Go Where the Problem Is with Charlotte DeWald

About this Episode

In this episode, host Kumar talks to Charlotte DeWald, Director of the Arctic Stabilization Initiative (ASI) at Renaissance Philanthropy. Charlotte is a deep researcher who has spent her career studying runaway climate risks and figuring out what needs to be done to stop them.

Charlotte discusses what drove her to assemble ASI's team and create a roadmap around that end goal from the start, and the advice and mindset that led her to make a deliberate departure from how she'd seen other organizations in the field start out.

Charlotte talks about the role her delivery focus has played in her own career shift, growing impatient with research that wasn't translating into action fast enough, and what pushed her to build something explicitly designed to produce usable, actionable outputs.

Charlotte’s fascinating story sheds light on how to find problems worth working on.

FOLLOW CHARLOTTE

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/charlottebeall

KEY QUESTIONS AND TAKEAWAYS

What is the Arctic Stabilization Initiative?

Housed at Renaissance Philanthropy and directed by Charlotte DeWald, ASI is stage-gated research designed to give governments and multilateral organizations the safety, efficacy, and feasibility data they'd need to evaluate Arctic-targeted climate interventions — not to deploy interventions itself.

Why isn't decarbonization enough to stop Arctic tipping points?

Climate action has three points of attack rather than two. Decarbonization and adaptation get the most attention, but neither addresses near-term "tipping point" risk already locked in by processes like sea ice loss and permafrost thaw. ASI focuses on the third arm: regional climate stabilization in the Arctic.

What are Arctic tipping points?

Once certain climate thresholds are crossed, DeWald explains, the resulting state change is irreversible on human timescales — and the Arctic is where several of the most imminent thresholds converge, making it a first test case for humanity's tipping-point response.

What types of Arctic climate intervention exist?

There are three broad categories: increasing atmospheric reflectivity, structurally reinforcing ice sheets and sea ice, and increasing atmospheric emissivity — helping trapped heat escape. DeWald's research focuses on the third and least-understood category.

Why do mixed-phase clouds warm the Arctic instead of cooling it?

Mixed-phase clouds cover roughly 60% of the Arctic and trend net-warming, not cooling. Because they sit low to the surface and much of the Arctic year has little sunlight to reflect, these clouds act more like a "hat" trapping heat than a shield blocking it.

What is mixed-phase cloud thinning?

The proposed intervention is to nudge clouds into ice formation to help them dissipate. The mechanism relies on ice-nucleating particles — rare naturally occurring particles that trigger ice formation at temperatures far above freezing — a topic DeWald spent roughly a decade researching via shipboard instrumentation and national-lab modeling collaborations.

Is Arctic cloud seeding a new or untested technology?

The approach is neglected, not infeasible. Cloud seeding and cloud shaping are established techniques; what's missing is the applied research connecting them specifically to Arctic stabilization. DeWald built the initiative largely by cold-calling experts across disciplines to pressure-test whether a five-year research agenda was viable.

Beyond the science

1. DeWald's path to ASI came from friction with the pace of climate science. After a decade studying aerosol-cloud interactions — widely regarded as one of climate science's most persistent uncertainties — she concluded that incremental scientific understanding wasn't translating into commensurate action, which pushed her toward field-building instead of continued lab research.
2. Defining the "end user" early shaped ASI's structure. A conversation with a former U.S. diplomat (ex-UN envoy for East Africa, USAID) helped DeWald realize the initiative needed a diplomacy function from the outset — since the research is only useful if there's a clear pathway to the governments and multilateral bodies who'd act on it.
3. DeWald's tacit-knowledge takeaway: talk to people, not just papers. Her throughline across the episode is that expertise compounds through networked conversation — knowing who to call, and being willing to call them — as much as through individual technical depth.

Open asks from the episode: DeWald is looking to connect with people in conservation (for perspective on intervention risk/tradeoffs), scientists developing Arctic sampling platforms or sensors, and anyone who can "think programmatically" about field-building. She's reachable via Substack and LinkedIn.

Episode Links

• Charlotte DeWald — Program Director of the Arctic Stabilization Initiative at Renaissance Philanthropy. An atmospheric scientist specializing in ice-nucleating particles — the rare aerosols that trigger cloud ice formation — she holds a Ph.D. in Climate Science from Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
• Arctic Stabilization Initiative (ASI) — A five-year, stage-gated research program producing the evidence governments and multilateral organizations would need to assess whether Arctic-targeted climate interventions are safe, effective, and feasible. Its first focus is Mixed-Phase Cloud Thinning.
• Renaissance Philanthropy — The organization producing this podcast and housing the Arctic Stabilization Initiative.
• Mixed-Phase Cloud Thinning (MCT) — The intervention ASI is evaluating first: seeding Arctic mixed-phase clouds — which cover roughly 60% of the Arctic and trend net-warming — to trigger ice formation and help them thin or dissipate, allowing trapped heat to escape.
• Ice-nucleating particles — Rare naturally occurring particles that trigger ice formation in clouds at unusually warm temperatures — the subject of Charlotte's decade of prior research and the scientific foundation underpinning MCT.
• Aerosol-cloud interactions — The broader, still highly uncertain field of climate science Charlotte spent a decade working in before founding ASI — studying how aerosols shape cloud behavior and, in turn, the Earth's radiative balance.
• Decarbonization and CDR (carbon dioxide removal) — The two dominant strategies in climate action that Charlotte argues are necessary but insufficient on their own to prevent near-term Arctic tipping points, given warming processes already underway.
• Joshua Elliott — Chief Scientist at Renaissance Philanthropy — the person Charlotte ultimately connected with through networked phone calls, whose own climate and RenPhil background helped bring ASI into being.
• Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss — The negotiation book Charlotte references as something she's currently studying. Note: the transcript mishears the author's name as "Chris Fosse" — corrected here to Chris Voss.