This is the ClimateCultures monthly selection of Views from Elsewhere so far for 2020. Each month, editor Mark Goldthorpe adds new stories he’s discovered (most recent reads at the top for each month, rather than in order of original publication). This year’s stories come from BBC Future, The Correspondent & Quanta Magazine.
Since 2017, we’ve covered over 200 stories from almost 100 different sources. You can browse our selections for 2019, 2018 and 2017.
January 2020
As Hall discusses "while the ice-albedo feedback loop is simple in theory, a number of complexities play into it, including ice thickness, the different types of ice, the presence of snow and clouds, and the physical interactions that govern those complexities. Slowly, scientists have begun to incorporate these intricacies into their simulations. Yet despite these recent improvements, our understanding of these and other feedback loops is still far too crude. That much can be seen in the variety of outcomes that various models predict. Some forecast that summer sea ice will continue to exist until sometime in the 22nd century. Others predict it will be lost within the next 10 years. Whenever it happens, the transformation will affect the entire planet." But personal encounters with the shifting ice bring home the strangeness of a habitat with profound implications for changes close to home and around the world. "Around 4 a.m. the day after the ice cracked beneath my feet, the thin veneer of ice started to explode with deafening booms that woke up the ship. Before I left for the trip, I spoke with a number of Arctic researchers who told me to listen to the ice. I thought that meant I had to kneel down on the ice and put my ear against the floe — that the ice would whisper to me. But the ice does not whisper. It screams. Whenever the pressure builds up, you can hear a large hissing sound — almost like the screeching from an exploding soda bottle. It sizzles. It pops. It groans. And it does so loudly. A polar bear standing in the distance likely would have heard something akin to thunder." Whenever he is asked "What gives you hope?” in the context of climate change, Ortiz knows that what people really want to know is “Where can I find hope?” He suggests that rather than looking for hope 'out there', "real, good, useful hope has nothing to do with positive news. Instead, it is profoundly linked with action: both ours and that of others alongside us." He quotes Rebecca Solnit's book Hope in the Dark, where she writes of hope that "'It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.'” As his article explores, there are key distinctions between hope and optimism, though we tend to use the words interchangeably. Charting this year by year over the coming decade, Holthaus starts with 2020 as "the year we acknowledge that the most urgent thing we can do in an emergency is to passionately tell others that it exists"; by mid-decade "through art, music, memes, and methods-yet-to-be-invented, we will laugh and love and interpret what it means to be a part of a thriving global civilisation in the middle of the most transcendent decade in human history" and "expand our practice of regenerative agriculture." And by 2030 "perhaps the most radical change of all this decade will be our newfound ability to tell a story – a positive story – about the future and mean it."
Writing in Quanta Magazine (16/1/20), Shannon Hall describes her six-week journey visit to scientists spending a year in a German icebreaker that's been trapped within the sea ice at the top of the globe. The researchers are monitoring the Arctic in order to better quantify some of the Arctic unknowns and so better inform models of the changing climate. 
In an interesting piece for BBC Future (10/10/20) Diego Arguedas Ortiz describes how he is inspired by "a handful of marine biologists who are fighting coral bleaching" as much as by young climate activists, atmospheric scientists and climate essayists. These biologists grow tiny bits of coral in underwater nurseries "and once they’re big enough move them back to the reef, hoping to restore it. Their pace is slow, possibly too slow to keep up with bleaching due to climate change. Warming waters swipe entire reefs in a matter of weeks. The biologists need months to nurture enough corals to restore a couple of square meters. Reef restoration seems like an impossible task, but they are relentless. It must be done to give corals a chance, so they are doing it ... They were earning their own hope, one coral at a time."
"What is human civilisation if not the result of all the stories we’ve been told?" asks Eric Holthaus in The Correspondent (8/1/20). "Our story of the 2020s is yet to be written, but we can decide today whether or not it will be revolutionary. Radical imagination could help us begin to see that the power to change reality starts with changing what we consider to be possible." With an infinite number of possible paths ahead of us, he offers one scenario to halve global emissions in a decade: "a story about our journey to 2030 – a vision of what it could look and feel like if we finally, radically, collectively act to build a world we want to live in.