The Alaska glacier is an image John Kiriakou returns to when the subject is climate change, drawn from a 2016 trip he made to Alaska with Gary Johnson during that year’s presidential campaign. He offered it in August 2025 in a conversation about Paris preparing for days of fifty degrees Celsius.
The visit
The party went to see a glacier. Visitors go to the centre first, are given a short briefing, and then find that the glacier is about a quarter of a mile away.[1]
The detail that makes the story is the siting of the building. The glacier used to come right up to the visitor centre — that, in Kiriakou’s account, is why the centre was put there. You could reach out and touch the ice from the observation deck.[1]
The joke
Somebody in the group asked why the planners would have put the visitor centre so far away from the glacier, and laughed.[1] Kiriakou’s response is the point of the anecdote: “Haha. Well, no, that’s not that’s not funny. That’s not funny at all. This is exactly what we should be talking about.”[2]
The wider conversation
The story came at the end of an exchange about European heat. Rall observed that Paris — a low-prestige posting in Roman times because the weather was poor — had never had weather like the 122 degrees Fahrenheit now being planned for, and that Europe was at least preparing in a way the United States is not.[3] Kiriakou agreed, and noted with some interest that Tulsi Gabbard had come out saying the country faced a climate disaster, wondering aloud whether she had been the one chosen by the administration to begin bringing conservatives around.[4]
He and Rall then pursued the same puzzle from the other direction — when, exactly, conservatives began caring about diet and health, which both of them had always taken for “a crunchy lefty thing.”[4][1]