About this episode
By creating the Snow, Ice and Permafrost Research Establishment (SIPRE) in 1949, the U.S. military became one of the earliest climate research groups on the planet. The group’s mission was to study the science and engineering of the warming Arctic and the national security implications that could follow. University of Vermont professor and geoscientist Paul Bierman wrote about this in his book, “When the Ice Is Gone: What a Greenland Ice Core Reveals About Earth’s Tumultuous History and Perilous Future.”He spoke to MPR chief meteorologist Paul Huttner for Climate Cast. The transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity and length.How and when did the U.S. military become interested with climate changes in the Arctic? They actually got interested during World War II, when they occupied parts of Greenland in part to rescue bomber and fighter pilots who'd landed on the ice and realized how ill-equipped they were to operate in frozen environments. They really stepped it up, though, in the early to mid-50s, fighting the Cold War in the Arctic.From the military’s point of view, climate change is important in variety of ways. It’s certainly important in the Arctic, where the very stability of the ground they’re working on is questionable, but it’s also very important in the sense that when you melt ice sheets, you raise sea level. That has huge implications for human migration around the world, and for things as simple as five of the U.S. aircraft carriers that are berthed in Virginia — which is a sea-level-rise hot spot and will find their docking facilities under water in the next couple decades. What does the military mean by the phrase ‘climate resilience is force resilience’?They mean that in the sense of trying to reduce the risks to active military, reduce the number of global conflicts that will come from climate change, and be prepared for the eventualities of bigger storms, higher temperatures — all those sorts of things that affect maneuverability on the ground to the safety of soldiers. So in one way, moving toward renewable energy takes them away from dependence on fossil fuels and the need to transport those fossil fuels. Another idea that jumped out at me in your book is that for the military, climate change is ‘too costly to ignore.’ There are estimates that suggest if we let sea level rise uncontrollably, which would be from the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice
