in the United States?
- What is happening in the Arctic
is affecting all of our lives.
The heatwaves, the wildfires in California,
the polar vortex that's coming down
so we get these deep freezes throughout the US
that aren't used to it in Europe.
- The droughts we had?
- The droughts that we've had.
- Which caused the forest fires.
And then also in terms of those flash floods
where we're starting to get a lot more rain
in places where we weren't used to having it.
So, how much more of the science do you want?
- I want a good amount of the science.
- Okay, a good amount of the science.
We've lost 75 percent of volume of sea ice,
75 percent, that's a massive, massive change
that's happened for sure in our lifetime.
We are losing a lot of it.
That's obviously concerning because that's gonna contribute
and is contributing to sea level rise,
and the problem with that is that it's not just
it's gotta go up really big for us to care,
it's about the storm surges.
- I still don't quite understand like
why a few centimeters of sea level rise
increases the power of storms.
- Well, so, two things are happening here.
First of all, the Arctic has the Jet Stream around it,
so these are really strong polar winds.
- I'm feeling them right now.
- Yeah.
And data is showing that as the summer sea ice weakens
that is changing the pressure on those winds,
which means that the track of storms will shift
and sea level rise will mean that
there's just more water there that gets whipped up
when a storm surge comes in.
It also means that when storms come up,
those weather patterns can hang around a lot longer,
so they sort of batter over and over and over again,
they don't move away so quickly.
So, weather itself on a daily basis is not climate change
but when we can see there's sort of extremes happening
more and more regularly that is definitely consistent
with what the science says that climate change will lead to.
- Is that why ultimately they changed the name
from global warming to climate change?
- Yeah, I mean I think the whole point is in that
sometimes you're gonna get more extreme cold
where you don't want them.
Why do we care about that?
Well, first of all, it affects our lives
and it can affect how we grow our food.
Agricultural businesses around the world,
they're big, they're reliant on pretty stable
weather patterns and precipitation patterns,
rainfall, snowfall,
but as the Arctic shifts it is shifting those,
which means it is putting terrible pressure on farmers
and how we grow our food.
- And this is all triggered by what's happening
in the Arctic?
- It's triggered by what's happening in climate change,
and climate change that's happening in the Arctic
is a feedback, an amplification on climate change
happening everywhere else.
- Well, it was a short trip,
but amazing, great conversation with Dr Gail,
and now back to that most terrifying of all,
transportation thingies.
And we go to day five, Greenland.
Mission? Catch one more flight and drive to a dying glacier,
in this thing.
I would be a terrible traveling channel host.
I don't know what to say about any of this .
So, here's a fun fact, we're in an Alpine desert.
I've never seen an Alpine desert,
it almost looks like New Mexico or something.
Looks like we're here!
And here we are on the edge of the great Greenland icecap
at the Great Russell Glacier,
in an area called Kangerlussuaq.
- Kangerlussuaq.
- Am I close?
- Yes, you are.
- Kangerlussuaq?
- You just need that 'scolooch'.
- Kangerlussuaq?
- Yeah, that's pretty good.
- All right, yeah! - Yeah!
- So, just really speak from your heart, okay?
So, what do you think is gonna happen to this glacier
in the next five or ten years,
where do you see it going?
- Like the height of the Russell Glacier has gone down
so you can actually see the land
behind the Russell Glacier now,
we couldn't see that 15 years ago.
So, I see it being smaller and smaller.
And less, how do you say? Magical.
It's disappearing.
- Hard to imagine right now that it ever is
gonna get shorter and shorter when it's this high
and we stand beside it,
but the whole sheet is getting shorter,
and it acts as a weather buffer
so that the wind as it gets lower
will be able to come across much faster into Europe.
- Just say, I don't know anything about glaciers
other than what I've learned in the last couple of days
but this one doesn't look particularly healthy
from my eyes.
I mean I'm just a dumb actor, what do I know?
This is in mid-collapse right next to
the Greenland ice sheet.
- So, what we can see is that the glacier itself
is not very white, it's really quite gray
and charcoal, almost.
And that means it's got less reflective ability
back into space of the sunlight,
which means it warms faster.
Not just the ice cap and the glacier ice that's melting,
we're seeing that ice in the Arctic in general is melting
and a really good example of that
is the Arctic summer sea ice.
In some places it's gonna be colder for periods of time,
or at different parts of the season,
so we're seeing shifting weather patterns
or seasonal patterns,
so summer's not really summer, it's maybe in the spring.
So, one of the things that my team does is we try to do
the economic modeling of what is the cost of the impact
if the Arctic summer sea ice and permafrost melt.
And we've got clear estimates that show that it makes
more sense economically to try and fix the problem
and stay within a 1.5 degree warmer world
than to let those things melt away.
- Because that's gonna be way more expensive after the fact?
- It'll be way more expensive after the fact,
so it makes sense to invest now.
- And the environmental impact is all over,
it's in transportation companies, it's in...
- It's in infrastructure, it's in agriculture,
it's in insurance, it's in the loss of biodiversity,
it's just much more expensive to have runaway climate change
than to mitigate and fix that problem.
- Coming up on An Idiot's Guide to Climate Change.
Hopefully meeting Greta Thunberg here.
- Thank you all so much for coming here.
We cannot continue to look away from this crisis anymore.
- Oh hey, Greta.
- Hey, could you get me Steve Carell's autograph?