快猫短视频

I鈥檓 talking to you as you descend from the summit of the Carstensz Pyramid in Indonesia. How was the climb?
It was extreme, very steep. One wrong foot and you鈥檙e falling a long way. We started at 1 am this morning and reached the summit at dawn. It is unbelievably spectacular: you鈥檙e looking down on forest canopy with mountains poking through the clouds and the last remaining glaciers on the flanks of the mountains.

This climb is part of your campaign. What is this about?
There are 25 mountains on the equator that still have glaciers. The glaciers have been here since the last ice age, but within a quarter of a century they will all be gone because of human-induced climate change. The ones here in Indonesia have about five years left. Over the two weeks of the UN climate conference in Paris, we鈥檙e climbing three of these mountains: Carstensz in Indonesia, Mount Stanley in Uganda and Chimborazo in Ecuador. I鈥檒l be climbing all 25 of these mountains over the next two years.

One of the aims is to try to influence the talks in Paris by broadcasting our climbs directly to them. A sense of urgency is key. The problem with climate change is that it鈥檚 not tangible, it鈥檚 invisible. You need to find proxies for it, and melting glaciers are a good visual indicator of what鈥檚 happening.

How big are the effects of climate change that you have seen on your expeditions?
The effects are very clear. Arctic sea ice has reduced by about half. It is very apparent in the Antarctic too. Shackleton had to cross three glaciers when he got to South Georgia on his 1914-16 journey. When we retraced his footsteps in 2013, we only had to cross two glaciers because the third one was a lake. I knew then that melting glaciers would make people sit up and take notice of what was going on.

Are there other things that you learned while retracing Shackleton鈥檚 journey that are proving useful in the TwentyFiveZero campaign?
Yes. Firstly, the powerful visual images you bring back from these places are a good way of influencing opinion. Secondly, Shackleton鈥檚 leadership was all about getting a disparate group of people to follow in the same direction to achieve a single goal, in their case their own survival. I feel those same leadership skills could be brought to bear in bringing together all the stakeholders in the fight against climate change.

How do you think the world is doing in the fight against climate change?
All the governments attending the Paris conference submitted plans in advance for what they鈥檙e prepared to do in terms of carbon reduction, and those plans together don鈥檛 add up to keeping us at 2 掳C of warming, which isn鈥檛 good. On the other hand, this does represent progress as everybody submitted a plan, including developing countries who weren鈥檛 obligated to act under the previous Kyoto Protocol.

(Image: Anthony McKee)

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淒oomed glacial hotspots鈥�