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Green and Bold: Conversations from the CSU Spur Climate Hub podcast series will arm listeners with reliable climate knowledge and inspiration by featuring some of the most innovative climate champions in the U.S. Mountain West, from academia, industry and the public sector – all actively moving the needle in climate. Our conversations are science-based, non-partisan, hopeful, and timely. We focus on positive change in the region, and the people behind the change. Through punchy, bi-weekly conversations, we explore climate change through the lens of solutions and meaningful action.
0:00:03 - Veera Mitzner
Hello and welcome to the Green and Bold podcast. I'm Veera Mitzner, the director of the Colorado State University's Climate Hub. Today we are diving into a topic that has attracted surprisingly little public attention - sea level rise caused by the collapse of ice sheets and glaciers in Antarctica and technologies that can help prevent some of the worst outcomes. Did you know that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, has predicted sea levels to rise between a foot and a half and six feet by the end of the century?
And did you know that every inch of sea level rise will displace 2.5 million people? This means that even in the best-case scenario, we're expecting to witness the displacement of between 50 and 100 million people in the coming decades. To put this into a context, World War II displaced 50 million people.
This alone is concerning, but there is also a wild card.
A glacier in Antarctica called the Thwaites Glacier, or the Doomsday Glacier, that might collapse within our lifetimes and rise the sea levels by at least six feet. This collapse would lead to the displacement of hundreds of millions of people. It is fascinating how a development in a seemingly remote place can so profoundly impact the lives of so many people around the globe. But this is what climate change is, a reminder of how connected we all are. It is a shared cause and a shared opportunity. Brent Minchew’s research focuses on glacier dynamics, ice sheet physics, and sea level projection, drawing on satellite remote sensing, field observations, and computational modeling to constrain the timing and magnitude of ice sheet driven sea level change.
Before entering academia, he served eight years on active duty in the US Marine Corps, then earned degrees in aerospace engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and a PhD in geophysics from Caltech.
He has held faculty positions at MIT and Caltech and his current work bridges fundamental ice sheet science with actionable approaches to one of the most consequential and least reversible dimensions of climate change. I really enjoyed my conversation with Dr. Brent Minchew, who is a professor of geophysics at the California Institute of Technology and the co-founder of the Arête Glacier Initiative. Brent is studying a technology that one day might save us from the worst calamity of rising sea levels. He also is a firm believer of human agency and the power we have to turn things around. Up next, my conversation with Dr. Brent Minchew. Thank you.
0:02:47 - Dr. Brent Minchew
What's really important about this and what the natural examples tell us is if we're able to pull this off, if we're able to get the glacier to start to freeze itself to the bed, it will stay stable for centuries after that without any additional energy input, without any additional workings from humans or anything. It is all part of the natural process.
0:03:08 - Veera Mitzner
Good morning, Brent, and welcome to the Green and Bold podcast. Brent, you are a professor of geophysics at Caltech and the chief scientist of the Arête Glacier Initiative. And you do work that could almost be from a science fiction novel and it kind of is. For those who have read Kim Stanley Robinson's bestselling book, The Ministry for the Future, will find your research quite familiar. So you work to stabilize ice sheets to avoid the worst-case scenario of sea level rise. Can you tell us more about this research and why is it important?
0:03:42 - Dr. Brent Minchew
Absolutely. Yeah, so we work to try to understand how we might stabilize an ice sheet the size of Mexico, which is the West Antarctic ice sheet. And the reason for that is that the West Antarctic ice sheet is by far the largest source of uncertainty in future sea level rise. And by that, I mean, if we're going to get sea level rise around two meters or so by the end of the century, or six feet by the end of the century, which is something that would displace hundreds of millions of people around the world, and that most of that sea level rise really has to be driven by what happens in West Antarctica.
There are other primary contributors to sea level rise, such as the expansion of ocean waters as they warm, melting of the Greenland ice sheet and so forth, and these are important contributors. But they're relatively predictable as well. These are things that we can plan around.
However, some of our recent work suggests that West Antarctica is responsible for about 92% of the uncertainty in these really high-end projections of sea level rise. And that kind of makes planning coastal areas around the world, planning adaptation, planning, in some cases, the movement of communities, nearly impossible, because the difference between the low-end scenarios and the high-end scenarios are so extreme. They're trillions of dollars, and again hundreds of millions of homes. And so we work on understanding ways in which we might be able to stabilize the ice sheet, to take these worst-case scenarios off the table, to protect the natural environment within Antarctica. And to do so with the lightest touch possible, and in a way that is really motivated by natural processes within the ice sheet.
0:05:14 - Veera Mitzner
How would you do that? What is the technology?
0:05:17 - Dr. Brent Minchew
Yeah, so there's kind of two broad buckets that we think about. Both of them involve drilling holes from the surface to the bed of the glacier, which is something that glaciologists have done for about 75 years. It basically involves a hot water heater and a long water hose. And so once we have a hole, we can kind of think about two broad batches of scenarios. So one, as you mentioned before, the book, The Ministry for the Future, discusses pumping water. And so moving water around at the base of the glacier influences how fast the glaciers are flowing.
Which kind of brings us to an important point. All these contributions of West Antarctica that I was talking about before are all related to how fast the glacier flows, which essentially just means how fast are the glaciers able to dump ice cubes into the ocean, just like you would dump ice cubes into your glass of water and causing it to overflow really quickly. That's what the West Antarctica sheet is doing.
And all of that fast flow in West Antarctica is really facilitated by the fact that the beds are thawed and the glaciers are sliding along the rock and the mud that is underneath them. And so by drilling to the bed and pumping out water, you kind of reduce this lubricating effect, cause the glaciers to really start to stick more to their bed and they start to slow down over time. And naturally there are complexities in the system, but a good mental image is to think about a hole that's drilled and pumping water out spraying it out into the air, which causes it to fall as snow on the surface.
The other bucket of interventions has to do with cooling the bed. Again, all these worst-case scenarios, the instability is related to the fact that the glaciers are thawed at their bed. There's water moving around, they're sliding along, there's rock in their mud at their base.
But what we know from observations and neighbors of Thwaites Glacier and neighbors of these areas that we're really concerned about in West Antarctica, are the glaciers can tend to freeze themselves to the bed as part of the natural process. And so if we're able to drill a hole and we're able to sink down essentially air conditioners or heat pumps, however you want to think about it, into the system, then we can start to cool down the bed, which reduces the rate of melting at the base. So the rate of production of the lubrication that's allowing the fast flow will cause the glaciers to start to dig themselves into the bed which will encourage further cooling because the surface of the ice is cold and the base is warm. And so there's always heat flow coming from the base of the glacier to the surface.
And so this cooling mechanism utilizes this technology that's been around for many decades, has been used in many decades for interventions in the Arctic around freezing permafrost in place, sort of dealing with permafrost slopes and so forth as they thaw.
This technology is called thermosiphons. And there's sort of the, the picture of elegance in terms of a particular strategy, which is that you take your hole that we drilled from the surface to the bed, and you're going to drop in a tube, some flexible tubing that deals with all the shearing that takes place within the glacier. And in this tube is about 100 pounds of carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide is pressurized to about 400 psi. That's about the high end of what an air compressor at Home Depot will give you.
So, you know, well within the range of existing technologies. And so under those conditions and under those pressures, the carbon dioxide is a liquid at the base of this tube.
And the tube sits in there with this liquid carbon dioxide and it starts to absorb heat from the bed, right? Remember, we're wanting to cool down the bed. So it's absorbing heat from the bed, which vaporizes the CO2.
Which causes it to rise toward the surface, where it interacts with the cold pipe that's exposed to the cold air and the colder ice. Whenever that happens, the CO2 vapor recondenses, like the droplets that form on the outside of your ice water. Whenever that recondensing happens, that releases the heat that it absorbed from the bed. The CO2 rains back down to the bottom of the pipe, and this process repeats itself. There's no additional energy input, no moving parts to the system. Our preliminary engineering studies suggest about a 30-year minimum time to failure for these different systems.
So basically you set these tubes in, they start cooling the bed, they live at least 30 years or so. Eventually they'll break once they've done their job, essentially. So you can think of them like stitches in that way.
And so those are basically the two broad buckets. Again, we drill to the bed in both cases and we either remove the lubricant to immediately start to slow down the glacier or we cool the bed to slow down the glacier over time. The advantages of both, each have their own advantages and disadvantages. So the real intervention strategy will almost certainly involve some distribution of both pumps and thermosiphons in order to get the glacier to slow down. And an important point about this that I really want to emphasize is that, and this is encouraging natural processes, and I'm happy to talk about it in some detail, but what's really important about this and what the natural examples tell us is if we're able to pull this off, if we're able to get the glacier to start to freeze itself to the bed, it will stay stable for centuries after that without any additional energy input, without any additional workings from humans or anything.
It is all part of the natural process. And that centuries then should be enough time for decarbonization efforts and so forth to take hold so that we can keep the ice in the West Antarctic ice sheet. as long as possible.
0:10:45 - Veera Mitzner
That all sounds great. And you mentioned it's a known technology, but there must be some level of risk. What are those risks and how would you mitigate them?
0:10:57 - Dr. Brent Minchew
So important, before we talk about risk, let's note that the overwhelming weight of the scientific evidence suggests that the alternative to doing these interventions is a complete collapse of the ice sheet, right? And all of its intending risks, right? So there's no world in which we're facing zero risk or zero cost scenario. We have to weigh these things against each other. So the big risks when we're going into this is kind of thinking about the actual complexities that are taking place at the bed of the glacier, right?
So I gave you a simple sort of 30,000 foot view of what is going to be a complex and involved kind of technology and scientific endeavor. In particular, we think a lot about how the rivers, lakes, and the streams at the base of the glacier move around. You know, fun fact, Antarctica is both the world's largest desert and the world's largest wetland at the same time, right?
So it's the world's largest desert on top because it doesn't have a lot of precipitation, so relatively low precipitation events and so forth. And at the base of the glacier, there's a lot of active rivers, lakes, and streams that exist. Relatively slow flow, so you can think of a lot of these areas as kind of almost swampy estuarine type of features. We don't really have a great understanding of how these systems evolve, these hydrological systems at the base of the glacier, how they move around, how they might respond to these types of interventions, which is why this is a primary focus in our roadmap at Arête for trying to understand how these pieces work.
We're doing a lot of science. We're building out ideas - from theory to laboratory to natural examples and scaling our way up, you know, just like NASA would build the rockets and so forth to get to the moon for the first time, following exactly that kind of framework, which is how humans build a lot of complex things throughout history.
And so that's kind of the biggest risk in this sense. I think that it is primarily a risk in terms of the way that we approach the problem. It's primarily a risk in the fact that it might end up being a stopper, which is to say we might end up discovering through all of this research and effort that these intervention strategies simply won't work. That the world is going to have to deal with sea level rise at coastal areas around the world, which in and of itself carries a tremendous amount of risk.
I don't foresee this at the moment if we follow good development strategies, if we're really careful with what we do and we're diligent in our research. I think that we can manage and we can quantify the risks of actual deployment in this particular type of scenario. And one of the things I really want to, kind of, to touch on and make sure that the audience sort of understands is in both cases of the intervention strategies that we were talking about before, there are off switches.
And so both of these strategies start to interact within the ice sheets and what I would typically refer to as a Goldilocks timescale. And what that means is that they, they can take hold, they can take effect and have their intended effect over time scales that are fast enough to really be able to deal with the problem. So sea level rise is exponential. That means we catch the exponential on its relatively flat slope before it really takes off and becomes a problem. But these interventions start to take hold and have their effects slow enough that if we observe things that are going wrong, something that is outside of our intended trajectory, something that is looking really bad, we can turn it all off and we can avoid any kind of catastrophic outcome.
0:14:37 - Veera Mitzner
Okay, so we have this technology, we have this massive global problem. What are the main barriers for implementation?
0:14:44 - Dr. Brent Minchew
So the policy component to all of this is a very interesting space, which we are working on right now. I think it's important to note that from a policy perspective, Antarctica is more like the moon than it is like anywhere else on earth. And that's literally true, right? The treaties that govern the use of space and lunar environment and so forth were actually designed off of use the Antarctic treaty system as a blueprint. And so Antarctica is kind of special in this way because no child has ever been raised there.
No single government has ever controlled Antarctica. It's governed entirely by the Antarctic Treaty System, which is an international treaty that was originally built up during the Cold War, kind of the mid 1950s, in some sense to avoid a military buildup within the Antarctic system. And so far, it has proven quite effective in maintaining Antarctica as a preserve, as a place for doing science, all with peaceful intent and so forth.
And so the Antarctic Treaty System is something that we're already working very closely with to try to understand the legal mechanisms within the Antarctic Treaty System and how, you know, what would be the environmental assessments and environmental protocols and so forth that these types of interventions would need to deal with. So this is something that's already front of mind that we're working to understand.
But in practical terms, what it means is, number one, this is not going to be a private endeavor.
So what it really means is that a government, most likely a government that is one of the territory claiming states in Antarctica. So there are seven of those around the world, the United Kingdom, Norway, France, Chile, Argentina, New Zealand, and Australia, or perhaps the United States, proposed to do this and this effort is done under the direction of a governmental body. So we're not looking for this to become a for-profit type of entity where private actors are doing this. In fact, Arête as you mentioned before, is a nonprofit that is working on these types of interventions.
The second, from a practical logistics perspective, is something like a medium to larger scale military deployment of that scale.
It wouldn't technically be a military deployment, but this is the types of scales that we're dealing with. So it would involve a number of people on the ice. These types of interventions and the holes that would be drilled, there would be probably a few thousand of them and so forth being drilled and deployment taking place over roughly a decade, possibly more, possibly less. The timescale of deployment depends very much on kind of the timescale of effect that people are looking for. So if we get to this early and we do good research, When we plan things out, then we can roll out deployment in a more deliberate pace.
If we wait too long and we get to the point that the exponential of sea level rise is starting to really steepen and we have to go faster, then deployment could roll along faster.
But that in and of itself, of course, entails more risks. So there's always a risk in waiting and responding in panic as opposed to working diligently and responding in time, the old adage, right? An ounce of prevention worth a pound of cure.
0:18:14 - Veera Mitzner
Have those conversations already started? And do you have an idea of how, what the scale of this work would be? What would be the cost of this?
0:18:28 - Dr. Brent Minchew
Absolutely. Yeah, so very early-stage conversations on the policy front, which is primarily kind of information gathering at this point on our end. So we are working very diligently and we have a number of partners on this. Importantly, for example, is the UCLA Law School. So we have partners in UCLA Law that are looking into understanding precisely what the procedures are. We have advisors who decades of experience in Antarctic diplomacy and so forth as advisors to help us understand what the procedural aspects of all of this are.
So all that is starting and getting underway. We imagine that the research and development for deployment will take roughly 10 years. And so we're also spinning up and understanding the policy framework as we go.
In terms of the overall cost and the scale, I mean, this is something that's sort of hard to estimate right now, but if we do simple sort of first order estimates based on current costs of supporting teams in Antarctica, drilling holes in Antarctica, and so forth, then we're getting an estimate up to kind of the tens of billions of dollars range. Somewhere around in there. Which is important to kind of compare to, again, the costs of dealing with sea level rise around the world, right? So we have to deal with sea level rise one way or another.
There's going to be high costs involved one way or another, but the cost of, you know, seawalls, for example, coastal barriers and so forth, they're approaching a billion dollars per mile. And so when we're talking about interventions costing a few tens of billions of dollars, we're talking about the cost of interventions of order what US cities are already planning to spend in order to protect their coastlines.
The city of Houston is looking to spend $50 billion to build slightly less than 60 miles of coastal barriers, right? That's where this number approaching $1 billion per mile actually comes from. This is real data and what people are developing. New York City is looking to spend $50 billion, and so forth. Los Angeles spent $50 billion to prepare for the Olympics. And so the types of costs that we're dealing with here are the kind of things that individual major cities spend and will spend on things. And so this would be a global cost of that amount of money paid for by, ideally, by the wealthiest countries in the world, which are all the ones that, which all have major coastlines and face major risks from sea level rise.
So it'll be a bargain for those countries. The other aspect, you know, you can look at this and coastal flood damage is projected to go into the several trillions of dollars per year by roughly mid-century, somewhere around in there, due to sea level rise. And so the, you know, we're looking at least a thousand X return on investment for doing something like interventions, which are very localized in space, but we'll have this global benefit in terms of savings. And all of this is, of course, nothing about the effects on people, right?
The idea that you could potentially safeguard the homes of hundreds of millions of people by also protecting the ice sheet at the same time and remediating it.
0:21:48 - Veera Mitzner
You co-founded the Arête Glacier Initiative last year to move your knowledge and research into action. Can you tell us a little bit more about the initiative and how it can be a vehicle for change? I'm also curious if you work with coastal communities and cities, through your initiative?
0:22:07 - Dr. Brent Minchew
So the initiative, I should point out, is quite new. We launched on the first annual, the inaugural World Day for Glaciers, as designated by the UN, which was essentially the first day for the decade of action for the cryosphere, also designated by the UN. And so that was March of 2025. So we've only been around for a little over a year or so. It took roughly a year or so of development and whatnot behind the scenes in order to get ready for that launch. So we're a very nascent, very young organization that is developing things out.
As you mentioned, designed to translate research that's done through basic science into actionable sea level forecasts, which is something that we're working on and we're going to put out a lot of first products this year.
And then also to research the intervention piece. So dealing with this dual question of how fast are sea levels going to rise and what are we going to do about it? And so the initiative is sort of launched. Myself and my longtime colleague, Colin Meyer, who's a professor at Dartmouth, launched this initiative together essentially because we were kind of growing tired of just answering the question of how bad will things be? Which is a lot of forecasting. And we wanted to ask the question of how good can things be?
Like, what can we do to sort of, to lean toward a better future? And this is not simply theoretical. I mean, we were talking about our own children's future, right? And all of these effects that we're talking about will play out within my daughter's lifetime, within the lifetime of children who are alive today.
So this is not some hypothetical far-off piece. And so both of us are kind of individuals of action, sort of motivated by trying to get things done and so forth. And both of us have an engineering background before we came into science. And so this became a sort of natural kind of switchover between the two pieces. Like, of course, we should take the knowledge that we gained through basic science and translate it into essentially engineering outputs that help many people around the world. And so Arête kind of spins up and starts to address its mission really kind of in two broad buckets of kind of day-to-day efforts, if you will.
There's one bucket that goes into the re-granting of philanthropic funds. So we're 100% philanthropic funded by a range of different funders, and we're happy to provide information about who our funders are and so forth. They come from a variety of backgrounds.
But we have this aspect of regranting that accounts for roughly 75% of our total expenditures and funding output. The other 25% of those efforts goes toward funding in-house efforts around data acquisition, database management tools, the development of computational tools, and so forth to process and analyze some of this data. And then of course, once these things are mature enough, then making those data sets and so forth available to the scientific community. And so we were building up a lot of partnerships in some cases with, for example, private satellite operators, as well as taking in some of the publicly available data.
And so everything that we do, again, we're a nonprofit. So everything that we do to the best of our ability is going to be in the public domain, is going to be published, is going to be made accessible and so forth. And so we were kind of built around this idea as well that if you, well, a couple of things. Number one, traditionally the funding for understanding sea level rise and its impact around the world has been truly abysmal in the sense that kind of even in the good times, the total amount of US federal funding is maybe $10 million, somewhere around in there per year, which is trivial compared to the overall cost and certainly not enough to be able to do the science and do the research that we need to really be able to quantify these risks.
And so I think that the glaciologists in the field that have worked under these conditions for a long time and made the, you know, made the advances that we've made and gotten to the point where understanding, I mean, this is, this is an incredible effort and they deserve a lot of credit for it, but they're really, really working against this, this headwind. Right? And so we need to be able to switch that, right? We need to be able to give people a tail and there needs to be more funding that rolls into the, to the field.
We need to be able to attract people who have solve very similar problems in other fields, but maybe we don't yet see the connection between existing solutions and the problems that we have on front and so forth. We need to be able to pay people a living wage. The universities, sometimes outside of the faculty, sometimes they're hard for people with technical skills to live on, and it's hard to compete with tech companies and so forth on salary bases.
And we're never going to be able to compete directly with tech companies, but we can certainly at least provide a living wage to some people who work on these different pieces and so forth, right? So we can attract good people. And so my usual joke about what's going on at Arête is that we get champagne talent on a beer budget, right? And so that's really proven out true because there are so many people out there that really want to be part of something different, something special.
You know, there's a lot of people out there that don't just want to continue to hear about how bad are things going to be. They want to be able to ask the question of how good can we make the future, you know, for our children and so forth. And so it's, you know, it's built on all these kind of different aspects.
You know, the need for some translational institution. There is no such institution in the world right now. Nothing that acts like, for example, the National Weather Service. You know, it has traditionally provided accurate weather forecasts. There's just not enough funding in the field to come anywhere close to even addressing the question of how fast will sea levels rise, much less to address the question of what are we going to do about it. So we need to kind of come in with a different idea to try to bring in funding and whatnot to be able to pay talented people to be able to come up with good ideas and help to develop them.
And then ultimately, we need to be able to organize this, build compute around it, make sure that, you know, data is being collected and make sure that monitoring is happening. Did you know that there's no persistent monitoring happening in the West Antarctic ice sheet right now?
I mean, we get satellite observations and so forth, but there's no persistent monitoring that takes place. And one of the riskiest areas in the entire world and for coastlines around the world, there's nothing, but there needs to be. We need to be able to have persistent monitoring and data collection capacity within the ice sheet, not just satellites flying overhead, although that's really important. But we need instruments on the ice to be able to take detailed measurements of what's going on. This is the fastest changing part of the cryosphere in the world.
The two outlet glaciers, Thwaites Glacier and Pine Island Glacier, that we're really concerned about, each of them is losing on net 50 billion tons of ice per year. And we don't have a great way to really understand the different aspects of all that. So Arête is built around all of these different ideas, as well as providing an institutional home for rigorous and effective research and development into interventions that could stabilize the ice sheet and therefore stabilize sea level rise for coastal communities around the world.
0:30:06 - Veera Mitzner
That's great. And it seems that the awareness raising piece is extremely important because I'm really surprised that there isn't more discussion about this within the climate community. Hopefully that changes through your work and through your colleagues' work. My final question is, what are you watching closely that you think will matter in the next five years? A very general question, but I'm just curious about your shorter-term perspective here.
0:30:34 - Dr. Brent Minchew
So a number of things. I think awareness is the biggest piece. So when, you know, if you had asked me this question five years ago, I would have told you that I'm sure that everybody is aware of the risks and concerns of West Antarctica. Because I lived in a bubble, surrounded by people who thought about almost nothing else except for that. And what I came to discover is that that's just not true, but it's becoming more and more true thanks to folks like yourself and thanks to some traditional media outlets and so forth that are starting to talk about this.
So it needs to be an issue that is really elevated to a high degree because the risks are unavoidable and they cannot continue to be ignored.
And so that's the big piece. And with awareness comes a lot of interest and excitement from a number of different aspects of society, if you will. From individuals, again, very talented individuals who show up and want to apply their skills. I'll call out one example. We've had some folks that were very successful building out database tools for finance industries and a number of other folks show up and say, hey, we volunteer to build your database tools. We would love to be able to help with that and to be able to do these things. And they did. You know, they show up and they do a great job and they work with our internal team and they really build out these things in short order.
We have a number of folks that come in and say, hey, look, we're concerned with, you know, our grandchildren's future or something along those lines and we would like to contribute something to this. And they do. And we have, again, a nice long list and a diverse list of funders that are really on board with this idea and starting to put it out. And then I think the third piece, you know, you have, you have the awareness, you have the talent and, you know, fundings are starting to roll in.
And then the technology for, in terms of observations in particular is really taking a turn. What things look like now is so much better or what seems possible now is so much greater than what seemed possible just a few years ago in terms of we're seeing a lot more interest in earth observations within the private sector and so forth that really augments the national science agencies and so forth around the world.
And so the satellites and the resources that are put forward by NASA and ESA and these other national level space agencies is wonderful. And it's starting to become augmented in really important ways by the private sector. So different companies around the world ICEYE is this great example of a company that was formed in Finland. There's a US contingent. They launch a lot of satellites around the world that are useful to us. Planet Labs is another great example of these companies that are putting things out.
For new technologies, I've worked a long time on high altitude long endurance aircraft. Aircraft that can fly for months at a time over the ice sheet and collect continuous observations. And we are months away from first test flights of that kind of technology, right? I’ve been working on it for 10 years and we're just, we're getting there to that exciting point.
There's big changes afoot. You know, I recently moved from MIT to Caltech and Caltech is super motivated about forming a polar science program and adding their own particular flavor to all of this and collaboration and connection, of course, with the jet propulsion laboratory, which Caltech manages.
And so there's just, there's a lot of things that are going on, you know, to to steal a line from Arête’s Executive Director, Melissa Barnes is to say that, you know, climate has never looked more grim than it is right now, but we've never had a greater ability to do something about it. And so the future seems more and more bright in terms of, yes, this is a major problem. Yes, it's a major challenge. Yes, a lot of these things seem crazy and they look impossible at the moment on these sort of certain outsets. But we can do this. We have the ability to sort of move things forward if we really put our back into it and we really start to adapt these different technologies, if we really bring together this diverse group of people that are coming at it and looking at this problem from all kinds of different ways, like this is a problem that, at least to some degree, is solvable.
You know, the scars of climate change will, of course, be left behind and there will be impacts. I don't want to minimize the fact that, you know, we can't switch any of this off. We can't make it zero cost. We can't make it zero risk.
But where can we really go a long way, though, to reducing the potential harm if we just decide that we're going to do that, that we're going to really put our energy into reducing the harm that's going to come to people in the future based on actions that happened in the past? We can do it. We can move this forward. So these are the things that give me hope. I actually wake up feeling positive every single day that there's something that can be done.
And I hope that anybody that listens to this will take away this message of hope. It's not all doom and gloom. It's not impossible. It's not unaffordable. It's not any of these things. We can just decide to solve these problems. And we can, again, at least to some degree. And I don't want to minimize the cost, but let's also not minimize the potential for reducing those costs.
0:36:27 - Veera Mitzner
I fully agree. Thank you. This is a wonderful note to end today. There's so many solutions out there and you've outlined one of them in our conversation. So thank you so much, Brent, for joining us today. Good luck with your work. It's extremely important. And yeah, thank you.
0:36:48 - Dr. Brent Minchew
No, thank you so much. It's been great. Thanks for having me.
0:36:55 - Veera Mitzner
Thanks so much for listening to Green and Bold. I'm Veera Mitzner, director of the CSU Climate Hub at Spur. You can learn more about Dr. Brent Minchew and his work with Arête Glacier Initiative through the links in the show notes. This show is produced by me, Kevin Samuelson and Allison Sylte with audio engineering and editing by Kevin.