OMG it’s Climate Elvis!

John Crump

By GRID-Arendal

February 22^nd, 2019

One truism of communications is that the messenger is often as important as the message.

Enter Climate Elvis, stage right, at the Katuaq cultural centre in Nuuk, Greenland’s mountainous capital. Elvis was in Nuuk last weekend for Grønlands Klimadag for alle – Greenland Climate Day – hosted by Greenland Climate Research Center (Silap Pissusianik Ilisimatusarfik) to mark the organization’s 10th anniversary.

Climate Elvis is really Josh Willis, an oceanographer NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. He was in Nuuk to talk about NASA’s “OMG” project– Oceans Melting Greenland – which he leads. I was there to talk about the links between the Arctic and Small Island Developing States, and open an exhibition of Portraits of Resilience in which young people in both regions document the climate changes they are observing.

It is perhaps ironic that Willis uses an Elvis persona to deliver the hard facts given that there are so many who still believe that the real Elvis isn’t dead. Of course, there are people who “don’t believe in climate change” despite the overwhelming evidence that it is real and we are causing it.

I wore a jacket. Willis performed “Climate Rock” on stage clad in an Elvis Presley outfit, complete with big sunglasses, red scarf, wide belt and white shoes. You can find Climate Elvis on YouTube with a backup band and singers. In Nuuk he was on stage with four local kids who held up signs with messages about the climate in time with the music.

But Elvis/Willis is serious about science. It’s just that Climate Elvis is an unusual approach for a scientist who is delivering what is a pretty stark message about the effects that climate change is having on Greenland, and the importance of those changes for the rest of the planet.

Willis's presentation on OMG, a five-year investigation of the role the ocean plays in melting Greenland's ice sheet, is also delivered in his Elvis duds. The way he explains the complexities of change in the ice sheet’s mass balance – the difference between the accumulation of snow that forms the glacier and how fast it melts – is clearer than anyone else I've listened to.

The bottom line, Willis said, is “Greenland is losing weight because the ice is melting”, adding that four trillion tonnes has been lost so far, enough to raise global sea levels by a centimetre.

While a centimetre may not sound like a lot, the effects of this change are already being felt in places like the Arctic and Small Island Developing States.

Greenland’s ice sheet is a remnant of the last Ice Age and is three kilometres deep in places. If it melts, Willis said, it will produce enough water to raise global sea levels by 7.5 metres. “The question is, how fast will it melt in the future? Two metres of sea level rise is enough to displace 200 million people around the globe.”

For that reason, “everyone cares about what happens to the ice in Greenland because it affects everyone.”

Willis explained that the world has warmed by about one degree Celsius since the start of the Industrial Revolution. The rate of warming in the Arctic has been double that. But only about two per cent of the extra heat from human activity is being absorbed by the atmosphere. Most of the rest – about 93 per cent – is going into the oceans.

“That means the oceans are where most of global warming is happening,” Willis explained.

The NASA project Willis runs uses aircraft and ships to measure the ice and oceans as well as the shape and depth of the sea floor to monitor the rate at which the massive glaciers that flow out from the Greenland ice cap into the sea are melting.

While the information is complex, Willis is adept at explaining his science clearly and succinctly in a way that can be absorbed by a non-technical audience. It's not easy to do, but understanding starts with a conversation. And talking about climate change looking like Elvis is a good way to start a conversation.