Skip to content
Art Bell Archive Logo
Art Bell Archive

Journey into the unknown

From the High Desert book cover

From the High Desert

A Cultural History of Art Bell

Buy DirectAmazon
Thumbnail for October 16, 2002: Climate Change - Dr. Paul Mayewski

October 16, 2002: Climate Change - Dr. Paul Mayewski

Oct 16, 2002
2h 54m
Dr. Paul Mayewski
0:00 / 0:00
Art Bell speaks with Dr. Paul Mayewski, a world leader in ice core collection and analysis who has led more than 50 Antarctic and high mountain expeditions. Dr. Mayewski explains how ice cores function as a year-by-year record of Earth's climate history, capturing gas content, dissolved chemistry, dust particles, and volcanic signatures spanning tens of thousands of years. He describes the dramatic 100,000-year glacial cycles driven by Earth's orbital position relative to the sun and the smaller but still significant climate shifts occurring within interglacial periods like the present one.

The conversation turns to evidence of accelerating climate instability, including increased El Nino frequency during the 1990s, melting permafrost in Alaska, and measurable changes in ocean salinity that could disrupt the North Atlantic current carrying heat to Europe. Dr. Mayewski confirms that greenhouse gas levels have risen faster in the last 100 years than at any point in tens of thousands of years, potentially pushing the climate system toward a threshold event with rapid and unpredictable consequences.

Earlier in the program, Art discusses North Korea's acknowledged nuclear weapons program, the ongoing D.C. sniper case, and interviews entrepreneur Stan Abrams about his thermal combustor technology that converts waste tires into clean electricity and marketable byproducts in Nye County, Nevada.

Key Moments

  1. Climate has thresholds and a small push could trigger one: Mayewski explains that the climate system is governed by thresholds and that even the relatively small warming of recent decades could be enough to push it over an edge into a new regime within years rather than centuries.

  2. Greenhouse gases now without precedent: Mayewski states that CO2 and methane levels in the last hundred years have risen faster than at any point visible in tens of thousands or even a couple of million years of ice-core record.

  3. Chernobyl reached the South Pole: Mayewski reports finding Chernobyl fallout in ice cores not just throughout the Arctic but at the South Pole, demonstrating that contamination from a small region can blanket the entire globe.

  4. Nuclear winter is real, ice cores prove it: Asked whether nuclear winter is realistic, Mayewski points to the Toba supervolcanic eruption ~70,000 years ago - which the ice record shows cooled the climate for decades via stratospheric sulfuric acid - as the closest natural analog.

  5. The Norse vanished from Greenland in 1400: Mayewski cites the disappearance of the Norse settlements from Greenland around AD 1400 with the onset of the Little Ice Age - sea ice cut off resupply from Europe while the Inuit, who had adapted to the cold, survived.