The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future

by Laurence C. Smith

  The Siberian Curse

  The Siberian Curse is the brutal, punishing winter cold that creeps across our northern continental interiors each year. Western Europe and the Nordic countries, steeped in tropical heat carried north from the Gulf Stream, are largely spared. But from Russia to Alaska, and tumbling south through Canada into the northern U.S. states, the Curse descends each winter. The name was popularized in a book by Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy of the Brookings Institution,296 but the concept is as ancient as life itself. When it arrives, the birds depart, the ground cracks, frogs freeze solid in their mud beds. At the extreme end, if temperatures plunge to -40°F (or -40°C, the Fahrenheit and Celsius temperature scales converge at this number) steel breaks, engines fail, and manual work becomes virtually impossible. Human enterprise grinds to a halt.

  Regardless of country, all NORC northerners seem to hold something in common when it comes to this special temperature: “Minus forties,” as such days are known, are universally despised. The shutdown of activity it commands has been described to me by restaurateurs in Whitehorse, Cree trappers in Alberta, truck drivers in Russia, and retirees in Helsinki. And while they otherwise express varying opinions about the problems or benefits posed to them by climate change, the one sentiment they all seem to agree on is relief that “minus forties”are becoming increasingly rare.

  The most crushing cold rolls each year through eastern Siberia. On a typical January day in the town of Verkhoyansk, temperatures average around -48°C (-54°F). That is far colder than the North Pole, even though Verkhoyansk lies fifteen hundred miles south of it. Such frigidity stirs up images of hardy Russians bundled in furs, trudging home with some fire-wood or vodka to beat back the elements. A less familiar image is Verkhoyansk in July, when average daytime temperatures soar to nearly +21°C (+70°F). Our same Russian friends now stroll in short-sleeved shirts and halter tops, licking delicious precast ice-cream cones that taste like pure vanilla cream.

  “So . . . what are you doing this summer?” I am asked this question twenty or so times per year. Invariably—after responding I’m going to Siberia, or Iceland, or Alaska—I win a puzzled look, followed by a nodding smile and the advice to not forget my parka and snow boots. When I explain I’ll actually require sunscreen, DEET, and plenty of white T-shirts, I get another puzzled look.

  In summer, even on the high Arctic tundra, there is muggy heat, hordes of buzzing insects, and water running everywhere. Yes, there are stunted trees, tundra mosses, and no raccoons, but these things are the result of cold winters, not summers. In summer the sun circles the sky day and night. Everything is bathed in heat and light. The ground thaws, flowers bloom, and rodents teem. While driving through Fairbanks, Alaska, I noticed people starting softball games at midnight. The place simply explodes with pent-up life in fantastic overdrive.

  There is now overwhelming evidence that northern winters are becoming milder and growing seasons are getting longer. From weather station data, we know that air temperatures rose throughout the northern high latitudes during most of the last century, and especially after 1966. There was a short cooling snap lasting from about 1946 to 1965, but even then large areas of southern Canada and southern Eurasia continued to warm. After 1966, temperatures took off sharply, especially in the northern Eurasian and northwestern North American interiors, where annual air temperatures have been rising at least 1° to 2°C per decade on average. That’s about ten times faster than the global average, and it’s being driven almost completely by warmer springs and winters.297

  The New Arrivals

  As you might imagine, the biological response to this has been brisk. By the 1990s, a greening up of northern plant cover was spotted by satellites. Down on the ground, trees grew taller and barren tundra began sprouting up shrubs.298 All of this is consistent with the temperature increases recorded by weather stations. Not surprisingly, ecosystem models project plant growth to continue rising right alongside the projected increases in air temperature and growing season length. Even under the “optimistic” emissions scenario shown earlier, Arctic net primary productivity (a measure of overall plant biomass growth) is projected to almost double by the 2080s.299

  Wildlife is also on the move. From my travels and interviews the appearance of “southern” creatures in northern places was a prevailing theme. I heard repeatedly about raccoons, white-tailed deer, beavers, and even a mountain lion spotted in places they’d never been seen before. My uncle, a longtime outdoorsman in northern New York State, noticed gray squirrels and opossums moving in, along with some crazy disruptions to the spring harvest of maple syrup. The Mountain Pine Beetle, normally kept in check by winter-kill, is now devastating Canadian forests. Other biological examples published in the scientific literature include the common buzzard Buteo buteo wintering near Moscow, nearly a thousand kilometers north of normal; a northward shift in Japan’s Greater White-fronted Goose, Anser albifrons; and Sweden’s Brown Hare, Lepus europaeus, infiltrating the territory of (and possibly hybridizing with) Lepus timidus, the Mountain Hare. Red foxes are displacing Arctic foxes. Beavers are pushing north, and model projections suggest they will also become denser inside their current range.300

  By midcentury Ixodes scapularis—the Lyme-disease-carrying tick—is projected to expand northward from its current toehold in southern Ontario to much of Canada. By century’s end the smallmouth bass, today found only near the U.S. border, is projected to live all the way to the Arctic Ocean. In the North Sea—one of the world’s most productive fisheries—nearly two-thirds of all fish species have either shifted north in latitude or sunk down to cooler water depths. Even lowly plankton is on the move: In the past forty years Atlantic warm-water species have pushed northward a staggering ten degrees of latitude—almost seven hundred miles—supplanting cold-water species that are in turn retreating north.

  The Displaced

  The 2007 sea-ice contraction triggered a new wave of public consternation about the future of polar bears, including an environmentalist push in the United States to classify them under the Endangered Species Act. This gesture, ultimately rebuffed by both the Bush and Obama administrations, was largely symbolic (far more polar bears live offshore of Canada, Russia, and Greenland than Alaska, and these countries are certainly not beholden to the U.S. Endangered Species Act), but the concern for these magnificent animals is valid. They exist naturally only in the Arctic301 and are uniquely adapted to live out their lives roaming on top of a frozen ocean. Their home is on the floating sea ice, hunting ringed seals, napping, and occasionally cavorting or mating with one another. Some females go onto land to give birth, but they otherwise spend as much time as possible out on the ice. Unlike other bears they do not hibernate through the winter. The lean time for polar bears is in summer, when the ice disintegrates and retreats. Forced ashore, they mostly fast and wait until it returns.

  There is growing evidence that the waiting and fasting periods are getting longer, leading to skinny bears, strange behavior (like wandering into towns), and even cannibalism. In 2004 biologists confirmed three occurrences of polar bears deliberately hunting and eating each other. In one case a large male bear pounded its forepaws through the den roof of a female, savagely bit into her head and neck, then dragged her off in a trail of blood to be devoured. Her cubs were buried and suffocated in the rubble. Such behavior had never been seen before during the scientists’ thirty-four years of research in the area.302

  The problem is that the bears’ favorite prey, ringed seals, also require sea ice. They spend their time either resting on top of it (and watching out for polar bears), or swimming beneath it looking for Arctic cod. The Arctic cod lurks under and along the edges of the ice, watching out for ringed seals while chasing amphipods, copepods, and krill. Those little creatures in turn graze on tiny flagellates and diatoms that grow on the underside of the ice, and also bloom profusely in the water alongside its melting edge. This entire food chain—from microscopic phytoplankton to a thousand-pound polar be
ar—is inextricably linked to the presence of sea ice. Walruses, bearded seals, and other species also use sea ice, though none so specifically as do polar bears, ringed seals, and Arctic cod.

  Despite growing evidence of stress (like bear cannibalism), none of these species is in immediate risk of extinction. But there is little question that if the summertime sea-ice fades completely, then these amazing creatures will fade right along with it. Government scientists, in a report to aid the Bush administration’s decision on the proposed Endangered Species Act listing, estimate that two-thirds of the world’s polar bears will be gone by 2050.303

  From these and other indications worldwide, climate change is forcing a massive ecological reorganization of the planet, with both extinctions and expansions now under way. Depending on the emission scenario used, one model projects that anywhere from 15% to 37% of the world’s species will be committed to climate-change extinction by 2050.304 If these numbers hold true, they are devastating—roughly comparable to the impacts of deforestation and other direct forms of habitat loss. When combined with all the other species extinctions since the last ice age, they will mark the sixth great mass extinction on Earth—and the first since the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction that ended the dinosaurs some sixty-five million years ago.

  The mechanisms for climate-change extinction are many. Amphibians and wetland species are especially vulnerable to droughts. As temperatures rise, polar and alpine species have literally nowhere left to go once pushed off the brink of the northernmost coast or highest mountain peak. A less direct mechanism is the decoupling of codependent species within a food web (called “match-mismatch” by ecologists) when their respective phenological cycles fall out of whack. Imagine birds migrating to their accustomed nesting area only to find that the caterpillar hatch they were planning to gorge on has already come and gone, for example. Another is that warmer temperatures tend to enable insect pests, invasive species, disease, and robust “generalized” species (like rats and raccoons) to outcompete specialized ones. Yet another is that the projected rate of climate change is so rapid that some sedentary species (like trees) may not be able to relocate quickly enough, or their escaping climatic comfort zone will shift to a place incompatible for other reasons, like terrain or soil. Some climates, especially in alpine and polar areas, will simply cease to exist. By century’s end, under a high carbon emissions scenario, 10%-48% of the world’s land surface is projected to “lose” its extant climate completely, and 12%-39% will develop new “novel” climates that don’t exist in the world today (mostly in the tropics and subtropics).305 These changes will have powerful impacts on world ecosystems and could even render some local conservation efforts obsolete. Finally, because ecosystems and food webs have so many complex interconnections, there will be rippling effects we don’t yet know about. All of this is piled on top of an ongoing raft of familiar ecological threats, including habitat destruction, invasive species, and pollution.

  Compared with other places, habitat loss and pollution are less severe in Alaska, northern Canada, the Nordic countries, and eastern Russia, where vast boreal forests, tundra, and mountains hold some of the wildest and least-disturbed places left on Earth.306 However, northern ecosystems also have far simpler food chains and fewer species than, say, the Amazon rain forest. Indeed, much of it is a colonizing landscape, still in the early stages of soil formation and biological expansion after being encased and pulverized by glacier ice just eighteen thousand years ago.

  When imagining 2050, I anticipate that a globally unfair assortment of some winners and many more loser species will be very apparent by then. Already the world’s plants and animals are in the midst of their biggest extinction challenge in sixty-five million years. Out of perhaps seven million eukaryote species found on Earth, nearly half of all vascular plants and one-third of vertebrates are confined to just twenty-five imperiled “hot spots,” mostly in the tropics and comprising just 1.4% of the world’s land surface.307

  Even in the far North, a specialized ecosystem adapted to frigid cold will be under attack by advancing southern competitors, pests, and disease. It is possible that the vast boreal forest—girdling the northern high latitudes from Canada to Siberia—might convert to a more open, savannah-like state.308 But total primary productivity—meaning plant biomass, the bottom of the food chain—will be ramping up. Certain mobile southern invaders will enjoy growing viability in a vast new territory that is larger, less fragmented, and less polluted than where they came from. Longer, deeper penetration of sunlight into the sea (owing to less shading by sea ice) will trigger more algal photosynthesis, again increasing primary productivity and reverberating throughout the Arctic marine food web. The end result of this can only be greater overall ocean biomass, more complex food webs, and the invasion of southern marine species at the expense of northern ones.

  The ecology of the North is imperiled and changing. But it will be anything but lifeless.

  Hunters on Thin Ice

  People rely on sea ice too. For millennia the Inuit and Yupik (Eskimo) peoples have lived along the shores of the Arctic Ocean and even out on the ice itself, hunting seals, polar bears, whales, walruses, and fish. It is the platform upon which they travel, whether by snowmobile, dogsled, or on foot. It is the foundation on which they build hunting camps to live in for weeks or months at a time.

  These hunters have watched in astonishment as their sea-ice travel platform—dangerous even in good times—has thinned, become less predictable, and even disappeared. People’s snowmobiles and ATVs are crashing through into the freezing ocean. Farther south, they are crashing through the ice covering rivers and lakes. In Sanikiluaq, Canada, I learned that weaker ice and a two- to three-month shorter ice season is impairing people’s ability to catch seals and Arctic char. In Pangnirtung a traditional New Year’s Day bash celebrated out on the ice has become unsafe. In Barrow, two thousand miles west on the northernmost tip of Alaska, I learned hunters are now taking boats many miles offshore, hoping to find bits of ice with a walrus or bearded seal.309

  This is a serious matter. In the high Arctic, eating wild animals is an essential part of human survival and culture. In Barrow I was welcomed into the home of an Inuit elder, who explained that three-quarters of his community relies on wild-caught food.310 I was struck by this because Barrow is one of the most prosperous and modernized northern towns I have seen. There is a huge supermarket with most everything found in the supermarkets of Los Angeles. But groceries are two or three times more expensive because there is no road or rail to Barrow, so everything must be flown or barged in. Most people at least supplement their diet with wild food; many crucially depend on it. Alongside Pepe’s Mexican Restaurant (which has surprisingly good food and is apparently visited by members of the Chicago Bulls basketball team) I saw plenty of bushmeat in Barrow. My host’s kitchen and backyard were festooned with racks of drying meat and fish; in his driveway was a dead caribou. Another driveway had two seals, yet another a massive walrus. In the Arctic, obtaining “country food” is not for sport—it is as important to people’s diet as thin-crust pizza is to New Yorkers.

  Of all northern peoples, the marine mammal-hunters living along the Arctic Ocean coast are suffering the most from climate change. Less sea ice means more accidents and fewer ice-loving animals to eat. It means faster shoreline erosion from pounding by the waves and storms of the open ocean. The Alaskan village of Shishmaref has lost this battle and will need to be relocated farther inland. But even in coastal towns, nearly everyone I meet bristles at the notion of being cast as a hapless climate-change refugee.

  Even as they express frustration at having their lives damaged by people living thousands of miles away—and think it only fair that those damages be repatriated—they also point to their long history of adaptation and resilience in one of the world’s most extreme environments. They are not sitting around idly in despair, or gazing forlornly out at the unfamiliar sea. They are buying boats, and organizing workshops, a
nd setting about catching the fat salmon that are increasingly moving into their seas.

  There is more to this story than climate change. Later, we will discuss some profound demographic, political, and economic trends now under way that promise to be just as important to northerners’ lives in the coming decades.

  Greenland’s Fine Potatoes

  One of the more vivid media images of 2007 was one of happy Greenlanders tending lush green potato fields against a backdrop of icebergs melting away into the ocean. The diminished sea ice was wreaking havoc on seal hunting—Greenland’s finance and foreign affairs minister observed that subsistence hunting crashed by 75%—but people were beginning to plant potatoes, radishes, and broccoli. “Farming, an occupation all but unheard of a century ago, has never looked better,” trumpeted The Christian Science Monitor. By 2009 some fields were doing so well that Danish scientists started studying them, to learn why Greenland’s potatoes were growing even better than southern ones.311

  What could be a more iconic symbol of the world in 2050 than seal hunters turned farmers in one of the coldest places on Earth? But in terms of sheer caloric output, any climate-triggered boons to agriculture will not be realized on the narrow, rocky shores of Greenland, or indeed any other place in the Arctic. Similarly to what we saw for certain wild organisms, the pressure is a gradient from south to north, not a leap to the top of the planet. Summers there will always be brief, and its soils thin or nonexistent. A short-lived vegetable garden is one thing, but when it comes to producing major crops for global markets, any significant increases will be realized at the northern margins of present-day agriculture. There will be no amber fields of grain waving along the shores of the Arctic Ocean.