Burleigh McCoy

She's a global change biologist at York University in Canada.

The drownings she's talking about were from 1991 to 2017, and they happened across 10 countries.

She says 50% of those drownings are related to air temperature.

When temperatures are hovering right around freezing and freezing, unfreezing, freezing, unfreezing, that leads to more of that weak white ice that we talked about earlier.

And it's harder to tell just how safe the ice is.

Right, going out on the ice.

And another thing that makes ice safety trickier to predict is something Hillary calls winter weirding.

So throughout the winter, lake ice is getting more unstable, less safe.

Plus, ice is forming later and disappearing earlier.

As is lake ice culture, which is less tangible in some ways, but comes with a lot of sorrow.

Yeah.

And James Tai, the festival organizer who we met earlier, hopes that it's also a call to action for change.

Real quick before the show, let's talk about public media.

Public media has been in the news a lot this year, and public media is what makes NPR shows like Shortwave special.

It's made for you.

When you listen to an NPR podcast, the people who make it aren't thinking about shareholders or advertisers.

We're thinking about you and delivering on a promise to help you understand the world a little better.

From its very founding in the U.S., public media was also meant to tell stories from underrepresented communities, providing cultural insight that expands your perspective.

At NPR, we still believe in all of that.

We always will.