It’s raining in the Arctic. That’s … not good.

Jordan: As I record this, it’s been raining for 36 hours or so in Toronto. It’s going to rain for another day. They tell me. And so what? Right? That’s spring. And somehow even though a warming climate means more rain almost everywhere, I tend not to worry about it unless it’s extreme weather. Well into every place. A little rain must fall. No. Well, it turns out I forgot that in our new climate era, that little aphorism also includes the Arctic. And again, even though it should seem obvious, I had not really considered the impact of the snow that usually falls in our Arctic changing to rain and everything that means. April showers in Toronto or BC or Nova Scotia bring May flowers and in Canada’s Arctic they bring nothing good. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Ed Struzik is a writer for the Island Press in Washington DC and a fellow at Queen’s Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy at Queen’s University. This story appeared in the Tyee. Hey Ed.

Ed Struzik: Hello. Why don’t you start by giving us a sense- most of us don’t live near the Arctic, don’t have much familiarity with it other than it’s supposed to be cold. What is normal for the Arctic in terms of both temperature, I guess, and most importantly, given what we’re about to talk about precipitation?

Ed Struzik: Well, it depends on which part of the Arctic you’re in because it’s circumpolar. It goes right from Alaska through Siberia. Typically here in Canada, it’s a very continental climate. North of the Arctic Circle. You have annual precipitation, say 20 years ago range from about 10 inches in southern areas to as few as two inches on the Arctic Island. So it’s almost a desert-like climate, but you have this incredible variability in temperatures across the Arctic. So the McKenzie Valley, I remember kayaking doing a solo kayak trip from the Nahanni River down the Liard River to down the Mackenzie over a 68-day period. And I was having temperatures that went from anywhere from, I had snow at times to 32, 34 degrees. And you can imagine what it’s like being on a river when it’s 34 degrees and you’ve got virtually 24 hours of sunlight. I got fried. So it can be extremely hot, but it’s often very, very cold.

Jordan: And you mentioned that a lot of the Arctic is typically like a desert. What does that look like in terms of precipitation levels and maybe explain how we realized that this was changing.

Ed Struzik: Well, typically when I went up to the Arctic, say 40 years ago, it was covered, the Arctic Ocean was covered in ice nine, 10 months of the year. And so there’s very little energy coming off the water to produce the weather that you get, say on the Pacific or the Atlantic side. And that’s why you don’t get a lot of precipitation. And so the ecosystem really does, especially on the Arctic Islands look like a desert. There’s not a lot growing there. There’s a lot of sand gravel. There’s a few exceptions such as Banks Island on the Western Archipelago that tends to be much more lush. But that’s because it’s more influenced by the bearing sea and the Beaufort Sea maritime conditions. What’s happened over the last 40 years is that we’re starting to see a lot more rain, 60% more rain over the last 20 years or precipitation over the last 20 years because the Arctic Ocean is no longer frozen as long as it has. And so you’re creating a lot of energy to create those rain clouds. And we’re actually seeing thunderstorms forming near the North Pole, which would’ve been unheard of. And in fact, meteorologists when they started seeing this four or five, six years ago, were absolutely gobsmacked by this kind of event. There’s one famous thunderstorm that moved across Alaska in 2015. It shot out 65,000 bolts of lightning in a five-day period and triggered 286 fires from that lightning but produced almost no rain. So it really didn’t help the fire situation. 2015 was the worst fire season in Alaska and one of the worst in the Arctic.

Jordan: Why are rain onto snow events so important when we are discussing the climate of the Arctic and how it’s changing,

Ed Struzik: It’s a simple answer to that is that you get a cover of snow and then it rains and it essentially turns that snow into ice or really a crusty layer of very hard snow that makes it very difficult for caribou, musk ox and other land mammals to dig through to get to the food that they need to get them through the winter. And so as a result, we’re seeing these major catastrophic die-offs, 10, 20, 30,000 animals dying in a single winter season because of rain on snow, creating what you essentially is a hockey rink they can’t get through to get the food that they need.

Jordan: Can we quantify how quickly rain on snow events are increasing and what we can expect in the short term based on what we’ve seen even just the last decade? Like how quickly is this changing?

Ed Struzik: Very quickly, I can remember this scientist, Frank Miller, who was really a character, ex-American Marine. He growled rather than talked. And when I asked him this question, are we going to see more of this in the future in a rapidly warming world? And he was not one to come to any hard and firm conclusions, but he said, if the climate models are right, we’re going to see a heck of a lot more of this. And in fact, he’s absolutely right. We had a major die off of animals on Banks Island in the high Arctic in 2003. And we’re continuing to see this happen more frequently. We now have a situation in right across the circumpolar world, but very vivid here in Canada where we’re seeing caribou simply disappearing from the landscape. And I’ll give you one example. I was on another canoe trip, a thousand kilometer canoe trip across the tundra along the back river in around 1991, 92, the Bathhurst herd, which is one of the largest herds in the world. There were 460,000 animals in that herd back then. And I recall one night, it was just before midnight, we were enjoying this beautiful midnight sun. And then we saw these clouds, dust clouds in the distance and couldn’t figure out what it was because it couldn’t have been a thunderstorm driving wind or anything like that. But then as it got closer and closer, we could see that it was caribou and I think driven by both predators and by bugs, which are just massive. And they were just on the move heading into the wind to get away from the bugs towards their camp. And it took them five hours to get past our camp. So we estimated there were probably 40 to 50,000 animals that passed through our camp that night, which was one of the great great visual scenes I’ve seen in all my years in the Arctic. That herd now used to be 460,000 and now it’s around 7,000 or 8,000 and it’s not alone. The Georgia River herd in Northern Quebec is suffering the same fate, the blue nose herd in the Arctic. The Western Arctic occurred in Alaska. All of them are collapsing and rain on snow events is one of the reasons why is that they just can’t get through the lichen to get the food that they need to get them through the winter. And the other thing that is happening is that we’re seeing a lot more wildfires burning in the Arctic and it’s burning up lichen as well. So they’re getting hit on both the summerside and the winter side.

Jordan: How might this change in the weather more frequent precipitation? As you mentioned, more fires during the summer change our own approach to the Arctic and how humans interact with it, deal with it. How we live there,

Ed Struzik: I tell people whenever I’m called upon to speak, is that the old Arctic that most of our acquainted with and still hanging onto is disappearing very, very quickly. That part of the world is warming three, four times faster than the rest of the world. And a new Arctic is unfolding, one that is completely different from the one that we are hanging onto, and it’s impacting the livelihoods of the Indigenous people who live north of the 60th parallel. Most places they can no longer hunt caribou. Musk ox an now are in decline because we’re now seeing disease taking its toll on mammals. The polar bear population in the Southern Western Hudson Bay areas, the polar bears are getting thinner and smaller and they may well disappear within the next 20 or 30 years. So all of these iconic images that we have of the Arctic also are disappearing. But one way that is affecting us in a real world truly understandable way is what’s happening to the Arctic Ocean. Before it was frozen for nine, 10 months of the year and now it’s becoming more of a warmer open body of water and it’s now creating the energy you need to have those thunderstorms. And it’s affecting our weather in South in the same way that El Nino and La Nina are affecting our weather from the South Pacific. It does it in this way is that you think of the jet stream which manufactures our weather and then drags our weather from west to east. It is dependent on the temperature difference between the Arctic and mid-latitudes. And so the bigger the difference, the stronger the jet stream. But because the Arctic is getting warmer, that jet stream is becoming really wonky and getting weaker and you’re getting these loops. And so it’s the reason why we’re seeing hot weather not being dragged away from BC in the summertime and instead we have these heat domes. And also on the other hand, why we’re seeing these atmospheric rivers coming in from the Pacific and dropping just a shitload of rain on BC and not being dragged because the jet stream is just too weak and wonky to be able to move it the way it did in the past.

Jordan: I’m fascinated by what you mentioned about a new Arctic unfolding. How would you describe the new Arctic?

Ed Struzik: Well, the new Arctic is one where it is no longer as frozen as it used to be. We also have to understand that that means that the land that most of the people live on is actually frozen permafrost that goes deep up to a hundred feet, 300 feet deep. It’s just a lot more ice than it is soil. So if you think about it, once that ice melts or thaws out, things start collapsing and we’re seeing these major landslides, major collapses along the tundra. The other thing that we’re seeing, I think that will really resonate with a lot of kids is that polar bears their habitat is disappearing because a polar bear, 90%, 95% of its diet are seals and they’re specialists. They have evolved from being a brown bear to a polar bear with a focus simply of being able to hunt seals. And so they can’t hunt seals where there’s open water, they have to fast longer and longer during the ice-free season. That means that those bears on the southern end of the range in Western Hudson Bay and Southern Hudson Bay are really having a tough time adjusting to this new arctic unfolding. And we also have beluga whales and narwhal, which are quintessentially arctic whales that are now getting tricked into staying in the Arctic longer than they should. And so what happens is that they get really warm weather in September. The ocean is still not frozen and they’re not heading back to Greenland to safe haven. They’re just sticking around because they’re thinking, well, things are fine. And then suddenly you get this deep freeze and then they get surrounded by ice and their pool of water gets smaller and smaller and you can have as many as 600, 700 whales that simply die because they can’t breathe. They can’t travel under the ice far enough to get into open water. And the other thing that’s happening to the narwhal and the beluga whales is that we have now orcas, killer whales, that used to fear ice because they cannot travel underwater for a long period of time. So they always stayed away from the Arctic. Now that the Arctic is opening up, they’re moving into the Arctic and they are now preying on those beluga whales and narwhal. So you can see this cascading effect that is happening that in the future, the polar bear may no longer be the king of the Arctic, the king of the Arctic may be the killer whale.

Jordan: What, if anything, and I realize climate moves in terms of eons, so I’m asking in the short term, practically, can we actually do about this to make the arctic safer, to protect some of these animals to change the way we live? Or are we now, I mean sadly locked in enough that we have to tackle the big climate crisis and then hope with time things normalize?

Ed Struzik: No, I think there are a number of things that can be done and that are being done, and I think we have to give credit to a lot of indigenous groups. For example, the people that used to hunt the Bathurst caribou herd have greed quite some time ago that they will no longer hunt those animals in the hopes that they will have enough time to reproduce and grow the population. And it appears that this has worked in the northern Yukon, Alaska with the porcupine caribou herd, which is one of the very few herds in the world that is not declining, and largely because the Indigenous people in the Alaska at Northwest Territories Yukon side of the border decided long ago that, Hey, we’ve got to manage this. So that’s one really good example I think of what can be done. I think the other thing is that we’ve got to appreciate that their landscape is changing in many ways, and so their transportation networks are being disrupted, roads are collapsing what roads that they do have, and we’ve got to figure out some way of ensuring their food security. We can no longer depend on getting, for example, food down the Mackenzie River because barges are getting stuck. The Mackenzie River is in this period of drought and extreme climate change is now getting shallower. And so those barges that bring in fuel and food to those very remote communities can no longer get there. So we have to figure out ways of adapting to these changes, and I don’t think that we’re doing it enough. I was just talking to someone earlier this morning about the fact that the indigenous people have self-government in the north and the First Nations as well across the rest of Canada. What they don’t have are the financial resources in most cases, to make the necessary changes that are needed. We still have a federal system which essentially controls the purse strings, and somehow we’ve got to figure out a way of transferring some of those financial resources to those self-governing systems in a much more efficient way. The same way that we share resources between the provinces is the way Alberta gives money to the rest of Canada or the Maritimes, for example, that have shortfalls. So I think we’ve got to include this. So there’s endless number of things that we can do that we’re not doing or we’re not doing fast enough.

Jordan: Ed, thank you so much for this. I’m glad that there are some things that we can do and we can keep doing in the long term. We are locked into a certain amount of change in the Arctic now, right? I know we’re locked into 1.5 degrees at least, and that’s worse up there.

Ed Struzik: We are. I mean, we can’t turn back the clock, but we can certainly, I mean, think long-term and understand that this way of living is no longer sustainable if wildfires and flooding in the South hasn’t persuaded us now, just wait five years and you’re going to see things are getting worse. As I give talks on wildfire, for example, and I say since 2003, almost every year something happens that surprises scientists and society. So at some point, there’s got to be this wake up call where we just understand that business as usual is not going to be successful. We have to start living in a different way.

Jordan: Thank you again for this. It’s really informative and thanks for all your work.

Ed Struzik: I appreciate this.

Jordan: Ed Struzik, a writer for Island Press and a fellow at Queen Institute for Energy and environmental policy. That was The Big Story for more, including all sorts of fun climate doomerism. You can head to The Big Story podcast.ca. It’s not really doomerism. It’s just reality, and we’re trying to fill you in. You can just search for climate in the search bar at the bottom, and you will get a lot of episodes. You can suggest that maybe we do less of these episodes, or maybe we should do more of them by giving us some feedback. The way to do that is by sending an email to hello at The Big Story podcast.ca, or by calling and leaving a voicemail at 4 1 6 9 3 5 5 9 3 5. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. I hope it’s not raining where you are. We’ll talk tomorrow.