PETER DITLEVSEN - Professor of Physics, Ice, Climate & Earth at the Niels Bohr Institute

Interviewed by Mia Funk

As we reach the tipping points of climate change, how will our world change? Greenland has already lost 4,700 billion metric tons of ice, an amount that is enough to flood the entire United States in 1.5 feet of water.

Peter D. Ditlevsen is an Associate Professor at the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University. The institute was founded in 1921 as the Institute for Theoretical Physics. Ditlevsen is a professor in physics of ice, climate, and earth. His fields of interest include climate research, turbulence, meteorology, complex systems, time series analysis, and statistical physics.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

What happens if we lose the Greenland ice sheet and pass the tipping points and Earth systems shut down?

PETER D. DITLEVSEN

If that shuts down, roughly speaking, the climate of Northern Europe would be like the climate of Alaska. So, climate models that actually simulate what happens when it's shut down, would say that England becomes like Northern Norway, which means that food security and things like that will be threatened because you cannot grow many crops in Northern Norway. And other models say precipitation changes, so places that are wet might become dry, and so on. So, these are of course severe consequences for Europe, but in some sense, this is going in the opposite direction of global warming. We're all talking about we're getting into a warmer world, but I'm talking about a cooling here. But the warm water that does not then flow from the tropics into the North Atlantic will stay in the tropics. And there, you're not contra-balancing global warming. There you will have the heating on top of the global warming. And that I see as maybe the largest problem we have is that the tropics become even warmer. And we have to realize if you live in a place where mean temperatures are maybe late thirties Celsius and or rise to the forties livelihood becomes very difficult.

The Sahara, which is not really desert, more like savannah, you might be able to change that [through geoengineering], but that's also connected with the monsoon system and all these chaotic systems are very hard to do. But the way we've deforested, the way we've made agriculture, the way we have messed with this planet. I mean, if you look at the biomass in mammals (it's us, it's cows, it's sheep, rhinoceroses, giraffes, whales...it's everything) 96 percent of that mass is human or livestock. That is, to me, an extremely scary number, that wild nature has so little room in our world.

The big problem we have with climate change is that this is not like any other crisis because it influences all parts of life. I'm a physicist. I like doing experiments. I thought, you know, how terrible would it be for me not eat meat, right? You know, I was used to going home on Friday night, putting on a steak, and a bottle of red wine. That was sort of the easy thing, right? So now, I don't buy an expensive steak. I buy some vegetables that are cheaper, okay? So I have money left over. If I spend that money on an airplane ticket somewhere, then it doesn't really matter. That's the spillover effect.

I think, in our part of the world, and if we are to be frontrunners, we have to crack that nut. We do like to think that our children should have a better world than we grew up in, and they should be better off and so on. So it should be a different kind of wealth, right? The wealth should not be having a large car and a big house and a lot of goods.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk withthe participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producers on this episode were Katie Foster and Ava Clancy. One Planet Podcast & The Creative Process is produced by Mia Funk. Additional production support by Sophie Garnier.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).

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JEFFREY ROSEN

President & CEO of the National Constitution Center
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PETER D. DITLEVSEN

Professor of Physics, Ice, Climate & Earth at the Niels Bohr Institute

What happens if we lose the Greenland ice sheet and pass the tipping points and Earth systems shut down?

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The Green New Deal presents itself as a kind of radical policy. If you look at the content, it's just simply the continuation of what capitalism wants to do. It's a massive investment in new, allegedly green industries, with the creation of more jobs with higher wages, but these are not the things that socialists or any environmentalists should be actually seeking because we recognize that capitalism is basically the root cause of the climate crisis and the misery of the workers. If so, I think it is high time to imagine something radically very different from business-as-usual capitalism.

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American Jews were interested and involved in Palestinian rights all the way back to 1948. There's this idea that it came about just now or in the 1970s, but actually as long as there's been a Nakba. As long as there's been Palestinian refugees, there’s been American Jews concerned with that, too. I would say that a lot of times these American Jews were very well informed and spent time in the region, and they came to these conclusions often not in the United States, but over there where they were talking to the Israeli left and meeting Palestinians and seeing a situation that they don't feel is ethical or sustainable.

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MICHAEL STICKA

President/CEO of the GRAMMY Museum

It's actually right in our mission statement that “we celebrate the music of yesterday and today to inspire the music of tomorrow.” And we do it through our exhibits. We have 35,000 square feet of galleries. We travel exhibits, really, all over the world over the world for the past 15 years. And through our education programs, we really focus on the next generation of music's creators and leaders. We do that through really specific curricula that is designed to educate particularly young people, K-12, about the business of music, especially for those who want to go into the industry.

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PETER DITLEVSEN - Professor of Physics, Ice, Climate & Earth at the Niels Bohr Institute

Interviewed by Mia Funk

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