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“There may well be measures that we can take on a temporary basis to cool the Arctic and to prolong Arctic sea ice”, says Brad Ack, the CEO of Ocean Visions. He joins Climate Curious to discuss how the ocean can play a central role in re-stabalising the climate. From its role in providing zero carbon food and energy and cleaning up carbon pollution, to the critical research scientists are undertaking into refreezing the Arctic. Recorded live at TED 2025.
Watch Brad’s TEDxBoston talk, ‘Lessons from the Arctic teach us we need a new version of conservation’.
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Created by TEDxLondon
Executive produced by Josie Colter
Produced by Ben Beheshty
Curated by Deesha Chandra
Hosted by Maryam Pasha and Ben Hurst
Communications by Tara Cooper and Issey Gladston
00:00 Introduction
00:16 Meet Brad Ack: Ocean Vision’s mission
01:28 The ocean’s role in climate stability
04:29 Ocean-based solutions to climate change
07:28 The arctic’s critical role in climate
09:02 Exploring arctic intervention strategies
12:49 The importance of climate literacy
13:25 Conclusion
[00:00:00] Introduction
[00:00:00] Ben Hurst: Welcome to Climate Quickies, bite-sized nuggets of Climate Goodness from our TEDx London experts in under 10 minutes in this week’s climate, curious, we are asking can we refreeze the Arctic permafrost if [00:00:15] it melts?
[00:00:16] Meet Brad Ack: Ocean Vision’s mission
[00:00:16] Ben Hurst: To explore that massive question with us is Brad Ack, the CEO of the nonprofit organization, ocean Vision, who’s doing amazing work to protect.
[00:00:25] Ben Hurst: And restore Ocean Hill, as well as researching cutting edge stuff [00:00:30] like the potential refreezing of the Arctic on why a bright future isn’t just green, it’s blue. Here’s Ocean Advocate, Brad. Ack. Stay curious.
[00:00:44] Brad Ack: When you work on [00:00:45] conservation, the first thing you do is try to identify the drivers that are, are having a.
[00:00:51] Brad Ack: Negative impact on what you’re trying to protect, whether it be a natural ecosystem or a species or a region. And over the course of my career, those [00:01:00] drivers have changed, but the one that has risen to the very top of the list across every ecosystem on the planet is climate disruption. So we now face a situation where.
[00:01:12] Brad Ack: Anything that we want to do to protect nature and [00:01:15] other species, living on the planet is going to start with fixing the climate problem. If we don’t fix the climate problem, we won’t have a chance of protecting and preserving all the other things that we care about, including our own livelihoods and wellbeing.
[00:01:28] The ocean’s role in climate stability
[00:01:28] Brad Ack: And the ocean is [00:01:30] central to all of this. Fundamentally, oceans and climate are just two sides of the same coin, which is nature and the oceans. At 70% of the planet’s surface drive an enormous number of the [00:01:45] processes, the physical processes on the planet that we call climate. So for example. Ocean currents and the way they bring moisture and rainfall or drought to different parts of the world.
[00:01:56] Brad Ack: That jet stream and what that does with weather systems, [00:02:00] just the mass storage of excess heat that the ocean is providing right now as we trap heat on the planet. These are all the ways that the ocean is sort of fundamentally connected to the stability of our climate. Plus oceanic systems like [00:02:15] sea ice in the Arctic or Antarctica has a major impact on the amount of reflectivity that we have on the globe, and therefore how much heat we’re trapping versus reflecting.
[00:02:26] Brad Ack: So you really can’t talk about addressing the [00:02:30] climate. Problems that we face the climate crisis without also thinking about the role of the oceans. And I also missed maybe one of the most important parts is the ocean is the largest cycler of carbon dioxide on the planet. Naturally, [00:02:45] it naturally cycles carbon out of the atmosphere, out of, uh, fresh water coming down from rivers and streams and puts it deep into the bottom of the ocean over thousands and millions of years.
[00:02:59] Brad Ack: The question is, [00:03:00] can we accelerate that process to deal with the enormous carbon problem that we have in our atmosphere?
[00:03:11] Brad Ack: We’re an ocean conservation organization, a [00:03:15] science-based organization, and we start from the fundamental, uh, analysis that the two biggest threats to the ocean are coming from a disrupted climate. One of those is all of the heat that we’re trapping on the planet, most of which is going [00:03:30] into the ocean.
[00:03:30] Brad Ack: It’s a. It’s an enormous amount of heat energy that we, excess heat, energy that we trap every year into the ocean. It’s about 30 times more heat than we produce. On the planet among all humanity. So if you took [00:03:45] all of the heat that we produce with everything we do, all the heat energy, we’re multiplying that about 30 times by these heat trapping gases and driving that into the ocean, which is causing massive impacts.
[00:03:58] Brad Ack: The other huge [00:04:00] impact of the ocean is what we call ocean acidification, which is coming from the. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is being absorbed into the upper layer of the ocean and changing the ocean chemistry. So as an ocean science organization that [00:04:15] cares about the health of the ocean, we have to deal with those two stresses.
[00:04:19] Brad Ack: And the only way to deal with those two stresses is to directly address things that are causing climate disruption, and that is too much greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
[00:04:29] Ocean-based solutions to climate change
[00:04:29] Brad Ack: And the ocean can help us in two major ways. One, it can help us by providing alternatives to human activities that drive greenhouse gas emissions.
[00:04:40] Brad Ack: So alternative energy, like offshore wind, wave [00:04:45] energy, tidal energy, those things that replace fossil fuels. Or blue foods as they’re known, either aquaculture or wild capture, fish or plants from the ocean that can replace carbon intensive food products on land. So those are two ways [00:05:00] the ocean can really help us.
[00:05:01] Brad Ack: In the transition to a low carbon economy. But then secondly, and maybe even more importantly, we have to clean up the carbon we’ve already emitted into the atmosphere. So like any other pollutant, [00:05:15] long lifed pollutant, we can’t just leave it there because it’s gonna continue to cause damage. And so as we think about this enormous task of pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and doing something with it so that it is inert.[00:05:30]
[00:05:30] Brad Ack: The oceans are the first place that we really look because such an enormous part of the planet’s surface, and it already is the largest cycler of carbon on the planet. So were we all to disappear [00:05:45] tomorrow? Humans, there’s no more human caused emissions over the next. Few million years, the ocean would clean up all of the excess carbon in the atmosphere through both natural biological and chemical [00:06:00] processes.
[00:06:00] Brad Ack: We don’t have a couple of million years to clean up this mess. So we ask the question at Ocean Visions. Are there ways that we can mimic or accelerate or enhance the biological and chemical [00:06:15] processes that the ocean already uses to cycle carbon and to try to clean up this carbon mess? So we work on both reducing emissions via ocean-based enterprises and removing and cleaning up emissions via ocean-based carbon [00:06:30] removal.
[00:06:35] Brad Ack: We absolutely can do this. We are not doing this to the level that we need to. Generally, we’re [00:06:45] not paying attention to the climate crisis at anywhere near the attention it deserves, given that it literally threatens the ways that we exist on this planet, and how many of us exist in a comfortable. Happy [00:07:00] state.
[00:07:00] Brad Ack: We are not putting anywhere near the time and effort into it anywhere, whether on land or in the oceans. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t do it. We can do it. The solutions are there, they’re available, and we just need to dedicate time and attention to them. And the ocean [00:07:15] is a magical place, and the diversity and abundance of species in the ocean and all the different roles and niches they fill and what they do and how they.
[00:07:24] Brad Ack: Survive is, you know, a source of wonderment to so many.
[00:07:28] The arctic’s critical role in climate
[00:07:28] Brad Ack: For me personally, one of the things that really changed the way I was thinking about oceans and climate was when I started working in the Arctic and I had been unaware until that point that the Arctic. Was changing much faster than the rest of the world, and it was warming up much, much faster.
[00:07:46] Brad Ack: And the big reason for that was because we were losing sea ice, which had provided this reflective shield at the top of the globe that was reflecting sunlight and heat radiation back into space. And as that. [00:08:00] Arctic ice was lost. There was a blue space open instead of a white space, and that blue space was absorbing all that heat, which was leading to the Arctic warming about four times.
[00:08:11] Brad Ack: Faster than the global average, which in [00:08:15] turn was leading to the destabilization of a lot of critical parts of the Earth system that we depend on, like the Greenland ice sheet, like Northern permafrost, which is all that frozen tundra at the top of [00:08:30] the globe, that as it thaws. Releases methane and carbon dioxide and thereby, uh, sort of accelerates climate change.
[00:08:39] Brad Ack: And also the overturning circulation in the Atlantic, which brings warm water and, and [00:08:45] temperatures to Northern Europe that’s being affected by the melt of ice off of Greenland primarily. So it was this amazing aha moment for me that Arctic sea ice. Was fundamental to preserving [00:09:00] life on the planet as we have known it.
[00:09:02] Exploring arctic intervention strategies
[00:09:02] Brad Ack: And nobody in the Arctic, among the thousands of scientists working on the topic, working on studying sea ice, were actually asking, is there anything we could do to slow this process down [00:09:15] other than just the Paris agreement and emission reduction? And so we started working on asking that question and answering it.
[00:09:22] Brad Ack: And we’ve produced a. Deep technology assessment of 21 different potential approaches to slow the alt loss of Arctic [00:09:30] sea ice. And we are now trying to drive research and testing and investment into actually looking at these different tools because keeping the Arctic frozen. Might be fundamental to keeping life on the planet, uh, as we know [00:09:45] it.
[00:09:45] Brad Ack: And there was an op-ed today in The Guardian by Sir David King, who’s a eminent British scientist who, uh, gave voice to this very topic that we no longer have the luxury of not asking these questions [00:10:00] about climate intervention. It’s very sad that we’re at this point now that we might have to. Sort of, uh, take actions like emergency medicine to keep key parts of the system alive while we slowly regain our climate [00:10:15] health through a more durable approach, reducing emissions, cleaning up emissions.
[00:10:20] Brad Ack: But we have to be looking at that now. And the Arctic was what, what taught me that lesson and has changed the way that I approach conservation. There may well [00:10:30] be measures that we can take on a temporary basis to cool the Arctic and to prolong Arctic sea ice and therefore the permafrost and therefore the Greenland ice sheet.
[00:10:41] Brad Ack: They are not solutions in that we cannot do them [00:10:45] indefinitely, but it’s the same as. Go back to my COVID analogy. It’s like going on a ventilator when your body has such a high fever that it no longer is able to breathe on its own. You can’t live on a ventilator forever, and you wouldn’t want to, but you might need [00:11:00] it for a week or two weeks or three weeks while your body fights off the fever.
[00:11:04] Brad Ack: We can’t. Cool and refreeze the Arctic indefinitely. But what if we could buy a decade or two decades, and that was the difference That allowed us to actually finally turn the [00:11:15] corner on emissions and on on carbon cleanup. Then it would be worth it. These are what are called positive climate feedback loops.
[00:11:23] Brad Ack: So as the Arctic warms, you get these positive loops of. Permafrost thawing, more [00:11:30] greenhouse gases going into the system. More heating, right? And so anything we can do to interrupt those positive climate feedback loops, which are really quite negative, is, uh, something we should be studying. And as again, as Sir David said, we [00:11:45] don’t have the luxury of saying that we can’t look at these things anymore.
[00:11:53] Brad Ack: So again, the Arctic has played a critical role in climate stability for [00:12:00] thousands of years, tens of thousands of years, and it does it in the sense that this frozen mass at the top of the planet has reflected an enormous amount of sunlight. And as we lose it, that sunlight is absorbed. And then. As the region has warmed, you start to see [00:12:15] the destabilization of the Greenland ice sheet, which has an enormous potential effect on sea level rise and the destabilization of northern permafrost, which has an enormous effect on future greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere.
[00:12:28] Brad Ack: So keeping it [00:12:30] frozen keeps those parallel systems intact, and that’s really important for the stability of the earth system. You can learn about any of the things we’ve talked about today on our website, ocean visions.org. [00:12:45] That’ll be an interesting place for those who wanna become a little more steeped in this.
[00:12:49] The importance of climate literacy
[00:12:49] Brad Ack: At the base of it, you know, the average person, the most important thing they can do is be climate literate. Understand the risks that we face and [00:13:00] hold their elected officials and other, uh, societal leaders accountable for. Taking the right actions. And so it’s not just elected officials, it’s also people leading corporations and leading academic [00:13:15] institutions.
[00:13:15] Brad Ack: We need to hold everybody in a position of leadership accountable for taking the actions and pursuing the work that needs to be done to counter this crisis.
[00:13:25] Conclusion
[00:13:25] Brad Ack: Thanks for listening to this quickie.
[00:13:27] Maryam Pasha: This episode was created by our superstar [00:13:30] podcast team at TEDx London. Until next time, stay curious.
