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Open any newspaper this week and you’ll see a similar picture. A deadly heat wave, rendered as a slightly sweaty postcard.

Then scroll down to the numbers. Since June 21, Europe has logged more than 1,300 excess deaths. France alone counted around 1,000 additional deaths in a span of days, with more than 1,400 dying on the hottest day, against a normal baseline of roughly 900 to 1,000. Paris morgues ran out of space.

A mass-casualty event behind closed apartment doors.

I’ve worked in and around climate for years, and I’ll be honest: I didn’t really understand the mechanism. I knew heat was dangerous but I couldn’t have told you how a heat wave actually kills a person.

If someone who reads climate research all day doesn’t have a gut sense of it, I suspect most people don’t either.

Let’s find out together.

How You Would Actually Die in a Heat Wave

By Art Lapinsch

Your Body Is a Furnace (That Has to Vent)

You are always running at around 37°C, and you are always producing heat. Your cells burn fuel every second of every day, and the waste product is warmth. Even sitting still, reading this, you’re throwing off roughly the heat of a 100-watt bulb.

That heat has to go somewhere. If it doesn’t, your core temperature climbs and things start breaking. Just think how you feel at at 38°C, 39°C, or (if you’ve ever experienced that) at >40°C.

Under normal conditions, getting rid of it is easy. The air around you is cooler than you are, so heat flows out of your skin and into the world, the same way a hot coffee cools over time. Your body fine-tunes this constantly, widening the blood vessels near your skin to dump more heat, like a radiator opening up.

The trouble starts when the air gets close to your own temperature. Once the air is around 35°C, the simple “hot thing cools in cool surroundings” method stops working. At that point, your body has exactly one more tool left: sweat.

Sweating cools you because evaporation carries heat away. Liquid water turning into vapor on your skin pulls energy out of you. It’s genuinely clever, and it’s your last line of defense.

But it only works as long as it’s not too humid.

Humidity Is Like a Heat Trap

This is the single most important idea: Sweat only cools you if it evaporates.

And evaporation depends on how much moisture the air can still absorb. Dry air is thirsty and soaks up your sweat. Humid air is already saturated, so your sweat just sits there, beading and dripping, doing nothing. You’re soaked, you feel awful, and your core temperature keeps rising anyway.

This is why a 40°C day in dry Arizona is survivable in a way that a 35°C day in a humid, swampy city may not be. The thermometer (Celsius/Fahrenheit/…Kelvin - if you’re a temp hipster) only tells you half the story. The other half is the water in the air, and the two together decide whether your body can cool of or if you’re on death’s door.

Scientists fold both numbers into a single value called the wet-bulb temperature. The name is wonderfully literal. Wrap a wet cloth around a thermometer and blow air over it. The water evaporates, cooling the bulb, and the reading drops, exactly the way sweat cools your skin. In bone-dry air, lots of evaporation, the wet-bulb reading is much lower than the real temperature. In saturated air, no evaporation, the wet-bulb temperature climbs to meet the real one.

So wet-bulb temperature is, in effect, the temperature your body experiences after its cooling trick has been used up. It’s the number that actually matters for staying alive.

For years the headline figure was a wet-bulb temperature of 35°C, the point at which a healthy person at rest, naked, in shade, with unlimited water, theoretically can’t shed heat at all. The body becomes a sealed system, core temperature climbs, and fatal hyperthermia follows within about six hours. A genuinely frightening threshold.

Except it’s worse. That 35°C figure was a theoretical ceiling from a thermodynamics model, not a measurement of actual humans. When researchers at Penn State put real people in heat chambers, they found the true danger threshold is meaningfully lower, closer to a wet-bulb temperature of 31°C, even for young, healthy subjects.

For older people it’s lower still. And a 2026 analysis found that several recent, deadly heat events killed people at wet-bulb levels below the textbook 35°C number. The deaths happening across Europe right now (and in the American North-East soon) are occurring well under the limit that used to be treated as the edge of survivability.

Let’s discuss this illustration.

Think of the air as a sponge. Dry air is a bone-dry sponge: press it against your wet skin and it pulls the moisture straight off, which is exactly what cools you. Humid air is a sponge that's already soaked. You can press it down all you like, but there's nowhere for the water to go, so your sweat just sits on your skin doing nothing. Your body is still making sweat, still trying to save you, but it's wringing water against a sponge that can't hold another drop.

Hence, dangerous heat isn't a single temperature, it's a sliding line that humidity drags downward. In dry air, around 20% humidity, you don't hit genuinely dangerous conditions until the temperature climbs past roughly 40°C. But crank the humidity up to 80% and that same danger line arrives at just 31°C. Same threshold, nearly ten degrees earlier, purely because the sponge is already wet. Thirty-one degrees does not sound scary. It sounds like a nice day at the beach. And that is exactly the trap: on a humid coast or in a muggy city, the number on the thermometer stays reassuringly low right up until your body can no longer cool itself.

But Why Is 31°C Enough to Kill You?

Here’s the part that trips everyone up. Thirty-one degrees is well below your body’s 37°C. If your skin is cooler than your core, why isn’t that fine?

Because your body isn’t trying to keep your skin below body temperature. It’s trying to continuously dump heat, every second, forever, because your cells never stop producing it. And heat only flows one way: from hot to cold. Your 37°C core pushes heat out to your cooler skin, and your skin pushes it out to the cooler world. Every step needs a gap to flow across.

Shrink that gap and the flow chokes. When the air around you sits near your skin temperature and the humidity has already shut down sweating, your core is left trying to shove 100 watts of heat through almost no gradient at all, into surroundings that offer no escape. The heat has nowhere to go. So your core does the only thing physics allows: it climbs. It keeps climbing until the gap is wide enough to force the heat out again, but by then your core is at 40°C and you’re in heatstroke. There is no safe equilibrium left to reach.

That’s why the danger line sits so far below body temperature. You don’t need your skin to reach 37°C to be in trouble. You just need it close enough that the gap can no longer carry your own body heat away. A few degrees of margin sounds like plenty. It isn’t, because that thin margin is the only thing exporting every watt you generate.

(One clarification, since these get mixed up: the wet-bulb temperature is not the dew point. The dew point tells you when water will condense out of the air. The wet-bulb tells you the coldest your skin can get by sweating. It’s the second number that decides whether you survive.)

What Dying of Heat Actually Looks Like

Your sweat has stopped working and your core temperature is climbing.

Start with the fluid. You’ve been sweating hard for hours, so you lose water faster than you can replace it, and your blood volume drops. What’s left flows thicker through the vessels. Now your heart has a problem. It’s being asked to do two competing jobs at once: pump blood out to the skin to shed heat, and keep pressure up for the rest of the body. With less fluid in the system, it can’t fully do both, so it races. And a heart beating that fast, under-filled, in someone whose arteries are already narrowed, is a heart doing more work on less oxygen. That’s the exact recipe for a heart attack. It’s why so many heat deaths are recorded as cardiac events.

Then the core climbs past roughly 40°C, and you cross into heatstroke. Your proteins, the molecular machines that run every cell, begin to denature, unfolding and seizing up the way an egg white turns solid and opaque the instant it hits a hot pan. It’s the same process in the egg and in you, and like the egg, it doesn’t reverse. You cannot un-cook a person.

From there it becomes a loop that feeds itself. The lining of your gut goes leaky and lets bacteria slip into the bloodstream. Your body answers with a whole-body inflammatory response, which makes vessels leak and blood clot where it shouldn’t, so you’re clotting and bleeding at the same time. Starved of proper blood flow, organs begin to fail, and each failure stokes the inflammation that drives the next. One thing turning the next in a circle. Once it’s spinning, it runs on its own, and without aggressive, fast cooling it runs to the end. This is why heatstroke is an emergency measured in minutes, not hours.

The people most at risk are the ones whose hearts, kidneys, and brains had the least margin to begin with. Heat rarely invents a new way to kill you. It finds the weakest link and pushes on until it breaks.

Who Actually Dies: Old, Indoor, Alone

Now throw out the fountain photo, because it has nothing to do with who’s in the morgue.

In France’s preliminary data from this heat wave, about 85% of the registered deaths were people aged 65 and over, and deaths at home jumped by roughly 40%, concentrated heavily in the Paris region. The defining image of a heat wave death isn’t a tourist or a kid in a sprinkler. It’s an elderly person, alone, in a closed-up apartment, often with the windows shut against a heat that’s already inside.

This is the part that genuinely unsettled me, because it’s so ordinary. Everyone reading this knows someone in that apartment. A parent/grandparent, a widowed neighbor, the quiet person down the hall.

Why are older people so much more vulnerable? Several reasons stack on top of each other. The body’s thirst signal weakens with age, so they don’t feel the dehydration coming. The sweat response gets less efficient. Many take common medications, for blood pressure, heart conditions, or mental health, that blunt the body’s ability to regulate temperature or to sweat at all. And many live alone, so there’s no one to notice the early confusion, no one to bring water, no one to call for help when they can no longer call for themselves.

There’s also a cruel detail in the French numbers: this heat wave broke records for nighttime lows, not just daytime highs. That matters more than it sounds. The body recovers from heat at night. A cool night is a reset. When the night never drops below the high 20s, there’s no reset, and fatigued bodies that survived the day don’t survive the accumulation. It’s a one-two punch over and over again.

The Air Conditioning Gap

Air conditioning is, bluntly, the single most effective thing humans have ever invented for not dying in heat.

Studies tracking American states before and after AC spread found it cut the risk of dying on an extremely hot day by about three-quarters. It is, very literally, life-saving technology.

And Europe largely doesn’t have it. Roughly 6% of German households have AC. Compare that to ~ 90% in the United States and in Japan, both of which also have aging populations and yet far lower per-capita heat death rates. Europe pairs the rich world’s lowest AC coverage with its highest heat-death rate. The two facts are not a coincidence.

Why so low? Partly history: Europe’s climate was mild for so long that cooling was genuinely unnecessary, and that assumption is baked into everything. Partly cost, with high electricity prices making AC feel like a luxury. Partly culture, a real strain of “we don’t do that here” energy-conservation pride. And partly, intriguingly, the buildings themselves. In places like Germany and Austria, you often can’t just bolt a condenser unit to the outside of a building, because altering the facade of a protected or regulated structure isn’t allowed. The wall is, in a sense, more legally protected than the person behind it.

The shift is happening, fast, the way these things do after a body count. After the catastrophic 2003 heat wave, Italian household AC went from somewhere around 10–15% to roughly 56% by 2024, and shops across France this week literally sold out of units. But a retrofit measured in decades is no help to someone in a sealed apartment during the heat wave that’s happening now. A brutal timing problem.

This deserves its own deeper treatment, the regulation, the grid implications, the equity questions - but that’s for a future post.

Common Misunderstandings

A heat wave is one of those events where the conventional wisdom is riddled with small, dangerous errors. Here are the ones worth fixing.

• “It’s just hot. People are being dramatic.” Heat is, in many years, the deadliest weather hazard there is, outpacing hurricanes and floods. It just kills slowly, indoors, and off-camera, so it never looks like a catastrophe.

• “The thermometer tells you how dangerous it is.” Only half. Humidity decides whether your sweat works, and the overnight low decides whether your body gets to recover. A muggy night that never cools can be more dangerous than a hotter, drier afternoon. Watch the humidity and the nights, not just the peak.

• “Healthy young adults are basically fine.” Mostly, at rest. But exertion erases the safety margin shockingly fast. In Poland this week, two cyclists, aged 30 and 71, died during a bike marathon in nearly 40°C heat. The 30-year-old was not frail. Add physical effort to extreme heat and the danger threshold drops to meet you.

• “Just point a fan at yourself.” Intuitive, and partly wrong. A fan cools you by helping sweat evaporate, fine when the air is cooler than your skin. But once the air is hotter than you are, a fan is just convection-blasting hot air across your body, like a fan oven, and it can actually accelerate dehydration while you feel like you’re doing something helpful. Above roughly body temperature, a fan can stop being a friend.

• “Drink as much water as you possibly can.” Hydration matters enormously, but pure water taken to excess has its own failure mode. Flooding your system with plain water while sweating out salt can dangerously dilute your blood sodium, a condition called hyponatremia that is life-threatening. The body needs electrolytes, not just volume. Salt with the water.

• “A cold beer cools you down.” Alcohol dehydrates you and impairs the judgment that keeps you out of trouble, including the trouble of cooling off in unsupervised water. France saw a sharp rise in drownings during this heat wave, including a 21-year-old footballer. Heat doesn’t only kill through hyperthermia. It kills through the things heat tempts people into doing.

• “This is just a freak event.” The World Weather Attribution group found this heat would have been virtually impossible 50 years ago and is now around 200 times more likely than it was 20 years ago. Europe is the fastest-warming continent on Earth. The freak is becoming the baseline.

A Knock on the Door

Let me bring this back to where it started, with the two photographs.

After everything, the body, the wet-bulb numbers, the missing air conditioners, here’s what stays with me. The intervention that saves the most lives in a heat wave is not high-tech. It’s somebody checking on the person in the closed-up apartment. Calling, knocking on the door, whatever. Making sure they’re drinking water, that the windows are open to the night air, that they’re not quietly slipping into the confusion that comes before collapse.

The 2003 European heat wave, which killed tens of thousands, triggered exactly this kind of civic awakening. People started thinking about their elderly neighbors, the ones who live alone, the ones nobody would notice for days.As one French official put it this week, we’ve perhaps forgotten that it could happen again, and that it could be even worse.

If you’ve got an elderly relative or neighbor, this is your reminder to check on them this week. It is, measurably, one of the most effective things you can do.

Stay cool out there. Look out for each other.

Art ✌️

I hope you learned a thing or two. I certainly did. If you found this useful, consider sharing it with a friend.

Next Time: the infrastructure side of this. What the heat does to the rails, the roads, and the grid.

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Delphi Zero explores the interplay of climate, energy, and security 🌳🔋🛡️

📧 If you are opening this essay in your email inbox, I recommend clicking on the title of this piece to enjoy the full-length version in the browser.

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Whaddup?!

Over the past weeks, we dove head-first into a 10-part series about the wonders of acoustic research in Antarctica.

Today, we’ll take a quick breather and listen to what one of the biggest spokes people for Antarctica has to say. Dr. Peter Neff - Icy Pete - has championed the importance of polar research for years and has built a massive online following.

His content is really cool.

• Ever wondered how a toilet looks like in Antarctica? 🧻

• Wind in Antarctica looks quite different

• Anxiety-inducing research “rooms”

I hope you’ll enjoy this interview as much as I did.

The Scientist With a Camera

In your email signature, you have a quote by Vannevar Bush. What’s the quote and why did you decide to use it?

The Vannevar Bush quote is:

“For better or worse we are destined to live in a world devoted to modern science & engineering. If the road we are on is slippery, we cannot avoid a catastrophe by putting on the brakes, closing our eyes or taking our hands off the wheel. What is the sane attitude of a scientist or layman? Absence of wishful thinking.”

I added this maybe 6-9 months ago or more.

Leading into 2025, I was thinking a lot about the fundamental nature of our democracy and how that is an essential ingredient and foundation upon which so much that we enjoy in the United States is built upon. If we’re not maintaining the health of our democracy, what we’ve built on top of it will also start to crumble. There are a lot of pieces to maintenance of democracy, but clear, truthful communication is one as is trustworthy, unbiased, independent scientific information to underpin decision making.

I was also thinking about how we’ve always, in the United States, placed an incredible amount of power in the presidency. This has in my field of work led to giant leaps for federal investment in university science, at the behest of influential folks like Vannevar Bush who helped coordinate the Manhattan Project during World War Two and connected US university scientific power with that of the US military apparatus--both of which are part of our national security apparatus (science should NOT be considered separate from this).

I also think of folks, for my Antarctic research focus, like Admiral Richard Byrd, America’s first polar exploration hero and someone who similarly had the ear of Franklin D Roosevelt at key junctures. I’m thinking of the first US government expeditions to Antarctica in the 1940s which built up over that decade and the next into the world-leading US military-civilian apparatus we have in Antarctica and which led to the establishment of the Antarctic Treaty in 1959, preserving that last-discovered continent for science & peace (something that we must remain resolved to preserve). The United States has continued to lead in Antarctica under the auspices of the military-civilian Operation Deep Freeze (ongoing for 70 years now) and the United States Antarctic Program. I’ve been incredibly privileged to be involved with our US Antarctic science operations most of my career so far...

Besides the quote simply describing that we can’t lose our focus on the road ahead (no matter your area of expertise... I think the quote applies to the challenge of climate change as well), it really fits the forward-thinking of Dr. Bush, who’s leadership and advocacy in the 1940s led to congress establishing the National Science Foundation in 1950. The ensuing 75 years of federal investment in US universities and other research has contributed greatly to all of our national security and prosperity, but this investment is increasingly under-appreciated.

We’ve invested in ourselves greatly in those 75 years, and NSF funding not only supports scientists and scientific research but its funds flow to the communities and folks of all working backgrounds who support all parts of our civil society which we need to be able to do great things!

What do you do for a living? What were the major turning points that led you there?

I’m an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota.

Relatively recently, I became a 50% research 50% teaching faculty, so I’m learning again how to be a good teacher while trying to balance my portfolio of federally-funded research projects.

My research specialty is ice core science and in the last 3-4 years I’ve contributed by collecting new ice cores. Collecting cores is quite the logistical effort, so we’re not always actually able to get new samples and folks spend lots of time working on what we’ve already collected.

In summer 2023, I led an international team to collect a 219 meter deep ice core from a site called Combatant Col, beneath the towering Mount Waddington in the southern Coast Mountains of BC, Canada.

In Antarctica, in addition to helping with a big community project called NSF COLDEX which has now collected the oldest ice cores ever (dated to 6,000,000 years old). I co-led another international team in partnership with South Korea to collect important new 150 meter deep ice cores near the most concerning glacier in the world: Thwaites Glacier which is rapidly shedding mass as it is melted from below by ocean currents.

It will be a contributor to sea level rise for the foreseeable future, but we need better climate and other observations to determine how much sea level it may contribute, and how soon.

As for turning points, here’s a list:

1. Supportive family that applied no pressure for what my educational and career course would be, but provided clear support even if the budget was tight when my siblings and I were in undergrad.

2. Key talented and supportive K-12 public school teachers, and participating in a well-supported Science Olympiad program. Our Prairie High School chemistry teacher Mr. Lemberg introduced me to science which he did with humor, kindness, and a magician’s flair. My English teacher Mr. Christian at the same time added really crucial perspective from literature and culture with respect to civics, privilege, public service, and the value of democracy.

3. The ability and fortune to attend my affordable in-state world leading university: University of Washington. Which just so happens to be a hub of polar research (as is the broader Seattle area, with its port and shipbuilding industry that not only built our heavy icebreakers but remains homeport for all of our US Coast Guard polar icebreaking fleet)

4. Undergraduate research positions with National Science Foundation funding. The 75+ year long US federal-university research partnership brought me into ice core research as a sophomore undergrad and I just kept pursuing it from there on.

5. Discovering mountaineering for the self confidence and sense of ability it provided in partnership with a moderate level of physical fitness and technical knowhow. Growing up and becoming an adult in Washington state really had an influence on me, and I learned a lot about my abilities and limits exploring the Cascade mountains and being fascinated by their geology and glaciers.

6. Supportive mentors who didn’t put any of their ego in the way of my own way finding for what drove me or obsessed me enough to quixotically pursue my research.

Why ice? What type of information do researchers usually look for? What can ice tell us and where are its limitations?

Ice is amazing for a host of reasons, but it’s basically the youngest and most actively-accumulating geologic archive from which we can extract chemical information that either lets us estimate (through chemical “proxy” relationships) or directly measure past environmental conditions.

The most direct part of this is the air bubbles that get trapped in glacier ice, which started as the air between the fingers of the millions and billions of snowflakes that make up glaciers and ice sheets. From that air, if we extract it under vacuum, is an incredibly direct archive of past air. Ice is also just a really clean “sampling device” for environmental chemistry, compared to (no offense to my sediment core colleagues) say lakebed or marine sediment cores.

That allows us to isolate almost any aspect of chemicals that are in the natural environment in ice, if we have instruments sensitive to detect the concentrations which can be extraordinarily small, say in Antarctica: parts per billion, parts per trillion or even parts per quadrillion....

Ice in Antarctica is clean enough to tell us what past carbon dioxide was in the atmosphere. The strongest control knob on Earth’s temperature is carbon dioxide, and we’re adding it to the atmosphere fast. All other glacier ice on Earth is too dirty - too much carbon-rich mineral dust - to cleanly preserve this particular gas without some alteration. Keep in mind the Northern Hemisphere, where our Greenland deep ice cores come from, has much more land surface area than the Southern Hemisphere and so is some tens of times more dusty than the Southern Hemisphere and by extension Antarctic ice.

Ice is limited though, in the time that it covers and of course is also biased towards regions where ice is well preserved - very cold, basically sub-freezing all year round. So we’re strongly biased toward the poles with a few mountain regions scattered worldwide although mountain glacier ice cores are more difficult to interpret. Greenland ice only dates back to 120,000 or 130,000 years or so (a key time period called the “Eemian” which is the last warm interglacial period, which was slightly warmer than today and is considered an analog for the near future).

Antarctic ice extends 800,000 years back continuously in time with the current oldest ice core (EPICA Dome C) which is soon to be extended to 1,200,000 years. I’m part of a big US team called NSF COLDEX that is working to understand some stranded pockets of “blue ice” (ice without snow on top of it, bare ice, looks blue) which have been dated to more than 6,000,000 years old but are again less complete and more difficult to interpret.

Finally, an advantage for what I work on is that we have ideal ice core sites right next to the most concerning glacier on Earth: Thwaites Glacier. This spot in West Antarctica, where that ice sheet flows into the Pacific Ocean, is changing fast and has been for the last few decades, but it’s very far from any permanent research station and thus long-term observations.

I went there in 2024 with an international team that recovered the first 100 year-long (drilling 150 meters deep at this very snowy location) just 130 kilometers from this hugely important glacier that may be sending 10s to 100s of centimeters of sea level rise across the globe in coming decades to centuries. We want to know what environmental variability that glacier has experienced, and ice cores are the only way to reconstruct that (no trees in Antarctica to core, and sediment cores aren’t as highly detailed as our ice cores are).

What are the biggest unknowns in your area of research? Do you have any hypotheses to those unknowns? What would be the one question that you’d like to have answered? Why this particular question?

Well, a big unknown is how much and how fast will we see continued ice mass loss and sea level rise coming out of Antarctica -- largely from possibly unstable retreat of Thwaites Glacier.

Gaining clarity here is a huge multi-disciplinary question relating to our fundamental ability to understand and model the behavior of a Florida-sized glacier that is being forced simultaneously by the atmosphere and ocean. And this is happening at one of the most remote, poorly observed locations in Antarctica or on Earth for that matter.

So, I'm hoping my new ice cores from what we're calling the RAICA initiative -- the Ross-Amundsen Ice Core Array -- provide the first year-to-year records of how weather and climate have been affecting a glacier like Thwaites. There's a high-end sea level rise scenario on any IPCC projections for 2100 or even 2300, a big upper dashed line that is our uncertainty about what this part of Antarctica will do.

I'm trying to make my small contribution to either eliminate that high-end scenario or better quantify it.

You have quite a popular TikTok channel. Were you surprised that it works well? Why/why not? What would be one quick win and one meta-principle you would like to share with every science communicator?

Yeah the social media for me was a happy accident. I posted a video on Twitter way back in 2018 of dropping a chunk of ice in a pure-ice borehole... it makes a crazy sound. It went super viral and sort of initiated my following there, and on Instagram and that led to Tiktok recruiting me as part of a cohort of educators back in April 2020 as they were blowing up and COVID was shutting everything down. I was posting about recent Antarctic fieldwork and it’s so visually captivating it built from there.

I’m not super surprised, to be honest, as we’re lucky to have the exotic “hook” of Antarctic scenes. I’ve since COVID become less unique of a creator, and Antarctic tourism is really expanding (rather dangerously, if you ask me) so more “influencers” are going down there for the draw and the clicks. I of course still only go there when supported by a national Antarctic program, like our world-leading United States Antarctic Program operated by the National Science Foundation with support from many branches of the military through the annual Operation Deep Freeze.

My social media is just me using my smartphone as a portal to our science. I try to act no differently when I’m on camera there (although because I’m often doing the science, I’m not always on camera myself). I don’t consider myself an influencer or content creator. I’m a scientist with a convenient camera, and a platform to share our work. I wish I didn’t feel so much like the only one of my colleagues there doing that type of science communication. It’s really not that scary and there’s so much attention everyone is giving to social media and video based communication that scientists have to be there to make clear how we university scientists do science for the American public using funds from federal agencies like the National Science Foundation.

Our 80 year old funding model, which has placed the United States firmly as a global leader in science, research and development, is massively in question. For other science communicators, please join along and share often, treat each post as an experiment to learn how to best communicate through these gamified social media communication platforms!

Looking at the next 20 years, what's the scenario that worries you most, and what's the one that gives you the most hope? Not the average scenario, the edges.

Next 20 years I really worry that not only will we not transition away from the hydrocarbon based energy system that we know is causing rising temperatures worldwide, but that what we do transition away from is science and evidence-based decision-making.

The late, great Carl Sagan worried about this back in the mid-1990s and his quotes from his final book (The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark) remain prescient.

"I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges near, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us—then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. / The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.”

Carl Sagan (p. 26-27)

What gives me hope is that we're already seeing that decisions made that are based on wishful thinking or to satisfy conflicts of interest aren't exactly succeeding. I am hopeful that we find renewed purpose in centering public service and sustainability in American life.

If a 19-year-old version of you was starting out today, same curiosity, same drive, but entering our current reality, what would you tell them? Why?

As for 19-year-old me, I'd say that the need to understand how Earth works and how we can find our way to a (more) sustainable relationship with Earth resources has never been more urgent. I try to tell this to my undergraduate environmental science, policy and management students.

We don't advise future policymakers and managers to ignore glaring problems that are causing harm and increasing risk. We advise them to understand the problem and bring folks along toward solutions.

Thanks, Peter 🙏

If you learned a thing or two, consider sharing this interview with a friend 🌳

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Delphi Zero explores the interplay of climate, energy, and security 🌳🔋🛡️

📧 If you are opening this essay in your email inbox, I recommend clicking on the title of this piece to enjoy the full-length version in the browser.

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Hi friend,

Welcome back to part 5 (out of 10) of the Sound of Antarctica: What the Quietest Continent Teaches Us About Paying Attention.

1. The Loudest Silence on Earth

2. The Singing Ice Shelf

3. Glacial Screams

4. The Ocean’s Secret Highway

5. The Z-Call

Last time, we rode the SOFAR channel from the Bahamas to West Africa and asked what infrastructure already exists around you, built for one purpose, waiting for someone to ask a better question.

This time, we meet the animal that answered that question millions of years before we did.

The Z-Call

By Art Lapinsch

Speed it up by a factor of eight and you might mistake it for the soundtrack of a spooky movie. A low, sliding tone that drops. Not a song in any way your ear would recognize. More like a machine powering down somewhere far away. Mechanical. Patient. Enormous.

Slow it back to its actual speed and it disappears entirely. The sound sits between 18 and 26 Hz, below the lowest note a human ear can register. You could be floating in the water directly above the animal producing it and you’d hear nothing. Your body might feel a faint pressure in your chest, a vibration you couldn’t quite locate. But your ears would report silence.

Now look at a spectrogram.

Three distinct units show up in sequence. The first is a sustained tone around 26 Hz. Then a rapid downward sweep. Then a lower sustained tone. Plotted on a frequency-versus-time graph, the three units trace the shape of the letter Z.

That’s the Z-call. The signature vocalization of the Antarctic blue whale. Among the loudest biological sounds on Earth, produced by the largest animal that has ever existed, at a frequency our species cannot hear without instruments.

Every element of that sentence is a superlative. And the animal is virtually invisible.

145,510 Kilometers of Looking

Here’s the absurdity of studying Antarctic blue whales.

A blue whale can reach 30 meters in length. It weighs as much as 25 elephants. Its tongue alone is roughly the size of a car. By every physical measure, it is the most conspicuous organism on the planet.

And you can spend weeks at sea in the Southern Ocean without seeing one.

The Southern Ocean spans roughly 20 million square kilometers of water. Blue whales are solitary by nature, surfacing briefly before descending to depths where no human eye can follow. They don’t breach the way humpbacks do. They don’t travel in visible pods like orcas. They come up, exhale, inhale, and slip back under. If you blink, if the swell is high, if the light is wrong, you miss them entirely.

In 2024, Brian Miller and his team at the Australian Antarctic Division published the results of a monitoring effort that puts the challenge into perspective. Seven voyages. 100k+ kilometers of track line. Approximately 3,900 hours of acoustic monitoring. All to answer a deceptively simple question: where are the Antarctic blue whales?

The method was elegant. Sonobuoys, small expendable devices dropped into the ocean from the ship, each containing a hydrophone connected to a VHF radio transmitter. The hydrophone sinks to depth. The transmitter floats on the surface. Sound from the deep ocean travels up through the hydrophone and broadcasts in real time to the ship, which can be tens of kilometers away. Cheap, disposable listening stations scattered across the Southern Ocean like acoustic breadcrumbs.

The most comprehensive survey of Antarctic blue whale distribution ever conducted. And the word that keeps showing up is elusive.

This is the series motif made flesh. You don’t find a 30-meter animal in a 20-million-square-kilometer ocean by looking for it. You find it by listening. The instrument matters more than the effort. Hydrophones succeeded where decades of visual surveys fell short, not because the earlier scientists worked less hard, but because they were using the wrong sense.

The Song Is Changing (And Nobody Knows Why)

Here’s where the story tilts.

In 2012, Alexander Gavrilov and his colleagues at Curtin University (the same team we met in Part 3, listening to icebergs from Western Australia) published a finding that the blue whale research community is still grappling with.

The frequency of the Z-call is declining.

Not erratically. Not in response to some obvious one-time event. Slowly, steadily, measurably. Year after year. The pitch is dropping. And it’s not just Antarctic blue whales. Similar downward frequency trends have been observed in blue whale populations across multiple ocean basins.

Gavrilov’s team documented both inter-annual and intra-annual decreases in the fundamental frequency of the Z-call. The shift is small in any given year but unmistakable over a decade. Something is changing in the way these animals vocalize, and it’s been changing for as long as we’ve had instruments precise enough to measure it.

The natural question is: why?

Nobody has a definitive answer. What exists is a set of hypotheses, each plausible, none proven, and not mutually exclusive.

Hypothesis 1: Population recovery. After decades of industrial whaling that reduced Antarctic blue whale numbers by roughly 99%, populations are slowly recovering. More whales in the ocean means shorter average distances between individuals. If you don’t need your call to travel as far to reach another whale, you can vocalize at a lower intensity and a lower frequency. You don’t need to shout when someone’s in the next room.

Hypothesis 2: Noise masking. The ocean is getting louder. Commercial shipping, seismic surveys, and military sonar all pump low-frequency noise into the deep sound channel. (We talked about this in Part 4.) If the noise floor is rising in the frequency band whales use to communicate, shifting to a slightly different frequency could help them be heard above the din. An evolutionary workaround for a human-caused problem.

This reminds me of a story I heard about city birds. Sparrows and house finches in noisy cities have been documented singing at higher frequencies than their rural counterparts. Also, a 2024 study using passive acoustic monitoring across urban gradients confirmed that bird song frequencies in cities are significantly higher than in rural areas, with low-frequency anthropogenic noise identified as a key driver.

Same problem, different medium. When your environment gets louder, you adapt your signal or risk not being heard. It’s not just a marine phenomenon.

Hypothesis 3: Ocean temperature. Warmer water changes the speed of sound, which changes how efficiently different frequencies propagate through the SOFAR channel. If the acoustic environment is shifting, the optimal calling frequency might shift with it. The whales could be tracking a moving target.

Hypothesis 4: Something else entirely. Body size, hormonal changes, learned cultural drift, some interaction effect we haven’t considered. This is an active area of research. The honest answer is: we don’t know.

The cultural drift hypothesis is the most intriguing one to me. There’s more and more research coming out about the similarity of whale and human languages - like vowel inflections (similar to Mandarin language).

Just watch this 90-second video:

I find this genuinely thrilling. Not the not-knowing itself, but what the not-knowing implies. We are watching a species respond to environmental change in real time, on a global scale, in a behavior that’s fundamental to reproduction and survival, and we can measure the change to a fraction of a hertz.

When the Ecosystem Shifts, the Sound Shifts First

The Z-call doesn’t exist in isolation. It tracks the health of the Southern Ocean.

Blue whales follow oceanographic structure. They congregate near current boundaries where nutrient-rich water upwells from the deep, fueling phytoplankton, which fuel krill, which fuel whales.

Follow the physics, find the biology. And when the physics shifts, the biology shifts with it. El Niño events rearrange distribution patterns. During the 2015-2016 El Niño, researchers documented a near-total stop of humpback whale singing in certain regions. The animals didn’t just move. They went quiet.

Krill is the linchpin. Antarctic blue whales eat almost exclusively Antarctic krill, and krill populations are under compounding pressure from expanding commercial fishing and retreating sea ice. The food web that supports the largest animal on Earth starts with ice, and the ice is changing.

The acoustic record captures all of this. Blue whales vocalize more at dusk and night, when krill migrate toward the surface. D-calls increase during summer feeding. Z-calls pick up in late summer and autumn, when breeding communication ramps up. The temporal patterns mirror the seasonal rhythms of the ecosystem with remarkable fidelity.

This is what makes blue whales more than charismatic megafauna. They are acoustic data points. Their song integrates temperature, circulation, ice extent, krill availability, and anthropogenic disturbance into a single measurable signal.

When the Z-call shifts, the ocean is telling you something.

Next time: Antarctica’s strangest sound haunted submarines and baffled scientists for 50 years. Nobody could identify it. They called it the “bio-duck.” The answer, when it finally came, told us something unexpected about the most pristine acoustic environment left on Earth, and what happens when that pristine baseline starts to degrade.

Part 6: The Bio-Duck Mystery.

Tag along for this 10-part series about Antarctica, acoustics, and paying attention.

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This is Part 5 of “Sound of Antarctica,” a 10-part series on what the quietest continent teaches us about paying attention.

Delphi Zero explores the interplay of climate, energy, and security 🌳🔋🛡️

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Hi friendo,

Welcome back to part 4 (out of 10) of the Sound of Antarctica: What the Quietest Continent Teaches Us About Paying Attention.

1. The Loudest Silence on Earth

2. The Singing Ice Shelf

3. Glacial Screams

4. The Ocean’s Secret Highway

Last time, we watched a continent scream at 220 dB and asked how on earth a listening station in Australia could pick up the sound of ice breaking apart 9,600 kilometers away.

This time, we answer that question. Fasten your seat belt and let’s ride.

The Ocean’s Secret Highway

By Art Lapinsch

In the spring of 1944, a sailing vessel called the USS Saluda sat in the waters near Eleuthera in the Bahamas. Hanging off her side was a hydrophone, lowered deep into the ocean. On board were two scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution: Maurice Ewing and J. Lamar Worzel.

They were waiting for a bang.

Hundreds of miles away, a Navy ship was dropping 4-pound explosive charges into the deep ocean, set to detonate at a depth of 4,000 feet. The question was simple: would Ewing and Worzel hear them?

Maurice Ewing was not an obvious candidate for revolutionizing ocean science. He was born in 1906 in Lockney, Texas, the eldest surviving child of a farming family on the harsh flats of the Texas Panhandle. Three older siblings had died in early childhood. His parents stressed education above everything, and young Maurice (pronounced “Morris,” never “William,” though that was his legal first name) won a scholarship to Rice University, where he earned a bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate in physics.

Ewing had a reputation for working harder than anyone. “Seasickness is like a toothache,” he once said. “You don’t notice it if your house is burning.” And his house was always burning. His biographer, William Wertenbaker, wrote that “Ewing was desperate to learn something most of the time.” When researchers at Columbia University invited him to try seismic measurements on the ocean floor, he agreed instantly. Years later he’d explain: “If they had asked me to put seismic equipment on the moon instead of the bottom of the ocean I’d have agreed, I was so desperate for a chance to do research.”

By 1940, war was coming. Ewing moved to Woods Hole and started doing defense research for the Navy. Without waiting for his contract paperwork, without pay, he and his former students wrote Sound Transmission in Sea Water, the manual that would become the standard reference for underwater acoustics throughout the entire war and long after.

It was during this wartime work that Ewing developed a theory. He believed that somewhere in the deep ocean, the physics of temperature and pressure would create a layer where sound could travel enormous distances with almost no energy loss. A natural pipeline, hidden a thousand meters below the surface.

The Saluda experiment was designed to prove it.

On April 3, 1944, the test came together. Shot 43. A charge detonated at 4,000 feet, 320 nautical miles away. And then, on the hydrophone hanging from the Saluda: bump bump bump bump bump bump. A series of pulses building up to a sharp climax. Ewing and Worzel described the end of the transmission as “so sharp that it was impossible for the most unskilled observer to miss it.”

They had found the highway.

But the experiment wasn’t done. When the results were analyzed, something unexpected showed up. Receivers stationed in Dakar, on the west coast of Africa, had also picked up the explosions. From the Bahamas. A distance of roughly 3,200 kilometers.

A 4-pound charge. Heard across an ocean.

Stranger Things on High Sea

We need to do a quick excursion.

Around the same time, a ship that had been assisting with the sound channel experiments, the USS Buckley (DE-51), was about to have a very different kind of April.

Weeks after helping test whether sound could cross an ocean, the Buckley joined a hunter-killer task group sweeping the Atlantic for German U-boats. In the early hours of May 6, 1944, the Buckley encountered U-66 near the Cape Verde Islands. What followed was one of the most absurd engagements of the entire Battle of the Atlantic: the Buckley rammed the submarine, the two vessels locked together, and the crew of a destroyer escort fought German submariners in hand-to-hand combat using small arms, coffee mugs, and shell casings. Hand grenades were thrown into the flaming conning tower. U-66 sank. The Buckley’s commanding officer, Lt. Cmdr. Brent Abel, received the Navy Cross.

The same ship, in the same month, helping discover how sound travels across oceans and then fighting a hand-to-hand battle with a German submarine.

War is strange.

Bowling Lanes with Invisible Bumpers

So how does sound travel 3,200 kilometers through the ocean? Or 9,600 kilometers, as we saw with Iceberg A53a in Part 3?

The answer lives about 600 to 1,200 meters below the surface, in a layer of water called the SOFAR channel (Sound Fixing and Ranging channel). And the physics, once you see it, is beautifully simple.

Two forces are fighting each other as you go deeper into the ocean.

Temperature drops as you descend. Cold water means slower sound. So the deeper you go, the more sound slows down.

Pressure increases as you descend. Higher pressure means faster sound. So the deeper you go, the more sound speeds up.

These two forces pull in opposite directions. And somewhere around 600 to 1,200 meters (depending on location), they cancel each other out. That’s where the speed of sound reaches its absolute minimum.

Now here’s the magic. A sound wave traveling through the ocean naturally bends toward the zone of slowest speed. Why does sound bend back toward this zone? Imagine you’re driving and your right tires drop off the pavement onto gravel. The right side of the car slows down. The left side, still on asphalt, keeps going at full speed. The car turns right. Not because it “wants” to, but because one side is moving faster than the other.

Sound waves do the same thing. When part of a wave enters faster water (above or below the minimum zone), that part races ahead and the wave gradually curves back toward the slower zone. It’s not attraction. It’s geometry.

Think of it like bowling with invisible bumpers.

You roll the ball down the lane. It drifts toward the left gutter. But instead of falling in, an invisible bumper nudges it back toward the center. It drifts right. Another bumper pushes it back. The ball never reaches the gutter. It just keeps oscillating down the lane, losing almost no energy, until it reaches the pins.

That’s the SOFAR channel. The “bumpers” are made of physics: temperature above, pressure below. Sound waves that enter this channel at a flat enough angle (under about 12 degrees) get trapped. They bounce back and forth across the channel axis, never hitting the surface, never hitting the seafloor. They just keep going. For thousands of kilometers. With almost no loss.

This is why a 4-pound explosive charge in the Bahamas can be heard in West Africa. This is why Iceberg A53a’s scream traveled from the Weddell Sea to a listening station in Australia. This is why, in Part 3, the CTBTO hydrophones sitting between 600 and 1,200 meters depth can monitor every major ocean basin on the planet from just 11 stations.

They’re parked on the highway.

One detail worth noting: the depth of the SOFAR channel changes depending on where you are. In the subtropics, it sits deep, around 1,000 meters. At high latitudes, near the poles, the channel rises all the way to the surface. The water is so uniformly cold that pressure becomes the dominant force almost immediately.

This means that in Antarctic waters, the sound highway starts at the ocean surface. When an iceberg calves or a glacier quakes, the sound enters the channel right where it’s generated. No energy wasted getting down to depth. As the wave travels northward into warmer waters, the channel sinks, and the sound follows it down. The highway slopes deeper as it goes, and the sound just rides the gradient.

It’s one of the reasons Antarctic ice events produce such efficient acoustic signals. The on-ramp is right there at the surface.

Three Wars, Three Questions, Same Highway

The SOFAR channel didn’t change between 1944 and today. The water didn’t get smarter. The only thing that changed were our questions.

World War II: “Can we save pilots?”

Ewing immediately grasped the rescue potential. If a downed pilot, floating on a life raft in the middle of the Pacific, could drop a small explosive charge set to detonate at the right depth, the sound would travel through the SOFAR channel to listening stations on distant coastlines. Triangulate the arrival times at multiple stations, and you could calculate the pilot’s position to within 10 to 20 kilometers. Enough to send a rescue plane.

The Navy developed the SOFAR bomb: a small hollow metal sphere designed to implode when it sank to the channel depth. Ewing’s original idea was to put these spheres in pilots’ emergency kits. Simple, cheap, no radio needed, no battery, no electronics. Just gravity and physics. Drop it over the side of your life raft and wait.

The system was deployed in 1945 as the war neared its end. The concept worked. But the timing of history intervened. The war ended before the system could see widespread operational use, and eventually satellite-based emergency beacons would replace it entirely.

Cold War: “Can we track submarines?”

After the war, the Navy had a new problem. Soviet submarines were multiplying. By 1950, the U.S. realized that Soviet boats, built on the best of captured German technology, posed a serious threat. Frederick Hunt, who had led Harvard’s Underwater Sound Laboratory during the war, argued that the SOFAR channel could be used to detect submarines at ranges of hundreds of miles just by listening to the noise they generated.

The result was Project Jezebel, which became the Sound Surveillance System: SOSUS. A multibillion-dollar network of hydrophone arrays mounted on the seafloor, connected by undersea cables to onshore processing facilities. The first prototype was a 1,000-foot-long horizontal array of 40 hydrophones installed at Eleuthera in the Bahamas in 1951, the same waters where Ewing had first heard his explosive charges seven years earlier.

The system was staggeringly effective. SOSUS could detect radiated acoustic energy of less than a watt at ranges of several hundred kilometers, sensitive enough to distinguish the number of propellers on a submarine. For decades, it tracked Soviet ballistic missile submarines as they transited the GIUK gap between Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom.

In 1962, a SOSUS station in the Bahamas played a role in the Cuban Missile Crisis by monitoring Soviet submarine movements around the Caribbean.

Everything about SOSUS was classified. The shore stations were disguised as “Naval Facilities” conducting “oceanographic research.” Even the service records of the sailors who operated the arrays were classified. The personnel who walked the rows of recording machines, analyzing sound signatures from hydrophones hundreds of miles away on the ocean floor, couldn’t tell anyone what they did for a living.

And here’s a detail I love: the early SOSUS operators started picking up strange, unknown sounds on their recordings. One recurring signal was so puzzling that analysts attributed it to the “Jezebel Monster.”

Years later, they figured out that the monster were actually vocalizing blue whales and fin whales.

The system designed to hunt submarines was accidentally eavesdropping on the largest animals on Earth.

Post-Cold War: “Can we listen to the planet?”

The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. The Navy declassified SOSUS after 41 years of secrecy, and for the first time, civilian scientists were allowed access.

NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle was among the first to jump in. They used the Northeast Pacific SOSUS arrays to monitor low-level seismic activity on the Juan de Fuca Ridge. They detected submarine volcanic eruptions. They tracked blue whale migration patterns across the North Pacific.

And in 1999, a research team deployed six new autonomous hydrophones in the North Atlantic. They used a ship from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. The ship’s name: R/V Maurice Ewing.

The farm kid from Lockney, Texas, who was desperate to learn something, had a ship named after him. And that ship was being used to extend the very discovery he’d made 55 years earlier on the Saluda.

Submarines to volcanoes. Volcanoes to whales. Whales to climate. Three different decades, three different questions, all answered by the same invisible layer of water a thousand meters below the surface.

There's one more implication of the SOFAR channel that we'll return to later in the series. Because sound speed in water changes with temperature, and because the SOFAR channel can carry sound across entire ocean basins with minimal loss, you can measure ocean temperature at continental scale just by timing how long a sound takes to travel between two points. If the ocean warms, sound speeds up, travel time shortens. One of our readers had already teased it in the comments.

It's an elegant idea, and it's already been tested. But that's Part 9.

The Animals Who Got There First

There’s an uncomfortable truth buried in this whole story.

Whales have been using the SOFAR channel for millions of years.

Blue whales, the largest animals ever to exist on this planet, produce calls between 15 and 25 Hz. These frequencies sit in the exact band that propagates most efficiently through the deep sound channel. Their calls can travel hundreds, possibly thousands of kilometers.

This isn’t coincidence. This is evolution solving the same physics problem that it took the U.S. Navy, a few billion dollars, and four decades of classified research to figure out. Solitary animals that need to find mates across vast, dark, featureless ocean basins evolved to communicate at precisely the frequencies that exploit the SOFAR channel’s waveguide properties. Talk about adaptation to the environment.

As we discussed in Part 3, there’s a fundamental divide in cetacean communication that maps directly onto this physics. Baleen whales (solitary, long-range, low-frequency) versus toothed whales (social, short-range, high-frequency). The medium dictates the strategy. Evolution figured it out millions of years before Maurice Ewing dropped a hydrophone into the ocean.

Unfortunately, the highway that whales have relied on for millennia is getting noisier. Commercial shipping, seismic exploration, naval sonar. All of it pumps low-frequency noise into the SOFAR channel. The same frequencies that blue whales use to communicate are the same frequencies that propagate most efficiently, which means they’re the same frequencies that human activity pollutes most effectively.

We’ll return to this in Part 8, when we talk about what happens when the last quiet ocean stops being quiet. For now, just hold the irony: we built a classified global surveillance system to exploit a phenomenon that a 100-ton animal had been using for longer than our species has existed.

And our exploitation of that phenomenon is now degrading the very channel those animals depend on.

What Infrastructure Already Exists Around You?

The pattern in this series keeps tightening.

Part 1 established that the signal was always there, hidden behind human perceptual limits. Part 2 showed that new instruments can reveal signals invisible to existing ones. Part 3 demonstrated that infrastructure built for one purpose can be repurposed for another. Part 4 adds the mechanism: the reason any of this works, the natural highway that carries sound from pole to pole with almost no loss.

But the piece that sticks with me the most is the lineage.

Maurice Ewing built a system to rescue pilots. The Navy repurposed it to track submarines. NOAA repurposed it again to study volcanoes and whales and climate. The CTBTO built a new version to detect nuclear tests, and researchers in Australia repurposed that to monitor Antarctic ice.

The infrastructure didn’t change. The questions did.

The internet was a military communications network. GPS was a missile guidance system. The SOFAR channel was a pilot rescue tool. In every case, the most consequential use was the one nobody imagined when the thing was built.

So I’ll leave you with this: What infrastructure already exists around you, built for one purpose, waiting for someone to ask a better question?

Next time: We’ve learned how sound travels the ocean. Now it’s time to meet the animal that mastered it. The Antarctic blue whale produces a call so low, so far below human hearing, that we didn’t even know it existed until we put hydrophones in the SOFAR channel. Its song shows up on a spectrogram as a distinctive Z-shaped mark. And over the past few decades, that song has been shifting in ways nobody fully understands.

Part 5: The Z-Call.

Tag along for this 10-part series about Antarctica, acoustics, and paying attention.

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This is Part 4 of “Sound of Antarctica,” a 10-part series on what the quietest continent teaches us about paying attention.

Delphi Zero explores the interplay of climate, energy, and security 🌳🔋🛡️

📧 If you are opening this essay in your email inbox, I recommend clicking on the title of this piece to enjoy the full-length version in the browser.

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Hi there,

Welcome back to part 3 (out of 10) of the Sound of Antarctica: What the Quietest Continent Teaches Us About Paying Attention.

1. The Loudest Silence on Earth

2. The Singing Ice Shelf

3. Glacial Screams

Last time, we listened to an ice shelf hum. This time, we’re turning up the volume way up 😱

Glacial Screams

By Art Lapinsch

You’re sitting in your living room. Someone across the room raises their voice at you. That’s roughly 70 decibels.

Now imagine they plug in an electric guitar and crank the amp. 110 decibels. Your ears are ringing. You reach for the door.

Now stand 25 meters from a jet engine at full thrust. 150 decibels. At this point, sound isn’t just loud. It’s a physical force pressing against your chest. Sustained exposure causes immediate, permanent hearing damage. WHAT?!!

Now keep going.

A lightning bolt striking the ground nearby registers around 170 dB. A hand grenade detonating at close range hits roughly 180 dB.

What the hell does that mean? How loud is that actually?

Interlude 1: dB - Why it gets real loud, real quick 💡

I want to take you down a quick rabbit hole. It’s going to be very important important information to grasp how extremely loud Antarctica can be.

When people talk about decibels, they usually refer to dB SPL - a logarithmic measurement of sound pressure.

The easiest way for humans to wrap their head around this is: With every additional 10dB the perceived loudness doubles. (IF +10dB THEN 2x of perceived loudness)

Examples:

• 60dB is perceived as double as loud as 50dB

• 70dB is perceived as double as loud as 60dB

• 80dB is perceived as double as loud as 70dB

• 90dB is perceived as double as loud as 80dB

• 100dB is perceived as double as loud as 90dB

Quiz Time: How much louder is 100dB compared to 50dB?

• a) 5 times?

• b) 10 times?

• c) 32 times?

Think about it for a second and see if you come up with the right answer.

The answer is (c) 32 times.

50 dB of difference = five doublings of perceived loudness. 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 32.

This is why the decibel scale is so deceptive. The jump from 60 dB (a normal conversation) to 110 dB (that cranked guitar amp) isn’t “almost twice as loud.” It’s 32 times louder. The jump from 110 dB to 150 dB (the jet engine) is another 16x on top of that. And from 150 dB to 180 dB (the hand grenade)? Another 8x.

By the time you reach 180 dB, you’re experiencing sound that is roughly 4,000 times louder than a normal conversation. Your body doesn’t process this as “noise” anymore. It processes it as impact.

ps: kids, put earplugs in when you go to a club.

And here’s where things get strange. In air, sound has a ceiling.

At around 194 dB, the low-pressure phase of the sound wave creates a full vacuum between compression cycles. There are literally no air molecules left to carry the signal. Above 194 dB, sound stops being sound. It becomes a shockwave. Air, as a medium, simply breaks.

Explosions can push past this limit. The Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear detonation in history, is estimated to have exceeded 220 dB at the source.

But at that point, what’s traveling through the air isn’t sound anymore. It’s a wall of compressed gas moving outward. The medium has given up.

Water doesn’t give up.

Water is roughly 800 times denser than air, and its molecules are packed tightly enough to transmit pressure waves that would be physically impossible in our atmosphere. The theoretical ceiling for sound in water sits somewhere around 270 dB.

In rough terms, 220 dB underwater is not as apocalyptic as it sounds if you're used to thinking in air decibels. The scales aren't directly comparable. But the point is: water can carry sound pressures that would literally tear air apart.

Which brings us to Iceberg A53a.

In 2004, a slab of ice roughly 1,100 square kilometers in area broke free from the Weddell Sea. Over the following months, it drifted north, ground against the seafloor of the Bransfield Strait, and eventually disintegrated in the Scotia Sea. The acoustic signature of that journey registered an average source level of approximately 220 dB and it was recorded at listening stations up to 9,600 kilometers away.

Nine thousand six hundred kilometers. That’s roughly the distance from Berlin to Tokyo.

A53a wasn’t unusual. Icebergs colliding produce multi-harmonic signals between 3 and 10 Hz that can last for hours. Matsumoto et al. (2014) found that iceberg acoustic energy dominates low-frequency sound levels across the entire Southern Hemisphere. The continent isn’t whispering, the way the Ross Ice Shelf does. It’s screaming. And the ocean is carrying that scream from pole to pole.

In Part 1, I described standing on a hill watching an iceberg calve in silence, then being hit by the sound seconds later. That was a small event seen from about a kilometer away. Scale it up by a factor of a thousand and add water as the medium, and you begin to understand why researchers can track individual icebergs from the other side of the planet.

The World’s Most Surprising Dual-Use Technology

In the 1990s, the international community built something extraordinary.

The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) established the International Monitoring System: a global network of 337 stations designed to ensure that no nuclear explosion on Earth goes undetected. Seismic stations feel the ground. Infrasound stations listen to the atmosphere. Radionuclide stations sniff for radioactive particles.

And 11 hydroacoustic stations listen to the oceans.

These hydrophones sit at depths between 600 and 1,200 meters, suspended in the SOFAR channel (more on that in Part 4), where sound travels most efficiently. Six stations use underwater hydrophone arrays; five use land-based seismometers that pick up ocean sound waves converting to seismic energy at coastlines. Together, 11 stations are enough to acoustically monitor every major ocean basin on the planet.

The system works. It detected all six of North Korea’s declared nuclear tests between 2006 and 2017. When the first test happened in October 2006, the IMS was only 60% operational, yet more than 20 seismic stations still picked up the event. Two weeks later, a radionuclide station in Yellowknife, Canada, 7,500 kilometers away, detected traces of xenon-133 in the atmosphere, confirming the explosion was nuclear.

When the Chelyabinsk meteor exploded over Russia’s Ural Mountains in February 2013, 17 CTBTO infrasound stations registered the event. They tracked the shockwave as it circled the Earth. Twice. Over three days. When the Beirut port explosion devastated the city in August 2020, the CTBTO network recorded it as well.

But the monitoring system’s unplanned second life is what interests me most.

Researchers at Curtin University in Australia realized that the CTBT hydroacoustic station off Cape Leeuwin in Western Australia, positioned to catch clandestine nuclear detonations in the Indian and Southern Oceans, was also capturing something else entirely. It was recording the acoustic signatures of Antarctic ice events from over 5,000 kilometers away. Gavrilov and Li demonstrated that they could track seasonal patterns of ice breakup, distinguish individual iceberg collisions, and follow the acoustic biography of specific icebergs as they drifted, grounded, and disintegrated. From a listening post in Australia. Pointed at a continent 5,000 kilometers to the south.

This is dual-use technology in its purest form. Infrastructure built to enforce nuclear arms control, repurposed for climate science. Cold War paranoia becoming climate early warning. The same hydrophones that would catch a clandestine detonation beneath the Pacific are now among our most valuable tools for monitoring the disintegration of Antarctic ice.

I’ve worked most of my life in tech. If there’s one pattern I’ve seen repeat across every domain I’ve worked in, it’s this: the most consequential infrastructure is almost always built for a reason other than the one that ends up mattering most. The internet was a military communications network before it became... everything. GPS was built for missile guidance before it guided your Uber. And the CTBTO’s hydroacoustic network was built to detect nuclear explosions before it started listening to the sound of a warming planet.

We’ll come back to this network in Part 4 (the physics of how sound travels those distances) and again in Part 9 (using the same stations to measure ocean temperature). For now, hold the image: 11 stations. Monitoring every ocean. Originally designed for bombs. Now listening to ice.

What 362 Invisible Earthquakes Tell Us

In late 2025, seismologist Thanh-Son Pham at the Australian National University published a paper in Geophysical Research Letters that landed like a gut punch.

Between 2010 and 2023, Pham detected 362 glacial earthquakes at the Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers in West Antarctica. 245 of those 362 events occurred at Thwaites’ marine terminus, where capsizing icebergs collide with the face of the “mother glacier.”

362 earthquakes. Over 13 years. And standard global seismic monitoring networks missed every single one.

Here’s why. Normal earthquakes produce a spectrum of seismic waves, including high-frequency body waves that propagate (= travel) through the Earth’s interior and are easily picked up by seismometers worldwide. Glacial earthquakes at Thwaites are different. They lack those high-frequency components. Their seismic signature is dominated by low-frequency surface waves that attenuate before reaching distant monitoring stations. To the global networks, these events are invisible. Pham had to develop a new detection algorithm using regional seismic stations on the Antarctic continent itself to find them.

This is a frequency problem, and it connects directly to a principle I find endlessly fascinating in acoustics.

Sound doesn’t behave the same way across all frequencies. Low-frequency waves travel farther because they lose less energy to absorption. That’s true in air. It’s dramatically more true in water, where low-frequency absorption is nearly negligible. A 10 Hz signal in the deep ocean can propagate for thousands of kilometers with minimal loss. A 10 kHz signal gets eaten alive within a few kilometers.

This is why the underwater world runs on bass.

In my conversation with marine biologist Anya Astafurova last year, we touched on something that stuck with me: in cetacean research, there’s a fundamental divide between baleen whales and toothed whales that maps directly onto this physics.

Baleen whales (blue whales, humpbacks, fin whales) are solitary creatures that communicate over vast distances. Their vocalizations sit in the low-frequency range, some below 20 Hz, because those frequencies can cross ocean basins. Toothed whales (orcas, dolphins, sperm whales) are social creatures that communicate over shorter distances. Their vocalizations sit in the high-frequency range, using echolocation clicks and rapid burst pulses.

Evolution figured out the physics of underwater sound propagation millions of years before we did. Solitary animals need long-range communication and use low frequencies. Social animals need precision and use high frequencies. The medium dictates the strategy.

The same physics explain why Thwaites’ glacial earthquakes were invisible to distant monitoring. Their energy sits in a frequency band that doesn’t propagate well through rock to remote seismometers, but propagates extremely well through water. If you had hydrophones nearby, you’d hear them clearly. But the global seismic network, designed to detect the high-frequency signatures of tectonic earthquakes and nuclear tests, was tuned to the wrong channel.

Sound travels roughly 4.3 times faster through water (~1,500 m/s) than through air (~343 m/s). But speed isn’t even the most important difference. It’s reach. Water’s density means less energy is lost. And at low frequencies, the absorption coefficient in seawater is orders of magnitude lower than in air. A low-frequency sound can travel farther through water in a few seconds than it could travel through air in a lifetime.

And there’s one more detail from Pham’s paper that should tingle our spidey senses. Unlike Greenland, where glacial earthquake activity tracks seasonal air temperature (summer warmth drives summer calving), Thwaites shows no such seasonal pattern. The strongest driver of glacial earthquakes there is not surface temperature. Something else is controlling the rhythm of ice destruction. The most likely driver: ocean conditions that accelerated the glacier’s ice tongue by 20-40%, weakening the sea ice holding icebergs in place and triggering more capsizing events. But the ocean forcings themselves remain, in Pham’s words, “not well understood.”

At least he managed to pick up the signal and highlight this trend so that others can dig deeper.

📣 Interlude: Q&A with Dr. Son Pham

After interviewing Dr. Julien Chaput for part 2, I figured that it might be a good tradition to at least try and reach out to the scientists that are covered in these essays.

Luckily, Dr. Son Pham was kind enough to engage in some email ping-pong and answer some questions. Thanks, Son!

Q: Your catalog shows that the most active period of glacial earthquakes at Thwaites (2018-2020) correlated with a 20-40% speed-up of the ice tongue, driven by what you describe as “not-well-understood external ocean forcings.” If you had unlimited funding and access, what would you deploy and where to close that gap in understanding? What’s the instrument or dataset that doesn’t exist yet but should?

The findings of the Thwaites (and Pine Island) glacial earthquakes were genuinely incidental. I did not expect that so many significant quakes would go unnoticed for so long.

The seismic network covering most of West Antarctica, i.e., POLENET, played a critical role in detecting and analysing the events. Unfortunately, many seismic instruments in the network will be discontinued after 2025. Thus, if I have access to such funding, I am very keen to upgrade them to a long-term seismic network of a similar scale to continue monitoring glacial quakes in the endangered glaciers.

In addition, direct measurements from the ocean sites are also badly needed. To my limited knowledge, there were no ocean monitoring systems in the Amundsen Sea or in front of Thwaites in recent years that coincide with the seismic detections I made.

One must acknowledge that accessing these places is very logistically challenging. Nevertheless, I would invest in a long-term monitoring system that collects data on local ocean currents, temperature, and salinity in parallel with the on-land seismic network. I am not an ocean monitoring expert to call out exactly which instruments or technologies should exist.

Having the amphibious monitoring system would go a long way toward understanding the actual forcing of the so-far-unnoticed glacial quakes and their impact on the stability of the glaciers farther inland.

Q: What’s an acoustics question that keeps you up at night? Why? Any guess at an answer?

As an observational seismologist, I have the privilege of working with various types of mechanical waves every day, including acoustic waves traveling through air or other liquids, and elastic waves traveling through solids.

Honestly, many of them keep me awake at night.

As I noted in the article, I am recently puzzled by the quakes near the Pine Island Glacier. There are several guesses of the possibility, but the lack of complementary observations in such a remote part of the world prevents any solid conclusion as yet.

The Time Advantage

Acoustic monitoring doesn’t just detect different things. It detects them faster.

This is not because the speed of sound is faster than the speed of light. Obviously, it isn’t. It’s because acoustics can listen inside the system while satellites can only see what’s happening outside. A satellite photographs a crack after it has reached the surface. A hydrophone hears the stress building before the crack forms. The time advantage isn’t about signal speed. It’s about where the instrument is pointed: upstream in the causal chain rather than downstream at the result.

This matters enormously in practical terms. Satellites observe the surface. They take snapshots at fixed intervals, limited by orbital paths and cloud cover. They see outcomes. Acoustic monitoring observes the interior. It listens continuously, 24/7, regardless of weather or season. It hears precursors.

As someone who worked in adtech, this feels oddly familiar. The industry went through a decade-long obsession with “last-click attribution,” giving all the credit for a conversion to the final touchpoint before a purchase. Slowly, the smarter companies realized the real value was in multi-touch attribution, measuring the upstream signals that influenced the decision long before the click. The companies that tracked intent signals earlier in the funnel could predict conversions, allocate budgets more efficiently, and consistently outperform competitors who were staring at the final event.

Satellites staring at the calving event is last-click attribution. Hydrophones catching the acoustic precursors months earlier is upstream attribution. The insight is identical: if you only measure the final event, you’re always too late to influence it.

What Signal Are You Missing?

The pattern keeps compounding across this series. Part 1 established that Antarctica only appears silent because human senses are the wrong instrument. Part 2 proved that continuous acoustic monitoring can reveal structural change invisible to the naked eye. Part 3 adds two more layers: the infrastructure to listen already exists (built for nuclear arms control, repurposed for climate), and acoustic monitoring provides a genuine time advantage over visual observation.

Each piece sharpens the same question. It’s no longer just “are you listening?” It’s “are you listening early enough in the chain to do something about what you hear?”

The Ross Ice Shelf was singing for millennia. Icebergs have been screaming at 220 dB for as long as there have been icebergs. 362 glacial earthquakes shook Thwaites over 13 years while standard networks heard nothing.

The signal was always there. The question was never whether we could hear it. It was whether we were measuring at the right point in the chain, early enough to matter.

So, I’ll leave you with a closing question: What signal are you not hearing, not because it isn’t there, but because you’re measuring the wrong thing at the wrong point at the wrong time?

Next time: How does sound travel 9,600 kilometers through the ocean without losing its signal? The answer involves a WWII survival trick, a physics phenomenon that whales discovered millions of years before us, and a natural highway hidden 1,000 meters below the surface.

Part 4: The Ocean’s Secret Highway.

Tag along for this 10-part series about Antarctica, acoustics, and paying attention.

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See you in two weeks 🌊

This is Part 3 of “Sound of Antarctica,” a 10-part series on what the quietest continent teaches us about paying attention.

Delphi Zero explores the interplay of climate, energy, and security 🌳🔋🛡️

📧 If you are opening this essay in your email inbox, I recommend clicking on the title of this piece to enjoy the full-length version in the browser.

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Hi there,

Welcome back to part 2 (out of 10) of the Sound of Antarctica: What the Quietest Continent Teaches Us About Paying Attention.

1. The Loudest Silence on Earth

2. The Singing Ice Shelf

We’ll dive into the beautiful world of acoustics research and what it can teach us about the world around us. (+ I have a little surprise for you)

Let’s tune in 🎧

The Singing Ice Shelf

By Art Lapinsch

There’s a slab of ice floating in the Southern Ocean that’s roughly the size of France (or Texas… in case that’s easier to imagine).

It’s called the Ross Ice Shelf - 487,000 square kilometers of glacial ice, up to 750 meters thick in places, fed by slow rivers of ice pouring off the Antarctic interior. From the sea, its face is a wall of white rising 50 meters above the waterline, stretching 800 kilometers from one anchor point to another.

Early explorers called it simply “the Barrier.” James Clark Ross, who first encountered it in 1841, compared the futility of trying to sail through it to attempting the Cliffs of Dover.

It’s been there for thousands of years. It’s the largest ice shelf on Earth. And for all of those thousands of years, it’s been singing into the void.

In 2018 though, a team led by geophysicist Julien Chaput published a paper that changed how we think about Antarctic ice. The research team had buried 34 ultra-sensitive seismometers beneath the snow on the Ross Ice Shelf’s surface and left them there for over two years, from late 2014 to early 2017. They weren’t listening for music. They were trying to understand the shelf’s physical structure. But when they started analyzing the data, they noticed something nobody expected.

The ice shelf was humming. Constantly. A near-continuous vibration at frequencies above 5 Hz - far below the threshold of human hearing (>20Hz). A continent-sized instrument playing a song to an empty room.

What is the biggest slab of ice on the planet telling us while we are not listening?

📣 Interlude: Q&A with Julien Chaput

When writing this piece, I did a Hail Mary and emailed Julien to ask him a question about their experience. What’s better than to hear it from the researcher himself.

So, here’s your surprise. Despite being busy, he was kind enough to respond 👇

Q: When you first noticed the continuous hum in the data, did you and your team know immediately what you were looking at? What did it feel like and how did the situation evolve?

Julien: The “hum” in the data is a subtle, inaudible thing that is revealed in the data via spectrum analysis. We construct images called spectrograms, which are representations of frequency strength vs time, and the ice resonances can be seen clearly there (see below link to a seminar I gave on it a few years ago).

The character, drift, and evolution of the resonance peaks generally breaks all assumptions we have about how seismic signals propagate, and it took me almost two years to start figuring it out (and a lot of numerical modeling).

From the tiny insights derived from the math of it, we were able to start building intuition about the source of the hum, namely, subtle interactions between the surface expression of snow and firn structures, wind, and changes in the snow itself. It lead to a sprawling ongoing research project, and will eventually lead to another visit with a much more dense instrument array.

How Ice Learns to Sing

Here’s how it works.

The Ross Ice Shelf isn’t bare ice. It’s covered in a thick blanket of compacted snow - what glaciologists call the “firn layer” - that can extend several meters deep. This firn layer acts as insulation for the ice beneath, a kind of thermal fur coat protecting the shelf from surface temperatures. On top of that firn sit massive snow dunes, sculpted by Antarctic winds into formations that look like a frozen desert.

When those winds blow across the dunes - and they blow constantly - they set the firn layer vibrating. Like a flute being played nonstop.

The analogy is more precise than it sounds. A flute produces different notes depending on which holes are open and how fast the air moves through them. The Ross Ice Shelf works the same way. Two forces shape the pitch: wind speed reshaping the dune topography (changing where the air interacts with the surface) and air temperature altering the speed at which seismic waves travel through the snow (changing the medium itself). Strong storms rearrange the dunes and the frequency shifts. Temperature rises or drops and the frequency shifts again.

Chaput’s team observed both gradual spectral changes over months and rapid shifts on the scale of hours. They recorded frequency excursions of up to several hertz. They even detected a January 2016 regional melt event - a moment when surface temperatures approached 0°C and weakened the snow lattice - through the change in the shelf’s acoustic signature alone.

They detected structural change in the ice by listening to it.

The firn layer’s seismic behavior turned out to be extraordinarily sensitive to near-surface conditions. The spectral peaks the team observed - those narrow bands of resonant frequency between roughly 4 and 50 Hz - responded to everything happening in the top several meters of the shelf. Wind redistribution of snow. Formation of melt ponds. Refreezing events that created new percolation layers beneath the surface. Each of these processes left a distinct fingerprint in the acoustic data.

This isn’t a metaphor. The Ross Ice Shelf is broadcasting its vital signs in real time, 24 hours a day, to anyone with the right instrument pointed at it. The seismic hum is a continuous readout of the shelf’s structural health - its temperature, its density profile, its response to storms, and its vulnerability to the kind of surface melting that precedes catastrophic breakup.

Why This Matters More Than You Think

Here’s where I need you to hold two numbers in your head.

The first number: 5 meters. That’s how much global sea levels would rise if the West Antarctic Ice Sheet - the mass of grounded ice behind the Ross Ice Shelf - flowed unimpeded into the ocean. The USGS puts the total at 11.6 meters. Five meters is the conservative estimate for the portion most at risk. Five meters redraws the coastline of every continent on Earth.

The second number: eightfold. That’s the factor by which glacier flow can accelerate after the ice shelf holding it back collapses. We know this because we’ve watched it happen. When the Larsen B Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula disintegrated in 2002 - 3,250 square kilometers of ice, gone in a month - the glaciers behind it accelerated two- to six-fold almost immediately. Their mass loss jumped from 2–4 gigatonnes per year to somewhere between 22 and 40 gigatonnes per year. The Crane Glacier alone tripled in speed.

The Larsen B was roughly the size of Connecticut. The Ross Ice Shelf is roughly 100x the size.

Ice shelves are the corks in the bottle. They exert back-pressure on the glaciers feeding them, slowing the flow of land ice into the sea. When the cork pops, everything behind it accelerates. And once it starts, we don’t have a way to put it back.

Now, the Ross Ice Shelf is currently considered relatively stable. That word “currently” is doing a lot of work. Research has shown that warm ocean water is eroding the shelf from below - parts of it are losing 10 to 20 meters of thickness per decade. The firn layer - the same fur coat that generates the singing - is the shelf’s first line of defense against surface melting. If the firn weakens, melt ponds form. Melt ponds drive water into crevasses. Water in crevasses drives a process called hydrofracture - think “fracking done by nature”. Hydrofracture is what killed the Larsen B.

This is where the singing becomes more than a curiosity. Chaput’s discovery means we can monitor the firn layer’s health continuously, passively, from seismic stations that cost a fraction of satellite missions and aren’t limited by orbital passes or cloud cover. Changes to the hum - shifts in frequency, amplitude, spectral pattern - can tell us whether melt ponds or cracks are forming before they become visible from space. A tool to monitor the environment and its impact on the ice shelf. (At this point, I’m thinking that this data would be perfect for machine learning systems to uncover hidden correlations/insights.)

The shelf was telling us about its health long before anyone was listening. The signal was always there.

A Listening System That Already Exists (And Three That Should)

The Ross Ice Shelf discovery sits inside a broader revolution in passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) - the science of learning by listening rather than probing. It turns out the planet is broadcasting an enormous amount of critical data acoustically, and we’ve only recently started building systems capable of hearing it.

One existing system is the following 👇

The NOAA/NPS Ocean Noise Reference Station Network (URL)

A network of 13 calibrated hydrophone moorings distributed across U.S. waters - from the Arctic to the tropics, spanning the continental shelf, Hawaii, and American Samoa.

Deployed starting in 2014, these stations record continuously in the 10–2,000 Hz band, capturing anthropogenic noise (shipping, drilling), biological signals (whale calls, fish choruses), and geophysical sounds (storms, ice).

The explicit goal: establish long-term baselines so we can actually measure how the ocean soundscape is changing. You don’t know what abnormal means if you’ve never defined normal.

Now let’s go into day-dreaming territory. Three types of PAM installations that should exist but don’t (yet)👇

#1: An Acoustic Monitoring Ring Around the Antarctic Ice Sheet

Right now, seismic monitoring of Antarctic ice shelves is ad hoc - individual research deployments lasting two or three years, covering fractions of specific shelves.

Imagine a permanent, interconnected ring of broadband seismometers covering every major ice shelf: Ross, Ronne-Filchner, Amery, the remnants of the Larsen system.

Continuous, real-time monitoring of the firn hum across all of them. The shift from sampling to surveillance. Early warning not for one shelf, but for the entire system.

The technology exists. The models exist. What’s missing is the institutional will to treat acoustic monitoring of ice shelves as critical infrastructure rather than research curiosity.

Big Data sensor system at continental scale. A man can dream.

#2: Acoustic Monitoring of Offshore Wind Farm Foundations

Offshore wind is scaling fast - thousands of turbines being driven into the seabed across the North Sea, the U.S. Eastern Seaboard, the Baltic. Each foundation is subject to fatigue and structural degradation that’s extremely expensive to inspect by sending divers or ROVs (i.e. robotic submarines).

Passive acoustic monitoring of the structural resonance of these foundations - listening for shifts in vibration patterns that signal fatigue cracks, loosened grouting, or scour undermining the base - could provide continuous structural health data at a fraction of the cost of periodic inspection. The same principle as the singing ice shelf: if the structure is resonating, changes in the resonance tell you something about the structure.

#3: Acoustic Early Warning for Subsea Methane Release

Methane hydrates - frozen deposits of methane locked in sediment on the ocean floor - represent both a potential energy source and a climate wildcard.

As ocean temperatures rise, these deposits can destabilize, releasing methane (roughly 80 times more potent than CO₂ over 20 years) into the water column and atmosphere. The release of methane from hydrate deposits produces distinctive acoustic signatures - bubbles, sediment displacement, changes in seafloor resonance. A network of passive acoustic monitors on the Arctic continental shelves, where hydrate deposits are most vulnerable to warming, could serve as an early detection system for large-scale methane release events.

We have satellites watching the surface. Nobody’s listening to the floor.

You Can’t Grasp What You’re Not Measuring

I spent a decade in adtech before before diving into climate/energy. It’s crazy how much this industry resembles the early days of online advertising.

In early digital advertising, you had massive amounts of signal - user behavior, click patterns, engagement data - but most of it was hidden. Not because it wasn’t valuable. Because the infrastructure to capture, process, and act on it in real time didn’t exist yet. The data was there. The pipes weren’t.

The companies that figured this out first - that built the signal-processing infrastructure before anyone else understood why it mattered - ate the market. The insight wasn’t “users generate data.” Everyone knew that. The insight was: the gap between available signal and deployed measurement infrastructure is where all the value lives.

That gap is exactly where climate science is right now with passive acoustics.

The Ross Ice Shelf has been singing for millennia. The Southern Ocean has been propagating iceberg collisions at 190+ dB for as long as there have been icebergs. Whale calls have been crossing entire ocean basins since before humans existed. The data has always been there. We’re in the early innings of building the pipes.

And here’s the thing that really maps from adtech: the signal you’re not looking for is almost always more valuable than the signal you are looking for. Chaput’s team deployed seismometers to study the Ross Ice Shelf’s structure and stumbled into a continuous health-monitoring system. This is a pattern. When you build the infrastructure to listen at scale, the most important discoveries aren’t the ones you planned for.

The Ross Ice Shelf is still singing. Right now. Winds are blowing across its snow dunes setting the firn layer vibrating at frequencies you’ll never hear with your ears. The pitch is shifting with the weather, tracking every storm, every temperature swing, every subtle rearrangement of the surface.

It’s the longest-running performance on Earth. And for most of human history, the audience was empty. One research team proved that we can tap into it.

Now the next question is for you: Who (or what) is performing right under your nose while you’re not paying attention to it?

Thanks for reading and thanks (a) to Julien and his team for their research effort and (b) Julien himself to take the time to respond to my email.

Next time: The ice doesn’t just sing. Sometimes it screams - and when it does, hydrophones in Australia pick up the phone.

See you in two weeks. Latest. 🧊

This is Part 2 of “Sound of Antarctica,” a 10-part series on what the quietest continent teaches us about paying attention.

Delphi Zero explores the interplay of climate, energy, and security 🌳🔋🛡️

📧 If you are opening this essay in your email inbox, I recommend clicking on the title of this piece to enjoy the full-length version in the browser.

Subscribe now

Hey friend,

Normally, I don’t send newsletters on Saturdays. But the great thing about having your own newsletter is that you get to make the rules. So here we are.

Also, sometimes, I like to write climate fiction. The last time I published a cli-fi story was - *checks notes* - back in October 2023.

Why so long? Because I got obsessed with a a very specific story. A story about the risks and opportunities that new technologies carry.

Ever since reading my friend Ben’s article about atmospheric sulfur injection to dim the sun, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around how to tell this story. Many drafts later, I wasn’t happy with it and shelved it. Two years later, (I think) I finally cracked it.

This is the story that deserved to be told for a long time.

I hope you enjoy reading it 🙏

White Sky

By Art Lapinsch | Delphi Zero | 2029

The first thing you notice in Chennai is the light.

Not the sun itself. You can’t really see the sun anymore, not the way you used to. What you notice is the quality of the light: a diffuse, hazy glow that makes everything look like a photograph taken through a window smeared with Vaseline. Locals have started calling it vellai vanam. The white sky. Street vendors sell polarized sunglasses with a wink: “For the new India.” Children who were born after the deployment don’t know the sky was ever different.

I arrived in Chennai eighteen months after Rajesh Patel’s fleet turned the stratosphere into a mirror. I came to write about the man who did it. I left understanding that the man doesn’t matter. What matters is the door he opened. And the fact that it doesn’t close.

I. The Richest Man You’ve Never Heard Of

To understand what Rajesh Patel did, you first have to understand where he came from.

Not Mumbai. Although that’s where RP Industries was headquartered by the time he became one of the forty wealthiest people on the Indian subcontinent. Patel grew up in Bhuj, a city in Gujarat’s Kutch district that sits on the edge of salt flats so vast they can be seen from space. Kutch has always been a very particular plot of land. Hot, dry, prone to earthquakes. But when Patel was a boy, in the late 1980s, there was still a season when the rains came and the white earth turned green for a few weeks.

That season doesn’t exist anymore.

By the time I began reporting this story, I couldn’t find a single resident of Kutch under the age of thirty who remembered a reliable monsoon. The rains still come, but they come wrong. Too much water in too little time, then nothing for months. The old farmers call it paagal mausam. Crazy weather.

Patel left Kutch at seventeen. He studied engineering in Ahmedabad, then built a logistics company that grew into a conglomerate spanning shipping, defense contracting, and industrial chemicals. RP Industries was not a household name outside of India, but within the country’s defense establishment, Patel was a man who could get things done without attracting attention. His company held long-standing contracts with the Indian Ministry of Defence for high-altitude aircraft. Modified jets that could operate at the edge of the stratosphere for surveillance, reconnaissance, and cargo delivery to remote Himalayan border posts. This work gave Patel access to military airfields, classified procurement channels, and the kind of relationships that don’t show up in annual reports. It also gave him a fleet of aircraft that could fly higher than almost anything else in the Indian inventory.

I spoke to eleven people who knew Patel personally. Every single one of them described some version of the same scene: Patel pointing at an air-conditioning unit and asking whoever was in the room whether they remembered sleeping through the heat as children. It was a tic, almost a compulsion. The cool air in his offices (which were kept at a frigid nineteen degrees Celsius) seemed to remind him of something he couldn’t stop thinking about.

“He talked about it the way some men talk about a woman they lost,” his longtime driver told me. “The coolness. Not the machine that makes it. The feeling of being cool.”

In March of last year, Patel was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The prognosis was five weeks. He lasted seven.

In between the diagnosis and his death, he launched what atmospheric scientists would later call the first confirmed act of unilateral stratospheric intervention. The aircraft were already there. RP Industries’ high-altitude fleet had been flying classified missions for the Ministry of Defence for years. Adding internal sulfur tanks and dispersal nozzles to airframes that already operated at seventeen to nineteen kilometers was, by the standards of aerospace engineering, a minor retrofit. What Patel needed wasn’t hardware. It was sulfur, flight paths, and a government willing to let it happen.

It was not enough to cool India. It was not designed to be.

It was enough to be detected. Atmospheric monitoring stations in Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and East Africa registered a measurable uptick in stratospheric aerosol optical depth. Climate modelers at three separate institutions confirmed the signal was anthropogenic. For the first time in human history, someone had demonstrably altered the composition of the stratosphere on purpose. Not in a lab. Not in a simulation. In the actual sky, above the heads of a billion people.

The deployment proved that it could be done. Cheaply, quickly, and without anyone’s permission.

Everything that followed was a consequence of that proof.

II. The Price of a Degree

Let’s pause and talk about sulfur dioxide, because most people don’t understand how absurdly simple this is.

If you wanted to cool the planet by roughly one degree Celsius, you would need to put approximately one million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere each year. This is not a theoretical number. It’s derived from what happened in June 1991, when Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines and ejected roughly twenty million tons of SO₂ into the upper atmosphere. Global temperatures dropped by about half a degree over the following two years. The sulfur formed tiny reflective particles (aerosols) that bounced a fraction of incoming sunlight back into space before it could warm the surface.

We already emit more than a hundred million tons of sulfur dioxide annually from burning fossil fuels. The difference is altitude. Our industrial sulfur goes into the troposphere (the lower atmosphere) where it rains out in days. Pinatubo’s sulfur went into the stratosphere, above the weather, where it stayed for years.

The cost of a full-scale stratospheric aerosol injection program has been estimated at less than twenty billion dollars per year. For context, that’s roughly what Americans spend on Halloween candy and costumes. It’s a rounding error in any major economy’s budget. It is, as one climate scientist told me with visible discomfort, “the cheapest thing you could possibly do that would have the biggest consequences for every person on Earth.”

This is the fact that keeps certain people up at night. Not that geoengineering is difficult. That it’s easy.

The technical barrier is not chemistry. It’s not even engineering. The leading delivery method proposed by researchers is a fleet of purpose-built high-altitude tanker aircraft. No existing commercial plane can reach the tropical stratosphere at twenty kilometers with a meaningful payload. But modified military jets and high-altitude cargo aircraft can reach the lower stratosphere at seventeen to nineteen kilometers, particularly in the subtropics where the tropopause dips lower. Several nations already operate such aircraft for reconnaissance and border surveillance. The retrofit required to turn a high-altitude surveillance plane into a sulfur dispersal platform is modest. Tanks, nozzles, plumbing. A competent aerospace contractor could do it in months.

A single nation could do it. A single corporation with the right government connections could do it. The conditions only need to align once.

For years, this was a thought experiment that climate policy people discussed at conferences in the same hushed tones that nuclear strategists once used to discuss first-strike capability. Everyone agreed it was possible. Everyone agreed it would be destabilizing. Everyone assumed someone else would figure out the governance.

No one figured out the governance.

III. The Woman Who Saw It Coming

I’ll call her Marina, because she asked me to.

Marina is a former intelligence analyst with a Western government agency whose mandate included monitoring what the agency internally classified as “environmental threat vectors.” She is, as of this writing, still employed by that agency in a senior policy role. She agreed to speak with me on the condition that I not name her employer or her current title.

We met in a diner on the outskirts of a midsize American city. She ordered coffee and didn’t touch it.

“I flagged the sulfur shipments seven weeks before the deployment,” she told me. “The shipping manifests were in a public OSINT channel. Some kid with a VPN had pulled them off a leaked database. Thousands of tons of SO₂, flowing into Jawaharlal Nehru Port. It was obvious.”

Marina had joined the agency five years earlier, drawn by a sense of duty she described with a shrug that suggested she’d long since stopped finding it romantic. Her family had been climate migrants. She didn’t elaborate on from where. Her father had earned citizenship through military service. She’d studied the emerging field of eco-terrorism prevention and had risen quickly through the ranks. She was good at pattern recognition, better at connecting disparate data points, and frustrated (deeply, chronically frustrated) by the speed at which her agency moved.

“I brought it to my supervisor. He gave me a week to build the case. I built it in three days. Shell companies, defense contracts, diplomatic cables. It all pointed to RP Industries. And the Indian government wasn’t just aware. They were underwriting the whole thing.”

She paused and looked at me.

“Then I brought it upstairs. And that’s when I learned what this job actually is.”

IV. The Game Behind the Game

What Marina described next will be familiar to anyone who has spent time in the national security apparatus. And bewildering to anyone who hasn’t.

Her agency’s deputy director - a career official Marina described as “the kind of person who makes you feel like you’re wasting their oxygen” - called her into a private meeting. The deputy director had read Marina’s case file. She confirmed every one of Marina’s conclusions. Then she explained why the agency had already known about the Patel operation. And why certain data had been deliberately obscured from Marina’s analytical feeds.

The logic, as Marina reconstructed it for me, went something like this: The Indian government was betting that a successful stratospheric deployment would cement India’s position as a leader of the Global South. A nation willing to act while the West debated. If the deployment produced results, India would gain enormous geopolitical leverage. If it failed or produced blowback, Rajesh Patel (a dying man with no future to protect) would absorb the blame. The government would conduct the usual theater of accountability. Some department heads would step aside. An independent investigation would be announced. Standard procedure.

For the Western agency, the calculation was different. They didn’t want to stop the deployment. They wanted it to happen. And then to use the controversy to justify tightening export controls on India. Specifically, controls on the advanced semiconductors and computing infrastructure that India needed for its artificial general intelligence program.

Climate intervention as geopolitical chess. The sky as a pawn sacrifice.

“She told me this was above my pay grade,” Marina said. “She told me I’d understand when I was in her position. Then she took me off the case.”

I asked Marina what she did next.

She took a long sip of the coffee she hadn’t been touching.

“I got promoted.”

V. Beginning of the End

While Marina was learning the architecture of her own irrelevance, Rajesh Patel was dying.

The last person to spend significant time with Patel before the deployment was Monish Joshi, his longtime CTO and hand-picked successor as CEO of RP Industries. Joshi agreed to meet with me at the RP Industries campus in Mumbai. A sprawling compound of glass and concrete that manages to look both futuristic and exhausted, like a science fiction set after the crew has gone home.

Joshi is a careful man. He spoke slowly, chose his words like someone who had been deposed multiple times (he had), and occasionally stopped mid-sentence to stare out the window at the milky sky his former boss had created.

“The day he showed me the hangar was the day I understood,” Joshi told me. “I knew those aircraft. I’d seen them on our books for years. Border surveillance, high-altitude cargo runs. Standard defense work. But when he walked me in and I saw the sulfur tanks, the dispersal nozzles, the flight path maps pinned to the wall... I realized the entire fleet had been quietly repurposed. The planes I thought were flying reconnaissance had been retrofitted for atmospheric injection.”

I asked Joshi how long Patel had been planning this.

Joshi shook his head. “That’s the thing. I don’t think he planned it, not originally. The aircraft capability was already there because of the defense contracts. The Indian government had been funding high-altitude flight programs for years. Some of that work, I later learned, included feasibility studies for stratospheric intervention. Not as a deployment plan. As a strategic option. The way you study nuclear capability without deciding to build the bomb. When Raj got his diagnosis, all the pieces were already on the table. He just decided to assemble them.”

The conversation between Patel and Joshi, as Joshi recounted it, centered on a childhood memory. Both men had grown up in western India. Both remembered trying to sleep through afternoon heat that made the air feel solid. Both remembered a time, decades ago, when the heat was survivable.

“He kept pointing at the air conditioner,” Joshi said. “Saying, ‘We have this. Hundreds of millions of people don’t. They’re roasting alive and nobody is doing anything about it.’”

I asked Joshi if he tried to talk Patel out of it.

“I asked him if he was playing God.”

“And what did he say?”

Joshi paused for a long time.

“He just looked at me. And after a while he said, ‘What would you do, Monish? If you had four weeks and all this money and you knew what was coming?’”

VI. Six Weeks

The deployment began on a Tuesday.

The aircraft launched in pairs from two airfields in Tamil Nadu. Each flight climbed to between seventeen and nineteen kilometers before activating the dispersal system, releasing aerosolized sulfur dioxide along pre-programmed flight paths designed to distribute the material across the tropical lower stratosphere. The operation ran continuously for six weeks. Multiple flights per day. There was no announcement, no press conference, no warning.

Fifteen thousand tons of SO₂. A fraction of what a full-scale planetary cooling program would require. But injected at the right altitude, in the right latitude band, it was enough to produce a detectable signal.

The first external indication was a spike in aerosol readings at a monitoring station in Colombo, Sri Lanka. A technician flagged it as an instrument error. When a second station in the Maldives reported similar readings six hours later, the data was escalated to the World Meteorological Organization. By that point, Patel was in a hospital bed, watching the coverage on a muted television.

Within forty-eight hours, the story was global news. Satellite imagery showed a thin layer spreading across the tropics like oil on water. Climate scientists scrambled to model the implications. Governments issued statements that ranged from furious to conspicuously measured. On social media, the reaction split along predictable lines: outrage in the Global North, cautious approval in parts of the South.

The deployment was too small to meaningfully cool India. But that was never the point. The point was the proof of concept. The demonstration that a single actor, operating outside any international framework, could alter the composition of the stratosphere and get away with it. That the taboo could be broken.

In India, the response was complicated. Street protests erupted in Delhi and Kolkata, where activists condemned the deployment as reckless. In the south, where the aerosol haze was faintly visible, the mood was different. On social media, Indian nationalists celebrated what they called a “climate moonshot.” A farmer in Andhra Pradesh told a local news crew that it didn’t matter whether temperatures had actually dropped yet. “Someone finally did something,” he said. “That’s more than the UN has done in thirty years.”

It was during this period that Marina received her promotion.

She didn’t tell me this directly. I pieced it together from dates in public records and things she let slip in our later conversations. Sometime between the deployment and the international fallout, Marina was moved from her analyst desk into a senior policy role. The same deputy director who had taken her off the case signed the paperwork.

When I asked her about the timing, she gave me a careful, rehearsed non-answer about “organizational restructuring.” Then she went quiet for a moment and added, almost to herself: “You learn pretty quickly which questions are worth asking and which ones just make your life harder.”

I didn’t press her on what she meant. I didn’t need to.

VII. The Pandora’s Box Problem

Rajesh Patel died eleven days after the deployment ended.

According to Joshi, Patel spent his final days in a state of oscillating certainty. Some hours, he was serene. Convinced he had done the only moral thing available to him. Other hours, he was terrified.

“The last real conversation we had,” Joshi told me, “he grabbed my arm and said, ‘Monish, promise me you’ll make sure no one does this carelessly.’”

Joshi said he promised. Then he asked Patel who, exactly, he was worried about.

“Everyone,” Patel said. “I’m worried about everyone.”

This is the moment where the story stops being about Rajesh Patel.

Because the question was never whether Patel’s deployment would “work” in the sense of cooling India. It didn’t. Fifteen thousand tons is a demonstration, not a solution. The question was never even whether it was morally justified. Reasonable people disagree, and will continue to disagree, possibly forever.

The question - the one that should keep you awake - is: What happens now that someone has proved it can be done?

Stratospheric aerosol injection has a scaling problem that doubles as a governance nightmare. Patel’s fifteen thousand tons was detectable but climatically trivial. To produce meaningful cooling, you’d need roughly a million tons per year. To sustain that cooling, you’d need to keep injecting, year after year, because the sulfur rains out of the stratosphere over twelve to twenty-four months. If you halt the injections without first reducing the underlying greenhouse gas concentrations, the masked warming comes roaring back. Climate scientists call this “termination shock.” It would be like taking your hand off the thermostat and discovering the house is on fire.

Who decides whether to scale up? Who decides to sustain it? Who pays? Who is liable when the monsoon pattern shifts over Bangladesh, or the Sahel dries out, or the ozone layer thins in ways we didn’t model?

There is no international framework for answering any of these questions. The UN Environment Programme has published reports. Academic institutions have convened panels. But there is no treaty, no convention, no governance mechanism of any kind that addresses what happens when one actor (a country, a corporation, or a dying billionaire) decides to alter the composition of the atmosphere.

Patel didn’t cool the planet. He did something worse. He proved the concept, and in doing so, he issued an open invitation to everyone with the means and the motive to try it at scale.

This is Pandora’s box.

The first person to open it always has a reason. The problem is, the box doesn’t close.

VIII. The Second Deployment

I didn’t plan to write this section.

Six weeks after I finished interviewing Joshi in Mumbai, I received a message from a source I’d cultivated during my reporting. An atmospheric scientist at a European research institution who monitors stratospheric aerosol levels.

“You should look at the latest AOD readings from the Arabian Peninsula,” the message said. “Something is happening that isn’t residual from Patel.”

I pulled the data. Aerosol optical depth measurements over the Persian Gulf had ticked upward in a pattern that couldn’t be explained by the slow decay of Patel’s original injection. New sulfur was entering the stratosphere. Continuously. At volumes that dwarfed the Indian demonstration.

Over the following weeks, through a combination of satellite data analysis, shipping records, and conversations with people who asked not to be identified, I confirmed what the atmospheric scientist had suspected: a second deployment was underway. Not from India. From a facility in a Gulf state whose economy is built on fossil fuels and whose leadership has watched with growing alarm as international climate agreements threaten to strand their primary asset.

Their motivation is the mirror image of Patel’s. He wanted to cool the planet because his people were burning. They want to cool the planet because if temperatures stabilize, the political pressure to transition off fossil fuels decreases. Geoengineering, for them, is not a last resort. It’s a business strategy. Keep the sky cool and the oil flowing.

Where Patel’s operation was a demonstration, this one is built for scale. My sources estimate the injection rate at several hundred thousand tons per year and climbing. Enough to produce a measurable regional cooling effect. Enough to change the politics of climate policy worldwide.

I reached out to Marina one more time. I told her what I’d found.

There was a long pause. When she spoke again, her voice had the flat, careful tone of someone choosing every word for a transcript.

“I’m not in a position to comment on that.”

I asked if she was aware of any monitoring efforts related to the Arabian Peninsula readings.

“I’d encourage you to direct those questions to the appropriate interagency channels.”

That was all I needed to hear. Not because of what she said. Because of what she didn’t say. The Marina I’d met in that diner six months earlier would have cursed, or laughed, or asked me where I got my data. This Marina had learned the language of the institution. She answered like someone who’d been briefed on how to answer.

IX. White Sky

I went back to Chennai before filing this story.

I wanted to see the sky one more time, now that I knew what I knew. That the white veil above me was no longer one man’s desperate act but the opening chapter of a geopolitical contest with no rules, no referee, and no endgame.

I took a rickshaw through the old city. The driver, a man in his fifties, glanced up through the windshield at the flat white dome above us.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” he said. “We call it the Indian Milky Way. You can see it even during the day now.”

Rajesh Patel opened the box. And now the rest of us have to live inside it.

🙏 Thanks Ben for the initial idea and brainstorming. A big shoutout to Liam, Don, Kip, Nick, Sara, Megan, Berkay, and many others who have helped me birth this monster into existence.

If you enjoyed this essay, please consider forwarding it to a friend who would enjoy reading a wild story 🌳

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If you have feedback/ideas/critique/etc., please get in touch.

As always, stay healthy, stay happy ✌️ The world is a messy place.

Art

Delphi Zero explores the interplay of climate, energy, and security 🌳🔋🛡️

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Hi friends,

Today, I’ll write the first of a ten-part series called Sound of Antarctica: What the Quietest Continent Teaches Us About Paying Attention.

This topic has been on my mind for more than a year. Finally, I found the words to explain why Antarctica had such a lasting impact on me (and why the core motif of this series is applicable to all of us).

1. The Loudest Silence on Earth - this one

2. The Singing Ice Shelf - A Texas-sized slab of ice plays a song only seismometers can hear

3. Glacial Screams - When Antarctica screams, Australia picks up the phone

4. The Ocean’s Secret Highway - How a WWII survival trick became climate science’s best tool

5. The Z-Call - Tracking the world’s largest animal by its lowest note

6. The Bio-Duck Mystery - Antarctica’s strangest sound and the 50-year quest to name it

7. The Doomsday Frequency - Listening to the Thwaites Glacier crack apart

8. The Last Quiet Ocean - Noise pollution arrives at the bottom of the world

9. Taking the Ocean’s Temperature with Sound - The most elegant climate tool you’ve never heard of

10. Composing at the End of the World - What happens when climate data becomes music

Thanks for gifting me your attention 🙏 Let’s go.

The Loudest Silence on Earth

By Art Lapinsch

We crossed the Drake Passage in two days.

48 hours of open ocean, no internet, no signal, nothing but water and a ship full of strangers slowly becoming friends. By the time we spotted the first iceberg through the fog, I thought I’d already made the transition. Civilization behind me. Antarctica ahead. Done.

But I was wrong. The ship is a sealed environment. You don’t notice it because everything feels so different from normal life - no emails, no notifications, no deadlines - that you mistake the absence of your routine for the presence of something new. But the ship has its own noise. The engine hums through the hull at all hours. Air vents push recycled air into the corridors. Passangers and crew members do whatever it is they do.

It’s relatively quiet but it’s still a human-made soundscape.

The actual arrival happened on the water.

We’d reached the Melchior Islands ahead of schedule, and the captain surprised everyone with an unplanned zodiac boat excursion. The energy on board was through the roof. People scrambled to their rooms, layered up, clipped on life jackets, and shuffled down to the embarkation deck to put on their rubber boots.

I ended up on Zodiac 4. Maybe eight or ten of us, shoulder to shoulder on that black rubber grip mat, knees almost touching. The guide stood at the back, radio strapped to his chest, one hand on the outboard motor. We launched off the ship and into the bay.

For a few minutes, everything was movement and noise. The engine buzzing. Cold air against exposed skin. Water slapping against the inflatable hull. People pointing at everything - Melchior Base research station with its red paint, a fur seal sitting upright on a boulder like it owned the place, glacier faces glowing pale blue against a hazy grey sky. Everyone had a camera out. Everyone was looking.

Then the guide killed the engine.

Two seconds. Maybe three. The mechanical engine sound drops away.

Five seconds. The zodiac’s forward momentum starts to fade. The slap of water against rubber softens.

Ten seconds. The wake dissolves. The boat goes still.

And then there’s just… nothing.

Not silence exactly. But nothing that we made. A faint slapping of water against ice somewhere. The occasional plop of a penguin surfacing behind us. A seal shifting its weight on a nearby rock. And behind all of it, something heavier - not a sound but a weight, as if the air itself was holding something it hadn’t released yet.

Tears started rolling while I was smiling. I know I wasn’t the only one who’d gone completely still. I didn’t understand what was happening to me at the time, and it took almost a year to piece it together.

The ship had flushed my inbox. The Drake had flushed my routine. But that moment on the zodiac - engine off, wake gone, nothing between me and the ice - flushed something deeper. Something I didn’t know needed flushing.

It wasn’t that the silence gave me something new. It removed what had been in the way.

I just didn’t have the language for it yet.
I hadn’t learned to listen yet.

Why Antarctica Is So Quiet

Here’s the thing about Antarctica: it’s not just a quiet place. It may be the quietest natural environment on Earth.

Explorer Erling Kagge, who walked solo to the South Pole with a broken radio, wrote that Antarctica was the quietest place he’d ever been. No life. No signal. Nothing.

And physics explains why.

Snow and ice are extraordinarily good at absorbing sound. Think of how the world goes muffled after a heavy snowfall - that’s a couple of centimeters doing the work. Now imagine an ice cap that averages two kilometers thick. Antarctica’s surface is, in effect, a continent-sized acoustic dampener. No trees to rustle. No insects to hum. No roads, no cities, no infrastructure. On a calm day in the dry valleys, the ambient noise approaches the threshold of human hearing - roughly 0 decibels.

To put that in context: Microsoft spent big money to build an anechoic chamber - six layers of concrete and steel, vibration-damping springs, fiberglass wedges on every surface - and achieved -20.3 dB. It holds the Guinness World Record for the quietest room on Earth. Antarctica’s dry valleys, on a windless day, get close to those conditions naturally. No engineering required. Just ice, snow, and the absence of everything we’re used to.

If you’ve read my piece on Climate Tech’s Resonant Frequencies, you’ll remember the Shannon-Weaver model — the “mother of all models” for how communication works. Sender encodes a message, transmits it as a signal through a channel, receiver decodes it on the other end. Noise degrades the signal along the way.

Antarctica, acoustically, is the Shannon-Weaver model stripped to nothing.

There’s barely any sender - no fauna density, no human activity, no mechanical noise generating signals. The channel itself - snow and ice - is hyper-absorbent, swallowing whatever sound does get produced before it can travel. And the noise floor is practically zero. It’s a communication system with nothing to transmit, a medium that eats its own signal, and no interference because there’s nothing left to interfere with.

Your ears, which evolved to decode signals from a world full of senders, are suddenly tuned to an empty channel. That’s what creates the feeling. It’s not just peaceful. It’s disorienting.

Or so your ears would have you believe.

Because here’s where it gets strange. Silence doesn’t just feel peaceful. It does something to you physically.

Researchers at the Alfred Wegener Institute studied expedition crews who spent 14 months at Neumayer Station in Antarctica. After the stint, brain scans revealed measurable shrinkage in the hippocampus - the region responsible for spatial navigation, learning, and emotional processing. The sensory deprivation of the polar environment was literally reshaping their neural architecture. Similar patterns show up in studies of solitary confinement.

The human brain does not handle the absence of stimulation well.

We are, it turns out, spectacularly bad at being still.

Which is what makes the Antarctic experience so disorienting. You arrive at the quietest place you’ve ever been, and something inside you short-circuits. Your senses, so accustomed to filtering signal from noise, suddenly have nothing to filter. And in that vacuum, something else shows up. Something that was always there, drowned out by the hum of the ship, the ping of the inbox, the chatter of daily life.

The silence doesn’t fill you. It empties you. And what’s left is what was always underneath.

The Silence Paradox

A few days into the trip, we hiked up a hill during one of our land excursions and stood looking out across a bay. Icebergs scattered across the water like chunks of marble someone had forgotten to clean up.

At some point, I noticed movement on one of the larger icebergs in the distance. A section of it - massive, probably the size of a multi-story building - detached from the main body. And it was falling. Slooooowly. So slowly that it looked almost unnatural, like watching a skyscraper collapse in slow motion.

It took a long time to hit the water. When it did, we could see the impact - a massive eruption of white spray shooting up from the surface, waves radiating outward. But we couldn’t hear anything. Just the visual, playing out in what felt like total silence.

And then, a few seconds later, the sound arrived. A deep, rolling crack followed by a thunderous boom that echoed across the bay and hit us in the chest.

The delay was maybe three or four seconds. Which means the iceberg was roughly a kilometer away. But it felt like an eternity - watching destruction happen in silence, then being hit by the sound after the fact. I’ve never experienced anything like it. In daily life, sight and sound arrive together. You don’t think about the speed of sound because you never need to. But at that scale, with that distance, the gap between seeing and hearing becomes visceral. Your brain knows something is wrong. The timeline doesn’t match.

That moment taught me something I didn’t fully grasp until much later: Antarctica only appears silent because human senses are the wrong instrument.

Because beneath the surface - literally, below the ice and below the water - Antarctica is one of the loudest places on Earth.

The Southern Ocean is among the most acoustically active environments on the planet. Icebergs collide at source levels exceeding 190 decibels - 30 times louder than a jet engine at close range, detectable from thousands of kilometers away. Blue whales produce vocalizations between 18 and 26 Hz that travel across entire ocean basins. The Ross Ice Shelf - a slab of ice roughly the size of France - vibrates continuously, producing a low hum that was only discovered in 2018 when scientists happened to bury seismometers in the right place.

None of this is audible to a person standing on the surface. It’s below our frequency range, or underwater, or propagating through ice at wavelengths we can’t perceive. The continent is screaming. We just can’t hear it.

The gap between what the surface feels like and what’s actually happening underneath is, in a word, enormous. And it’s not unique to Antarctica.

The Bigger Story

I’ve spent the past few years writing about climate, energy, and the stories we tell about both. If there’s one thread running through all of it, it’s this: the most important things happening on this planet are often happening below the threshold of casual observation.

An ice shelf hums a song for millennia before a seismometer picks it up. A glacier cracks apart in a pattern that standard monitoring networks were never designed to detect. A whale population shifts its migration route in response to ocean temperature changes that satellites can’t see from the surface.

These aren’t metaphors. These are real phenomena - real signals - that existed long before anyone built the instruments to hear them. The signal was always there. What was missing was the right tool, pointed in the right direction, by someone who had a guess what to listen for.

Antarctica taught me that this applies far beyond ice and water. It applies to how we consume information, how we evaluate technology, how we build policy, and - broadly speaking - how we pay attention to the things that matter.

We mistake the absence of signal for the absence of reality. We assume that if we can’t perceive it, it isn’t happening. And then we’re surprised when the iceberg calves, the shelf collapses, the glacier retreats.

The attention we pay determines the truths we can see.

And sometimes, paying that attention means deploying the right instrument.

What’s Coming

This is the first of a ten-part series called Sound of Antarctica: What the Quietest Continent Teaches Us About Paying Attention.

Over the next nine pieces, I’m going to highlight how different people listen to this unique continent. Not metaphorically - literally. We’re going to explore ice shelves that sing, whale calls that cross ocean basins, glaciers that produce earthquakes invisible to standard monitoring, and a Cold War surveillance network that accidentally became one of our most powerful climate tools.

Every piece will follow the same thread: something important is happening. We needed a specific instrument to hear it. And what we heard changes how we understand the world.

Here’s the plan. New pieces drop every two weeks, for the next five months:

1. The Loudest Silence on Earth - this one

2. The Singing Ice Shelf - A Texas-sized slab of ice plays a song only seismometers can hear

3. Iceberg Songs and Icequakes - When Antarctica screams, Australia picks up the phone

4. The Ocean’s Secret Highway - How a WWII survival trick became climate science’s best tool

5. The Z-Call - Tracking the world’s largest animal by its lowest note

6. The Bio-Duck Mystery - Antarctica’s strangest sound and the 50-year quest to name it

7. The Doomsday Frequency - Listening to the Thwaites Glacier crack apart

8. The Last Quiet Ocean - Noise pollution arrives at the bottom of the world

9. Taking the Ocean’s Temperature with Sound - The most elegant climate tool you’ve never heard of

10. Composing at the End of the World - What happens when climate data becomes music

I’m committing to this publicly because accountability matters. And because I think this story - the story of how sound reveals what eyes can’t see - deserves to be told properly, piece by piece, with the depth it requires.

If any of that sounds interesting, subscribe.

Subscribe now

I’ll see you in two weeks 🌊

If you’re new here: Delphi Zero explores the interplay of climate, energy, and security. Welcome aboard 🌳

Delphi Zero explores the interplay of climate, energy, and security 🌳🔋🛡️

📧 If you are opening this essay in your email inbox, I recommend clicking on the title of this piece to enjoy the full-length version in the browser.

Subscribe now

Hi friends, it’s been a while.

How are you and how have you been? Feel free to respond via email. I’m curious.

On my end, I’ve been tinkering and working on a larger project that I will share soon-ish with all of you. Hint: it’s related to today’s interview.

It’s time to get this publication firing from all cylinders again. There’s no better way to cold start it than by talking to a climate scientist who let’s ice speak for itself 🧊

If your social feed looks anything like mine, then you’ve certainly come across our guests work. His name is Zack Labe and he produces the most beautiful data visualizations about climate trends (in particular data about the polar regions).

Also, he has one of the coolest personal websites I’ve seen around. Go check it out.

We discussed:

• How having a weather diary as a child informed his career choice further down the line 📔

• What people most commonly misunderstand about the Arctic 🧊

• And why letting data do the talking is the art of science communication 📊

Enjoy ✌️

Letting the Ice Speak

By Art Lapinsch

What do you do and how does a regular work week look like for you?

I am a climate scientist at Climate Central. We are a policy-neutral 501(c)(3) nonprofit focused on researching and communicating the science and impacts of our changing climate.

My work is part of our new program on climate services, which focuses on improving our understanding of current and future climate risks, as well as translating and communicating complex climate science data for actionable decision-making.

My day-to-day usually blends scientific research, data visualization, and science communication across a range of interdisciplinary topics.

I really enjoy the opportunity to dig into open questions in climate science, especially around regional impacts and uncertainties in future climate projections, while also thinking creatively about how to communicate these findings clearly and effectively to the public.

How did you end up in climate? In hindsight, was there a defining moment that set you on the path you’re currently on? Why this moment?

You could best describe me as a weather nerd.

I have always been fascinated by the weather and still find myself staying up late watching big storms move through, just like I did as a kid. I even used to keep a weather diary.

However, growing up I had little exposure to climate change in school and only began to understand its relevance in early college. After spending a summer learning how to do scientific research, which was on how the timing of spring plant blooming may shift in a warming climate, I realized I wanted to use my passion for meteorology to better understand the relationship between climate change and extreme weather impacts.

I also did not originally intend for science communication and data visualization to play such a central role in my career, but I think that has become some of my most important contributions as a scientist, especially at this critical moment in time.

What was your favorite weather phenomenon as a kid? Why? What is it as an adult? Has it changed (if so why)?

My favorite weather is snow, and that has definitely not changed.

I have already had several late nights tracking winter storm updates on my computer this winter and taking measurements outside throughout the night. Part of what drew me to Arctic climate research is that the high latitudes contain important climate signals and oscillations that meteorologists use to forecast changes in the winter storm track (i.e., the polar jet stream), and the likelihood of cold air outbreaks.

One major area of ongoing climate research is understanding potential connections between Arctic change and winter weather farther south.

When you talk to people who don’t work in climate, what’s something that catches their attention? Why?

Everyone loves talking about the weather, and almost everyone has a story about a powerful storm or something they have noticed changing in their own backyard.

A big part of communicating climate science is connecting those stories and local observations to the data itself.

One of my goals in science communication is to help translate this information and make it relevant to people’s everyday experiences. I also really enjoy showing visuals about the Arctic and Antarctic to help connect the science in these far away places.

What’s your favorite personal weather story that you like to tell? Why?

One of my first weather-related trips as a kid was to the Mount Washington Observatory in New Hampshire, often nicknamed home to “the world’s worst weather.”

Founded in 1932, the high-elevation observatory has a long history of recording extreme conditions. This includes a world record 231 mph wind gust. Its location near the U.S. east coast storm track and unique mountain geography make it a rare place to observe extreme weather year-round, especially in winter.

During my visit, we were given a behind-the-scenes tour of the observatory, which is permanently staffed during winter too. I even tested out my first handheld anemometer, which measured wind gusts over 60 mph during our visit. It was an unforgettable experience that helped spark my appreciation for the importance of long-term weather and climate data monitoring.

What’s a thing that most people understand well about the Arctic? Why?

I think most people recognize that the Arctic is changing very quickly.

In fact, the Arctic is warming more than three times faster than the global average. This amplified warming is driven by feedbacks within the climate system, and changes in the Arctic have been one of the earliest and clearest indicators of human-caused climate change for decades now.

What’s a thing that most people misunderstand about the Arctic? Why?

Beyond the challenge of explaining how changes in a place as remote as the Arctic can affect weather and climate around the world, another key concept that is often new to people is the difference between types of ice.

For example, there are important distinctions between sea ice and land ice (e.g., glaciers and the Greenland Ice Sheet), and each has very different consequences as it changes.

In short, sea ice is frozen ocean water and largely does not contribute to global sea level rise (e.g., think of an ice cube floating in a glass of water), unlike melting ice from Greenland and mountain glaciers.

If you’d have to highlight one particular data story of yours, which would it be? Why is it important? What would you like people to take away from it?

One of my favorite climate data visualizations is an animation showing how Arctic sea-ice volume has changed since 1979, the start of the satellite record.

The graphic is intentionally simple and uses just two bar graphs. A static bar provides a reference for what we consider a “normal” amount of sea-ice volume, accounting for both ice thickness and total area, while an animated bar shows how that volume changes from year to year. Visual cues like color and motion highlight the main story, which is the long-term decline in Arctic sea-ice volume.

In fact, 2025 recorded the lowest annual average on record. The loss of thicker and older Arctic sea ice suggests that the region is transitioning into a new state, with far-reaching consequences for both the environment and society. I think simple visualizations like this can be incredibly powerful for communicating complex climate change topics, and one of my key recommendations in science communication is to be bold and keep it simple.

Playing devils advocate here. Why should people care about the Arctic sea-ice volume? What kind of real-world impact does it have for someone in North America, South America, Europe, Africa, or Asia?

In short, the loss of Arctic sea-ice volume directly amplifies global warming.

With less sea ice during summer, more dark ocean water is exposed, which absorbs incoming sunlight rather than reflecting it back into space (i.e. Albedo Effect) like bright snow and ice.

When the ocean refreezes in fall, much of that stored heat is released back into the atmosphere, driving further warming and additional ice loss.

If I could have one question answered, it would be this: What is the long-term impact of climate change on deep ocean ecosystems — especially those we’ve never even seen?

Because while we focus on surface-level changes — melting sea ice, rising temperatures — the deep ocean is absorbing most of the planet’s excess heat and carbon. It’s like the ocean is quietly holding our mistakes, and we don’t yet fully understand what it’s costing.

- Anya Astafurova in our recent interview “The Ocean Is Everything”

This is a process known as a positive feedback in climate science.

Rapid Arctic warming may also influence extreme weather, including persistent summer patterns that can lead to prolonged heat waves or droughts across highly populated regions of North America, Europe, and Asia.

Beyond climate impacts, declining sea ice has geopolitical and economic implications, such as increased shipping access or interest in natural resources. It also directly affects marine ecosystems, with cascading consequences for fisheries and the broader food web.

What is something that you have changed your mind about since entering the climate space? What is something you have doubled down on? Why?

One thing I have changed my mind about since entering the climate space is the role of data in science communication.

To my surprise, data visualization has become one of the most effective ways for me to reach large audiences and share climate change information. In some ways, this ran counter to guidance I heard early on in science communication workshops, which often emphasized avoiding numbers and facts and focusing instead on human-centered stories. While different approaches matter for different audiences, I now believe that climate data stories can be just as effective for connecting with people. I also believe that regularly translating complex data and science also helps build trust and transparency in the research process.

Related to this, something I have doubled down on is letting the data tell the story. For instance, I will often share a trend graphic without explicitly mentioning climate change, allowing viewers to interpret what they are seeing on their own.

Another piece I think is essential to better understand and communicate is uncertainty and natural variability in the climate system and how this influences short-term trends and different types of weather and climate extremes.

What’s your favorite, big question that you don’t have an answer to yet? Why do find it interesting and important? Any best guesses for an answer?

The most common question I get is when the Arctic will experience its first ice-free summer, and the honest answer is that we do not know yet.

I am not even sure we will ever be able to pinpoint an exact year until it is very close to happening. While the long-term trend in Arctic sea ice is clearly downward, there is still substantial year-to-year variability driven by weather patterns and natural climate variability, which can temporarily speed up or slow down ice loss. That variability makes precise projections difficult, which is why estimates pointing to sometime in the mid-21st century remain reasonable.

This also reflects both uncertainty and the range of scientific methods used to study this problem. While it is an interesting and important question, it is also worth recognizing that continued ice loss itself is what drives impacts. From that perspective, there is very little difference in real-world consequences between a summer with 1.5 million square kilometers of sea ice and one with 1 million square kilometers, which is often used as the technical definition of “ice-free” in the scientific literature.

Looking back from a Net Zero future, what do you hope they will say about us?

I hope people say that we quickly recognized the importance of working together across countries and disciplines to solve big, complex problems like climate change.

I also hope we are seen as a period that strengthened collaboration across fields, along with recognizing that improving resilience, our environment, and society depends on clear communication of the science to build trust and ground decisions in facts.

Thanks, Zack 🙏

If you learned a thing or two, consider sharing this interview with a friend 🌳

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Tangent #1: Weather data seems to be the talk of town in Europe. Today, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced that it’s next/third-gen satellite sent back its first images.

We’re looking at global surface- and cloud-level temperatures:

Off we go, little satellite!

Tangent #2: I’d love to hear from you, please get in touch and tell me whom I should interview next or which topics you’d like to see covered ✌️

Delphi Zero explores the interplay of climate, energy, and security 🌳🔋🛡️

📧 If you are opening this essay in your email inbox, I recommend clicking on the title of this piece to enjoy the full-length version in the browser.

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Today’s interview is a very special one. Let me explain.

Since starting this publication back in 2022, Ramez (Mez) Naam was at the very top of my list of “people I’d love to interview one day.”

Not only did he predict the growth of solar more than a decade ago but he’s also an accomplished Sci-Fi author. I still have a vivid memory reading his Nexus book series on a rush-hour train ride from San Francisco to Fremont. While clinging onto the handrail myself, the main characters of the story were attending a neuro-hacking warehouse party in Oakland - a few miles from where exactly I was in that moment. It was a surreal feeling.

Fast forward to 2022, when diving head-first into the energy and climate space, I read his long-form interview on the Noah Smith newsletter. It was tremendously helpful to get an updated high-level view of the world (anno 2022). It might have been one of the reasons why I went back to uni to study Energy Law. I still recommend it to friends who want to learn more about the space. (You should also read it)

With this interview, I’m coming full circle to all the topics that set me on my own climate journey:

• Frontier technologies that are indistinguishable from magic

• Stories of possible futures we’d like to live in

• And last but not least, the realities of the human condition as part of this equation

We discussed this and much much more.

Enjoy ✌️

Looking at the Future

By Art Lapinsch

Mez, thanks for doing this. This is very exciting. Let's dive right in. What role do you believe (science) fiction plays in driving human progress? Why?

I think there are a number of roles that science fiction has played and continues to play.

It's definitely been an inspiration for many kids and teens that eventually led to them working in the sciences or technical fields. I meet people all the time who went into engineering, or software, or the sciences because they were fascinated by and inspired by science fiction they read in their youth.

There's also a role of science fiction in encouraging scientists and engineers along certain research and product paths. The story of how Star Trek communicators influenced the design of flip phones is well known.

I've been incredibly flattered at times when neuroscientists or neurotech entrepreneurs tell me that they want to build the Nexus brain technology in my books. Though this is also a bit of a feedback loop. In several of those cases I've said to them, "I was reading your papers when researching the novel!"

The real advantage science fiction has here is being unmoored from the timelines of shipping products, publishing papers, or securing grants.

Science fiction authors can simply look much further out - and talk about it publicly - than mainstream scientists. This became really clear to me when the head of a large neuroscience institute invited me to come speak to the assembled scientists there. I would obviously be the least qualified person in the room. I'm not a neuroscientist! I said this, and the institute head told me, "Yes, but I can't get my scientists to look beyond their next grant! I want you to challenge them about what we could do in 50 years or 100 years."

Well, even there, I probably know less than any of the scientists, but as a fiction author, you have license to dream.

All of that said, I think the even bigger impact of science fiction in driving human progress is in writing about future paths of civilization, either optimistically or pessimistically. Science fiction is often chock full of social commentary. It's often about anxieties of the present and what that could mean for the future.

Sometimes that manifests in deeply utopian work that can inspire people towards building a better future. Star Trek fits that bill. It's a post-scarcity, egalitarian society. On the other hand, sometimes it manifests as dark warning tales about the future, driven by the present.

Orwell wrote 1984 in 1948 (see what he did there?) and what the novel was at least part driven by his horror at what he saw Stalin doing in the USSR. Stalin was erasing people from history. There's a famous photo of Stalin and three other leaders of the USSR. One by one, as those men fell out of Stalin's favor, Stalin had them executed. And each time, he had a new version of the photo reduced with that person edited out (long before PhotoShop or AI editing tools!)

Stalin did this sort of thing with many famous photos, actually. And so Orwell saw a future where the state, under a dictatorial rule, actively used the media to gaslight the populace.

Now, many people have said over the years "science fiction ought to be more optimistic!" But both of these types of social commentary have their role. The inspirational future of Star Trek can inspire, and also cast a lens on topics like racism. And the dark stories like 1984, if they're well done and relevant, can become what David Brin has called "self-defeating prophecies", where they inoculate society against potential failure modes in the future.

Personally, I think both are important, and I try to weave both elements into my novels, at the same time.

Before we dive deeper into technology, I have to ask about your writing process. Can you share why and how you wrote the Nexus trilogy? Was there anything particularly surprising about the process?

Nexus was born out of a fascination I had with neuroscience plus my frustration with the War on Drugs and the War on Terror.

I'd written a non-fiction book long before then, More Than Human, that looked at the science and ethics of human enhancement. Could we turn humans into superhumans? Should we? And as I researched and wrote that book, the technology that fascinated me most was neurotech, and specifically the emerging field of brain-computer interfaces.

At some point several years later, some friends who were fellow sci-fi buffs suggested forming a little science fiction writing circle. We all worked on short stories and shared them with each other. I decided my story would riff off of those brain computer interface technologies and imagine a world where they were really mature and had really low barriers to usage.

I didn't expect to ever do anything with that story, but sometime later, I quit my job in tech, intending to write a non-fiction book on climate and energy. That book, The Infinite Resource, eventually came out just a few months after Nexus, but for a while it was stalled. So, with no job, my main project stalled, I decided to try my hand at turning the short story I'd written into a novel.

The technology and my fascination with the brain in general were one impetus. Burning man culture, which I've been a part of for decades now, was another. But what motivated the plot was really a philosophical debate about who gets to decide what you put into your brain. What civil rights do we have? Do we own our own bodies and brains? Can we make informed decisions about them?

I've long been appalled by the so-called War on Drugs. Drugs have some real negative effects on society, but the War on Drugs makes all of them worse, and tramples civil rights along the way. I was also writing in the years after 9/11 and the War on Terror, which I also felt was really trampling civil liberties, and could lead us to a world of a more powerful state that really restricted individual behavior in ways beyond those needed for a decent level of safety.

So I threw all those ingredients together, along with what I saw happening in the wider world geopolitically - China's rise, a coming cold war between the US and China, and so on - into one book (later a trilogy), and then just tried to make it as mind-blowing and tightly paced and plotted as I could.

One of the main questions I've been asking myself is "Where is Top Gun for Climate?" Can you think of a fiction story that does a good job of covering climate? As a writer, do you think there are particular challenges or opportunities when writing climate-related stories?

There's plenty of climate fiction out there.

Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future is the most visible recent example. Paolo Bacigalupi's novels all touch on climate change, for example, The Water Knife. Tobias' Buckell's Arctic Rising is another.

Most climate fiction uses climate change as part of the world building and context. It's just generally something that has affected the world that the characters live in. Stan Robinson is the exception to this, where his work really deals with how to address climate change.

Personally, I like to write about dealing with big problems, but I find climate difficult to frame as the main problem of a novel, because the timeframes for solutions are just so long.

The Nexus trilogy takes place over the timeframe of a few years. That's long enough for a technological revolution to start, and social implications to be felt. But it's not the timeframe of decades or perhaps even a century that the fight against climate change will span. That timeframe just makes it difficult to make a fight against climate the centerpoint of a novel, unless you're writing a multi-generational novel, which is very different than my style or that of most authors.

That said, it's hard to write a plausible future set in the next century on earth where climate change isn't one of the major background elements of the world. William Gibson did this in a sort of indirect way in The Peripheral. The novel isn't about climate change, but one of the background elements is "The Jackpot" - a poly-crisis that humanity goes through in his timeline that causes severe environmental and economic disruption. Gibson doesn't dwell on this - it's just part of the world the characters live with. And I think that's the most realistic way to deal with it.

One thing I do think is important, though, is showing some degree of hope. As someone whose day job is climate and energy, I do think we will round the corner on this, and that the most likely outcome is that, a century from now, while there will be scars from climate change, the median person on earth will be far better off than they are today.

So something I'd like to see more of in fiction is stories where, yes, climate change is real, and did real damage, but society came through it, found solutions, and has actually grown more prosperous, and is perhaps even changed in positive ways by the experience of having to overcome climate and other challenges. I think there's room for many more stories of that sort.

Let's dig into your day job. Before reading your novels, I knew you as the guy who had an overly-optimistic (at least according to IEA/etc. consensus) view on solar PV learning rates. In hindsight, you were more right than others. How did you spot these trends and why do you think others have missed them repeatedly?

It is the other thing I'm known for.

Back in 2010, the IEA was predicting that the cost of solar would drop roughly in half by 2050. I wrote a piece for Scientific American where I looked at the last decade of cost declines and predicted that costs would drop by more than a factor of 10. I was called a crazy optimist. And I was in fact wrong - costs have actually dropped about twice as fast as I predicted.

How did I get that right? I credit coming from tech and futurism. My degree is in computer science. I'd worked 15 years in tech at that point, and seen the incredible power of Moore's Law. I'd read Kurzweil, and gotten to know him some, and seen exponentials in a lot of fields. So when I was working on my book asking if we could innovate our way out of resource challenges, environmental challenges, population growth, and so on, one of the first things I did was look at trends in clean energy technologies. I downloaded some data on the cost of solar from NREL (the National Renewable Energy Lab). I put it in a spreadsheet, and, as is my norm, I changed the Y axis to a log scale. Honestly, anyone doing data analysis should use log scales for the vertical axis more often. If it's a dataset that contains any exponential component - even a slow exponential like the stock market or GDP - a log Y axis is just so much more revealing.

Well, on this log scale, the cost of solar was dropping, and it was pretty much a straight line. That's exactly what you see in the cost of computing - Moore's Law - or in related costs of bandwidth, memory, storage, etc...

I'll be honest, at that point I knew just enough about energy to be dangerous. There were so many things I didn't understand about the complexities of energy technologies or even energy costs and pricing. Simple things like the difference between the wholesale cost of generation (what's coming out of the powerplant) vs the cost for consumers (which includes the grid itself, which nearly doubles the cost).

Either way, that straight line on a log scale got me excited, and I boldly wrote that there appeared to be an exponential cost decline in solar. And that was correct. Not because I knew much about solar, but because a background in tech gave me this habit of looking for and thinking about exponential technology trends.

Since then I've learned a lot more. The way to look at these costs trends is really as a function of scale, not time. Industries learn as a function of scaling. And it turns out that there are scores of different technologies - in dozens of industries - that have these learning rates. But the rates are different from technology to technology, and increasingly we understand why and can predict which technologies will drop in cost the fastest, which is both awesome and pretty darn useful.

I remember reading your interview with Noah Smith back in 2022 - right after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Back then, you made a qualitative prediction that Putin's invasion would accelerate the clean energy transition. What's your stock take in 2025? What did you get right and what did you miss? Why?

This was one of my more controversial predictions!

It's largely come to pass, though. In 2021, Europe had about 160GWs of solar installed. By end of 2024 they had more than 300GWs and on path to (conservatively) more than 600GWs by 2030. New policies mandate solar on essentially all new buildings in the EU. Heat pump deployment pace has roughly doubled in Europe (as so much natural gas is used for building heat).

The pace of battery deployments in Europe has grown nearly 10-fold from 2020 to 2024. 2023 set a record for European wind deployments. And offshore wind investments in particular have hit 30 billion euros a year, compared to less than a billion euros in 2022.

One thing that's particularly important is that the EU and some member states have moved to make permitting easier for renewables, and especially wind power, which gets hit the hardest by overly strict permitting rules. The EU has done this. And Germany and Poland in particular have made siting wind projects easier. There are more reforms at the EU level and member state level on the way.

What did I miss? I'd say I under-emphasized the importance of energy efficiency, across individual uses and economies as a whole. Germany in particular did an amazing job turning down the most inefficient uses of energy to focus on the most productive and valuable uses.

A mixed bag, I'd say, is what's happened in nuclear. It was frankly too late for Germany to alter its nuclear shutdown plans dramatically, which is really unfortunate, though there's now talk of possibly restarting some reactors in 2032.

Belgium, Sweden, the UK, and France are all moving forward with more reactors, and Poland is building their very first nuclear reactor, but this is all not at the scale or with the cookie-cutter approach that's likely necessary to really bring nuclear costs and construction times down. The invasion of Ukraine was an opportunity to get an ambitious nuclear power plan going in Europe, but it didn't happen.

And of course, the other big energy story is Europe's diversification of natural gas supply. There's only so fast you can replace the enormous amount of natural gas that Europe imports from Russia with renewables. In the short run, it's been easier to import LNG from the US and Qatar. Frankly, I'm fine with that. The Russian gas weapon over Europe needs to be eliminated. We'll eventually get rid of all of those emissions. But in the meantime we can't let Putin hold Europe over a barrel.

What if you'd have to give a prediction give the current state of geo-politics? Anything energy-, climate-, or security-related that stands out? What do you think most people are missing?

Geo-politics has certainly gone up in intensity in the past several weeks!

One clear trend to my view is that information technology is really disrupting defense and warfare and providing asymmetric benefits to the side with greater agency, smarts, and initiative.

The Ukraine-Russia war long ago turned into a drone war, with drones accounting for more than 75% of all casualties on the front lines. Their surprise attack against Russia's strategic bombers just showed the incredible power of these cheap software-controlled devices against hundred million dollar targets.

Israel's surprise attack on Iran showed the same. Battery powered drones aren't going to replace long distance weapons, but for a range of scenarios they're incredibly powerful, and that has to have every military planner on earth spinning their gears.

Right now, signal jamming is the number one defense against drones. But as we move into drones with onboard AI, machine vision that can follow terrain and identify targets, and even facial recognition, that defense goes away. As batteries and compute get smaller and lighter, the size of a killer drone will also drop, making them easier to conceal and sneak into places. I think this has pretty massive and maybe terrifying implications for any military target and also in civilian life. Compute continues to be on an exponential trend, and so is battery energy density, albeit a lower one. So this is a genie you can't easily put back in the bottle, and it's likely that defense is going to cost many many many times more than offense here for the foreseeable future.

What about energy? On a longer term, one of the best outcomes of electrifying transport is going to be the defunding of petrostates. The IEA just put out their latest forecast for peak global oil demand, which sees it coming around 2030. That's at the outside edge of the range I saw a decade ago, which was somewhere between 2025 and 2030.

The world won't change instantaneously when oil demand peaks. Oil consumption will probably stay on an undulating plateau for many years or a decade after that. But eventually we'll enter secular decline of the oil markets. And when that happens, while there will still be fluctuations in oil prices, they're going to start to decline. That takes funds away from some of the worst regimes on earth, including Russia and Iran.

Over time it'll reduce the strategic importance of the entire Middle East. That has lots of upside for the world. With the exception of Norway and the US, large oil-producing countries are not modern democracies. Even the ones that are our nominal allies - Saudi Arabia, for example - repress speech, execute people for criticizing their leaders or demanding rights, and have their own histories of sponsoring extremism.

Now, this transition isn't going to be all roses. The most positive outcome is that the coming decline of oil revenue spurs nations to modernize and to some extent liberalize. You can see this in Saudi Arabia, where MBS (Mohammed bin Salman) is trying to bring more women into the workforce and diversify their economy. But will it work? I doubt it will happen fast enough. Saudi Arabia runs a budget deficit at oil prices below $90/barrel. Finding new sources of economic productivity and shifting to them fast enough to make up for their existing deficit - not to mention the likelihood that it grows as we replace oil with EVs - is a very tall order.

So what happens when Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other nations no longer have that spigot of oil money? Obviously it reduces their ability to fund wars or extremist groups. But I think there's also a real risk of instability inside these countries as the money starts to dry up.

All that said, on balance, dropping oil consumption and dropping the bottom out of oil prices globally looks like a overwhelmingly positive thing for the world. It won't happen overnight, but it's going to happen.

And to some extent it's China, the largest battery manufacturer, largest EV manufacturer, and largest domestic market for EVs - that's leading the charge.

Alright, let's shift gears towards AI. What do you think most people over-appreciate and under-appreciate about this technology? Why? What's your current mental map for what's actually going on?

Can't we go back to easier topics like world peace? ;)

In all seriousness, AI is the most fascinating and possibly most bewildering subject out there right now.

First, I'd say that most people in the US and the world actually have minimal appreciation of what's possible with AI today. Only about half of Americans have even used an LLM. So the general public is mostly not engaged in this conversation. And when people do start to use it, they use it as either a better Google or as a kind of therapist/life coach. Both of which are awesome applications, but are probably just scratching the surface of what's actually possible. All up, I think the general public under-appreciates everything about AI as a technology.

AI is actually really profound, and I think the notion of "intelligence on demand" or "intelligence as a service" is mostly right, and that the general public doesn't understand that yet.

Almost all white collar work - from accounting to architecture - can be accelerated quite a bit by AI. I think we're headed for a surge of global creativity and innovation output, as almost anyone who wants to create, design, or analyze systems - whether they're words, numbers, images, or the design for a new car or home - will be super-powered.

People who have little to no skills in these areas will suddenly find themselves with some of those capabilities on tap. And experts will find themselves super-powered and accelerated, able to do things in a fraction of the time it usually took them, at larger scale, and often with new levels of quality or creativity or really substantial new innovations.

When I look at this, I see agency and curiosity as the new limiting factors. When intelligence (of a limited sort) is on tap for pennies, the thing that limits individuals and teams is going to be asking the right questions, having high enough aspirations for what we can accomplish, setting the right direction, and picking the problems to apply AI to. And the ability to exercise good judgment, to be skeptical of AI output to some degree, and to ride herd on these systems. The future belongs to the curious, the brave, and the motivated.

That said, I do think there are real unknowns and quite a bit of hype. Some of the unknowns are just how far AI techniques will go, and will AI systems truly be able to operate autonomously, or will they continue to require human supervision? I lean towards the latter for the foreseeable future.

AI systems are tools, but they really continue to require a human tool user in general. And while it's clear that in any narrow domain we can get AI to the level of the best humans or slightly better, it's not a slam dunk to me that we're on path to strongly superhuman systems. AI is dependent on the quality of its training data. And if you train an AI with data showing the very best of human thinking in a domain, it makes sense that an AI system can learn to match that, and even to exceed it somewhat, as no single human can truly stay abreast of the best work even in their single domain. But can current approaches lead to something that's 10x human quality in a domain? I honestly don't know. But it's far from proven yet. And I'm on the skeptical side.

Partially for that reason, I think there's too much hype in tech and AI circles about AGI (a vague term that confuses us quite a bit) and even more so about the idea of superintelligence. We can clearly build systems that are amazing at solving specific narrow problems, but they also go off the rails when you put them at the edge of their knowledge. And they require absolutely staggering amounts of training data - far more than a human does - and are running up against the limits of available training data. By some estimates in the next 3 or 4 years, frontier models will be training on nearly all publicly available human-created text. What happens after that? Where will the next improvements come from? How much can we improve them with synthetic data? If you're training AIs on data created by AIs, do we end up with a snake eating its tail?

Related to that, there's a lot of under-appreciation of how hard some of the problems people want to apply AI to - climate change, longevity, etc... - really are. There's some magical thinking going on that once we achieve AGI or SSI (if that's even achievable) suddenly we'll stop aging, or we'll make discoveries that allow us to beat climate change overnight.

For example, you have Demis Hassabis saying recently that AI could cure all diseases within 10 years. And Dario Amodei said recently that AI could double human lifespan in the next 5 years. Excuse me, but no. These are not serious statements.

I appreciate that Amodei and Hassabis are both trying to hype their companies, and the nature of tech and capitalism is that people make overly optimistic statements, but these are just dramatically off. AI almost certainly will help us accelerate biotech R&D. But these sorts of pronouncements are just ignoring the complexity of human biology - and of actually experimenting with biological systems - by orders of magnitude. I want to be clear that work like AlphaFold, that essentially solved the protein folding problem, is breathtakingly awesome. There are also orders of magnitude of complexity separating that from curing all diseases or doubling human lifespan. Knowing how each protein folds is great. Now, let's scale that up.

Inside of every human cell you have roughly 10 billion proteins, and large numbers of them are constantly interacting in complex and very non-linear networks. And your body has about a trillion cells. We simply lack the ability to model those interactions at scale, and LLMs in particular aren't going to solve that problem.

Biology is the most complex thing in the universe. It's code, but it's spaghetti code, and every change has ripple effects throughout the whole of the organism. That's even before you get into needing to run experiments, and then animal trials, and finally human trials to verify that what you expected to happen is what actually happens. Because usually, in biology, it's not that simple. Again, everything has side effects, many of them unexpected.

Similar things are true in other domains. A prominent AI person told me recently that AI would solve climate change. Just how do you see that happening? There's a physical world that requires physical R&D, prototypes, building factories, scaling to bring down cost, finding financing, finding customers, deploying in the real world. AI can help on the R&D side. One of my portfolio companies uses AI to help improve battery chemistries. But it doesn't magically solve the problem all at once.

Again, I don't want to downplay the benefits here. I truly believe that AI will accelerate R&D in biotech, in medicine, in chemistry, in materials science, in energy. Those applications of AI to improve our physical and biological technologies are some of the things that get me most excited. I think the potential value is huge. But it's not a panacea. We can't just hand wave problems and say "AGI will solve that".

I also see some downsides to AI. I'm overall extremely positive on AI. I think the societal value will be huge. But some scenarios concern me. In particular, I'm concerned about AI's effect on democracy. I was incredibly bullish on social media when it arrived. My Nexus novels make a case that increasing the ability of humans to communicate is fundamentally a huge positive for freedom and for society. Yet what I see now is that social media is often pretty toxic to public discourse and is being used as a weapon against democracy. AI could amplify that.

We have recent studies showing that LLM-based chatbots are more persuasive than humans when you unleash them on reddit or in structured debates. What happens when we have customized LLMs, trained on broad data but also on exact characteristics of a demographic, an audience, or even an individual target, and deployed as a tool of political persuasion? Using text and synthetic video and audio? Are we prepared for this world of hyper-persuasive, A/B tested, individually targeted manipulation bots? We could use AI to defend against that, of course. But do people even want to know the truth? Or do they prefer just getting content that aligns with their tribe and current beliefs? That scenario worries me far more than some superintelligence or dark singularity. It's right over the horizon.

So overall, I come down on the argument for "AI as a normal technology" as a recent paper argued. What I mean by that is that AI is actually totally amazing, and it's going to put incredible capabilities at the fingertips (or tip of the tongue) of billions of people around the world. I think it has huge implications for education, for all creative and design and engineering work, for accelerating the sciences, for mental health (when used constructively). And AI is going to pose real challenges. We should be worried about its use in manipulation. We should be worried about its effect on employment, even if it creates more new jobs than it destroys. It's a big deal. And at the same time, those "normal" impacts - pro and con - seem a lot more grounded to me than eschatological scenarios of recursive self-improving superintelligence that either saves or destroys the world. The hard work will come down to us and how we decide to use and regulate these tools, as both individuals and societies.

Mez, thank you so much for all your insights. I'd like to ask two last things: (1) Do you think all of the above will have a significant impact on the human condition? If yes, how? And (2) Where do you see us by 2050? Will we have achieved Net Zero or not? Why/how or Why/how not?

It's been a real pleasure, Art.

Regarding the human condition: Yeah, I think this does change the human condition, in ways that are both straightforward and that are harder to predict. The straightforward way is that we're heading for a world of more physical abundance and enhanced abilities to learn, analyze, and create. We're going to see new drugs, new progress in science and engineering, and a lower bar than ever to create art.

The harder to predict ways stem from how we interact with each other - as individuals and societies - and where we find the meaning of life. Will AI destroy jobs faster than it creates them? People have been predicting technological unemployment for almost a century now, and it hasn't really arrived yet. But maybe this time it's different. If it arrives, how will society deal with that? If we truly get to a place where very few humans can add economic value, how will we humans think about ourselves and our lives?

AI is also becoming a companion. We already have a trend where younger generations are doing more and more of their socialization electronically. Now what happens when more and more of your socialization is either mediated by AI or just interactions with AI? There are obvious good things here. AI will eventually make a great therapist. AI can help alleviate much of the loneliness and isolation of old age. But AI may also be more compelling to interact with than other humans for many people who are in the prime of their lives. We already see the rise of AI girlfriends and boyfriends, while the tech is still pretty primitive. I think we're heading for a world of hyper-romantic software, atop the hyper-persuasive capabilities I mentioned earlier. Porn already made depictions of sex unrealistic for a generation. Now AI will make depictions of romantic relationships - and maybe even friendships - unrealistic.

Ultimately the virtual world may just be more compelling than the real world. The science fiction author John Barnes has a concept that in the future, AI engineered to meet human desires leads to more and more humans going into "the box" - an immersive experience where they live whatever wonderful life they want through AI, rather than dealing with the messiness of the physical world. That's still science fiction and the technology to do that is still largely far out in the future, but little bits of it are getting closer. How will humanity deal with that?

All of that sounds pessimistic, but I'm still largely positive. The concrete benefits of more physical abundance, healthier lives, better science and engineering, and augmentation of our ability to think, learn, and create are just too large to ignore. I think we need to be aware of the risks, but not use that as an excuse to stifle the technology or all the many ways it can benefit us.

What do I see in 2050? Most likely, the world will be a better place. The median person on Earth will live in better health, with less burden of disease, less likelihood of hunger, more access to shelter and information and transportation and practical freedoms in their life. That's especially true in the developing world, where people's well being is rising faster than that in the already rich countries. But it's likely to be true almost everywhere on earth except for the countries with the very most dysfunctional governments. Crop yields will be up. Clean energy will be up. New medicines will be available. Education through cheap digital tools will be personalized and widely available. Language will increasingly recede as a barrier between people. Lots of good things.

Will we have stopped climate change? Will we have completely decarbonized the global energy system? I doubt it. There's just not enough time between now and 2050 to make that plausible. But we'll be on the other side of the peak. The peak of oil consumption will be in the rearview mirror. The peak of coal consumption will as well. Electricity generation and ground transport will be cleaner than ever, and dropping in the use of fossil fuels every year. We'll still be struggling with figuring out how to make the last 20 or 30% of electricity clean (especially in less-sunny place). We'll still have hundreds of millions of older gasoline and diesel powered cars and trucks on the road. And we'll still be using fossil fuels for a lot of heavy industry and for things like aviation. But the overall trajectory will be towards eliminating those emissions. And if we're lucky, we'll be able to see a path to actually hitting net zero in 2070 or 2080.

That's not a perfect world. There will increasingly be problems from climate change. There will still be people who go hungry. There will still be death and disease and poverty. But it'll be a world that's better than the one we live in now in the large majority of ways you can measure it, and where humanity increasingly has the tools to solve the problems that remain.

Thanks, Mez 🙏

I’d love to hear from you, please get in touch and tell me whom I should interview next or which topics you’d like to see covered ✌️

Delphi Zero explores the interplay of climate, energy, and security 🌳🔋🛡️

📧 If you are opening this essay in your email inbox, I recommend clicking on the title of this piece to enjoy the full-length version in the browser.

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My trip to Antarctica was truly life changing.

One of the key people who guided us travelers into the scale, the serenity, and the significance of this place was Anya Astafurova - a marine biologist - who is more similar to a badass character in a sci-fi novel than to your typical academic. Honestly, go follow her, learn through her experience, and say hi to her.

In this wide-ranging, in-depth conversation we discuss:

• 🌊 Why people should care about the oceans

• 🐳 How looking into the eye of a humpback whale makes you feel

• 🪸 What all of us should understand about the complex and mysterious ecosystem of our oceans

This is part 2 of an ongoing series about The White Continent:

1. My Antarctic Dispatch: What It Feels Like To Arrive In Antarctica

2. The Ocean Is Everything: Marine biologist Anya Astafurova takes us into the depths of our mysterious oceans.

Enjoy 🐋

The Ocean Is Everything

By Art Lapinsch

Why should people care about the ocean? What’s so special about it?

I’ll put it simply: Because the ocean is everything.

It’s the beating heart of our planet — regulating climate, producing over half the oxygen we breathe thanks to phytoplankton, and feeding millions of people every day. But it’s more than just science or survival.

For me, the ocean is where I’ve found purpose, awe, and belonging. I’ve looked into the eyes of a humpback whale, stood still as orcas slipped silently beneath ice, and watched a frozen silence stretch into forever in Antarctica.

The ocean humbles you. It reminds you how small you are — and how deeply connected everything is.

That’s why we must care for it — because when we protect the ocean, we’re protecting the future, not just of marine life, but of ourselves.

How did you develop your love for the oceans and marine biology? Take us through your journey of how you ended up where you are today.

It started from school and my goal was to see a polar bear in its natural habitat after watching one of the BBC documentaries.

And just like that, at 21, I saw a polar bear for the first time in the Arctic, and later, an orca pod cutting through the icy waters of Antarctica. It wasn’t just beautiful — it was life-altering. In their presence, I felt something shift. From that point on, I followed the pull — I studied, trained, and slowly stepped into this life.

Today, I work as a marine biologist, polar guide, and lecturer on expedition ships in the Arctic and Antarctica. It’s not always glamorous — there are long days, isolation, and harsh conditions — but it’s real, and it’s deeply meaningful. Being out there, surrounded by whales, seals, sea ice, and icebergs, I feel fully alive.

I’m not just observing nature — I’m part of it. And every encounter reminds me why I chose this path: to protect, to educate, and to be a voice for the wild, beautiful world.

What are the biggest unknowns about the ocean? Do you have any hypotheses to those unknowns? What would be the one question that you’d like to have answered? Why this particular question?

The ocean is the most mysterious part of our planet — I guess we’ve explored more of the moon than our own deep sea.

One of the biggest unknowns is the vast diversity that still exists in the deep, dark layers — the life forms, ecosystems, and even behaviors we haven’t yet discovered. Every time researchers go deeper, they find something that rewrites what we thought we knew.

If I could have one question answered, it would be this: What is the long-term impact of climate change on deep ocean ecosystems — especially those we’ve never even seen?

Because while we focus on surface-level changes — melting sea ice, rising temperatures — the deep ocean is absorbing most of the planet’s excess heat and carbon. It's like the ocean is quietly holding our mistakes, and we don't yet fully understand what it's costing.

The more I study — from shrinking krill populations in Antarctica to changes in predator behavior — the more I wonder what silent shifts are happening far below, where we can’t look.

That question keeps me awake, because the ocean is not just a habitat — it’s the heartbeat of Earth I’d say.

Who’s your academic crush? Why?

There are so many individuals who have influenced me throughout my academic journey, but a few stand out.

My mentor and whale guru Mark Carwardine — without hesitation. He’s not just a brilliant zoologist, conservationist, and author, but someone who’s managed to communicate the wonder and fragility of the natural world with such clarity and passion.

His work with whales, in particular, struck a deep chord with me — he sees them not just as species to study, but as individuals with histories, emotions, and importance beyond what we can measure.

His ability to merge science with storytelling — to make people care — is something I deeply admire. He reminds me that data is powerful, but it’s empathy that moves people to protect what’s still wild. That’s the kind of impact I hope to have, too.

Roger Payne, for instance, is a huge inspiration to me—his discovery of the humpback whale's song fundamentally changed how we understand whale communication and the emotional depth of these creatures.

Michael Bigg’s development of photo identification techniques for whales is another major influence. His work revolutionized the study of whale populations and individual whale behavior, making it possible to track and protect these majestic animals in a way that had never been done before.

Then, there’s Sylvia Earle, a renowned oceanographer and one of the most well-known female figures in marine science. Her work has brought global attention to the importance of ocean conservation, and she continues to inspire generations of marine biologists, including myself, to dedicate ourselves to protecting our oceans.

Finally, I’d like to mention Alison Cusick, oceanographer, marine biologist focusing on phytoplankron study in the Southern Ocean and polar guide. She has navigated both academic and personal challenges to become a powerful voice in polar science, and her story of perseverance resonates deeply with me. It’s a reminder that passion for science can drive you to overcome any obstacle.

Why have people been fascinated by the ocean and its creatures throughout history (mythology, adoration, etc.)? Do you have any theories?

Absolutely—I think people have been fascinated by the ocean and its creatures throughout history for a few deep, interconnected reasons.

First, the ocean is vast and mysterious. For most of human history, it represented the unknown—an endless expanse that held both danger and discovery. That sense of mystery naturally inspires awe, fear, and imagination, which is why so many cultures wove it into their mythology—Poseidon, sea serpents, mermaids, and sea gods are just a few examples of how the ocean became a symbol of power, unpredictability, and transformation.

Second, the ocean has always been vital to human survival. It's provided food, trade routes, and even climate stability, so there's been a kind of reverent dependence on it. That can evolve into admiration or even spiritual connection, especially in coastal cultures.

Lastly, I think there's something deeply emotional about watching ocean life—whales breaching, bioluminescent waves, coral reefs teeming with color. These sights feel both alien and profoundly alive, almost like a reminder of how small we are in the grand design of nature.

My theory is that the ocean taps into both our curiosity and our sense of wonder. It mirrors the depths of the human psyche—beautiful, mysterious, sometimes terrifying, and full of things we have yet to understand.

Let’s talk about creatures. Your research focus are cetaceans (i.e. whales). What would you like more people to know about whales? Why?

As a marine biologist studying whales, I’d love for more people to know that whales are not just giant animals swimming through the ocean—they are intelligent, socially complex, emotionally aware beings with rich cultures of their own.

Some species of whales, such as orcas and sperm whales, have dialects, some baleen whale produce complex vocalizations we refer as songs, and whales have behaviors that are passed down through generations, much like human traditions. For instance, humpback whales sing intricate songs that change over time and are shared across vast ocean basins.

Orcas live in tight-knit family pods and families and have unique vocalizations and hunting techniques specific to their group—some even pass these strategies on like cultural knowledge.

I’d also want people to understand how deeply connected whales are to ocean health and, in turn, to our own. Whales play a vital role in the marine ecosystem—when they dive and feed, they circulate nutrients, helping to support the entire food chain and even contributing to carbon cycling that affects the climate.

Through a process called the “whale pump,” whales’ iron-rich feces fertilize phytoplankton, which form the base of the marine food web and absorb massive amounts of CO2 while releasing oxygen through photosynthesis just like plants do.

Phytoplankton release more than 50% of oxygen into the atmosphere... oxygen we all breathe. Put it simply, more whales - more poop and food for phytoplankton - more phytoplankton - the healthier and rich marine ecosystem is - and more oxygen for us, humans! This is part of why whales are so important in fighting climate change.

Why does this matter?

Because when we value whales not just as creatures, but as keystone species and fellow sentient beings, we’re more likely to protect them—and in doing so, we protect the oceans and ourselves.

What are your top 3 favorite whales? And why?

Great question—it's hard to choose, but if I had to pick my top three favorite whales, they would be:

1. Orcas (Killer Whales)

They are absolutely fascinating because of their incredible intelligence and strong social bonds. They live in tight family groups, or pods, and some populations even have distinct cultures, including unique dialects and hunting strategies passed down through generations. Some orcas specialize in hunting seals, others in fish, and they coordinate these efforts with a level of cooperation that’s almost military-like in precision.

Their intelligence is humbling—it forces us to reconsider what we think we know about animal minds.

2. Bowhead Whales

These gentle giants are the longest-living mammals on Earth—some individuals are estimated to be over 200 years old.

They live in the Arctic and thrive in one of the harshest environments on the planet, yet remain relatively mysterious to science.

3. Narwhals

Narwhals are like something out of a fantasy story.

Often called the "unicorns of the sea," their long, spiral tusk is actually an enlarged tooth filled with nerves. Their biology is bizarre and beautiful, and they remain one of the most elusive whale species—we still don’t know everything about their behavior or full migration patterns and exact purpose of their tusks.

Their mystery adds to their magic, and they’re a perfect example of how much wonder still exists in the natural world.

You referred to Krill as the Unsung Superheroes of the Antarctic Sea. Why are they so important for the ecosystem? What’s the “Krill Paradox?”

Absolutely! Krill may be small, but their role in the marine ecosystem and their impact on the climate are truly profound.

Krill are a key food source for an extensive range of marine species in Antarctica (whales, seals, penguins and other seabirds). Krill aren’t just important for marine life—they also play a significant role in the global climate system, particularly through their relationship with the carbon cycle. Krill contribute to what’s known as the "biological carbon pump."

Phytoplankton take in carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere during photosynthesis. When krill consume phytoplankton, they take in this carbon. As krill dive deeper into the ocean to feed or when they die and sink, or their feces sink, much of the carbon they consumed is carried down into the deeper ocean layers, where it can be stored for hundreds to thousands of years.

This is a vital process in the global carbon cycle, as it helps sequester carbon away from the atmosphere and helps mitigate climate change to some degree. So if krill populations were to decrease significantly due to climate change, overfishing, or other factors, the efficiency of this carbon sequestration process could be reduced, potentially accelerating climate change.

The Krill Paradox revolves around the relationship between whales, krill, and phytoplankton, and it stems from the important role whales play in fertilizing the ocean. When whale populations were decimated due to industrial whaling in the 20th century, the Krill Paradox emerged.

Here's how it works: baleen whales, consume enormous amounts of krill in Antarctica, and in doing so, they also contribute to the ocean's nutrient cycling. Their feeding activities help to mix the ocean's layers, which facilitates the upwelling of nutrient-rich waters from deeper parts of the ocean. This process delivers essential nutrients—particularly iron—into the upper ocean layers, which is crucial for the growth of phytoplankton, the primary producers in the ocean. Phytoplankton is at the base of the marine food chain and is the primary food source for krill. When industrial whaling drastically reduced whale populations, there were fewer whales to provide this essential iron and other nutrients through their feeding and waste products. This led to a decline in phytoplankton productivity. With less phytoplankton available as food, krill populations also began to decrease, even though the absence of whales might have initially suggested an increase in krill numbers due to reduced predation pressure.

The paradox is that whales are directly responsible for sustaining krill populations—not just by eating them, but by playing a key role in the ocean's nutrient cycling. In essence, fewer whales mean less iron in the ocean, which means less phytoplankton, and in turn, fewer krill. This results in a cascading effect throughout the ecosystem.

So, the Krill Paradox is: The decline in whale populations → led to a reduction in the nutrients → that sustain the phytoplankton → that krill feed on, → which paradoxically caused krill populations to also decline, (even though there were fewer whales eating them).

This highlights just how interconnected the marine ecosystem is.

Whales, krill, and phytoplankton are all part of a delicate web, where the presence of whales is crucial not just for their direct food sources (krill) but also for supporting the broader ecological processes that sustain life in the Southern Ocean.

What’s the ocean’s role as a carbon sink? What idea should more people understand? Why?

The ocean plays a critical role in regulating the Earth's climate, particularly by acting as a carbon sink. This means that the ocean absorbs and stores large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere, which helps to mitigate the effects of climate change.

The ocean absorbs carbon through two main processes:

1. The Physical Carbon Pump: When CO2 from the atmosphere dissolves in the ocean's surface waters, it forms carbonic acid, which is then converted into bicarbonate and carbonate ions. This process occurs more efficiently in colder waters, such as the polar regions. The absorbed CO2 is carried into the deeper layers of the ocean through ocean currents and upwelling. The deep ocean acts like a vast, long-term storage reservoir for CO2.

2. The biological carbon Pump: Phytoplankton, the tiny single celled algae that live near the ocean's surface, absorb CO2 during photosynthesis. They are the foundation of the marine food web. When they are consumed by marine animals (such as krill), some of the carbon in those phytoplankton is transferred to larger creatures and can be "pushed" deeper into the ocean when those organisms die or excrete waste.

This biological process helps move carbon from the atmosphere to the ocean depths, where it can be stored for decades, centuries, or even longer. This mechanism is essential for regulating atmospheric CO2 levels.

Why this is important: The ocean absorbs roughly 25% of human-made carbon emissions every year. Without this ability, atmospheric CO2 levels would be much higher, leading to faster global warming and more extreme climate events.

Essentially, the ocean acts as a natural buffer against the full force of climate change, buying humanity more time to reduce emissions and develop solutions.

However, there are challenges. As the ocean absorbs more CO2, it is becoming more acidic (a process called ocean acidification). This is harmful to marine life, especially organisms that rely on calcium carbonate to form shells and skeletons, like corals, shellfish, and some plankton. This not only affects biodiversity but also reduces the ocean’s ability to absorb further carbon, creating a vicious cycle.

Why more people should understand the ocean’s role as a carbon sink:

1. The Ocean Is Under-appreciated: Despite the ocean's huge role in climate regulation, it's often overlooked in discussions about climate change. People tend to focus more on terrestrial solutions like forest preservation or reducing fossil fuel use, which are important, but the ocean is just as critical. Understanding the ocean's role as a carbon sink helps us recognize the interconnectedness of Earth's systems and the importance of protecting marine ecosystems.

2. Climate Change and Ocean Health Are Interconnected: The health of the ocean is directly tied to the future of the climate. I mentioned that already, but as the ocean absorbs more CO2, it becomes more acidic, which impacts marine life. Additionally, if the ocean's carbon storage capacity is reduced (due to warming, acidification, or overfishing), it could accelerate climate change. Therefore, protecting the ocean and its ecosystems isn’t just about saving marine life—it’s about ensuring that the ocean can continue to act as a buffer against climate change

3. The Role of Marine Conservation: Understanding the ocean's role as a carbon sink also emphasizes the importance of marine conservation efforts. For example, protecting key ecosystems like mangroves, seagrasses, and salt marshes, which act as carbon sinks themselves, can help sequester carbon and preserve the ocean’s ability to store more. Marine protected areas (MPAs), sustainable fisheries management, and efforts to reduce pollution all play a role in maintaining the ocean’s carbon storage capacity.

4. The Urgency of Action: As the climate crisis deepens, it's increasingly important to think of the ocean not just as a place for recreation or resource extraction but as an integral part of the global climate system. More public awareness of how ocean health and climate are intertwined could foster greater support for policies that protect marine environments and reduce human impact on the ocean.

What are some climate/climate-tech-related ideas we can borrow from the ocean?

Great question! The ocean is a treasure trove of innovative ideas that could help us tackle climate change.

Over billions of years, marine creatures have evolved unique features and systems that we can borrow to design more sustainable technologies, improve energy efficiency, and even address climate challenges.

I can think of the following ones:

1. Humpback whale tubercles (inspiration for wind turbines)

So humpback whales have small, bumpy protrusions, or tubercles, along the leading edge of their pectoral fins.

These tubercles help the whales move through the water more efficiently by reducing drag and improving their maneuverability. Engineers have studied these tubercles to improve wind turbine blade designs. By mimicking the whale’s unique fins, wind turbines can be designed to operate more efficiently at lower wind speeds, with reduced drag and turbulence.

This could lead to more efficient and cost-effective wind energy generation, which is crucial for accelerating the global transition to renewable energy.

2. Shark skin (bio-inspired surface textures)

In fact, shark skin has a unique texture made up of microscopic, tooth-like scales called dermal denticles.

These scales reduce drag and help sharks glide smoothly through the water, making them more energy-efficient swimmers. By applying a similar texture to surfaces such as ships, airplanes, or pipelines, we can reduce friction and energy consumption. This principle has already been applied to improve the design of fuel-efficient vehicles and wind turbine blades.

Additionally, anti-fouling coatings based on shark skin have been proposed for ships and other marine structures, reducing the need for harmful chemical coatings that leach into the ocean.

3. Coral reefs (inspiration for coastal protection and carbon sequestration)

Coral reefs are highly efficient at capturing carbo and also act as natural barriers that protect coastlines from storm surges and erosion. The limestone structures of coral reefs are formed by the accumulation of calcium carbonate, which is derived from CO2.

Inspired by coral reef structures, we could design artificial reefs or floating barriers that act as coastal protection systems to combat rising sea levels and protect coastal infrastructure from extreme weather. Additionally, carbon-capture technologies could be enhanced by mimicking the process of calcification in corals, creating carbon-sequestering materials or methods for long-term CO2 storage.

4. Squid and octopus camouflage (adaptive materials for energy efficiency)

I’m obsessed with cephalopods in general!

Squid and octopuses have specialized cells in their skin, called chromatophores and iridophores, that allow them to change color and texture to blend with their environment. This dynamic ability helps them with camouflage, communication, and temperature regulation.

As far as I know, researchers are currently exploring adaptive materials inspired by these creatures to create smart building materials that can change color or texture depending on the temperature or light conditions. These materials could be used in energy-efficient buildings to help regulate temperature, reducing the need for air conditioning or heating. For example, windows or walls could adjust their properties to absorb less heat in summer or retain heat in winter, reducing energy consumption.

Through your lens as a marine biologist, researcher, and expedition team member, what are some impacts of climate change that you have personally observed? What would you like more people to be aware of?

In both the Arctic and Antarctic, glacier retreat and sea ice loss are accelerating.

I’ve observed firsthand how glaciers in Antarctica have been rapidly retreating, especially in places like the Antarctic Peninsula, where warm ocean currents have led to the collapse of ice shelves.

In the Arctic, sea ice is thinning and shrinking, and sea ice free periods become longer which affect many sea ice depend species, such as polar bears, walrus, belugas and narwhals.

I always try to explain the guests on our expeditions that sea ice is critical. As sea ice melts, it reduces habitat for these species and changes the structure of marine ecosystems.

The loss of ice also impacts the Albedo Effect—the ability of ice to reflect sunlight back into space. Less ice means more heat is absorbed by the ocean, accelerating global warming.

Looking back from a Net Zero future, what do you hope they will say about us?

Looking back from a Net Zero future, I hope people will say that we were courageous, innovative, and collectively responsible in the way we faced the climate change.

I hope they’ll reflect on how we recognized the interconnectedness of all life on Earth—understanding that the health of our oceans, forests, and ecosystems directly impacts our own survival.

🙏 Thanks, Anya for taking time and sharing your perspective.

I’d love to hear from you, please get in touch and tell me whom I should interview next or which topics you’d like to see covered ✌️

Delphi Zero explores the interplay of climate, energy, and security 🌳🔋🛡️

📧 If you are opening this essay in your email inbox, I recommend to click on the title of this piece to enjoy the full-length version in the browser.

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Happy International Fact-Checking Day, everyone 🎉

You most likely subscribed here to read about climate and energy.

Nonetheless, the current geopolitical moment is important and I want to share a useful framework that I use quite regularly - the OODA Loop 🔁

It is an incredibly handy tool to audit learning and business processes. But today, I’ll discuss it through the lens of information flows through society. Hopefully, it will give you an additional tool to make sense of what’s going on.

This is part two of an ongoing series about various aspects of national/international security:

1. Transatlantic Rift - What you can do in times of crisis.

2. (this post) The War for Observable Information - How (exactly) dirty information destroys our shared reality. And what we can do about it.

I’ll be back with climate/energy content shortly, but today, we’ll dive deep into a fascinating communication rabbit hole 🕳️

The War for Observable Information

By Art Lapinsch

Why do governments regulate energy markets but don’t care about sneakers?

It’s because governments focus on things that can have an outsized impact on society. Positive as well as negative.

By looking at national regulatory bodies, you can figure out their priorities:

The Objective Is to Keep Essential Flows Running

In Germany, the Bundesnetzagentur (the German infrastructure regulator) regulates the following:

• ⚡️ Energy (electricity & gas) → You can read my extensive piece about energy regulation 101

• 💡 Information

  • 📱 Telecommunication (broadband, cellular, and radio)

  • 🛜 Digital (internet)

  • ✉️ Postal Services

• 🛤️ Railways

In a country like the US, some additional markets are regulated:

• 💵 Finance and Insurance → regulated via the SEC

• 💊 Health and Food → regulated via the FDA

In my mind, these industries have one thing in common: they enable the flow of something through society.

Stop energy flows and nothing works. Stop transportation and people are stranded. Stop food and all hell breaks loose.

One of these somethings is information. Let’s see what happens if/when information flows break down 👇

The Flow of Information and the OODA Loop

My ears tell me that something is loud. My skin tells me that something is hot. My eyes tell me that something is bright.

If my senses stop feeding information to my brain, I stop perceiving it and have a limited impression of my surroundings. It becomes more difficult for me to maneuver in my environment.

There’s a great framework that analyzes how information is processed.

The OODA Loop 🔁

If you’re new to this framework, I highly recommend you to dive into Taylor Pearson’s Ultimate Guide to the OODA Loop. In it, he writes:

In the late 1950’s, [John] Boyd was the best fighter pilot in America and possibly the world. He was called “Forty-Second Boyd” because he could defeat any opponent in simulated air-to-air combat in less than forty seconds.

…

Moving from warrior to intellectual, he worked to synthesize what he learned from all these domains to answer the question: How do individuals and organizations win in an uncertain environment?

The ultimate result of this synthesis was the OODA Loop.

The OODA in OODA Loop is an acronym that stands for:

1. Observe

2. Orient

3. Decide

4. Act

It is a description of a process that you are already doing every minute of every day. …

The OODA loop is often seen as a decision making model, but can be more accurately described as a model of individual and organizational learning and adaptation.

The Causes of Organizational Stagnation

I agree with John Boyd that the OODA Loop is applicable not only for individuals (fighter pilots; professionals; citizens) but also for organizations (companies; NGOs).

Let me show you.

In 2020 - the year of Covid - my team was using the OODA Loop to audit and resolve broken communication silos caused by a sudden shift from working in a co-located manner to working remotely.

Anyone can use the OODA Loop framework as a tool to troubleshoot.

• Observe: How do we observe new information? What type of information do we observe? Are there obstacles to observing correct information?

• Orient: What are our internal references for making sense of the observed information? How do we put new information into our current context?

• Decide: What are our decision making algorithms? Do we have decision guidelines?

• Act: How (and how quickly) can we translate our decisions into action? How do we measure whether our decisions & actions achieve the desired outcome? How do we learn and adapt based on the new results?

The issue was that our organization was using many different communication channels (various Slack instances; MS teams; Whatsapp; email; in-person conversations; etc.)

There was no single-source-of-truth.

As a result, all teams existed within different informational realities. They were not able to collectively adjust to new circumstances.

Imagine Company A and Company B compete in the same market. One of them gets to change their strategy once a year while the other one gets to readjust to changing market conditions once a week. Company A has one adaptation loop while Company B has gone through 52 adaptation loops. At the end of a year, which one do you think will be better adapted to the market realities?

I’m telling you all of this because the OODA Loop doesn’t only work for individuals and organizations but also for societies.

And currently, there’s a fight over observable information - the first step of our collective OODA Loop.

The Attack on Observable Information

Donella Meadows - the godmother of systems analysis - once said:

And that’s exactly what is happening all around us.

You probably heard that democracies around the world are in decline.

What’s replacing them? Autocracies.

An autocracy is a political system with an in group (a single ruler and his inner circle) and an out group (i.e. everyone who doesn’t look, talk, and behave like them).

The in group rules the political system to their own benefit by restricting the out group from interfering. Order and obedience is more important than personal freedom.

In Europe, it’s the various flavors of nationalist parties in France, Poland, Hungary, Austria, etc. In the US, it’s the current administration. And all the list goes on all across the world.

You most likely know who is pulling such shenanigans in your own backyard.

They try to do that by implementing a variation of “The Autocratic Playbook.” (I added the ⚠️ emoji to all the plays that directly impact the flow of information)

The key “plays” in The Playbook are to:

• Weaponize Fear – Embrace a language of violence, promote a more punitive culture, leverage military might at home. Give critics reason to believe they’ll be harmed if they oppose.

• Target Outsiders — Stoke the fires of xenophobia by demonizing immigrants and foreigners. Blame domestic problems including economic woes on these scapegoats, and depict political opponents as sympathetic to these imagined enemies.

• Undermine Institutions — Take over the courts, eliminate checks and balances, undo established treaties and legislation that limits executive power, weaken protections for free and fair elections.

• ⚠️ Rewrite History — Exert control over schools and the media to indoctrinate the public with beliefs that reinforce autocratic power.

• Exploit Religion — Appeal to the religious majority while targeting minorities. Conflate national identity with religious identity.

• ⚠️ Divide and Conquer — Use hate speech and encourage violent actors to widen social rifts and use manufactured crises to seize more power.

• ⚠️ Erode Truth — Attack the press as an “enemy of the people”; dismiss negative reports as “fake news,” counter legitimate information with disinformation, or “alternative facts.” Blast the media landscape with endless scandal and contradiction to overwhelm the traditional fail-safes.

And information flows are a key lever to achieve “order and obedience.”

Problem #1 (Systemic): Bad Actors Pollute the Signal/Noise Ratio

In politics, the information space is a key battleground.

Autocratic regimes try to implement the following tactics to change what is being observed by the public.

• 🤫 Censorship: You can’t say certain things → results: Narrative echo chambers; etc.

• 🤔 Misinformation: You hear wrong information that sounds credible → results: Erosion of trust; Loss of shared reality; etc.

• 😵‍💫 Flooding the Zone: You hear contradicting information → results: cognitive bandwidth is overloaded; Analysis paralysis; etc.

The signal/noise ratio is being changed. Less signal. More noise.

Collective inaction is their goal.

I’ve you ever heard the saying “garbage in, garbage out” then you know what this is about. A worse signal/noise ratio has downstream consequences on our collective OODA Loop:

• Observe: We observe different things.

• Orient: We have conflicting situational assessments.

• Decide: We decide much slower.

• Act: We fail to act in a coordinated manner.

Welcome to the end of our shared reality.

Problem #2 (Individual): We Are Abstracted from Reality

This is compounded by the fact that most of us no longer look at the world with our own eyes. We look at our screens and accept the information on it at face value.

We are the people sitting in Plato’s Cave.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you to join some Conspiracy BS Telegram channel but I hope that all of us at least appreciate that there is an inherent risk when information is consumed through abstracted channels.

It’s easier to selectively change what’s shown on a screen than to change what’s actually going on in the real world.

It might look bleak but there are some beacons of hope.

The Resistance to Protect Observable Information

At the end of the day, autocracies are made of humans like you and I.

And recent history shows that it’s possible to turn autocratic movements around.

Solution #1 (Systemic): Protect and Fight for Institutions

Systems are stable when they have balancing mechanisms.

In democracies, there are various:

• Courts: The rule of law makes sure that everyone plays by the same rules.

• Elections: Elections allow the population to make adjustments by voting in regular intervals.

• Free Press: As Jeffrey Goldberg (of SignalGate fame) says: “The role of journalism is to inject a dose of reality into the cognitive system of a society.” (watch these 2 minutes)

Lesson learned: Protect democratic institutions and norms at all costs.

Solution #2 (Systemic): Protect Observable Information

There are things that governments can do to protect observable information:

• 🤫 Censorship → Freedom of Speech

• 🤔 Misinformation → Fact Checking (Happy Fact Checking Day everyone!)

• 😵‍💫 Flooding the Zone → Media Literacy and Decentralized Communication Networks

But the problem with these is frequently that this needs to happen before The Authoritarian Plays are being called.

Which leaves us with one more solution.

Solution #3 (Individuals): Pick Your Lane

In my previous essay - The Transatlantic Rift - I talked about the concept of Picking a Lane

One of the most actionable pieces of advice I’ve seen is the following 👇

Honestly, if you don’t know what else to do in the current environment, just pick a lane/subject and get active.

My friend and writer Richard Delevan has shared a beautiful example in his most recent essay:

Learn from Cory Booker

Removing all policy and moral valence from it, there are just some comms tactics on display here that anyone can and should learn from. So I’m going to show you some of the key clips and how they fit together. In total they’re like 15 minutes. But come back later if you just want to go back to our normal programming.

Twelve hours in (seriously - 12 hours standing up and talking is a long-arse time) - Booker delivered one of his most poignant attacks on the current US administration. Specifically, how it is trying to rule by executive fiat instead of constitutional norms. In this example, how without due process people in the US are being grabbed off the street by plainclothes agents with unmarked cars and masks and without so much as a hearing being shackled and renditioned to a mega-prison in El Salvador chosen not despite its reputation for human right violations but because of it.

Read the full account here:

Wicked Problems

Mr Booker Goes to Washington

Happy Liberation Day to those who celebrate! If you were sick and tired of lower costs on everything from consumer goods to core raw materials and components essential for climate tech, today is your day…

Read more

a year ago · 2 likes · 3 comments · Richard Delevan

Yes, Mr. Booker is a senator and has a massive reach. But everyone can get their message out within their means and abilities.

I try to do it with this newsletter. Maybe for you it’s an email, a text message, or a good ol’ conversation with someone.

You can crowd out the noise by adding your signal.

The War for Observable Information

I know this is a dense and draining topic. But it’s an important one.

This topic will require many more explorations and I hope that it opens up a dialogue. If you have thoughts, suggestions, critique about it, please let me know.

At the very least, I hope that you take away something that helps you in your day-to-day.

If someone can destroy our shared reality, then we can re-establish it.

🙏 Thanks to Clemens, Tim, and Apas for discussing early versions of this idea.

And thanks everyone for reading. Please get in touch.

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Recommended Reading

• The Ultimate Guide to the OODA Loop (Taylor Pearson)

• An Introduction to Systems Thinking (Art Lapinsch)

• Systems Thinking in Times of Crisis: Three Frameworks for Policymaking 🔥 (Art Lapinsch)

• Mr Booker Goes to Washington (Richard Delevan)

• Twenty Lessons, read by John Lithgow (Timothy Snyder)

Delphi Zero explores the interplay of climate, energy, and security 🌳🔋🛡️

📧 If you are opening this essay in your email inbox, I recommend to click on the title of this piece to enjoy the full-length version in the browser.

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Traveling to Antarctica was awe-inspiring in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible.

This is the start of a series, where we’ll explore the scale, the serenity, and the significance of my favorite place on earth - the Seventh Continent 🐧

1. My Antarctic Dispatch: What It Feels Like To Arrive In Antarctica

2. The Ocean Is Everything: Marine biologist Anya Astafurova takes us into the depths of our mysterious oceans.

Let me share with you my very personal experience.

Antarctic Dispatch

By Art Lapinsch (pictures courtesy of Sara Shih and myself)

Let’s start with some trivia. Why is it called Antarctica?

Turns out, Arctic comes from the Greek word ἀρκτικός - "arktikos" or “near the bear” - and refers to the star constellation Ursa Major mainly found in the northern sky. Also, polar bears are only found in the Arctic/northern regions.

Antarctica comes from ἀνταρκτικός - "antarktikos" or “opposite the bear.” No bears but lots of penguins 🐧

Earlier this year, my wife, two friends, and I departed on a journey to Antarctica 🇦🇶

We embarked on February 4th from Ushuaia, Argentina. The journey would take us through the famed Drake Passage - also known as the roughest sea in the world.

All of us went through the motions: Novelty, boredom, sea sickness, adaptation, excitement.

140 guests. 120 crew. 1 Polar Class 5-certified vessel.

48 hours. Nothing but water. A lot of water.

On a side note: What would happen if an alien would randomly be dropped on Earth?

Given that Earth’s surface is ~71% water and 29% land, that particular alien would most likely land in the middle of the ocean. It would struggle to stay afloat, then find its composure, and after enough idle time deduce that most likely this planet must be dominated by an organism that is adapted to water, since it’s all that the alien is seeing and experiencing.

Most likely, it would be shocked to see a horde of land-evolved monkeys zip by on a Polar Class 5 vessel.

Anyway, where was I?

48 hours is enough time to flush your senses from the daily grind. No internet, no news, no distractions.

And so, in the late afternoon on February 6th all of us were in for a treat: The sighting of the first ice berg among thick fog 🧊

People stood up, rushed to the windows and onto deck and started sharing their excitement:

• “Is that an iceberg?”

• “Wow! Do you see that?”

• “I can’t believe it.”

It’s hard for me to put into words. But there’s something primal inside of us that gets triggered in such a moment. Maybe it’s the fact that we need some sort of sensory contrast? Maybe it’s that we want to “feel safe” by knowing that there’s a land mass where we could theoretically set foot and walk around?

I don’t really know why, but - in a way - it felt very human.

Ultimately, when people ask me “how was it?,” I usually think of three things:

1. The Scale

2. The Serenity

3. The Significance

I’ll showcase these by talking you through our day of arrival in Antarctica.

Disclaimer: I have somewhere between 10,000 - 20,000 more words in me to summarize the trip in its entirety. If you’re interested in the full account (logistics; impressions; technology; wildlife; etc.), go to my personal blog and sign up to get the magnum opus.

In this Delphi Zero essay, we’ll focus on the big picture 🇦🇶

The Scale

One thing that no one prepares you for is the scale of the place. Everything is massive.

The most striking example I can think of is the first “holy shit” moment of this trip.

As I said, we travel for two days straight, the fog parts, we see icebergs here and there, and suddenly, we see this monster 👇

Yes, the picture looks insane. Yes, the iceberg seems to rock a halo on top. Yes, the shape of this iceberg is wild.

But… this picture doesn’t do it justice.

One of the expedition photographers explained it in a way that made sense to me:

A photo or a video is a representation of something but it misses important context.

It can capture the image but what it cannot capture is the journey, the context, and the personal experience of that particular moment.

It doesn’t replace the experience itself.

And I agree. This picture doesn’t capture:

• The fact that we traveled 48 hours and this was one of the first things we saw

• The fact that this iceberg was probably 10x the size of our vessel (which in itself is 100m long)

• The fact that seeing this iceberg had some sort of religious quality to it (I don’t really believe in god but this is the closest thing to a spiritual experience that I can think of)

And the wildest thing is that this was just the beginning. The icebergs were getting bigger, the views more stunning, and the mind-blowage more extreme.

Antarctica by the Numbers

• 🇦🇶 Hefty Footprint: Antarctica covers ~14.000.000 square kilometers // It’s twice the size of Australia and larger than the combined area of the US & Mexico.

• 🧊 Ice, Ice, Baby: (1) 98% of Antarctica is covered in ice, (2) which represents 90% of the world’s ice; (3) the average thickness of the ice is ~2km and can reach up to 4.5km; (4) during winter the sea ice expansion leads to a doubling of Antarctica’s surface area.

I still stand by my opinion: Quantitative data can’t capture the quality of this place.

The Serenity

After passing the magnificent iceberg, we were in for yet another surprise.

Our expedition leader called a mandatory impromptu meeting for all guests. People started coming up with all sorts of theories as to what was going to happen. But we didn’t guess it right.

The crew notified us that:

• a) we were ahead of schedule

• b) this meant we would reach Melchior Harbour faster than expected

• c) we would get to go out on a Zodiac cruise just 60 minutes after the announcement

It’s hard to describe the energy in the room. People were shouting, laughing, and jumping up. It felt like all of us were back in Kindergarten and someone told us there would be unlimited scoops at the ice cream truck.

Pure mayhem. In the best possible way.

Time was ticking. Each of us had one of four assigned color groups, which were used for a coordinated and batched activities. It’s easier to manage 40 people than 140.

We rushed to our room, put on our thermal undies, zipped up our parkas, clipped up our life jacket, walked down to the 3rd floor (out of 8 floors) base camp, slid into our boots, and waited for the exit hatch to open.

Time to get out.

It was busy, loud, and buzzing on the ship.

But once we hit the waters, there was only silence, bliss, and serenity.

Look at these faces.

On the Zodiac boat, all eleven of us reacted in different ways. Silence, laughter, exaltation. I had tears run down my cheeks while smiling.

But what it had in common was that everyone was truly and deeply touched.

By the wildlife.

By the history.

And by the untouched beauty of this place.

Antarctica is also called The Last Great Wilderness. For a reason.

After experiencing it, it’s hard not to think about the cost of modern-day progress.

The Significance

Initially, when we embarked on this expedition, we’ve been told that “after this trip we will become Ambassadors of Antarctica.”

I didn’t quite understand it then.

Yes, there were a couple of people amongst the guests who had already been to Antarctica and decided to go back at a significant cost and time expenditure. I didn’t think much of it.

But after having done my first trip to Antarctica, I do understand.

And, there’s even scientific evidence for that 👇

The Science of Awe

Experiences of awe can have the following effects:

• ⏳ Time Perception: (1) Brings individuals into the present moment, and (2) also can expand people’s perception of time, making them feel as though there’s more time available1.

• 🪞 Self-Perception: (1) Leads to self-diminishment2, where individuals feel smaller in comparison to something greater [never done LSD, but sounds like it’s along the lines of “we are part of the same larger whole” transcendence3], and (2) can motivate individuals to align more closely with their authentic selves4.

• 🫶 Prosocial Behavior: (1) Can motivate people to be more generous, volunteer more, and enhance connection to others5, (2) as well as motivate meditation of meaning in life6.

From my own experience, all of this checks out.

My wife even told me at some points during the trip that “we should volunteer more” and that she thinks “this trip will finally get her to join the climate race.”

I remembered the statement: “After this trip we will become Ambassadors of Antarctica.”

To that, I’d say: Mission accomplished ✅

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My Antarctic Dispatch

I hope that I was able to convey just a little bit of the scale, the serenity, and the significance of this beautiful place.

At this point, I’d like to thank the entire expedition team, the entire crew, and all the old and new friends on our expedition who made it a trip of a lifetime 🫶

Thank you, Antarctica, you are unlike anything I’ve seen before 🇦🇶

What’s Next?

I will continue writing this series:

• The importance of Antarctica for our global climate

• Legal implications of the Antarctic Treaty

• Interviews with some of the expedition team on a variety of topics (nature photography; ornithology (i.e. birds); cetaceans (i.e. whales); etc. ) - trust me, these interviews will be incredible

And maybe a few more cute pictures of penguins 🐧

Thanks for reading ✌️

🙏 Thanks to my wife Sara for convincing me to go on this trip of a lifetime. And also a shoutout to my climate buddy Sayesha, who has been an Antarctic ambassador way before me.

If you have any questions about Antarctica, please get in touch 🇦🇶

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Delphi Zero explores the interplay of climate, energy, and security 🌳🔋🛡️

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Well, shit! This is that it feels like to live through historic times.

The US-EU partnership is breaking apart in front of our eyes. I don’t like it a single bit and that’s why today’s essay will cover:

• What I’m observing

• Why I’m choosing to act pro-actively

• How I plan to do it (+ how you can do the same)

tl;dr: What to do in times of crisis 💥

Transatlantic Rift

By Art Lapinsch

This is not the essay I wanted to write. But it’s the one I have to write.

Yes, Delphi Zero is a climate-focused publication. But more importantly, it’s an honest reflection of what’s going on in my head (and in my heart). My motivation to starting this publication was this:

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine changed everything for me.

I have family history in that region, many of our Ukrainian friends were affected, and once upon a time my parents and I were war refugees ourselves.

On top, as a German tax payer, it became clearer by the day that security policy and energy policy are heavily intertwined. For better or for worse.

I started doom scrolling and one topic lead to the next: Security updates from the conflict zone → security policy analyses → energy policy analyses → climate technology.

I got hooked by the intersection of Energy 🔋 x Climate 🌳 x Security 🛡️ and my curiosity just ran with it.

Initially, it was just another rabbit hole but soon enough I realized that the climate space was full of opportunity. Finally, I convinced myself to spend the next chapter of my career in climate.

Even if I haven’t published much security-related content in recent months, it’s still very much at the core of Delphi Zero.

I hope that today’s essay will expand your view of the world we live in today.

What the Hell Is Going On?

It’s 2025 and the current US administration is dismantling transatlantic relations faster than we can report on it.

Here’s a quick lowlight reel:

• After claiming that Europe is in democratic decline, JD Vance (Vice President of the US) refused to meet with sitting German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and instead met with the leader of the far-right party AfD. [A side note: A German court has ordered the surveillance of the AfD party because they are deemed to be a threat to democracy.] Well done, JD. Actions speak louder than words.

• In a recent U.N. vote - condemning Russia’s aggression towards Ukraine - the US delegation sided with Russia.

• The US met with the Russian delegation to hold “peace talks.” Who was not present at the table? Ukraine.

That’s not a good picture.

What’s New About This Situation?

In 1949, NATO was co-founded by the US with the following objective:

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created in 1949 by the United States, Canada, and several Western European nations to provide collective security against the Soviet Union.

The US guaranteed safety for the European continent. This seems to be eroding more and more each day.

In the past, Europe and the US might have had disagreements on policy matters. But they could always count on one thing: They both shared democratic values.

This doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.

Frank Sauer (Senior Research Fellow at the Bundeswehr University in Munich) once divided possible conflict lines along four parameters:

1. 🗺️ Territory: Landlines; etc.

2. ☝️ Cultural: Anti-modern vs. Progressive

3. 🛢️ Energy: Fossil vs. Renewable

4. ⚖️ Political: Autocratic vs. Democratic

While the US government starts looking less like a liberal democracy and more like an authoritarian regime, the political conflict lines are being reshuffled.

This is a massive problem for Europeans because Russia is the #1 military threat for the continent.

Why Do I Care?

In 1992, my parents and I fled the Yugoslav Civil War when it reached Bosnia.

To this day, us getting out of there is the single-most-impactful event in my life.
I am where I am because of it.
I am who I am because of it.

Now, with an increased likelihood of the US abandoning Europe as a security guarantor, this means that armed conflict might be at our doorstep (yet again).

Analysts say that IF an armed conflict happens THEN it is likely to start in one of the Baltic countries (Lithuania; Latvia; Estonia). Here’s a 3-minute explainer video that captures the various risks pretty well.

Why? Because geography dictates so 👇

Let me break down my color-coded annotations:

• 🇷🇺 Russia (Red): Some people are surprised to learn that Russia’s territory is split into two parts: (1) the massive area that all of us know from global maps, but (2) also a small plot of land (i.e. Kaliningrad Oblast) that’s wedged right in between Poland and Lithuania.

• 🇧🇾 Belarus (Orange): Belarus is a quasi-Vassal state. The dictatorial regime in Minsk works in tandem with Moscow. Whether it means hosting Russian troops on its territory (as done right before the full-scale invasion into Ukraine) or by other means.

• 🔧 Choke Points (Blue): These are areas, which restrict transportation via land. Now look at what’s going on from the perspective of the Baltic States: West, you have the Baltic Sea; North, you have the Gulf of Finland; East, you have Russia; South, you have Belarus and a 50km stretch from Russian to Belarusian territory. It would be relatively easy to cut of land-routes to the Baltics.

The Baltics include 3 countries, roughly 6 million people, and my father’s side of the family. These guys 👇

Rough Awakening for Europe

What does this mean for Europe?

Donald Tusk (Prime Minister of Poland) said it well:

Hear for yourself how it sounds,

500 million Europeans begging 300 million Americans to defend them from 140 million Russians.

If you can count, count on yourself. Not in isolation, but with full awareness of your potential.

Today, in Europe, we do not lack economic strength, people, but the belief that we are a global power.

Welcome to 2025. Time to wake up.

What Are The Baltics Doing?

Since this is an energy-related publication, I want to focus on a specific action besides all the military-related activities: Grid Connection.

Since (a) energy can be used as an offensive capability in a conflict and (b) Baltic countries partially depended on electricity from the Russian grid, it was time for the Baltics to get serious about energy security.

This meant that Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia decided to (1) not renew their partnership agreement with Russia, (2) cut the electricity grid connections from the Russian Grid, and (3) connect to the Continental Europe Synchronous Area (CESA).

Let’s have a look at a map showing what’s going on 👇

• 🔌 Interconnectors (Red): The Baltics have disconnected from the 9 Russian interconnectors (i.e. cables with massive electricity flow capacity between different electricity markets/grids).

• 🏝️ Energy Island (Yellow): Kaliningrad Oblast has become a de-facto energy island and now depends exclusively on it’s own energy production via gas and coal power plants.

The press release of entso-e says the following:

Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have successfully synchronized their electricity grids with the Continental Europe Synchronous Area (CESA) on 09 February 2025 at 14:05 EET, marking a historic milestone in their journey towards strengthened energy system resilience and integration with the Continental Europe electricity grid.

… This process follows years of thorough preparation and cooperation among the Baltic transmission system operators (TSOs): Elering (Estonia), Augstsprieguma tīkls (AST, Latvia), Litgrid (Lithuania), and their counterparts in the Continental Europe synchronous area. A particularly important role of PSE in Poland was the overall coordination and project management, as a direct neighbour and as the system which physically connects the Baltic States’ systems to Continental Europe.

This is only one of many measures to build and expand their own resilience. Watch this region of the world.

What Am I Doing?

This is a very scary moment but I want to be doing something.

It’s just a starting point and I hope to expand these activities over the coming months. If you have better ideas, please let me know.

#1: Spread Useful & Factual Information

Looking at my audience, the largest chunk of people is in the US. That’s great!

My wife is American and I have my in-laws and many many close friends living in the States. This country is dear to my heart and I want to keep this line of communication going.

Hopefully some of my info can inform you - American readers - about what’s going on in Europe.

#2: Fight Disinformation

One of the most actionable pieces of advice I’ve seen is the following 👇

Honestly, if you don’t know what else to do in the current environment, just pick a lane/subject and get active.

I’ll fight disinformation in my areas of expertise: Comms; climate; energy; etc.

#3: Boost the EU

If you run an EU-focused organization and think that I can help, get in touch with me 🇪🇺

I’m here to help.

What You Can Do In Times of Crisis

Up is down and down is up.

In times like these, the important thing is to regain some sort of control. Start acting on what you can control for the sake of your own sanity and to build momentum.

Small steps accumulate over time. Get started.

Important Side Note: Our world is full of issues and problems.

There are many conflicts going on. Gaza, Sudan, Sahel, and unfortunately many more. There are climate/nature topics. There are cultural and societal topics. All of them are important.

But we have a limited bandwidth of what we can deal with physically, intellectually, and emotionally.

Your topic might not be European security. I understand.

The only thing I can tell you. If you find a topic that you truly care about, maybe lean in and try to do something about it. Every little helps. I hope you succeed.

What To Expect In the Coming Weeks?

I have a whole backlog of climate-related topics:

• An exciting series of posts about Antarctica 🇦🇶

• More expert interviews across the entire spectrum from energy tech founders to activists 🎙️

But, given the times, I will write more essays related to the active conflict zones we see today:

• A practical series about the fundamentals of EU law 🇪🇺

• More security-related analyses 🛡️

I will do my best to ignite the European Optimism Machine.

Time to wake up. Time to step up. Let’s do this.

🙏 Thanks to my cousin Harijs for highlighting the grid disconnection topic.

And thanks everyone for reading. Please get in touch.

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Climate is not a technology problem but a story problem.

Delphi Zero is a consultancy and newsletter about the narrative potential of climate.

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Happy 2025, everyone. Hope you are healthy and motivated to rock this year of the snake 🐍

Today’s interview is with my buddy Skander Garroum - we go way back to our early entrepreneurial days in San Francisco. In 2022, we reconnected as both of us wanted to break into the climate space (a bit more background here) and we started a private whatsapp group to accelerate our progress via collective learning, accountability, and motivation.

Fast forward, Skander co-founded of Climate Drift - a climate career accelerator - and has helped hundreds of people transition into climate.

Today, we’ll discuss:

• His journey of building a business in climate 🎢

• Learnings from coaching hundreds of senior-level professionals apply their skills to climate 🌳

• Current trends in climate 💡

Enjoy ✌️

Accelerating Climate Careers

By Art Lapinsch

Please tell us a bit about your own journey into climate. What triggered the interest and how did you land where you are today?

I have been a founder my whole life.

I founded my first startup with 16 in China, and since then, I’ve been obsessed with understanding how to build companies. I studied economics, with my thesis focused on network theory, and became a founding team member at Startup Genome at Stanford. We spun out a data benchmarking company, and sold it after a few years, and continued building more data and AI companies.

Over time, I became deeply worried about climate change. The pressing question for me was: Do we have real solutions, or are they, like many startups, just hot air?

In most sectors, a failed startup is unfortunate but acceptable; for climate solutions, failure isn’t an option.

Walk us through the different stages of Climate Drift (your own essays; first cohort; community; etc.). What is it and where do you see it in the future?

Climate Drift

Explaining climate solutions and helping 1 million people find their career in climate.

By Marco & Skander

Phase 1: Like many serial founders, I started exploring climate solutions and offering advice by learning from the people who are in the space: founders and investors. Quickly I realized that many of the learnings we made scaling startups didn’t make it into climate yet and I wanted to fix this.

Phase 2: Quickly I found a co-founder with a similar background - Marco Morawec He cofounded and exited several education companies and helped 1,000s of people transition careers. You should follow him on Linkedin btw, he drops great climate career advice daily.

I began sharing what I was learning, writing 52 essays in a year and it resonated. Some pieces went viral.

Phase 3: We found the problem we wanted to tackle: Helping people with transferable skills transition into climate.

It started with hundreds of one-on-one calls.

Phase 4: That turned into small structured cohorts - a more scalable way to help.

Phase 5: Now, it’s about sharing what we’ve learned widely to get more people involved.

Today, we find the most experienced and talented people and help them tackle the single most important challenge for humanity: Solving Climate Change.

Looking ahead I want the companies who are working on the most impactful climate solutions to be wildly successful. And I know that hiring the right leadership talent is very difficult and also a make-or-break situation for many of those companies.

I’m passionate about making knowledge freely accessible and easy to find and understand. That’s why we recently launched a free course providing an overview of different climate solution areas. In the future we’re open-sourcing more and more of our insights to ensure this knowledge reaches as many people as possible.

If I can help them find the right talent at the right time then I could look the future generation in the eye and say: this was my contribution. Those companies over there, I helped them build their team so they could scale and do this crazy thing that saved us from the worst.

You are working with a lot of people who want to transition into climate. What are some surprising insights about your audience? Why is it surprising?

The people I work with are incredibly talented and could easily land top roles in tech or other industries. But even with their experience, they struggle to break into climate.

They lack the network and don’t fully understand the solutions landscape. It’s surprising how much even the most capable people need help navigating this space.

What's the main roadblock that prevents people from moving into a climate career? Why is it there and how can it be fixed?

The biggest roadblock is the lack of clarity around the landscape—many people don’t know where their skills can make an impact or how to navigate this complex space. Alone and without clear guidance, the process feels overwhelming and discouraging.

So, what helps?

• Education: Provide resources and frameworks to help people understand the climate sector and identify where they can contribute.

• Fireside Conversations: Discussions with industry insiders to demystify challenges and provide inspiration.

• Accountability: Offer structured frameworks and support to keep individuals focused and on track during their transition.

• Pitching Support: Equip people with the tools and strategies to confidently articulate their value and position themselves effectively in the climate space.

These solutions together can break down barriers, create clarity, and enable a smoother transition into meaningful climate careers.

From “Transitioning into Climate: Big Company or Startup?” by Allan Smith (via Climate Drift):

One of the coolest parts of my past year has been colleagues from all previous walks of life - NASA, Tech, Hollywood - reaching out and wanting to learn about my exploration into Climate. From hundreds of conversations this year, I’m motivated by the wide-scale understanding and imperative across a large talent pool. Everyone I talk with seems to get the opportunity and immediacy of solving these Climate challenges. All of them come back to a similar question: How do I start?

Here are the behaviors that work for me as I’ve navigated the past year of career transition into tech.

1. Show up. Much of my luck and opportunity comes through availability. My friend encouraged me to join the My Climate Journey Collective, I noticed climate meet-ups happening in the city; I do a decent job staying in touch with friends from past lives. Every one of these opportunities faces a decision point - do I pay the $99 to join a Slack community? Do I really feel like fighting traffic to go to a networking event? I’m an extreme activator - I’d always rather be taking a step than waiting and analyzing, so I tend to jump at these opportunities. I can 100% point to the ‘luck’ I create by simply showing up to these opportunities.

2. Work with intention. This requires first doing the work to understand what I’m working towards. As my friend Jeff MacGregor tells me, it’s time to get really honest with myself about what I’m solving for. If it's a financial opportunity, I work to understand that and fit it into my moral framework. This allows me to pursue it relentlessly. If it’s to save the planet, I still do the same self-work: is this about feeling good about myself or making up for something? When I discovered my intention lies in the world I’m creating for my kids to inherit, I tapped into a clear motivation to keep me going through inevitable disappointments, dead ends, and obstacles.

3. Remember: I can always learn. If you’re mapping out a career change to Climate, you’ll have the opportunity to make money, meet amazing people, and work on something inspiring and daunting. At some point, some of the smaller details like what type of org to join, where to apply your talent are just iterations and opportunities to learn. You can’t fail if you keep improving with each decision.

What's the most useful skill you have taught your students?

Knowing where, how and in what order to apply their skills and experiences to help a climate company scale.

This is why we have challenges: helping Drifties find challenges in the climate world where their skills and experiences apply and helping them package them.

What's something you have started to see in a different light now that you started teaching people about climate?

I’ve realized how tough this journey is - breaking into climate, staying updated on such a fast-evolving topic, and keeping motivation high.

What’s been inspiring, though, is seeing the power of community. The way our high-powered Drifties support each other is incredible.

What's your take on the current climate career market? How is it evolving? What's something to look out for?

The climate tech sector is maturing, and the career market is catching up. There are more roles opening up across various areas.

But with the current funding slowdown, companies are hiring strategically, focusing on senior positions. It’s creating a competitive landscape where hundreds of applicants are going for a handful of high-impact roles.

You have published your Climate Recap 2024 - a trend report slide deck. What was most surprising to the audience? What is something unintuitive that few people understand? Why is that? What was most surprising to you?

Most surprising to the audience: China’s dominance in climate tech. They control 80% of solar cell production, 50% of lithium-ion batteries, and 60% of EV manufacturing. They’re also gearing up to lead in hydrogen and other solutions.

Decades of subsidies, industrial clusters, and supply chain control made this possible. There is a lot to learn from this… and many ways to collaborate.

Something unintuitive: Climate is fundamentally an infrastructure game. Even with all the progress and exponential milestones, we’re still in the early stages. Every solution, even renewables, is in its infancy. That means anyone who dives in now can become an expert and have an impact quickly.

Most surprising to me: Despite all the 2024 hype around data centers and AI, these areas are underfunded and under tested.

There are so many potentially impactful solutions that just aren’t being explored. I hope 2025 changes that.

Can you share a specific story of someone from your cohorts who made a successful transition/transformation into climate? What were the steps? What can others learn from that?

Jonathan, a partnerships lead at the Gates Foundation, wanted to break into Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAF).

The challenge? Explaining the value of partnerships in a technical space.

He delivered value upfront: diving deep into the SAF landscape and writing a 25-page deep dive on stakeholders and relationships. It showed he understood the space inside out.

Climate Drift

The Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) Solution Framework

Welcome to Climate Drift - the place where we explain climate solutions and help you find your role in the race to net zero…

Read more

2 years ago · 9 likes · Jonathan Castrodale

Now, he’s the Director of Renewable Fuels at Earth Finance, developing an SAF accelerator and helping kickstart the sector and airlines decarbonize.

Climate Drift has a big content catalogue - especially from guest writers. How has the process evolved over time? What have you learned about writing throughout this process?

Writing is about delivering value.

The form matters less than the substance: understanding your audience’s problems (the ones they know and the ones they don’t) and addressing them in a way only you can.

The hard part is extracting and amplifying that value in both writing and editing.

My go-to question is: Who is this helping, and how?

What is something that you have changed your mind about since entering the climate space? What is something you have doubled down on?

Changed my mind: I used to think the space was full of dreamers and hot air. But there are so many real, scalable solutions ready to go. The time to work in climate is now and everyone who is starting now will still be early.

Doubled down on: Believing in the amazing people working on real solutions—they’re making money and having a real impact. I am also a strong believer that we can create the future we want. This is your opportunity now, to step in and work in climate.

Looking back from a Net Zero future, what do you hope they will say about us?

That we tried hard, succeeded, and made the world a better place for everyone.

Offer from Skander: We want to give a little something for Delphi Zero readers: Mention 'Delphi Zero' in your application to be fast tracked for a 1on1 interview.

Apply here

🙏 Thanks, Skander for taking time and sharing your perspective.

I’d love to hear from you, please get in touch and tell me whom I should interview next or which topics you’d like to see covered ✌️

Climate has a story problem.

Delphi Zero is a consultancy and newsletter dealing with the exciting world of climate tech. One story at a time.

📧 If you are opening this essay in your email inbox, I recommend to click on the title of this piece to enjoy the full-length version in the browser.

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Wow! Just wow. I rediscovered my love for food.

How? I finished yet another Netflix binge. The show du jour was “Culinary Class Wars” - a Korean entertainment masterpiece 🇰🇷🍜

Honestly, it’s probably the best entertainment product I’ve consumed in the past few years. If you haven’t seen it, go for it. No regrets!

But why write about it on a climate newsletter? Because I believe it has practical takeaways for our race to net zero. In particular, how to tell inspiring and most-importantly activating stories through awesome non-fiction.

It is part of a series about storytelling:

1. Climate Tech’s Story Problem

2. Climate Tech’s Resonant Frequencies

3. Climate Tech’s Story Opportunity (Pt. 1): Story Quadrants

4. Climate Tech’s Story Opportunity (Pt. 2): Awesome Non-Fiction

5. From K-Wave to Net Zero

갑시다!

From K-Wave to Net Zero

By Art Lapinsch

The Shortest History of Korea and K-Wave 🌊

Before we begin, some cultural context.

I think it’s not only relevant but also utterly fascinating.

The K-Wave 한류 🫰

Remember Gangnam Style by Psy? This is exactly what K-Wave (“Hallyu”) refers to.

Recent examples include:

• Parasite was the first non-English speaking movie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.

• BTS is the most popular boy band on the planet. Just check out their concert in LA 👀

The fact that a country produces cultural hits is not noteworthy in itself. But the fact that it happens repeatedly by design should give us pause.

Let’s explore the origins of the K-Wave 👇

Order from Disorder 🐦‍🔥

Korea is a relatively young democracy with a very dynamic political history:

Since 1948, the constitution has undergone five major revisions, each signifying a new republic.

The current Sixth Republic began with the last major constitutional revision that took effect in 1988. From its founding until the June Democratic Struggle (1987), the South Korean political system operated under a military authoritarian regime, with the freedom of assembly, association, expression, press and religion as well as civil society activism being tightly restricted. During that period, there were no freely elected national leaders, political opposition is suppressed, dissent was not permitted and civil rights were curtailed.

But what does this have to do with K-Wave? Well, hear me out.

After the troubled decades of the late-20th century, South Korea had to try something new to stabilize democracy.

In 1990s, the government started a set of policies to develop and promote domestic culture.

• 📺 Liberalization of cultural policies: In 1996, South Korea's Constitutional Court denounced the preliminary review system for cultural content as unconstitutional, removing government-mandated censorship.

• 📦 Policy, promotion, and export support: New departments and strategies were established, such as the Hallyu department within the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism, to focus specifically on the Korean Wave.

• 💳 Government funding: Significant financial resources were allocated to support the cultural industry, including incentives for startups and the creation of a $1 billion cultural fund in 2014.

If Silicon Valley has venture capital, then South Korea has governmentally-funded cultural capital.

And it works.

South Korea's central bank, the Bank of Korea, found in 2021 that BTS, including a "ripple effect" that included increased tourism to South Korea; increased interest in Korean culture, movies, and study of the Korean language; and added approximately US$5 billion per year to South Korea's economy, a growth of about 0.5 percent.

A 2018 study showed that, on average, 800,000 foreigners per year had visited South Korea over the past four years for BTS-related reasons.

(wiki)

🇰🇷 Current events disclaimer: Yes, there was a failed coup attempt in early December’24. Read this for more context.

You might argue “K-Wave didn’t prevent the coup attempt itself.” This is correct, but I’d argue that a liberalized media environment without censorship helped to “prevent the successful completion of the coup.” But what do I know 🤷‍♂️

Alrighty, back to the essay.

The Theme of Class Struggle

One of the central themes of K-drama is the topic of class struggle.

Over the past decades, South Korea has undergone an impressive economic transformation.

The rise of chaebols (large conglomerates) has concentrated wealth and power in the hands of a few. The gap between rich and poor has become more extreme.

Many cultural artifacts from the K-wave movement discuss this:

• 🦠 Parasite (2019): A poor family infiltrates a wealthy household, exposing stark class disparities and the desperate measures taken to climb the social ladder.

• 👺 Squid Game (2021): Debt-ridden individuals compete in deadly children's games for a massive cash prize, highlighting the exploitation of the poor in a capitalist society.

• 🥘 Culinary Class Wars (2024): Chefs from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds compete in high-stakes cooking challenges, revealing class differences influence culinary styles and opportunities in the food industry.

Now that you have a 80/20 understanding of the background, let’s dive into our show du jour 👇

“Culinary Class Wars”: A K-Wave Blueprint

Culinary Class Wars is not only quintessentially K-wave but it also offers a blueprint for creating awesome non-fiction.

Besides top-shelf production quality, it excels at the following:

1. Enticing Concept 💡

2. World-Class Cast 👩‍🍳

3. Innovative Formats 🦾

4. Fast Loops 🔁

Enticing Concept: Class Wars 💡

As discussed, class differences and lack of social mobility are familiar topics. Not only in Korea but all across the world.

The show answers the most important question right from the beginning:
”Who wants what and what stops them from getting it?”

The contestants (who), want to prove themselves (desire), but 99 other master chefs are in their way (conflict).

Culturally-speaking and topic-wise, this is a very Korean show. But the premise has a global appeal. It resonates and it hooks the audience.

It entertains.

World-Class Cast: Stars and Stars in the Making 👩‍🍳

The show has real characters, strong personalities, and different styles.

The 100 contestants are made up by:

• ⚪️ 20 White Spoon Chefs: Most famous chefs in Korea. Some of them with their own Michelin-star restaurants. All of them are addressed by their real name - as a sign that they are from a “worthy class”.

• ⚫️ 80 Black Spoon Chefs: Up-and-coming chefs in Korea. The challengers. All of them are addressed throughout the show by a nickname (e.g. “Cooking Maniac,” “Comic Book Chef,” etc.) and they have to earn the right to reveal their real name through advancing to the final cook-off. It is the metaphor of climbing the ladder of social mobility 🪜

To top it off, the contestants are judged by two greats of the food & beverage industry:

• Paik Jong-won: One of the most famous restaurateurs in Asia.

• Anh Sung-jae: Korea’s only three-star Michelin chef.

The audience has a buffet of characters to choose from. Anyone can find someone to root for. A great way to get the audience involved.

Innovative Formats: Constantly Evolving Show 🦾

I used to believe that cooking shows have to be boring. But Culinary Class Wars changed my mind.

Every round was different:

• 🍣 Different theme

• 📋 Different judgement modalities (who; how; when)

• ⏰ Different constraints (time; ingredients; solo vs. collab)

It is remix culture at its best.

Mixing contestants and cuisines. Mixing known formats with new ideas. Mixing everything for maximum entertainment.

Not only that, but it also educates the audience on a variety of topics.

Fast Loops: Quick Reward Cycles 🔁

I think one of the most effective tools in this show are the quick and repeated dopamine hits.

• Visually Appealing: You can see the ingredients going from raw form (ingredient) to finished end product (dish) in a short period of time.

• Quick Iteration: A dish can be made in anywhere from 2 minutes to many hours. But the kicker is that you can make multiple dishes at once or multiple dishes per day.

• Everyone Understands It: All of us consume food. When we see a buttered cheese toast we know what it will taste.

• True Mastery and Creativity: The show gives a rare insight into how masters go about their craft.

To the audience, the reward loops are strong and frequent 🤤

It is inspiring.

The Result: Personal Activation Energy 💥

Just like after a great dish, I was left with a desire for more.

At the end of each episode, I wanted more. More personal stories from the contestants. More challenges. More dishes.

At the end of the show, I wanted more. More knowledge about different cuisines and cooking techniques. More time spent exploring cooking and learning about food myself.

This show got me hooked on food (again).

Mastering the Activation Funnel (for Climate)

To me, it looks like K-entertainment has mastered the audience activation funnel.

In a previous piece, I wrote that you have to “entertain to educate.” You cannot expect that people will immediately get excited about something that you care about.

Through this essay, I think we can add more fidelity to the “entertain to educate” statement:

1. Entertain: Create fast-paced entertainment to hook the audience.

2. Involve: Showcase individual story arcs and get people interested in the characters that bring the story to life.

3. Educate: Embed ideas and information in a broader narrative so they are easier to digest.

4. Inspire: Amplify the appreciation for food, recipes, ingredients, cuisines, techniques, chefs, etc.

And the results are clear: South Korea gets people interested and activated in their culture 🇰🇷

Remember this stat:

A 2018 study showed that, on average, 800,000 foreigners per year had visited South Korea over the past four years for BTS-related reasons.

Those foreigners probably weren’t born with a bingo card that said “listen to K-pop and study Korean.” They developed interest over time. And this was heavily facilitated by the creators of the K-Wave movement.

Our industry could benefit greatly from activating more people. One of the ways is through awesome non-fiction but there are many others. So regardless whether you create documentaries, run corporate marketing, or just want to get people excited about your ideas in climate, it might be time to learn from the masters.

• Enticing Concept → Entertain

• World-Class Cast → Involve

• Innovative Formats → Educate

• Fast Loops → Inspire

Who knows, maybe this will get people interested and activated in our own culture 🌳

🙏 Thanks Sara, Lindsay, and Brian for watching this show with me.

If you’re interested, I’d recommend you to check out my 5,000-word travel log from last year’s trip to Seoul. Disclaimer: It also includes the famed “sugar syrup” story that my friends still make fun of me to date.

Thanks for reading, and as always, happy to hear from you.

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Climate is not a technology problem but a story problem.

Delphi Zero is a consultancy and newsletter dealing with the exciting and beautiful world of climate tech.

📧 If you are opening this essay in your email inbox, I recommend to click on the title of this piece to enjoy the full-length version in the browser.

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Dear friendos, this is a quasi-follow up to my previous essay “How the CIA Would Evaluate Climate Tech.” Both essays have been inspired by spit-balling ideas with other climate brains at the Drop conference.

Today’s essay is about the learning framework that Ben and I taught at the conference.

This is your personal 10-minute crash course in effective learning 👇

How to Learn Anything (in Climate)

By Art Lapinsch

The Great Explainer's Secret Sauce(s)

Richard Feynman is an intellectual crush of mine:

• 1965 Nobel Prize-winner for his work in quantum mechanics

• Dubbed “The Great Explainer” for his ability to explain complex topics with simple words

• And one of the people who turned the Manhattan Project into the history-defining endeavor we all know

Feynman’s Signature Sauce: Teach to Learn

If you know Feynman, then you might be familiar with his didactic maxim:

“If you want to master something, teach it.”

He reasoned that in order to convey something clearly to an audience, you must truly understand it. By teaching it, you’ll quickly uncover the gaps in your own understanding.

The method can be mapped as follows: Choose a concept → teach it → identify gaps → review and simplify → rinse and repeat.

But this only applies if we already know about a subject.

So to all the scholars and scientists out there: Try teaching your knowledge to someone else. You might learn a thing or two.

But - for the rest of us - the question remains: How do we learn something new?

This is where Feynman’s lesser known technique comes into play 👇

Feynman’s Secret Sauce: What → Why → How

Hidden in the Feynman Lectures at CalTech, there’s a golden nugget.

Feynman argues that teaching/learning should follow this sequence:

1. Who: The learner 🤷 → What’s their context? What do they know already? What’s the language that they speak and understand? etc.

2. What: The topic ⛳️ → What needs to be learned? What’s important? What’s not? What are the boundaries of the content? What’s out of scope? etc.

3. Why: The purpose 💚 → What are the practical implications of the acquired knowledge? Why bother? Why does it matter to the learner? etc.

4. How: The method 🗺️ → What is the best method to teach the topic under the given circumstances (who/what/why)?

I’ll give you a practical example that blew my little mind.

Feynman’s Los Alamos Episode: Learning Advanced Nuclear Physics from Scratch

When Feynman moved to Los Alamos to join the Manhattan Project, he was a PhD from Princeton University but his expertise was primarily in quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics.

In case someone didn’t know, the purpose of the Manhattan Project was to build an atomic bomb. So naturally, fundamental and advanced knowledge of nuclear physics was crucial. But Feynman didn’t know advanced nuclear physics (yet).

The Manhattan Project hired someone to build an atomic bomb without being an expert in atomic physics. What the crap!

In his autobiography “Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!” he wrote about this episode. If we plug it into our little framework, then we see this:

1. Who: Richard Feynman, PhD 👨‍🏫 → One of the world’s leading physicists and researchers in quantum physics.

2. What: Nuclear Physics ⚛️ → Nuclear fission, chain reactions, neutron diffusion, etc.

3. Why: Win the War ⚔️ → It was believed that Nazi Germany was months ahead in developing their version of the atomic bomb. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

4. How: Lab Exposure 🗺️ → The fastest way he could learn the topics to work side-by-side with the leading nuclear physicists and researchers. It’s faster to ask Szilard, Bethe, or Lawrence than it is to find it in a physics book. Why? It wasn’t commonly documented knowledge (yet).

His How of acquiring this knowledge was a result of his context.

Personal Case Study: Learning About New Markets

I’ll give you another practical example from my own life: Learning about data centers.

Recently, I started feeling the entrepreneurial itch again and started exploring a couple of problem/trend spaces:

• Increased deployment of off-grid solar

• Increased data liquidity in the electric grid

• Increased energy demand for data centers

• etc.

I’ll show you how I approached my data center x energy research 👇

Using Feynman’s Secret Sauce

My situation could be mapped as follows:

1. Who: Art Lapinsch ✌️ → Former AdTech founder w/ degree in Energy Law and understanding of electricity market regulation

2. What: Energy Demand for Data Centers ⚡️ → Scope; Growth rates; Road Blocks; etc.

3. Why: Understand the Market 💡 → The map; the players; the flows; etc. (see above 👆)

4. How: In-depth Content 🗺️ → Many hours of podcast conversations about various topics related to data centers; detailed blog posts; etc.

My What/Why-combo informs the How.

When I’m trying to understand a market, I usually follow this process that I shared in a previous essay:

My first goal was to build a mental map of the climate data center space:

Where are the edges of the map?
Who is participating?
How do the various groups interact?
What are the main flows in this world?
Which fundamental knowledge do I need to learn?
What are common misconceptions?

The goal in this step is to get enough of an understanding to start having conversations with domain experts. This is my “desk research” so to speak.

My InternetU Curriculum - Written Content

To get a first grasp of the problem, I would google and read as much as I can:

• AI will use a lot of energy. That's good for the climate.: A high-level case for the positive economic impacts of data center expansion.

• Free Guide to Data Center Power: A technical resource with lots of figures and illustrations.

• A Roadmap for Sustainability in AI: A practitioners view on data center’s ESG impact + possible fixes.

• Steel, Servers and Power: What it Takes to Win the Next Phase of AI: Nice lens on project development/financing.

Here’s how it works behind the scenes:

• A real estate developer—QTS, Vantage and CyrusOne are three popular ones—goes and buys land and power that they believe a data center can be built on.

• The developer approaches the big tech companies and offers them a 15-year or 20-year lease on the data center, for a total cost of $2-10B.

• Once the developer has a signed deal, they go to the capital markets, and they raise debt against the deal, usually from banks or real estate investors.

• The debt investors are not underwriting the future AI demand in the data center—they are underwriting the credit of the customer, say Microsoft or Amazon, and expect a yield that is a slight premium to corporate debt.

• The developer goes and hires a general contractor—for example, DPR, one of the most popular data center builders.

• The general contractor goes and hires subcontractors. The subcontractors then go and recruit labor. Labor is a huge component of the cost of data center construction.

• Labor moves to the location where the data center is getting built—for example, a small town or city—and they are put up in hotels or other accommodations in the area.

• Over a two year period, a massive construction project takes place, starting with steel and concrete for the overall structure, and ending with industrial parts and GPUs being installed.

• During this whole process, the end-user of the data center (e.g., Microsoft or Amazon) is negotiating with their own supply chain for diesel generators, liquid cooling systems, and other necessary equipment.

After reading all of this, I’m already a bit more informed than before.

My InternetU Curriculum - Audio Content

After learning some of the abbreviations, players, and concepts, I feel equipped enough to consume hour-long podcasts.

My favorites so far:

• The Complete History & Strategy of Amazon Web Services: Helps to get a grasp of the scale and stickiness of data center business models.

• Nvidia Part III: The Dawn of the AI Era (2022-2023): Helps to understand (a) what is meant when people talk about “the data center becomes the computer” and (b) why bandwidth and networking technology is a major bottleneck in data centers.

• Not Boring Founders: Crusoe Energy (Chase Lochmiller and Cully Cavness): Grasp why it is “easier to move data than it is to move gas fields.”

• Saving the Planet with Better AI Data Centers (with Crusoe CEO Chase Lochmiller): Deep-dive into building modular data centers that are co-located next to oil wells.

Use Feynman’s Secret Sauce: What → Why → How

If Feynman can learn nuclear physics at Los Alamos, you can learn X in Y.

The key to structuring your own learning is to understand the who/what/why before you go all-in on the how. Different things work for different people and that’s ok.

My intuition tells me that a lot of the exciting climate tech is frontier stuff. There are no lectures or HBS Case Studies on it (yet). But there are enough operators who write and speak about it on the internet. Your task is to find the golden nuggets in the haystack of the internet.

So the next time you try to learn some frontier knowledge, ask yourself:

1. Who: The learner 🤷 → What’s their context? What do they know already? What’s the language that they speak and understand? etc.

2. What: The topic ⛳️ → What needs to be learned? What’s important? What’s not? What are the boundaries of the content? What’s out of scope? etc.

3. Why: The purpose 💚 → What are the practical implications of the acquired knowledge? Why bother? Why does it matter to the learner? etc.

4. How: The method 🗺️ → What is the best method to teach the topic under the given circumstances (who/what/why)?

Chances are that you will find something good.

🙏 Thanks Ben and Nick for spit balling about data centers.

I'd love to hear about your experiences with the Feynman Method or other learning strategies. Feel free to respond to this email or leave a comment below.

Share this essay with someone who's eager to dive deeper into climate tech learning.

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Climate is not a technology problem but a story problem.

Delphi Zero is a consultancy and newsletter dealing with the exciting and beautiful world of climate tech.

📧 If you are opening this essay in your email inbox, I recommend to click on the title of this piece to enjoy the full-length version in the browser.

Subscribe now

Hi, everyone. It’s been almost two months since the last post.

How are you doing? What’s on your mind? Respond to this mail. Would love to hear from you.

Last month, I attended Europe’s top climate conference The Drop in Malmo.

My pal Ben asked me if I wanted to co-host a learning session titled: Building the Climate Tech Infobahn: How to design climate tech learning.

In preparation for the session, we surveyed our participants and asked them what they wanted to get out of it.

One response caught my attention:

I’d like to have a framework that I can use to evaluate any climate technology in 30 mins.

Today’s essay is about a simple 4+1 framework I use regularly 👇

How the CIA Would Evaluate Climate Tech

By Art Lapinsch

My framework has 4+1 parts - like four branches and a tree trunk.

The Tree of Climate Tech:

1. 🌳 Environment: Is it good for the environment?

2. 🤖 Technology: Does the technology work?

3. ⚖️ Law: Is it legal?

4. 💶 Economics: Is it economically feasible?

5. 💚 [+1] Desire: Do people want it?

Get these right, and your climate technology has a fighting chance.

How did this framework come about?

What’s Good Enough for the CIA Is Good Enough for Me

If you are a long-time reader (hi there 😉), then you know that - once upon a time - I was a founder.

Our line of business was programmatic advertising - a highly technical endeavor. As a business generalist by training and vocation, I felt like I was coming with a knife to a gun fight. Poorly equipped.

I turned to my co-founder Mike, who was a programmer by training but turned into commercial leader/legend at Google Asia. My question to him was simple: What was the single most helpful book he had read?

His answer surprised me. He advised me to study this book 👇

The book is a collection of 14 practical thinking techniques (problem restatement; pros-cons-and-fixes; causal flow diagramming; scenario tree; utility matrix; etc.) that three-letter agencies use on a daily basis.

I was expecting a book about technological concepts. But instead it was a collection of problem solving methods.

My takeaway: It helps to get a grasp of the big picture of a problem before diving into the small details.

Similarly, it helps doing a high-level evaluation of a (climate) technology before diving into the weeds. What works for the CIA should do just fine for our use case.

So let’s move to a higher vantage point when evaluating climate tech 🦅

Four Fundamental Elements of Climate Tech

In my essay “The Gordian Knot of Climate”, I developed an early working hypothesis.

These updated questions are specifically geared for quick evaluation of climate tech:

1) Environment 🌳

Start with the fundamentals:

• Net GHG Impact: Does it emit or remove GHGs? What’s the difference compared to conventional technologies?

• Greenhouse Gases (GHGs): If yes, which ones (quality) and how much (quantity)?

• Other Impact: Does it have a positive/negative impact on other vectors besides GHG concentration in the atmosphere (ppm/ppb)? Biodiversity; resources; etc.

You can see an example in Chris Bernkopf’s “The $40T Market Hiding in Plain Sight.”

These are table stakes.

If this is not covered then we cannot really talk about “climate tech.”

2) Technology 🤖

Map out how the technology works on a napkin:

• Technology: Is it an idea, an experiment, a demonstration unit, or a commercially-ready technology (i.e. Technology Readiness Level - TRL 1-9)?

• I/O: What are the inputs and outputs of the technology? (e.g. for fermentation: feedstock → culture → product; for chemical reactions: reactants → reaction → products; for IT: input data → algorithms → output data; etc.)

• Process: What exactly happens during the transformation from inputs into outputs? How long is the process? Does the process degrade over time? Are there step changes along the way? etc.

• Resources: Inputs/outputs (types; quantities; ratios); Energy usage (quality; quantity); etc.

• Constraints: Does the tech need a particular location (e.g. pumped hydro needs elevation δ)? Does the tech need particular conditions (temperature; altitude; pressure; etc.) to operate? etc.

A master at technology evaluation is my famed pal Ben.

In his series about climate molecules, he unpacked the most common methods of producing Synthetic Aviation Fuels (SAFs).

Once you have a back of the napkin understanding of the technology, you can probe deeper or start calling BS.

3) Law ⚖️

Legal departments can be party poopers in most industries, but in climate, you better start building rapport with those folks.

Climate - together with financial services and healthcare - is probably one of the most heavily regulated spaces.

Start asking the following questions:

• Policy: What are current policy objectives in your relevant area? What are its resulting policy instruments (i.e. laws; acts; regulations; directives; etc.)?

• Incentives and Constraints: What is legal? What is illegal? Are there any provisions that the climate technology in question can take advantage from (e.g. subsidies/benefits; extension to existing site/permit like the Hywind/Tampen wind park)?

• Legal Coverage: Which law applies (which country; which state; cross-border issues)? Which levels of the law apply (civil code; energy law; renewables laws; international law/treaties; etc.)? What is regulated and what isn’t? Which laws are about to change (new laws; updated laws; phased out laws; etc.)?

• Protection: Is this technology patented? Who owns the patent? How long does it last? What’s the coverage of the patent?

All these environmental, technical, and legal considerations give you enough information to evaluate the money matters 👇

4) Economics 💶

Technology needs to be paid for.

If something is vastly more expensive than existing alternatives, there’s very few cases (e.g. national security interest; policy-aligned kickstarting of a market; etc.) where it would make sense to pay for it.

So, check if the numbers pan out:

• CAPEX: How much does it cost to build the thing? How do you finance it (no funding = no prototype; no prototype = no validation to de-risk the investment)?

• OPEX: How much does it cost to operate the thing? Does that change (up/down) over time or with more scale?

• Business Case: Who is paying, how much, when, and how? Why? How long does it take to recoup all expenses (if ever)? Is this an existing business model or do you have to introduce a completely new business model? What is novel about it (e.g. audience; business model; delivery method; etc.)?

So far so good.

One Additional Critical Element of Climate Tech

Now, let’s imagine, we have a climate technology that checks our first four boxes:

• ✅ Environmentally friendly → no GHG emissions during operation

• ✅ Technologically feasible → uses electricity as an input instead of gas

• ✅ Legally in the clear → consumer technology that complies with all regulations

• ✅ Commercially sound → cheaper to acquire and operate

But still, some people don’t want to use it.

I’m talking about the good ol’ Induction Stove.

5) Desire 💚

A technology can be better on pretty much any parameter but as long as people don’t have a desire to use it, they won’t use it.

Or worse, they will make a point to oppose it.

So, despite evaluating the technology, don’t forget to think about the demand in the market.

• Market Education: Do people understand the problem? Are people aware that there are solutions/technologies?

• Language: Is there an established language to talk about their problems/solutions? If not, how difficult is it to introduce it and how long would that take?

• Market Demand: Are there existing budgets in the market? Do people want/need this technology now? What is the technology competing with (functionally; budget-wise; positioning-wise in the customer’s mind; etc.)?

To repeat one of my favorite entrepreneurial truisms: I’d much rather play in a supply-constrained market with existing demand than the other way around.

The Tree of Climate Tech: A 4+1 Framework

To summarize, one of our participants asked:

I’d like to have a framework that I can use to evaluate any climate technology in 30 mins.

I hope that this 4+1 framework answers this question and that the next time you’ll evaluate a technology, you’ll feel like a secret agent.

Remember - The Tree of Climate Tech has four branches and one trunk:

1. 🌳 Environment: Is it good for the environment?

2. 🤖 Technology: Does the technology work?

3. ⚖️ Law: Is it legal?

4. 💶 Economics: Is it economically feasible?

5. 💚 [+1] Desire: Do people want it?

Get these right, and your climate technology has a fighting chance.

🙏 Thanks, Ben and Miroslav for listening to a rough version of this framework.

Get in touch via Linkedin if you want to chat about ideas, projects, or a potential collaboration✌️

Climate is not a technology problem but a story problem.

Delphi Zero is a consultancy and newsletter about the narrative potential of climate.

Subscribe now

The fact that you and I can charge our phones from a plug in the wall is a miracle ✨

We sat down with Julie Cohn - historian and author of the book “The Grid: Biography of an American Technology.”

This interview has been on my mind since I first picked up her book a couple of years ago. I still have to pinch myself to realize that she took the time to answer some of my burning questions:

• Why researching the evolution of the American grid was a deeply personal affair 💛

• What the required step changes were to build the largest machine in the world 🪜

• What Hollywood gets wrong about blackouts ⬛️

• And much more…

Enjoy ✌️

The Epic of the American Grid

By Art Lapinsch

Please take us on your personal journey. Looking back, what are some moments that led you to where you are now? How and why did you decide to research American history through the lens of energy infrastructure?

My bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Anthropology provided me with good research and writing skills, but in the early 1980s, opened very few professional pathways.

I worked in city government, with non-profit organizations, and in university research groups on topics as wide-ranging as fine and performing arts programming, K-12 teacher training to bring new technologies into the classroom, to writing and reviewing a wide array of grant proposals – including those for environmental projects.

While compelling, none of these topics engaged my attention as deeply as questions surrounding my own father’s career, why he was busy successfully selling control instruments in California during the Great Depression, what kept him and his colleagues so deeply engrossed in the quotidian problems of power systems, and how we ended up with something called “the world’s largest interconnected machine” to keep our lights on.

These questions led me back to graduate school in history, specifically to study and understand the development of the North American power grid. 

Your father - Nathan Cohn - entered the energy industry in 1927 and worked in it until 1989. What were the most important step changes he witnessed during his career? Why were those so important in the grand scheme?

My father’s career in the industry spanned sixty-plus years, from his college graduation in 1927 to his death in 1989.

He worked for Leeds & Northrup Company, a company that manufactured precision instruments and was just barely active in the power market in the 1920s. A mentor advised him not to take his first job with Leeds & Northrup, asserting that the utility industry had their practices already down to a “cut and dried proposition.” At that point there were a handful of power pools and very little understanding of how companies that shared power were going to keep the systems stable. The tools for measuring, calculating, analyzing, and controlling system behavior were marginally useful.

Within 10 years the country boasted the largest interconnected systems in the world, and utilities were using analog computing and automatic control devices to model and predict system behavior, to plan investments, and to control power on grids. This was an enormous step change.

The huge demand for power to fuel war production in the 1940s was another step change.

The third was probably the adoption of digital computing and control – which happened more slowly and much later than in other economic sectors, but fundamentally changed the industry. This occurred over several decades – some use of digital computers in the fifties, many computational challenges for the industry as grids became quite large by the 1960s, calls for better control following the 1965 blackout, and then gradual but widespread adoption of digital computing by the late 1970s/early 1980s.

These changes were important because they accompanied the increasing reliance on electricity across the economy. Without the computing and automation capabilities offered by digital machines, it would have been far more difficult to maintain stability on the ever larger power pools of the post-war years.

In your book “The Grid: Biography of an American Technology” you describe the grid as the world’s largest machine. Can you expand on this idea? What do people commonly misunderstand about it and why?

I’m not sure who originally coined the phrase “the world’s largest machine,” or “the world’s largest interconnected machine” in connection with power grids, but it refers to the way in which every device on a system affects and is affected by every other device on the system.

There are two types of usable electricity – direct current and alternating current. In direct current, electrons flow in one direction – this is the type of electricity you get from a battery.

In alternating current, electrons flow back and forth at a high rate of speed - this is the type of electricity you get from a wall outlet. The speed at which the electrons go back and forth is called the frequency. On an alternating current system, every device must operate at as close to the same frequency as possible – 60 Hz is the standard in North America. When any device turns on or off, or slows down or speeds up, it causes all the other devices to adjust. Thus when someone turns off the light, it has a tiny effect on the whole system.

A power grid is made up of thousands, if not millions, of devices – generators, transmission lines, transformers, distribution lines, everything leading up to your wall outlet. And then there are the additional devices that connect to the grid – factory conveyor belts, hospital MRIs, my coffee-maker, etc. Because all these devices are linked, and because any one of them turning on or off affects all the others, the grid can be considered a single machine.

By the late 1930s, the Interconnected Systems Group, which extended from the Carolinas to eastern Missouri and from Florida to Michigan, was the largest grid in the world. This system ultimately grew into what we now call the Eastern Interconnection. Until recent years, this remained the largest interconnected machine in the world.

The top three things for people to remember about the grid are:

1. It’s not a single grid – there are three big grids serving customers in the continental United States.

2. It is owned and operated by thousands of entities, and there is no one person, agency, or company in charge of the grid.

3. The safe and reliable operation of the grid is an incredibly complex process – an everyday miracle if you will – that is only going to get more complex as we add renewables, EV’s, customer-owned generation and storage, and more and more electrified activities.

What can we learn from the standardization processes and its subsequent unlocks (e.g. interconnection)?What is one unlock you would like to see in the future?

Until the 21^st century, standards for system reliability at the national level were developed through both competition and collaboration, were decided in settings that drew the attention of academics, utility managers, manufacturers, and regulators alike, and were entirely voluntary. Mutual self-interest seemed to be the motivation for adopting the standards.

In 2005, Congress gave the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) the authority to develop mandatory reliability standards for the “bulk power supply” – so not the distribution systems that bring power to your meter, but the generators, transmission lines, and transformers that deliver electricity to the distribution systems.

FERC designated the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) as the entity that develops and enforces the standards. FERC adopted the first 83 standards in 2007.

Between 1965 and 2011, we experienced 8 major cascading power failures, roughly one every five years. Between 2011 and 2024 we have had none. This suggests that mandatory reliability standards make a difference.

With generation now appearing on the distribution portion of the power system, and also on the customer side of the meter, it will be interesting to see how quickly stakeholders converge on reliability standards in the future.

The regulators at both the state and federal levels will have to cast a much wider net to include all the owners and operators whose technology choices and operating conditions will affect reliability. 

What can we learn from the evolution of the electrical grid for contemporary infrastructure projects such as hydrogen networks (and potentially fusion energy)? What applies like-for-like? What would we have to re-think?

One salient feature of our grid is that it was developed piecemeal, by a collection of public and private entities, often through opportunistic decision-making.

There was no roadmap that everyone followed. The internet is a bit analogous, although the backbone of the internet was a federal project.

The power grid had no similar backbone. At every stage of the process, new needs or desires for electrification evolved based on what had come before, and solutions to problems often were good enough rather than ideal.

For well-conceived contemporary infrastructure projects, there is the opportunity to build-in both resilience and flexibility on purpose. The grid developed with geographic specificity, with certain types of collaboration that were possible only because companies couldn’t compete, and with cutting edge technologies that were of interest to academics and manufacturers alike.

It is hard to know if those same characteristics will apply for future systems.

Which other trends/technologies evolved hand-in-hand with the grid and were critical to its development?

Perhaps most important were developments in calculating and computing devices.

Power systems offered early examples of big data problems, and they were among the earliest adopters of calculators, analyzers, and computers. While computer history tends to focus on the big machines developed for wartime activities, the applications in power systems were very important.

Solutions to power control problems paralleled solutions to control problems in air flight and other feedback/feedforward systems. 

What’s the past, present, and future of storage batteries for the grid? What is one surprising thing that people frequently misunderstand about this development?

Utilities relied very heavily on storage batteries during the earliest years of electrification, for all the same reasons storage batteries are in use today.

For example, companies could generate power more consistently over each 24-hour period if they could charge up their storage batteries during times of low demand and draw from the batteries when demand hit its peak. Unfortunately, a storage battery large enough to support a system during a power outage lasted only a few minutes.

By the early 1900s, utilities found they could gain the benefits offered by storage batteries, and more, through interconnection. Battery popularity dropped.

I think your readers may be surprised by how important batteries were to the early development of power systems. In 1904, one utility executive said, “the conviction forces itself that this former 'ugly duckling' of the electrical art has, in its later perfection, become a swan." 

For a time, storage batteries were economical, had multiple uses, and seemed the wave of the future.

In a recent project, you researched the representation of electrical blackouts in American film. What is something that Hollywood gets terribly wrong? What is something that they get right?

Hollywood draws on tropes that emerged from high-profile blackouts, and that were largely based on documented events in New York City.

So, 1965 was the “good” blackout, when people shared stories and passed around food and drinks on the steps of Grand Central Station while waiting for the lights to come one. Then, 1977 was the “bad” blackout, during which widespread looting occurred in the city. Years later, 2003 was the “scary” blackout when we briefly thought a foreign terrorist had taken down our power system.

But the actual experience of blackouts is much more diverse, in some places life threatening, in others simply tedious and inconvenient. And the explanation for what happened and what has to be done to get everything working again is often so technical and complex that it really isn’t easy to make it into entertainment. And perhaps it shouldn’t be.

I appreciate that sometimes screenwriters try to portray this underlying technical complexity, and its implications. And at other times they simply try to capture the ordinary human experience.

Having lived through several power outages in Houston in recent years – none of which were cascading failures – I can say that there is very little about it that is glamorous, sometimes the experience can bring neighbors together, often the outage produces misplaced anger, and always it is an enormous relief when the lights come back on.

What is something that you have changed your mind about since researching the energy space? What is something you have doubled down on?

My thoughts about renewables are definitely in constant flux as I learn more about the challenge of operating a grid that is rich in renewables, the uncertainty about resources needed to produce renewable technologies, the advantages of off-grid operation provided certain types of renewables/storage battery combinations, the inequities that may result from customer-owned generating sources, and the big question of what role the existing infrastructure will play in the future.

I have doubled down on two things:

1. Our power system is an everyday miracle

2. Electrification has definitely improved lives across the last century

What’s your favorite, big question that you don’t have an answer to yet? Why do find it interesting and important? Any best guesses for an answer?

As I alluded to in the prior answer, the very interesting big question is how we are going to use our grid in the future.

Will we build larger, longer transmission lines that ultimately link across the entire continent, or will we shift to a system of smaller networks that can easily operate islanded from each other?

And whichever approach we take, how will we do it so that everyone who wants or needs to use electricity has access to it at a fair price.

I don’t have an answer.

Looking back from a Net Zero future, what do you hope they will say about us?

That we figured it out!

🙏 Thanks, Julie for taking time and sharing your perspective.

Thanks, Berkay and Tomas for reviewing the questions.

Check out more Expert Interviews

I’d love to hear from you, please get in touch and tell me whom I should interview next or which topics you’d like to see covered ✌️

Climate is not a technology problem but a story problem.

Delphi Zero is a consultancy and newsletter about the narrative potential of climate.

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Do you ever dread the moment when someone asks you “So… what does your company do?”

If you do, then it’s probably because of a core tension: There is so much to cover but only so little that the other person wants to hear.

Let’s be real, your answer to this questions usually results in one of two things:

1. If you nail your answer, it can turn into a great conversation and a lasting friendship/partnership

2. If you don’t, you have a first-row seat to witnessing how your poor, glassy-eyed counterpart scrambles for a “plausible excuse” to move on from this conversation

Ouch!

Regardless of your audience, there’s a great reward to acing these moments. They might be the decisive factor to landing a key hire, securing a strategic partnership, or making an important sale.

I started writing this series to show how companies like yours can do this in practice:

1. Branding for Tech Companies 101: Future Mythology

2. Branding for Tech Companies 102: Clarity and Consistency

3. Brand Audit in Climate Tech: Lilac Solutions

4. Brand Audit in Climate Tech: Commonwealth Fusion Systems (today’s essay)

Today’s deep-dive is about Commonwealth Fusion Systems - a wild organization that is quite literally stealing fire from the gods so that we can recreate a star on earth ✴️

Let’s see what they do well and what could be improved 👇

Brand Audit in Climate Tech: Commonwealth Fusion Systems

By Art Lapinsch (illustrations generated via Midjourney)

Everyone is the main character in their own life.

When someone asks “So… what does your company do?” they are actually asking “So… what does your company do for me?”

You can break this down into four useful elements:

1. Hero: Who is the hero of the story? (hint: the hero is always the person who asks)

2. Desire: What do they want?

3. Complication: Why can’t they (currently) have it?

4. Stakes: Why is it important to them?

It’s the common “who wants what? and what’s in their way?” question that master storytellers have used across centuries.

We will reference this framework quite a bit. So get comfy with it.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Their Challenge

I picked Commonwealth Fusion Systems (aka CFS) because (a) they are building crazy shit and (b) because they are currently hiring for an external comms lead.

Let’s take this step-by-step.

About the Company

They write:

Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) has the fastest, lowest cost path to commercial fusion energy.

CFS collaborates with MIT to leverage decades of research combined with groundbreaking new high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnet technology. HTS magnets will enable compact fusion power plants that can be constructed faster and at lower cost. Our mission is to deploy these power plants to meet global decarbonization goals as fast as possible.

tl;dr:

• What is fusion? → When we think of “nuclear”, it is usually splitting heavy atoms (i.e. fission) to generate energy. CFS does the opposite. They fuse light atoms together (i.e. fusion) to generate energy. [My friend Ben wrote a super helpful primer to fusion energy. You should read it.]

• Commercial fusion reactor: Commercial fusion reactors don’t exist (yet). That’s why a group of former MIT researchers have started CFS to commercialize decades of academic research. The goal of a fusion reaction is to get more energy out of the reaction than you what you put into the reaction. This is expressed by the fusion energy gain factor (Q). We want a Q that is higher than 1 (i.e. Q>1).

• Fastest path to commercial fusion → There are different types of fusion reactor designs (see illustration below). CFS uses the Tokamak design, which is currently the most researched and closest to the Q>1 threshold. That’s why CFS claims being on the “fastest path to commercial fusion.”

Let’s practice our framework from earlier:

1. Hero: Commonwealth Fusion Systems

2. Desire: Commercial fusion at global scale

3. Complication: We haven’t achieved Q>1 yet. Unlocking frontier science and accomplishing sci-fi-esque engineering feats is expensive. That’s why CFS plans to demonstrate that their approach works via a pilot project (SPARC). If successful, this will unlock the resources to build the first commercial fusion plant (ARC).

4. Stakes: Climate change; energy security; etc.

They are looking for help to get this story across 👇

About the Role

As the Head of External Communications reporting to the CMO, this is a highly visible role responsible for bringing our groundbreaking fusion technology to the world stage.

In this role, you will craft compelling messaging and differentiated positioning to drive broad comprehension of fusion's potential as a safe, sustainable power source. You will lead strategic storytelling and executive casting as CFS looks to be recognized as the industry juggernaut and industry statesman.

This role will be responsible for accelerating the growth of our global brand, managing our corporate reputation, and elevating CFS as a category-creator in clean, sustainable energy. 

Specific Responsibilities

Further, they expand on the responsibilities:

This team member will:

→ Company Narrative: Own the company narrative and be aggressive in capturing tailwinds from the global zeitgeist

→ Strategic Messaging: Develop an audience-specific messaging house and own the document on an ongoing basis

→ Co-founder Communications: Develop a proactive, strategic approach to earned media placement and co-founder communications

→ Issues & Crisis Management: Lead on building a rapid-response crisis communications team able to cover both issues management as well as crisis issues

→ Third-Party Influencers: Working with Open Innovation, Digital and Global Affairs, develop a third-party influencer campaign to identify, curate, manage and activate industry analysts, academics, and other key opinion leaders

→ Metrics: Manage the right set of tools to capture quality of earned media coverage, message pull through and tonality and benchmark against the competition

We will use these elements from the job description to structure the rest of this case study.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems: Brand Audit

It all starts with an audit of the status quo.

Similarly to what I did in the Lilac case study, we start by creating a brand/narrative pyramid - a one pager for CFS’ brand.

You can find relevant information all across the web. I usually start with these sources:

→ Website: The most helpful sites are the main landing page, the /about, the /solutions, and the /careers pages. You can deduce a lot from there (e.g. Vision; Mission; Brand Promise/tagline; Value Proposition; RTBs/Proof Points).

→ LinkedIn: Great to find a standardized boilerplate section on the company.

→ Press Releases and Blog Posts: You can derive brand focus areas via looking for repeating narratives/language/words.

The initial brand audit resulted in this brand/narrative pyramid 👇

How to read this audit:

• ⚫️ Bold - Cornerstone Keywords

• ✴️ Orange - Statements that felt important to me

• 🔴 Red - Possible areas of tension in the narrative

• ❓ Question Marks - Missing insights, since I couldn’t access this information

My quick-and-dirty analysis of CFS is this:

💪 Strengths

• Strong alignment with vision statement: Everything revolves around “limitless, clean fusion energy” which is good.

• Strong signature/origin story: Hard to compete with “we developed this at MIT and now we are commercializing it.”

🧐 Opportunities

• Shorten and focus the statements: Some of the communication elements like the Mission Statement could benefit from leading with the actual mission (i.e. “commercialize fusion energy…”). Currently, it starts with the problem (i.e. energy demands for clean energy). Don’t burry the lede.

• Sharpen the Category: IF Commonwealth Fusion Systems wants to become a “category-creator” THEN it needs to clearly state (a) what the category is and (b) how it is different from other categories. Clean energy is not differentiated enough.

• Unclear Target Customer(s): From my initial audit, I couldn’t deduce the target audience. Is it the government? Is it citizens? Is it the scientific community? Who are the heroes?

• Expand Proof Points: CFS has strong proof points for its claim of being the “surest path." Yet, it lacks proof for “limitless and clean.” This can be improved.

Overall, CFS does a lot of things very well, which is not surprising for a mature tech company with enormous funding. But there’s always room for improvement.

Let’s take it step-by-step.

Company Narrative

Company Narrative: Own the company narrative and be aggressive in capturing tailwinds from the global zeitgeist

Notes:

• Company narrative: My feeling is that CFS is looking for a cohesive story top-to-bottom.

• Capturing tailwinds from the global zeitgeist: I kind of get what they are trying to say: “piggy on current news and global trends.” A few thoughts: (a) the phrasing sounds more like something a D.C. think tank would say and not something from an academic spin-off from MIT … there’s a bit of dissonance. (b) There’s nothing wrong with leaning into certain trends (e.g. increased priority for national/energy security; etc.) but if CFS wants to be a category-creator, it must set the tone. What are the trends that are unique from CFS’ perspective? What do they see that the “zeitgeist” hasn’t captured yet?

To create a cohesive company narrative, I updated the brand/narrative pyramid. This is what v2 looks like 👇

The changes/adaptations are highlighted in orange ✴️

• Emphasize Mission: Don’t burry the lede. Always start with the mission. In this case, commercializing fusion energy as fast as possible.

• Lean into the Origin Story: CFS does this well already. But being able to say that you developed the scientific/academic breakthroughs and now are commercializing is unique. Maybe there’s a way to lean more into the MIT heritage since they have a long history of conjuring impactful technologies (e.g. research at Building 20 during WWII)

• Brand Values: I reworked those, since (a) it’s nice to have three instead of four values for easier triangulation, and (b) it’s kinda cool if the values fit into the CFS acronym (Committed. Fast. Scientific.)

• Expand Proof Points: The value proposition claims “limitless” and “clean” needs more proof. Think of sub-sites, blog posts, papers, videos, etc. Otherwise, “surest” is the only claim that has very solid proof and it feels a bit lopsided.

I’ll address the sections in red (category/frame of reference; target customer; customer need) in a section below.

Strategic Messaging

Strategic Messaging: Develop an audience-specific messaging house and own the document on an ongoing basis

Ok, let’s unpack this one. I disagree with the phrasing.

The words that irk me are “develop an audience-specific messaging house.”

First, what are we talking about?

CFS asks for a messaging house. It’s an overview of a messaging structure:

Looks familiar? It should, because it’s pretty much what I call a brand/narrative pyramid and what you have seen further above. I tailored my framework specifically to fit tech companies.

Clear and Consistent

Origins of the Narrative Pyramid

Clear and Consistent explores Narrative Clarity for Tech Companies…

Read more

3 years ago · 2 likes · 2 comments · Art Lapinsch

So, let’s get back to what CFS is asking: “audience-specific messaging house.”

Let’s assume we have 3 core audiences (and three core promises):

1. US Government → “Commercial fusion is good for national/energy security.”

2. Scientific/Talent Community → “Commercial fusion is a frontier technology and might be the most important work of your career.”

3. Investors → “Invest in the Standard Oil of the future.”