Ramona Valdez is a permafrost monitoring technician with NOAA, based in Fairbanks, Alaska. She's been tracking soil temperatures at monitoring stations across the North Slope for fifteen years. Last month, after compiling the 2024 annual data showing record permafrost temperatures at nearly half of Alaska's long-term monitoring stations¹, she went on medical leave. This is her third therapy session.

She's agreed to let us observe via Zoom.

What follows is unusual. Ramona's responses exist in multiple emotional registers simultaneously, as if her psyche is attempting to process the same information through incompatible frameworks at once. We've transcribed all frequencies.

Can you explain what happened when you saw the 2024 numbers?

[PROFESSIONAL DETACHMENT: The data showed permafrost temperatures ranking highest on record at 47% of our monitoring stations, which represents a statistically significant deviation from the 1990-2020 baseline] [DENIAL: but it's probably just a weird year, these things happen in cycles, my grandmother used to say the weather goes in cycles] [RAGE: THE FUCKING GROUND IS COOKING AND NOBODY GIVES A SHIT] [DISSOCIATION: I remember thinking my hands looked very small on the keyboard, like doll hands, typing numbers that didn't mean anything into a spreadsheet that would go into a report that would go into a database that would] [GRIEF: I started crying and couldn't stop for three hours] [DARK HUMOR: At least I'll save money on my freezer! I can just bury stuff in the yard! Oh wait—THE GROUND DOESN'T FREEZE ANYMORE].

When did you first notice the trend?

[TECHNICAL PRECISION: The warming signal became unambiguous around 2015-2016, with accelerating temperature increases in the active layer and upper permafrost zones] [NOSTALGIA: When I started this job, the ground would freeze solid by October. You could hear it, this deep creaking sound. My supervisor Tom used to say the land was "locking up for winter." He retired in 2018. Smart man] [TERROR: Now some sites take three months to freeze² and I lie awake calculating how much carbon is being released during those extra weeks, 207 million tons per year from wildfires alone³, and that's just wildfires, that's not even counting the microbial respiration, and] [FORCED OPTIMISM: But renewable energy is getting cheaper! Electric cars! We can still] [BRUTAL HONESTY: We can't].

What does it mean that the tundra is now a carbon source?

[PATIENT EDUCATOR MODE: Think of permafrost as a freezer that's been storing carbon for thousands of years. When it thaws, microbes wake up and start consuming that carbon, releasing CO2 and methane. We're looking at 1.5 trillion tons of stored carbon⁴—more than all the carbon in all the world's forests] [EXISTENTIAL DREAD: which means the ground itself is now working against us, the actual earth is betraying us, we've heated the planet enough that the planet is now heating itself and] [MANIC LAUGHTER: It's so fucking elegant! A feedback loop! Do you know how many years I spent in college learning about feedback loops as theoretical concepts?] [NUMBNESS: I don't feel anything anymore when I look at the graphs] [EVERYTHING ALL AT ONCE: I feel everything, I'm drowning in feeling, I can't breathe under the weight of what these numbers mean for my niece who's seven years old and loves caribou and the caribou populations are down 65%⁵ and].

Your therapist is asking you to slow down.

[COMPLIANCE: Yes. Sorry. I'm breathing. Four counts in, four counts out] [RESENTMENT: Why should I slow down? The permafrost isn't slowing down. The microbes aren't slowing down. They're respiring 30% higher in warmed plots⁶, they're working overtime, they're very busy little guys eating carbon and farting out greenhouse gases and] [CHILDLIKE WONDER: Did you know microbes have been asleep in that soil for thousands of years? Some of them are ancient. We woke them up] [HORROR: We woke them up and now they're eating the world] [DEFENSIVE RATIONALIZATION: I'm just a technician, I just record temperatures, this isn't my fault, I didn't burn the fossil fuels, I drive a Prius] [SELF-LOATHING: I drove to work every day for fifteen years watching the numbers climb and I still ate beef and flew to my sister's wedding and bought things on Amazon and].

What do you want people to understand?

[FUTILITY: But nobody will understand because numbers don't mean anything to people, I could say "207 million tons of carbon per year from Arctic wildfires since 2003"³ and it just sounds like words, it doesn't sound like the end of the world] [MISSIONARY ZEAL: We need immediate action on emissions reduction, we need to stop pretending this is a problem for later, we need] [EXHAUSTION: I need to sleep but I can't sleep because I keep seeing the graphs, the beautiful terrible graphs, the way the temperature lines curve upward like they're reaching for something] [LOVE: I love the Arctic. I love the tundra. I love the way the ground smells in spring, like earth and time. I love the caribou. I love] [MOURNING: I loved. Past tense. I'm practicing past tense].

The session ends shortly after this. Ramona's therapist suggests we stop. As we're disconnecting, Ramona says something that doesn't parse through any single emotional filter:

[ALL FREQUENCIES SIMULTANEOUSLY: The permafrost at Station 47 hit -0.2°C this year, which means it's barely frozen, which means it's basically thawed, which means it's fine, which means it's over, which means I need to call my niece, which means I can't call my niece because what would I even say, which means the microbes are awake and hungry and ancient and I'm so tired and the numbers are still climbing and I should eat something but food tastes like grief and did you know some tundra soils now take more than three months to freeze and I used to know what winter meant and].

She disconnects.

The screen goes black.

We sit in the silence of our own living room, in our own warming world, trying to decide which emotional frequency to process this through.

We find we cannot choose just one.

Editor's note: Ramona Valdez is not a real person, though the permafrost data she references is devastatingly real. This interview is a thought experiment in how we might speak about climate catastrophe if we allowed ourselves to feel all of our contradictory responses at once, rather than choosing the emotional register that lets us sleep at night.

Footnotes

1. https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/2024-arctic-report-card-arctic-tundra-now-net-source-carbon-dioxide ↩

2. https://science.nasa.gov/earth/climate-change/alaska-tundra-source-of-early-winter-carbon-emissions/ ↩

3. https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/arctic-tundra-becoming-source-of-carbon-dioxide-emissions ↩ ↩²

4. https://www.npr.org/2024/12/10/nx-s1-5215967/arctic-tundra-contributes-climate-warming-pollution-report-finds ↩

5. https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/arctic-tundra-becoming-source-of-carbon-dioxide-emissions ↩

6. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-54990-9 ↩

7. https://www.highnorthnews.com/en/large-parts-arctic-no-longer-carbon-storage-now-net-source-emissions ↩