Discovery
‘Focus on pollution’: Arnold Schwarzenegger urged climate activists to offer a focused, hopeful message that targets pollution rather than turning off the public with “constant alarm which cannot be sustained.”
The former California governor raised his past as the star of the “Terminator” films in an address to the Austrian World Summit in Vienna, an event he helps organize. Those movies, he said, portrayed a frightening, dystopian world but “focused on human will and on human hope.”
“No one is going to invest huge sums of money in a movie where there is no hope,” Schwarzenegger said. “Yet frequently I hear environmentalists talking about the existential threat of climate change ... we are going to be eliminated.”
“Is it any wonder that people are confused and tuned out?” he asked. “This movie doesn’t have a story line except constant alarm which cannot be sustained.”
Since leaving political office in 2011, the Austrian-American actor has devoted time to environmental causes. A Republican, he sparred with former president Donald Trump over climate issues.
Schwarzenegger argued that the public perceives the environmental movement as being “stuck in despair and confusion,” and using language that goes over people’s heads. He argued that activists need to zero in on one message: “Pollution is enemy No. 1 ... it is the very thing that causes climate change.”
“Humans can solve it — we can kill it, we can terminate it,” he said.
Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg, speaking to the same event, told participants that “you, especially leaders from high-income nations, are pretending to change and listen to the young people while you continue pretty much exactly as before.”
“You say we need to move slowly to bring the public along,” she added. “However, how do you honestly expect to bring the people along if you don’t treat this crisis like a crisis?” (AP)
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‘Last Ice Area’ melting:
Part of the Arctic is nicknamed the “Last Ice Area,” because floating sea ice there is usually so thick that it’s likely to withstand global warming for decades. So, scientists were shocked last summer when there was suddenly enough open water for a ship to pass through.
The opening, documented by scientists aboard a German icebreaker, popped up in late July and August in the Wandel Sea north of Greenland. Mostly it was due to a freak weather event, but thinning sea ice from decades of climate change was a significant factor, according to a study in the journal Communications Earth and Environment.
While scientists have said most of the Arctic could be free of summer sea ice by mid-century, the Last Ice Area was not part of that equation. They figure the 380,000-square-mile (1-million-squarekilometer) area won’t be ice-free in the summer until around 2100, said study coauthor Kent Moore, a University of Toronto atmospheric physicist.
“It’s called the Last Ice Area for a reason. We thought it was kind of stable,” said co-author Mike Steele, a University of Washington oceanographer. “It’s just pretty shocking. ... In 2020, this area melted out like crazy.”
Scientists believe the area — north of Greenland and Canada — could become the last refuge for animals like polar bears that depend on ice, said Kristin Laidre, a co-author and biologist at the University of Washington.
The main cause for the sudden ice loss was extraordinary strong winds that pushed the ice out the region and down the coast of Greenland, Moore said.
That had happened in smaller, infrequent episodes, but this time was different, Moore said. The researchers used computer simulations and 40 years of Arctic sea data to calculate that “there was a significant climate change signal” — about 20%, they estimate — in the event, Moore said. (AP)