What the Arctic Teaches Us About the Climate Crisis: A Conversation with Dr. Zachary Labe

From weather blogs to world-class graphics, a leading young climate scientist helps us visualize a planet in flux.

If you spend enough time talking about climate change, you begin to recognize the same set of problems. The facts are there. The data is clear. The impacts are unfolding in real time. But the conversation often breaks down before it begins because the language of science can feel like a locked door. That’s why talking to Dr. Zack Labe feels like such a breath of fresh air.

Zack is a climate scientist who knows his way around a dataset, but more importantly, he knows how to show you what that data means. His graphics are striking, intuitive, and often alarming. They have become some of the most widely shared visual tools in the climate space. You’ve probably seen them, even if you didn’t realize it. A stark red map of North America pulsing with heat. A plunging line chart tracking the collapse of Arctic sea ice. A four-panel time-lapse of U.S. temperature anomalies that quietly breaks your heart.

What sets Zack apart is not just that he makes charts. It is that he makes you feel something when you look at them.

We spoke with Zack on our podcast Three Degrees, and from the first few minutes, it was clear. This is not just a scientist doing outreach. This is someone who has made it his mission to meet people where they are. Scientists are not trained to communicate, he told us, not bitterly but matter-of-fact. The incentive structures in academia do not reward it. But we are trying to change that.

Zack’s story begins where a lot of weather lovers start, obsessing over snowstorms. In high school, he was writing detailed weather blogs on Weather Underground, forecasting nor’easters and tracking storm systems across the Northeast. That passion led him to study meteorology, but somewhere along the way, the long-term patterns began to matter more than the short-term forecasts. He pivoted toward climate science, earned his PhD, and dove deep into the Arctic, first virtually through climate models and then physically aboard a Norwegian icebreaker headed north of Svalbard.

I’ll never forget the first time I saw sea ice in person, he said. It felt like being on another planet. That encounter, seeing what he had only previously modeled, crystallized something for him. This was not just about temperature trends or abstract concepts. It was about a vanishing world and the people and ecosystems tied to it.

Back home, he started translating his research into graphics. Not dense plots full of labels and caveats, but simple, haunting visualizations. Maps, lines, and colors that told a story without needing explanation. He posted them online, and the response was immediate. Journalists, educators, and other scientists all wanted to use them. Not for clickbait, but because they cut through noise. Because they worked.

One of the most powerful examples is a graph he has updated annually since graduate school. It is a line chart showing the extent of Arctic sea ice in September, the month when it reaches its minimum. The data begins in 1979, the year satellites started tracking it comprehensively. The line jitters up and down. Weather, after all, is chaotic. But the overall trajectory is unmistakable. Downward. Sharply.

What makes that chart so effective is its simplicity. It does not lecture. It just shows. As Zack explained, people have a hard time separating weather and climate. They think a cooler summer means things are not warming. But climate is about the long-term trend, and that trend is crystal clear.

The loss of ice is not just a symbol of planetary warming. It has cascading effects. The Arctic used to be dominated by thick, multi-year ice, several meters thick, years old, hardened by time. Now, most of the ice is seasonal. It forms in winter, melts in summer, and disappears entirely. The resilience is gone. The Arctic is changing from a stabilizing force to a source of feedback. It is warming faster than anywhere else, destabilizing weather systems, altering ecosystems, and upending lives, from Indigenous communities to migratory animals to farmers thousands of miles away.

But Zack does not stop at the Arctic. On his website ZackLabe.com, he has built a vast library of graphics covering global and U.S. climate indicators. These include temperature trends, precipitation patterns, health-related metrics, and more. One recent addition is a four-decade visualization of U.S. temperature anomalies by decade. It is the kind of image that stays with you. The country shifts from mostly blue in the 1980s to dark red by the 2020s. You do not need to understand the numbers to get the message.

Color choice in climate graphics is never arbitrary, and Zack was candid about the challenge. If you fix your scale to the past, future data will be so warm that the map turns solid red. But if you constantly rescale, you risk minimizing the signal. His solution is to keep the scale fixed, let the visuals tell the story, and when a map washes out in red, use that moment to explain why.

These are not just aesthetic decisions. They are acts of public service. Especially now, when the scientific community in the United States is under pressure. Earlier this year, Zack was one of many early-career scientists offered jobs at NOAA, only to see those offers rescinded in a quiet wave of politically motivated cuts. It was not a news cycle. It was a purge. And it sent a chilling message to a generation of researchers. Your work may be crucial, but it is not guaranteed protection.

Zack landed on his feet at Climate Central, where he now works on rapid attribution. He studies how human activity contributes to extreme weather events in real time and is building out tools that connect climate data to public health, agriculture, energy demand, and migration. But he worries about his peers. Many are leaving science altogether. Brilliant communicators and modelers are pivoting to the private sector, not because they want to, but because the path forward has become unsustainable.

And yet, he remains hopeful. My goal, he said, is to make climate data as familiar as the daily weather. Something you can look at and say, I see myself in this. I see my community. I understand what this means.

That might sound simple. It is not. But it is exactly what makes Zack’s work so vital. In a time of overwhelming change and disinformation, he is giving us the tools to see clearly, to think long-term, and to connect the dots between melting ice, rising heat, and the lives we are living now.

If you want to understand climate change not as a theory but as a lived experience, start with the visuals. And start with Zack Labe.

---

We are proud to be part of the Iowa Writers Collaborative, a group of storytellers committed to telling the truth about our climate, our politics, and our future.