Climate
change is on a lot of people's minds these days. It's one of the
hottest summers on record--upper 90's in the midwest and atlantic
states, and dry as a bone from the west coast to the heartland. In
Fairbanks this July it has been relatively dry and warm compared with
a rainy May and June, with temps in the mid to upper 70's. Two weeks
ago during the longest days of summer we had a week in the mid to
upper 80's, the week of Matt and Stephanie's visit. And not just hot
but humid too. The previous two summers were warm early and cool and
wet by midsummer. Hot and humid is not what I've come to expect up here.
Joe and I have only been here three summers. The climate change skeptics (as
opposed to the deniers, who don't look at the science at all but
simply deny the existence of anything that would mean no more drive-through Starbucks) cite 'inter-annual variation' as a
reasonable contradiction to the idea that the planet is warming,
because inter-annual variation--patterns of hot or cold, wet or dry, stormy or calm weather that may characterize a season as 'unseasonal'--throws a certain amount of noise into the records, and thus the predictions.
Climate
skepticism is fine, but it doesn't explain drastic things, like
disappearing glaciers, shrinking sea ice, and gullies and cracks
opening up in ground riddled with permafrost—it's a bit like
those rich people aboard the Titanic who felt nothing more than a
bump that sloshed the brandy in their snifters, so they went back to
their card game. This is why animal lovers are freaking out about
polar bears, people who live in the North are getting nervous, and
the entities who brought you Exxon Valdez, Prudhoe Bay, and
Halliburton are casting their evil eyes upon the Arctic coast and
tenting their fingers like Mr. Burns. The sea ice is melting faster
and forming later, the oil companies and their political cronies
stand to make billions out of it, and polar bears, fisherman, and
coastal Native communities are being forced to get to the back of the
economic bus.
As I consider what to study up here and how
to study it, and to understand its relative importance against the larger
ecological and sociopolitical background, I wonder how long before the world as we know it--the world with its budding springs, lazy summers, and cold, stable winters--becomes a very different, and very harsh
place to live? Many ecosystems have been wrecked at our hands, over
and over. It starts with the wild things that are tasty to humans and
progresses to things most sensitive to disruption, things that live
in water or are rare and dependent upon specialized habitat--orchids,
amphibians, birds, insects. We don't perceive these changes until the
link directly impacting human survival is affected, and by then the
damage has magnified like a huge wave looming into view. How long
before the standard of living we so heedlessly enjoy is swept
away? Two generations? One? Half a generation? When will people stop
driving gasoline-powered engines? Until the oil runs out, or before
then? How long is that?
I really
want to know. Because it's not just about orchids and frogs now, or even weather.
At 52,
I've had a pretty good run, but it will be a very different world
twenty years from now, if I live to see it. If I die of old age
before that, that's perhaps luckiest of all. There is no sense in
pretending we will ever be able to engineer our way out of this
predicament. Humanity has gone global for better or worse. There
is a last-ditch plan being worked on as we speak by “climate
engineers,” a way of spewing enough aerosol particles into the
atmosphere to reflect sunlight away from earth and cool it down a bit
(cool it down?! How god-awful and Doctor Strangelovian!). And where
did such a 1950's sci-fi horror flick of an idea come from? I think
scientists have been tinkering with this idea for the past couple of
centuries, but current research was inspired by Mt. Pinatubo. Its
eruption in 1991 was just cataclysmic enough to reduce sunlight
hitting the earth by ten percent—but not to extinguish life. Thus
inspired, these geniuses still need to: A) find a suitable type of
material in an amount that won't poison us too much or wreck the
biosphere (sulfur dioxide is a serious candidate); and B) figure out
how to get it up there. I'd be curious to know if the first
powerpoint lecture on this was shown at TED.
Unlike
the rest of the country, our summer in the Alaskan interior has been
lovely, and I am trying to soak up every minute.
The hills are clad in bright green birch and poplar, the fields and
meadows are glowing fuschia with fireweed, the air is fragrant with
flowers and alive with winged creatures great and small. Will we ever
remember a summer like this again?
Solstice tree
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