book Pre-Release - raw video
embargo lifts Sunday 31, Oct. 5AM London time[1], 2021
Faster than Forecast book pre-release: synopsis
“Faster than Forecast: the story ice tells about abrupt climate change”[2]
Accompanied by numerous first-hand videos and written in plain language, the American ice maverick[3]Professor Jason Box describes a 30 year scientific adventure. This is the story that Greenland ice tells about abrupt climate change, its global consequences and now emphasizes the challenges faced by the COP26-era of policy makers, business leaders and youth.
Box’s angle: the world and COP26 needs a more realistic, science-based awareness of the present ecological and climatological changes. The scientific truth belongs to everybody.
Readers / viewers learn: the Arctic is a ‘leading edge of climate breakdown’. After framing grave climate impacts, a narrow window of opportunity for prosperity is defined.
The conclusion is that conventional approaches to the climate crisis are a distraction. It’s only by resetting fundamentals of our economic system that we should expect any peace and prosperity. Only by adopting a set of radical solutions, laid out in the book, will the worst aspects of climate catastrophe be averted.
Change through Science
The scientific content in the on-camera press-kit statements is after research conducted by Dr. Jason Box, one of the most quoted climate scientists[4] and his colleagues in the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP)[5]. Dr. Box is here speaking as a private citizen and walks a careful line as a Professor at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) with messages for three audiences:
- world leaders
- business
- young people
Recent articles led by Jason and his colleagues
- Box, J.E., W.T. Colgan, R Brown, M Wang, J Overland, J Walsh, U Bhatt, T Christensen, N Schmidt, M Lund, F-J Parmentier, E Euskirchen, V Romanovsky, R Corell, W Meier, B Wouters, S Mernild, J Mård, J Pawlak and M Olsen 2019. Key Indicators of Arctic Climate Change: 1971-2017, Environmental Research Letters, ERL-106063, https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aafc1b
- Box, J.E., W.T. Colgan, B. Wouters, D.O. Burgess, S. O'Neel, L.I. Thomson, S.H. Mernild 2018. Global sea-level contribution from Arctic land ice: 1971–2017, Environmental Research Letters, ERL-105795, https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aaf2ed
- Overland, J., Dunlea, E., Box, J.E., Corell, R., Forsius, M., Kattsov, V., Olsen, Morten Skovgaard Oleson, Pawlak, J., Reiersen, L.-O., Wang, M., The urgency of Arctic change, Polar Science (2018), doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polar.2018.11.008.
Change Through Science: raw video release
This digital video release for news editors:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/2wssxtssq6o82ki/AABWdV3rThWx-YZI6oF9fWIha?dl=0
The downloadable content contains several of the book’s main points, some in text below, and for timely release prior to COP26. The video content delivers key scientific points to confront world leaders and business heads. The B-roll supporting the video clips enables reporters to choose what materials are used and how they are edited.
Jason at COP26
Engagement is furthered by Jason being available in-person during COP26 (currently 1 to 10 Nov) for follow-ups and otherwise available using WhatsApp to +45 60124157 or Twitter @climate_ice. After 10 Nov, Box remains available for comment.
‘plain language’ on-camera ‘wakeup’ lines, on location in Greenland or elsewhere, including statement like:
“We now have plenty of very recent examples of extreme rainfall, super storms, and these are examples of how science cannot fully account for how rapidly the climate is changing. But what we do know is it's starting to spin out of control.
"Last time that CO2 was this high, sea level was at least 30 feet higher, and the fact is it just hasn't really sunk in, even in the science community that we effectively have lost the ice sheets.
“It's just a matter of time until we see many meters of sea level rise. So society has to now brace itself for a catastrophe of losing coastlines and the forced migration of millions of people inland.
“That is the inevitable future that we now face and where we're behaving like we can negotiate our way out of this. That's not how nature works.
“COP26 is the last chance that we have to have a science based policy that confronts the climate catastrophe before nature takes over
"The Arctic, the reflective areas, the cryosphere, the snow, the ice that's capping both poles is a very effective place to study climate change because the snow and ice is a very sensitive reactor to changes in temperature changes and heat of the ocean at the moment. And for the foreseeable future, the ice is melting from below. Because the oceans are heating up, the ice is melting from above. That's darkening this mirror that's keeping the polar regions cool. We have effectively broken this mirror that stabilizes our climate.
"So we now notice the connection of the Arctic with the rest of the world. It's because when you warm the Arctic, there's less of a temperature difference because the Arctic is warming three times faster than the globe. What that does is it makes the weather patterns more stationary, and a stationary sunshine period means drought... That's the fingerprint of Arctic climate change.
"Big question I'm asking myself is, are we a species that can only learn from crashes? Or are we smart enough to recognize these threats that are coming and react quickly enough to avoid the worst consequences? That's the moment that we're in right now.
"I wish that this was purely an issue of ignorance. But it's not. We are clearly behaving without using precautionary principles. It's like the reason that you buy fire insurance for your house. It's not that it's likely that your house is going to burn down, but you have that insurance on the small chance that your house catches on fire and you lose everything. We are not applying that kind of principle to the globe. That is the house that we all live in and that it's either, you know, complete ignorance. It's not ignorance, right? I'm not sure that it's stupidity. It's that we have a political system that isn't geared to be conservative in that way.
“Right now, we're at 1.2 degrees warming and talk of a 1.5 or a two degree target is not within our current framework. We have to change some fundamentals of the economic system. And one thing that would be very helpful is to make our economic system our policy very much science based.
Political / Economic messages
"A world with three or four degrees of warming is something that nobody wants, including the business community. So they have to come together at COP26 and actually redesign our economic system and make it really science-based so that we can go forward and really make a green transition.
"Under the current economic system, we are blowing way past the Paris target to three to four degrees of global warming, and that will cause a world that is so destabilized that it becomes ungovernable.
On solutions
“The only real solution is working with nature and finding ways to remove a hell of a lot of carbon from the atmosphere.
“The sad fact is that we can't plant trees enough to take down the amount of carbon that we need to out of the atmosphere, so that forces us to get into other carbon drawdown technologies
Science questions and booking
contact: Dr. Jason Box first by WhatsApp (or SMS to tel. +45 60 12 41 57
email: jbox.greenland@gmail.com
[1] 1 AM New York time, 9 PM Pacific Saturday, 30 Oct
[2] The book is to appear in full after COP26 at http://www.sila.cool/
[3] cover story https://www.rollingstone.com/interactive/feature-greenland-melting/
[5] Arctic Council’s Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP) AMAP.no