The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - The Great Arctic Ice Melt - Should You Care?

Episode Date: February 2, 2021

A number of new scientific studies are showing that the ice melt underway on our planet is happening at an increasing rate with some absolutely startling numbers being recorded from satellite imagery.  But do you care?  Is it affecting your life?  Author and Public Policy expert Adam Lajeunesse from StFX University in Nova Scotia has the answers.  

Hello there, Peter Mansbridge here, and you're just moments away from today's episode of The Bridge, where we're going to ask this question. The Great Arctic Ice Melt. Do you even care? And why you should? And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here with the latest episode of The Bridge. Let me start by asking you a question. It's not hard, it's an easy question. Raise your hands if you know who Louis Saint Laurent was.

Of course, you know. He was the Canadian Prime Minister. Do you know which Prime Minister he was, numerically in order? Probably not, but he was 12th, okay? He was number 12. He came in in 1948, replacing Mackenzie King, who had stepped down. And Louis Saint Laurent was Prime Minister for the next nine years, until 1957, when he lost in an election to John Diefenbaker. So not long after,

Saueron was replaced as Liberal leader by Lester Pearson. And that kind of sets you up under the track as to where we are now in terms of the different Prime Ministers that have encompassed the last 60, 70 years. All right, why am I telling you this? This isn't a history lesson, but Louis Saint Laurent is an interesting person in terms of the topic we're going to discuss today. Louis Saint Laurent's political history is not generally well known. He wasn't a failure. He was a pretty good prime minister, and he was well regarded as

a great Canadian nationalist. But you don't look around and see his name mentioned in too many places these days, right? There is one, though. His name is painted on the side of Canada's greatest icebreaker, the Louis S. Saint Laurent, which plies the waters of Canada's Arctic, has done since the mid-1960s. It's kind of a historic vessel in terms of Arctic voyages. Now, if you got on board the Louis S. Saint Laurent and you kind of looked around, you'd find tucked away in one corner

a little plaque on the wall with my name on it. And that's because in 2006, when I was at the CBC, we did some historic broadcasting. We broadcast live going through the Northwest Passage. We did the national live each night for a week. It was a pretty big deal. So there was a plaque made and it's on board the Louis S. Saint Laurent. Let me tell you just a couple of things about that. We did that week of broadcasting because we'd been convinced we're living in an era of a changing Arctic as a result of climate change and global warming and all of that.

So we did these broadcasts, and I'm telling you, that was not an easy thing to accomplish. Back in 2006, it would be a lot easier now with the advances in technology, but back in 2006, the only way we could do this, given the fact we were so far north, we started in Resolute. If you look at a map, look up at Resolute. We crossed Lancaster Sound. We went down through the different variety of waterways

that track us on the Northwest Passage. But to hook up our signal to the CBC, to the Toronto Broadcasting Centre, that took a bit of a challenge because we were so far north and because of the angle of satellite dishes and all that, I'm not going to get too technical here, but let me just tell you, it was a trick.

And we had a couple of guys from Raja Canada who were with us who were the satellite experts, and they had parked their satellite dish on the back end, around where the helicopter pad is, on the back of the Louis Saint Laurent. And we're literally, as we were on the air, as we were on the air, we're literally with their hands on either side of that dish, moving it a tiny little bit as we were moving. Obviously, it's a ship. It was moving.

It was cutting through some ice at some point. But that's how we kept our signal up. And occasionally we'd lose the signal, but fortunately it'd be in the middle of an item that I'd introduced. And so we were able to reestablish before the item ended. But it was a trick. And it was, you know, as it turned out, it was great fun.

It was a lot of stress, but it was a lot of fun. And I think Canadians enjoyed it, got their first glimpse of what was happening in terms of the changing nature of the Arctic. I can remember that first night, because, you know, I've been to the Arctic many times. I kind of started in Canada's north when I was with Transair, a small regional airline out of northern Manitoba, servicing lots of different northern communities, and all the way up to what were then the dewline stations at Eureka and Isaacson and Mold Bay. I went up to all of those. So I'd seen the Arctic from my days at Transair and also from my early days at the CBC because I started in Churchill, Manitoba in the late 1960s.

So I'd seen the incredible ice conditions in Canada's Arctic and being told, hey, things are changing. I needed to be convinced, and that trip on board the Louis S. Saint Laurent certainly convinced me, because if I'd gone on the Louis in the late 60s or 70s, cutting through the ice of those different areas, you know, you were cutting through ice

that was 20, 25 feet thick, and it was a tough slog, and sometimes you just couldn't do it. Suddenly, not suddenly, but eventually in 2006 when we got there and we're doing this story, we were cutting through ice. It was still thick, but it was like five or six feet thick. And for the Louis S. Saint Laurent, that was like cutting through butter. So we were seeing firsthand up close the changing nature of the Arctic and the impact that climate change was having on it. That was 15

years ago. Well, things have changed considerably in those 15 years. To the point at which, and you may have heard this, there's so much news been going on in our 24-7 world that this could easily have escaped you over the last week or two. But there have been a number of new reports, scientific reports, on the ice melt, not just in the Arctic, but in Antarctica as well,

and the impact that that's having. Let me give you the headlines on that story, because that's what today's program is all about, is the Arctic ice melt, and one, whether you should even care, why you should care. So let's talk about that. Here are the headlines from the latest report.

They've been doing satellite imagery since 1994. And that imagery has revealed over 28 trillion tons of ice have melted in Greenland and Antarctica, as well as the Arctic and Southern Oceans. So that sort of captures it all. Now, these stats have all been published in the last couple of weeks, and they've been kind of the headlines in every scientific, periodical, magazine, online base that you can find.

But so 28 trillion tons of ice, that sounds like a lot of ice. It is a lot of ice. But what does it mean? Like, how much ice is that? Well, here's the way they break it down. That loss, 28 trillion tons, amounts to a 100-meter-thick sheet of ice, okay? A sheet of ice as thick as, you know, roughly a football field.

This covering, covering the United Kingdom. Okay? That's how big the sheet of ice would be. First of all, 100 meters thick and large enough to cover all of the United Kingdom.

That's one stat that's worth knowing. Now, over the course of the 23-year-long study, right, since 1997, researchers have seen close to a 60% increase in the rate of global ice loss. So in other words, back in 97 it was such and such, now it goes up and up and up in terms of faster rate of loss, consistently, year to year to year. Just last year, this is according to sciencealert.com, just last year, floating ice cover in the Arctic Ocean hit its lowest extent since 1979,

when satellite recordings began, and Antarctica experienced a melt event unlike anything experts had ever seen before. One more fact. For every centimeter of sea level rise because obviously it's having an impact the ice melts the sea goes up we'll get into this in a little bit more detail in a moment for every centimeter of sea level rise experts predict a million people are in danger of being displaced. A million. What's more, mountain glaciers are a critical source of fresh water for many local communities. Okay, those are some of the basic facts about this story that's emerged in the last couple of weeks.

But for a lot of different reasons, we're in the middle of a pandemic. There are issues about the vaccines. There are issues about the delivery system. There are issues about travel. There's also the spectacle that continues to play out south of the border in Washington with the new administration of Joe Biden and the impeachment of the last president, Donald J. Trump. And these all crowd the news.

And they tend to move out things that, you know, perhaps we should spend a little more time thinking about and talking about. And that's the idea here with this. So, there are any number of different people, Canadians, many of them, who we could reach out and talk to, but today I chose a relatively young fellow who teaches at St. Evex in Atlanta, Canada, Adam Lajunas. He's the Irving Shipbuilding Chair in Canadian Arctic Marine Security Policy

and an assistant professor at the Mulrooney Institute of Government at St. Francis Xavier University. He's the author of a couple of books, including Lock, Stock, and Icebergs. And remember that name. It's going to come up in this discussion, I'm sure, that we're going to have with him. As well as a number of other books and papers. But Adam was the guy I wanted to talk to in terms of trying to understand what we should make of all this. So let's get it started.

So, Professor, if I'm sitting in my home, say, in Calgary or St. John's or wherever it may be, and I hear all these, like, incredible statistics about the amount of ice that's been melting and continues to melt, why should I care? Well, the global ramifications of the Arctic ice melting are fairly obvious. And this is something that scientists and politicians now have been talking about for years, if not decades. Naturally, this ice is a store of much of the world's water. And if it melts into the world's oceans, then you are going to start to see global sea level rise. You are going to start to see port cities and coastal areas

being inundated. From a more regional perspective, however, you're also going to see the emergence of a new region of the world for global trade and for international competition. Historically, the Arctic has always been at the back of people's minds it's never really been a serious concern economically or even geopolitically this is a region that armies cannot pass through which ships cannot sail through and now all of a sudden we are looking at a very real future where the great powers can move ships in and out of the Arctic Ocean where the polar basin or perhaps some of the Arctic channels will emerge as sea routes. At the very least, what we're seeing is increased activity, economic activity,

tourism, fisheries taking place in the Canadian Arctic and elsewhere. And with that activity comes danger, comes opportunity, and of course, security threats. All right. Well, let me back you up a little bit because, you know, we have, as you said, you know, we've been warned about this for years, decades, that this could be coming. And every year we see these incredible numbers in terms of the melt. But when is all this going to happen? Or when could it happen? I assume to a degree it's happening now.

But when could it be happening to such an extent that it will affect all those things that you just mentioned? Well, it is happening right now, as you said. I don't want to put a precise date on that, however, because this is not a predictable pattern. Ice levels vary dramatically from year to year one year the northwest passage will be open and they will have sailing ships moving through the next year it will be plugged full of ice so it's not a consistent pattern it's not a straight line down but that general variation is predictable. We know that over time, ice levels are going to decrease. Now, whether that is 2050 or 2070 or 2035 depends a lot on how rapidly global warming accelerates.

And of course, it also depends on outside factors like shipping companies deciding they want to take those risks that they want to move through the Arctic. So it's unpredictable. We can't say when it's going to happen, but we do know that it's probably inevitable. Is there a red line though, where once you pass it, it is definitely inevitable or is there something that could be done now to stop it? I mean, obviously, the global warming issue, climate change issue is a big one on the international agenda, even more so now that there's been a change in administrations in the United States. But is there something that could be done?

Is there a red line that says, you know, if we haven't done anything by now, we're locked in. It's going to happen. Well, ice dynamics aren't exactly my specialty, but I can tell you that the really dangerous thing for ships operating in the Arctic is what's called multi-year ice. It's ice that has been in the Arctic for multiple years, and every year it gets harder and harder and thicker to the point that it has the density

of concrete essentially. So this is the stuff that really damages ships. This is what makes moving through the Arctic so difficult. Now once you have the Arctic warming to the point where that multi-year ice is gone, that is when shipping through the Arctic becomes much easier. Now obviously the reason the region will freeze over every year. That's inevitable, of course, unless the Earth's axis changes. The Arctic will freeze, but that Arctic ice will form, melt, and then reform every year, and the multi-year ice will be gone. So even in the winter, what you're going to be looking at is much thinner ice

that even ice-strengthened ships or light icebreakers could theoretically move through. Part of this story revolves around one of the areas that you're obviously interested in. That's the security and the politics of it, really. And when you focus on the Arctic, one of the questions becomes who owns it? Like who owns the Arctic, one of the questions becomes who owns it, like who owns the Arctic? And that continues to play out at various, you know, polar conferences and discussion tables in different parts of the world. Are we closer to resolving that,

or is that a real point of not only question, but potential conflict? No, I think the conflict over ownership theme, which has been running in Canadian academic and media circles for at least 20 years now, really is overblown. What Canadians need to understand is there is very, very little in the Arctic where ownership is contested or up for grabs. So in terms of territory, to the best of my knowledge, I think there's literally one square mile of territory which is not settled. And that's Hans Island in the middle of Nara Strait between Canada and Greenland.

One square mile out of millions of square miles. It is not a particularly valuable island, and both countries have sort of let that. We've agreed to disagree. In terms of the maritime space, we are largely in agreement across the circumpolar Arctic over who has jurisdiction over what continental shelf. There's a small disagreement with the Americans north of the Yukon, but that disagreement has existed since the 1950s. No one has any real urgency to settle that. And then, of course, there's the future, a potential disagreement over extended continental shelves running out towards the North Pole and beyond.

So that is a lengthy process, which Canada, Denmark, Greenland and Russia are currently working through to try and see who has jurisdiction, not ownership, but jurisdiction over the subsea resources there. And that's actually moving through the process, the legal process, fairly reliably at present. And that really isn't going to come to a head probably for at least a decade or two, because that's the speed at which this process moves. What about the issue of, you know, who owns the waterways or who has jurisdiction over the waterways? And I, you know, I think of the Northwest Passage because, you know, who owns the waterways or who has jurisdiction over the waterways. And I, you know, I think of the Northwest Passage because, you know, we always talk about it.

But, you know, I can recall that great story of, I think it was Mulroney and Reagan, you know, looking at a globe together in the prime minister's office in Ottawa during one of Reagan's visits to Ottawa in the early 80s. And somehow they ended up pointing to the Northwest Passage or that area. And Reagan talked about, well, you know, we can move our ships through here or submarines or whatever. And Mulroney said, no, no, no, wait a minute.

That's ours. We own that. Like, that is part of Canada. And it seems to me that that's you know there there are definitely Americans who believe that's not the case that if they want to sail through there they'll sail through there and there are and there are more than that I think Russians too I mean Russian cruise ships and and that have used those waterways I think they've asked permission first of all but there is this kind of assumption that, you know, it's an international waterway. We want to use it. We use it. Where are we on that?

Well, that dispute, if you can call it a dispute, has not really moved in its essentials since it crystallized in the 1950s. And so for 70 odd years, give or take, we have largely agreed to disagree with the Americans. The Canadian position is that these waters are what are called historic internal waters, which means they are every bit as Canadian as the water running beneath Parliament Hill. We have absolute sovereignty. Whereas the Americans recognize our sovereignty over the territorial sea, but say that an international sea route exists through the waters through which they could send ships or warships if they desired. Now, that's not just

an American position. In fact, there's other countries around the world, the Germans, for instance, who maintain that same position. And that is a longstanding dispute. Now, Canada has a very good legal claim to those waters based on a number of different foundations. But the reality is this is not an active dispute. No one is really fighting over this. And we don't really expect certainly the Biden administration to try and pick a fight over this. Looking back historically, the Americans have sent hundreds, if not thousands, of ships through the Northwest Passage since the 1950s, but it has always been managed very carefully in an effort to not raise this issue and to not kick up a political or a legal fight.

Even during the Cold War, the Americans have sent submarines through the Northwest Passage, seven or eight by my count, actually. And those were always undertaken, those missions, with Canadian knowledge, often with Canadian observers on board, often to test Canadian sensor systems in the Northwest Passage. And they were managed through joint defense organizations like the Permanent Joint Board of Defense. So if you look back, there is this consistent theme where the two governments recognize that they disagree on fundamental principles of international law, but neither one really wants to get into a fight. And so both sides have bent over backwards to accommodate the other and to make sure that we can work together and cooperate in the Arctic without getting into that legal fight, like we did with Brian Mulroney. And I think the direct quote was, Ron, we own that lock stock in icebergs. Pointing to that globe, it's actually the title of my first book. There you go. Well,

to bring it back to where we started in terms of the ice melt, because you did suggest to us that this opens up the door to a lot of different discussions on the movement, trade movement, could be oil, could be basic trade materials, a shorter route, the original idea of the Northwest Passage, right? And why the explorers were looking for it for hundreds of years. Is that a, when you're talking about politics and security, is that more of an issue in terms of what could result from this melt? Well, it's possible. We're certainly seeing a lot more shipping moving through cruise ships.

Just over the last, I guess, six years now, we've seen three large, large cruise ships with up to 1,000 to 1,500 people go through the Northwest Passage, which 20 years ago would have been absolutely unprecedented. I was aboard two of them. The first voyage, they had to geek north to find ice because, of course, the passengers wanted to see ice and they had to move north in the Beaufort Sea just looking for ice. It had declined to such an extent. So you do have a lot of these new industries. You have fisheries that are growing and potentially significantly as fish migrate north following warming waters. The Northwest Passage, though, is unlikely to emerge as the kind of international sea route that it's sometimes touted as being. To begin with, it's poorly charted relative to some of the other Arctic areas, and it's also very shallow and very narrow. So the Northwest Passage is unlikely to easily accommodate the kinds of large cargo or crude

carrying ships, which would be able to sail north of Russia or through the polar basin in the event that the ice across the Arctic were to melt. So ultimately, shipping will increase in the Northwest Passage. We're going to see and we are seeing more activity, but most of that is going to be to and from Canadian sites. Resupply, mine site resupply or export, the international shipping. Some of that might take place, but honestly, I don't think the Canadian Arctic is going to emerge as the next Panama Canal. This has been fascinating. This has been a real

history lesson, I think, and a current lesson for a lot of people. I've done that trip through the Northwest Passage too, like you've done on cruise ships. I did it on an icebreaker and it's spectacular. You know, it's one of those times where you go through something and you say, God, if only all Canadians could see this in real time, because it is a spectacular trip. But as a last question to you, on this issue that's spurred as a result of the melt, what do you worry about most? Well, that's a very good question. One of the biggest worries from a practical consideration is disaster response. I think the headlines are normally going to be, if you read the papers, it's Russian militarization or sovereignty. Most likely security scenario that Canada has to face in the north is this emerging shipping and uncharted waters resulting in a cruise ship grounding. Or it results in a disaster like an oil spill or something that we are not able to respond to because, of course, our response assets in the north are minimal.

We've been building them up over the last decade or two but they're still very minimal there are no deep water ports along the northwest passage we have very little capacity to respond to oil spills our search and rescue capacity is very limited we train for a cruise ship of a thousand people grounding, but there's still no obvious answer for what we do there. I can tell you aboard one of these ships, the vessel stopped in Lancaster Sound for about an hour watching a polar bear on the ice. Maybe it was more than an hour, several hours. And the Department of Transport actually called them and said, are you okay? You stopped for quite a while now.

We're worried about you. Are you all right? Like, no, we're just watching the polar bear. And so they're very concerned and perhaps with good reason. So we're seeing that shipping. We're seeing that activity. What comes next has to be the capacity to not just police and monitor it, but assist it if necessary.

And I'll leave it at that for this discussion. It's been fabulous. And we really appreciate your time and your expertise and knowledge on this issue. Thanks very much, Adam. Well, it's a pleasure being with you, Peter. And there was assistant professor Adam Lajunas from St. FX in the Maritimes. Great to talk to him and great insight from him

about what this melt is really all about. All right, more to come, including a personal anecdote about why Arctic history can be few times to the Arctic, and whenever I have, I've tried to spend time talking to especially Inuit elders about some of the Inuit oral history and what that had been handed down to them generation after generation, was pretty good, pretty accurate, as it turned out. And both ships were found in some ways because of the history that had been told generation to generation by the Inuit. Here's another example. I was in Clyde River, north of Baffin Island, on the northern edge of Baffin Island. And I was trying to understand this change that was going on in the climate and in the Arctic.

And I went to see with a fellow, an old elderly hunter and fisherman. In his boat, we went out, and that's the picture actually on the cover art for, if you're looking at this in terms of a podcast today. That's the two of us going out by an iceberg. And while the iceberg is very dominant in the picture, the discussion we were having wasn't about that at all. This was 2006, 2007 in that area. He was telling me that he'd been hunting and fishing these areas for decades. And now, suddenly, he was seeing fish he'd never seen before. This goes back to something the professor was saying.

The water's getting warmer. Fish are moving further north. And he was seeing it. So he was seeing fish he'd never seen before. He was seeing bird life he'd never seen before. He was seeing bird life he'd never seen before. That was checking the box for him on this whole issue of climate change and a changing nature of the Arctic. So history can sometimes be told not on just a thermometer by satellite imagery, but by the people on the ground, especially those who have, like, real experience. Coming up, let you know tomorrow we've got a special guest on Smoke Mirrors and the Truth with Bruce Anderson.

When he joins us, we're going to talk to Ambassador Bob Ray, Canada's ambassador at the United Nations. Lots to talk about with Ambassador Ray. That should be fascinating. Looking forward to having that discussion. Later in the week, of course, on Thursday, it's kind of potpourri day where we try to catch up on a lot of different things that I've noticed in the last week

that are worth talking about, which aren't getting a lot of play. And on Friday, it's your day. It's the weekend special, we've been calling it for the last year or so, where we get a chance to listen to your thoughts and comments and questions through the emails that you send. So don't be shy. Send them along to themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com, themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com.

Looking forward to hearing from you. I'm Peter Mansbridge. This has been The Bridge. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours. Thank you.