5 Things to Know About the Warming Arctic | Before the Flood

If you look at it from space, the top of the world, the white ice acts like a reflector, like a mirror that sends back sunlight and energy and heat back to space. That's what made the Arctic the cooling system of the planet.

I was walking with Leo on the edge of the sea ice in the high Canadian Arctic, and I told him we will not be able to stand on the frozen sea anymore. In about 25 years, scientific projections are that by 2040, there's going to be almost no sea ice left in the entire Arctic. Climate change, through warming and acidification, is affecting the entire ocean. Because of that, the Arctic is warming and melting at the rate that is faster than anything else we've seen before.

All that white cap that expands in the winter and contracts in the summer, every time, is expanding less and shrinking to a smaller volume. That means massive melting of glaciers. No more sea ice for all these animals that depend on the sea for survival, like the seals and the polar bears. The populations are going to crash.

For the rest of the planet, the melting of the sea ice is going to be associated with more extreme weather events. Some areas are going to experience more flooding; some areas are going to experience more droughts. So I don't think we're going to be very happy with the climate that's coming.

There is only one thing that needs to happen to solve the issue of climate change, which is to reduce dramatically our carbon emissions. Our carbon portion, that's it. We need to move from a fossil fuel-dominated society to a society where renewable energies are more and more dominant.

We cannot pretend that this is something that somebody else in the future will have to build with. We have to take action right now if we are to preserve a beautiful and wonderful planet that we will be very happy to live in.