Today, Explained - The Colder War

Episode Date: March 15, 2018

There’s a new Cold War being fought in the North Pole between the United States and Russia (but also China, Finland, Norway, Canada, Greenland and more). Fueling the battle is the melting Arctic, which just had its warmest winter in recorded history. Vox’s Brian Resnick gives us the science before Yochi Dreazen takes us to the war. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Okay, Luke Vanderplug, Today Explained producer. We're here at Mattress Firm in Brentwood, D.C., and today we try the Firm mattresses. I am so pumped. Let's do it. Also, if you can't make it into a store right now, check out mattressfirm.com slash podcast. Brian Resnick.

Hey. Science reporter here at Vox.com. You've requested my presence here for some sort of experiment. Yeah, we're going to do a little science demonstration for you. What do we do first? We're going to grab a glass from the cabinet. Okay, great. I have a glass, you have a glass.

What's next? Let's get some ice. Ice. Ice, baby. We have one of these fridges that makes ice for us. It looks like we have like two regular sized glasses about filled with ice cubes but now what are we gonna do? Fill your glass up with water. It just says near the top. Okay, now we're heading to the studio, huh? Let's do it.

Okay, Brian. I've got my glass of water. I've got mine. I've got a glass of water. I got mine. I've got a marker. Do you have yours? Yep, purple. Okay, what happens now? So draw a line where the water level is. I am drawing a line on a glass that belongs to Vox Media.

I hope they don't mind. So what's next? We, uh, we wait. Why don't we do an interview while we're at it? Sure, sure. What do you want to know? Tell me what's going on in the Arctic right now. So the Arctic has had one of its warmest, wildest winters in recent history, perhaps in recorded human history.

Could you take me there? Tell me what it looks like? Set a scene for me. Arctic in winter, it is a desert. It is cold, it is blank, it is white, it is frozen. And in the winter, due to the seasons and the tilt of the earth, there's no sunlight up there. The sun doesn't rise on the North Pole until the equinox. All said and done, this winter was the warmest winter on record for the Arctic that we know of. And this week, actually on Tuesday, Nature Communications came out with a study that's finding an association actually between those warm Arctic winters and like weirdly cold weather

we're having in the United States. So if you think the Arctic is this far away place, like the weather up there impacts weather all around the world. When we talk about the Arctic, are we talking about Greenland? Are we talking about Canada? Are we talking about the Arctic, are we talking about Greenland? Are we talking about Canada? Are we talking about Russia? Or are we talking about some separate body of ice? So the Arctic is mostly an ocean. It's mostly a frozen ocean or supposedly frozen ocean. And yes, all these countries do creep into the Arctic Circle. So in the winter, we're supposed to have a lot of ice up in the north, which makes sense. It's the North Pole. It's frozen. There's no light up there. It's very cold. And the ice is supposed

to grow and grow and grow. Last year was the lowest ever amount of ice at its maximum. And the year before that was the lowest ever amount of ice at its maximum. And it's looking like this year is also going to set a new record low. Every year, NOAA releases an Arctic report card where they assess the health of the Arctic. And NOAA is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration? I think you got that right. Yeah. Okay, good. So they basically conclude is like, the Arctic is not reliably frozen as it used to be.

Every indicator seems to point to like, this is not reversing at all. Is there a chance that we'll just completely run out of ice up there? These ice scientists are projecting a circumstance where they're calling the ice-free Arctic. So basically in the summer, you know, when the ice shrinks and shrinks and shrinks, if it ever gets below a million square kilometers of ice, they're going to declare the Arctic virtually ice-free. This is when the Arctic becomes very accessible. The shipping, it becomes an ocean. And yes, there will be some ice around the North Pole, but it's not

that much. And scientists are always reassessing this timeline of when we're going to get to this ice-free Arctic. It's probably going to happen sometime this century. Wow. That timeline to that ice-free Arctic might be speeding up even. By the way, are we going to talk about this glass of ice water I have in front of me? Can I drink it? No, no, no, no, no. Put it down, put it down.

Putting it down, putting it down. You ruined the demonstration. Okay. Just let it sit and let's wait and you'll see. Fine, fine, fine. So ice-free Arctic, Brian, is that real? Can that be real? The Arctic is supposed to be boring.

It's supposed to be frozen. It's supposed to be this wasteland of nothing. Yeah. What we've been seeing, even in the last 10 years, is really dramatic. We're witnessing the fastest decline in sea ice in at least 1,500 years, and perhaps even longer than that. Does melting ice mean even more climate change? You know, is New York going to drown pretty soon? So this whole time we've been talking about sea ice, which when sea ice melts, it actually doesn't raise the water level. So before we had this glass of water, it was full of

ice. Has some ice melted? A lot of the ice has melted. Crazy thing. The water level hasn't changed a nick. And so that's what basically is happening in the Arctic. And this is related to Archimedes' principle, which is this ancient Greek mathematician. Basically, the amount of water that's displaced in a container is proportional to the mass of the thing you place in the container. So basically what happens because ice is less dense than water, when it melts, it basically just fills in the space that it displaced. So you're basically

going to end up with the same water level in any case. I guess we're good then? We're good on sea level rise because the water level in my cup didn't rise at all? Something is different here. So the surface of that glass is no longer ice. That ice kind of was like the crust on top of the water. Water holds on to more heat. Like the ice is bright and reflective. It will send a lot of radiation back up into space. So basically what happens when you have less ice, the Arctic warms. So it's kind of this little bit of a feedback loop. And the danger is that we have Greenland, which is covered in ice too, and this is different. So if that ice were to fall into the sea, it would contribute to sea level rise because it's not currently a part of that system. You're adding more mass, you're adding more volume.

I see. If all of the Greenland ice sheet was to melt, I think it's about, we're looking at about 25 feet of sea level rise. So ice that's already in the water melting does not raise sea level. Does not raise sea level. But new ice, i.e. Greenland, breaking off, falling into the sea, that's the stuff that's causing sea level to rise. Absolutely. And also, as we've been seeing less and less ice in the Arctic, we have seen an acceleration of melting in Greenland.

There aren't a lot of people up there in this place we're talking about, but will that maybe change? Historically, it's been pretty hard to get a boat through the Arctic Ocean in the winter because it's been covered in ice. This year, there was a little bit of a milestone. A tanker for the first time ever made an Arctic Ocean passage off the north coast of Russia. And it's weird to kind of think of the north coast of Russia. It's like where the map ends. It's supposed to be the edge of the world. But turns out this year, because of the warming,

a tanker was able to make this north passage through the Arctic Ocean. It was the first time ever. Where did it go? It went from the north coast of Russia to... It sailed from South Korea to a port in northern Russia. Wow. That was impossible until... Until this year. Yeah. This is the first winter that a ship has done that. Why wasn't that like news? It was news. I read it in The Guardian. Yeah, just because you didn't read it doesn't mean it wasn't news.

Happened. The Christophe de Margerie is a Russian-owned tanker. It will go down in history as the first ship to complete a journey through the northern sea route without any icebreaker escorting it. After the break, new waterway equals new gold Rush, and everyone's getting in on it. China, Russia, the United States, even Finland. Finland! This is Today Explained. Okay, Luke, here we are standing above a Serta Firm mattress here at Mattress Firm.

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This is Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos-Verm, and there is big news from the North Pole. It's literally a new ocean opening up. Joachim Driessen, foreign editor at Vox, host of The Worldly Podcast. So you've got Finland, Norway, Russia, China, and the US are all up there. China might seem somewhat surprising given that they're not a country we normally think of when we think of the Arctic. But they're there for the same reasons Russia is there and the US is there, which is if you want to have a new trade route, going through the Arctic saves you time and money. So it's really valuable financially. It also holds huge amounts of oil. And then if you want to get all of that, you need to have some way of protecting it, which is where the military part comes in. And there, Russia is so far out ahead of China,

and China is so far ahead of the US, the numbers are kind of startling. Wow. So is this kind of like the biggest deal politically as far as trade and access is concerned since like the Panama Canal or even bigger? Is there some sort of precedent here? Panama Canal is a good one. The Suez Canal is another good one. Okay. If it works, the cost of going from Europe to Asia plummets. It's almost as if the Panama Canal also had oil, so that as you were moving down the Panama Canal, you could also take oil with you. And so who's got the biggest claim to this? Who can really say like, come on guys, it's us. Is it Canada or is it Russia? It doesn't feel like it's the United States.

No, it's definitely not the United States. Legally, there are parameters set up to determine off this, but in practice, they don't matter all that States. No, it's definitely not the United States. Legally, there are parameters set up to determine all of this, but in practice, they don't matter all that much. What matters much more so is the kind of facts on the ground. Russia is reopening bases that haven't been used since the Cold War. They're building airstrips that will have Russian soldiers living there permanently. The buildup in the Arctic by the Russians has been quite dramatic. The U.S. knows about this.

We even have Republican senators like Dan Sullivan from Alaska talking about it really explicitly at Jim Mattis' confirmation hearing to be Secretary of Defense. Four new Arctic brigades, 14 operational airfields, 16 deep water ports, 40 icebreakers with 13 more on the way. And I can't see the Russians building up

this entire fleet without the United States doing something in return, right? Last month you saw the Commandant of the Coast Guard, the head of it, Paul DeComft. We are an Arctic nation. Making an announcement about how the U.S. was ready and the U.S. was going to be part of this fight in the future. Very soon, I'm talking tomorrow, we will release a request for proposal to acquire the first heavy icebreaker that will recapitalize our nation's fleet of icebreakers. What exactly is an icebreaker? Is it exactly what it sounds like?

Basically what it is is a very heavy ship that has a plow at the end of it. Okay. And it goes very, very slowly. It tries to see ahead of itself where there's ice that's softer, and they sort of mush their way through it very, very, very slowly. The reason why the weight matters is

normal ships, if they hit ice, can topple. Sure. Titanic. So if you're a normal ship trying to ice break, you're going to flip over. So these ships are unusually heavy. They move unusually slowly. And they need a huge amount of energy. So Russia has nuclear-powered ice breakers.

They have six and are building three more. China is building nuclear-powered ice breakers. The U.S. isn't. But the nuclear-powered ones have both the weight and the kind of just sheer thrust, where these things smash against ice and the ice begins to break and crack apart. So right now it's just this big frozen thing. And we're trying to cut roads into it, which would make shipping from Europe to Asia much cheaper and much faster. Isn't it melting? Why do we need to go break it?

It's melting, but not fast enough. Fast enough for us to go just race through it. So even as ice melts, in some ways it's more dangerous, because then you're moving along kind of cheerfully in open water. And then suddenly there's a big piece of ice that melted off something else. It's almost like an obstacle course now. And those bobbing pieces of ice are the things that are now kind of the risk to ships. The fact that the Coast Guard is now taking bids, it'll be at least a decade until the thing's operational. And that will give us two.

Russia has 40. Oh my gosh, they have a fleet. Six of those are nuclear powered and they're building three more. What? We'll have two a decade from now. They'll have 40 something and they're nuclear powered. Is the worth of access to this sea, of access to the land, of access to the oil, can we say this is billions, this is trillions of dollars?

It's trillions for sure. And whether you're talking about tens of trillions, but it's in the trillions because it's thought to have some of the largest oil reserves left in the world, so that by itself could be hundreds of billions if not more. But then add in shipping, you're talking in the trillions. Has this race to the Arctic shelf to break ice and plant flags been named yet? It's too bad the Cold War is taken. Yeah.

Cold War would be a good one. We were joking about a client, Slay Warfare. Slay Warfare? Because Russia loves to put out on its various Twitter accounts, photos of Russian troops with machine guns and like all white kind of video game outfits being pulled in slaves by reindeer. Sounds kind of Bond-y. It does. Or like Inception. Oh, yeah. That scene in Inception. Totally. When they get real deep. going to drown one day. Is Russia and China and the United States and Norway and Finland

staking claims to the Arctic a tacit acknowledgement of climate change, or is it a very clear acknowledgement? No, it's very clear. And you'd asked about whether there's kind of a name for this. The name that a lot of people use is the new great game, referring back to a century or so ago when people were fighting about colonial possessions and not caring about the people who lived in those colonial possessions. Every country in the world, and frankly, including the United States military, is saying climate change is real. It is happening. We have to figure out how to make money off of it. But for these countries, there's no debate whatsoever. The only question is, how much do you take and how?

And then you talk about the United States. We have a president who, when he was campaigning, said things like, So Obama's talking about all of this with the global warming and that a lot of it's a hoax. What's really striking is just how far Trump goes to not acknowledge this as a risk. Under President Obama, there's a document called the National Security Strategy of the United States, which explicitly said that climate change was a national security threat. When Trump released his in January, it stripped that out. So under President Obama, climate change was a national security threat.

Under Trump, it is not. It doesn't necessarily matter because the Pentagon, which is the part that actually has to do this in practice, does take climate change as a reality. And when Pentagon officials are questioned, when Pentagon documents come out, there's no ambiguity. They just say climate change is real, it's a threat, and we're preparing for it. And so the military itself in January released a report that said 50% of its bases could be hit hard by climate change. They could be submerged. They

could be hit by wildfire, by drought, by heat. Basically half the bases the U.S. now has might be unusable. So for them, not only is it not like an abstract political debate, it's not even about the Arctic. It's about bases on the mainland United States in Hawaii and elsewhere that might be underwater. As far as this actual issue we're talking about here, this opening of a new ocean, how does having a president who isn't on board with what the military is doing up there set us up to fail or succeed against China or Russia? If you're in the military, and I've had people who are generals and admirals say this to me explicitly, they just hope Trump doesn't notice. In theory, Congress could say, hey, DOD, we're cutting out of your budget any money you've set aside to do renewable energy, to do icebreaking,

to study climate change. But they're trying to hope that nobody notices it and they could just keep chugging along, building what they need to build without Trump telling them not to. Is it possible that the U.S. military saves our asses on this one? Yeah, so Sean, we're talking about the military saving the country when the military itself is saying half of its bases may be unusable because of climate change. So they could do their best, but if their bases are submerged, hit by wildfire, hit by drought, it's kind of like 10 plagues. And if that's ravaging the military, and the military itself is what we're counting on, we are deeply and profoundly fucked. Thank you. holy guacamole 17 mattresses later true to their name mattress firm seems to have a whole

lot of firm mattresses what do you you think? Are you a firm guy? You know, there's still one more type to try. Wow. Wow. You still got an appetite for this. Okay. Mattressfirm.com slash podcast. Tomorrow, we find out if Luke Vanderbloom, today's Explained Producer, is a soft, medium,

or firm mattress man. That's me.