Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (7 page)

The fantastic conceit of
The Day After Tomorrow
is that global warming produces global freezing. At the start of the film, a chunk of Antarctic ice the size of Rhode Island suddenly melts. (Something very similar to this actually happened in March 2002, when the Larsen B ice shelf collapsed.) Most of what follows—an instant ice age, cyclonic winds that descend from the upper atmosphere—is impossible as science but not as metaphor. The record preserved in the Greenland ice sheet shows that our own relatively static experience of climate is actually what is exceptional. During the last glaciation, even as much of the world was frozen solid, average temperatures in Greenland frequently shot up, or down, by ten degrees, as in the Younger Dryas. Nobody knows what caused the sudden climate shifts of the past; however, many climatologists suspect that they had something to do with changes in ocean-current patterns that are known as the “thermohaline circulation.”

“When you freeze sea ice, the salt is pushed out of the pores, so that the salty water actually drains,” Steffen explained to me one day when we were standing out on the ice, not far from camp, trying to talk above the howl of the wind. “And salty water’s actually heavier, so it starts to sink.” Meanwhile, owing both to evaporation and cooling, water from the tropics becomes denser as it drifts toward the Arctic; near Greenland a tremendous volume of seawater is constantly sinking toward the ocean floor. As a result of this process, still more warm water is drawn from the tropics toward the poles, setting up what is often referred to as a “conveyor belt” that moves vast amounts of heat around the globe.

“This is the energy engine for the world climate,” Steffen went on. “And it has one source: the water that sinks down. And if you just turn the knob here a little bit”—he made a motion of turning the water on in a bathtub—“we can expect significant temperature changes based on the redistribution of energy.” One way to turn the knob is to heat the oceans, which is already happening. Another is to pour more freshwater into the polar seas. This is also occurring. Not only is runoff from coastal Greenland increasing; the volume of river discharge into the Arctic Ocean has been rising. Oceanographers monitoring the North Atlantic have documented that in recent decades its waters have become significantly less salty. A total shutdown of the thermohaline circulation is considered extremely unlikely in the coming century. But, if the Greenland ice sheet were to start to disintegrate, the possibility of such a shutdown could not be ruled out. Wallace Broecker, a professor of geochemistry at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, has labeled the thermohaline circulation the “Achilles’ heel of the climate system.” Were it to halt, places like Britain, whose climate is heavily influenced by the Gulf Stream, could become much colder, even as the planet as a whole continued to warm up.

For the whole time I was at Swiss Camp, it was “polar day,” and so the sun never set. Dinner was generally served at ten or eleven P.M., and afterward everyone sat around a makeshift table in the kitchen, talking and drinking coffee. (Because it weighs a lot and is not—strictly speaking—necessary, alcohol was in short supply.) One night, I asked Steffen what he thought conditions at Swiss Camp would be like in the same season a decade hence. “In ten years, the signal should be much more distinct, because we will have added another ten years of greenhouse warming,” he said.

Zwally interjected, “I predict that ten years from now we won’t be coming this time of year. We won’t be able to come this late. To put it nicely, we are heading into deep doo-doo.”

Either by disposition or by training, Steffen was reluctant to make specific predictions, whether about Greenland or, more generally, about the Arctic. Often, he prefaced his remarks by noting that there could be a change in atmospheric-circulation patterns that would dampen the rate of temperature increase or even—temporarily, at least—reverse it entirely. But he was emphatic that “climate change is a real thing.”

“It’s not something dramatic now—that’s why people don’t really react,”he told me. “But if you can convey the message that it will be dramatic for our children and our children’s children—the risk is too big not to care.” The time, he added, “is already five past midnight.”

On the last night that I spent at Swiss Camp, Steffen took the data he had downloaded off his weather station and ran them through various programs on his laptop to produce the mean temperature at the camp for the previous year. It was, it turned out, the highest of any year since the camp was built. When Steffen announced this to the group around the kitchen table, no one seemed the slightest bit surprised.

That night, dinner was unusually late. On the return trip of another pole-drilling expedition, one of the snowmobiles had caught on fire, and had had to be towed back to camp. When I finally went out to my tent to go to bed, I found that the snow underneath it had started to melt, and there was a large puddle in the middle of the floor. I went back to the kitchen to get some paper towels and tried to mop it up. But the puddle was too big, and eventually I gave up.

No nation takes a keener interest in climate change, at least on a per-capita basis, than Iceland. More than 10 percent of the country is covered by glaciers, the largest of which, Vatnajökull, stretches over thirty-two hundred square miles. During the so-called Little Ice Age, which began in Europe some five hundred years ago and ended some three hundred and fifty years later, the advance of the glaciers caused widespread misery. Contemporary records tell of farms being buried under the ice—“Frost and cold torment people,”a pastor in eastern Iceland named Olafur Einarsson wrote—and in particularly severe years, shipping, too, seems to have ceased, because the island remained icebound even in summer. In the mid-eighteenth century, it has been estimated, nearly a third of the country’s population died of starvation or associated cold-related ills. For Icelanders, many of whom can trace their genealogy back a thousand years, this is considered to be almost recent history.

Oddur Sigurdsson heads up a group called the Icelandic Glaciological Society. On a dark and dreary autumn afternoon, I went to visit him in his office, at the headquarters of Iceland’s National Energy Authority, in Reykjavík. Little towheaded children kept wandering in to peer under his desk, and then wandering out again, giggling. Sigurdsson explained that Reykjavík’s public school teachers were on strike, and his colleagues had had to bring their children to work with them.

The Icelandic Glaciological Society is composed entirely of volunteers. Every fall, after the summer-melt season has ended, they survey the size of the country’s three-hundred-odd glaciers and then file reports, which Sigurdsson collects in brightly colored binders. In the organization’s early years—it was founded in 1930—the volunteers were mostly farmers; they took measurements by building cairns and pacing off the distance to the glacier’s edge. These days, members come from all walks of life—one is a retired plastic surgeon—and they take more exacting surveys, using tape measures and iron poles. Some glaciers have been in the same family, so to speak, for generations. Sigurdsson became head of the society in 1987, at which point one volunteer told him that he thought he would like to relinquish his post.

“He was about ninety when I realized how old he was,” Sigurdsson recalled. “His father had done this at that place before and then his nephew took over for him.” Another volunteer has been monitoring his glacier, a section of Vatnajökull, since 1948. “He’s eighty,” Sigurdsson said. “And if I have some questions that go beyond his age, I just go and ask his mother. She’s a hundred and seven.”

In contrast to glaciers in North America, which have been shrinking steadily since the 1960s, Iceland’s glaciers grew through the 1970s and ’80s. Then, in the mid-1990s, they, too, began to contract. Sigurdsson pulled out a notebook of glaciological reports, filled out on yellow forms, and turned to the section on a glacier called Sólheimajökull, a tongue-shaped spit of ice that sticks out from a much larger glacier known as Mýrdalsjökull. In 1996, Sólheimajökull crept back by 10 feet. In 1997, it receded by another 33 feet, and in 1998 by 98 feet. Every year since then, it has retreated even more. In 2003, it shrank by 302 feet, and in 2004, by 285 feet. All told, Sólheimajökull—the name means “sun-home glacier” and refers to a nearby farm—is now 1,100 feet shorter than it was just a decade ago. Sigurdsson pulled out another notebook, which was filled with slides. He picked out some recent ones of Sólheimajökull. The glacier ended in a wide river. An enormous rock, which Sólheimajökull had deposited when it began its retreat, stuck out from the water like the hull of an abandoned ship.

“You can tell by this glacier what the climate is doing,” Sigurdsson said. “It is more sensitive than the most sensitive meteorological measurement.” He introduced me to a colleague of his, Kristjana Eythórsdóttir, who, as it turned out, was the granddaughter of the founder of the Icelandic Glaciological Society. Eythórsdóttir keeps tabs on a glacier named Leidarjökull, which is a four-hour trek from the nearest road. I asked her how it was doing. “Oh, it’s getting smaller and smaller, just like all the others,” she said. Sigurdsson told me that climate models predicted that by the end of the next century Iceland would be virtually ice-free. “We will have small ice caps on the highest mountains, but the mass of the glaciers will have gone,” he said. It is believed that there have been glaciers on Iceland for at least the last two million years. “Probably longer,” Sigurdsson said.

In October 2000, in a middle school in Barrow, Alaska, officials from the eight Arctic nations—the United States, Russia, Canada, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland—met to talk about global warming. The group announced plans for a three-part, two-million-dollar study of climate change in the region. In November 2004, the first two parts of the study—a massive technical document and a hundred-and-forty-page summary—were presented at a symposium in Reykjavík.

The day after I went to talk to Sigurdsson, I attended the symposium’s plenary session. In addition to nearly three hundred scientists, it drew a sizable contingent of native Arctic residents—reindeer herders, subsistence hunters, and representatives of groups like the Inuvialuit Game Council. In among the shirts and ties, I spotted two men dressed in the brightly colored tunics of the Sami and several others wearing sealskin vests. As the session went on, the subject kept changing—from hydrology and biodiversity to fisheries and on to forests. The message, however, stayed the same. Almost wherever you looked, conditions in the Arctic were changing, and at a rate that surprised even those who had expected to find clear signs of warming. Robert Corell, an American oceanographer and former assistant director at the National Science Foundation, coordinated the study. In his opening remarks, he ran through its findings—shrinking sea ice, receding glaciers, thawing permafrost—and summed them up as follows: “The Arctic climate is warming rapidly now, with an emphasis on
now
.” Particularly alarming, Corell said, were the most recent data from Greenland, which showed the ice sheet melting much faster “than we thought possible even a decade ago.”

Global warming is routinely described as a matter of scientific debate—a theory whose validity has yet to be demonstrated. The symposium’s opening session lasted for more than nine hours. During that time, many speakers stressed the uncertainties that remain about global warming and its effects—on the thermohaline circulation, on the distribution of vegetation, on the survival of cold-loving species, on the frequency of forest fires. But this sort of questioning, which is so basic to scientific discourse, never extended to the relationship between carbon dioxide and rising temperatures. The study’s executive summary stated, unequivocally, that human beings had become the “dominant factor” influencing the climate. During an afternoon coffee break, I caught up with Corell.

“Let’s say that there’s three hundred people in this room,” he told me. “I don’t think you’ll find five who would say that global warming is just a natural process.” (While I was at the conference, I spoke to more than twenty scientists, and I couldn’t find one who described it that way.)

The third part of the Arctic-climate study, which was still unfinished at the time of the symposium, was the so-called policy document. This was supposed to outline practical steps to be taken in response to the scientific findings, including—presumably—reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The policy document remained unfinished because American negotiators had rejected much of the language proposed by the seven other Arctic nations. (A few weeks later, the United States agreed to a vaguely worded statement calling for “effective”—but not obligatory—actions to combat the problem.) This recalcitrance left those Americans who had traveled to Reykjavík in an awkward position. A few tried—halfheartedly—to defend the Bush administration’s stand to me; most, including many government employees, were critical of it. At one point, Corell observed that the loss of sea ice since the late 1970s was equal to “the size of Texas and Arizona combined. That analogy was made for obvious reasons.”

That evening, at the hotel bar, I talked to an Inuit hunter named John Keogak, who lives on Banks Island, in Canada’s Northwest Territories, some five hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. He told me that he and his fellow hunters had started to notice that the climate was changing in the mid-eighties. Then, a few years ago, for the first time, people began to see robins, a bird for which the Inuit in his region have no word.

“We just thought, Oh, gee, it’s warming up a little bit,” he recalled. “It was good at the start—warmer winters, you know—but now everything is going so fast. The things that we saw coming in the early nineties, they’ve just multiplied.

“Of the people involved in global warming, I think we’re on top of the list of who would be most affected,” Keogak went on. “Our way of life, our traditions, maybe our families. Our children may not have a future. I mean, all young people, put it that way. It’s just not happening in the Arctic. It’s going to happen all over the world. The whole world is going too fast.”