Cold

by Bill Streever

  Fourier harbored a strong aversion to cold. He believed that wrapping up in blankets would improve his health. In 1830, wrapped in blankets, he tripped down a flight of steps. The fall killed him.

  The Swede Svante Arrhenius was not born until 1859, almost a decade after the end of the Little Ice Age. By then carbon dioxide had been frozen, Agassiz had become famous for his belief in the great Pleistocene Ice Age, and Lord Kelvin had developed a temperature scale with zero set at the limit of molecular motion. Arrhenius probably rode, or at least saw, an early bicycle, a direct descendant of the Draisine, invented when the Year Without Summer pushed the cost of grain and hay beyond reach and rendered horses unaffordable. In the April 1896 edition of the London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, Arrhenius wrote of the greenhouse effect. “Is the mean temperature of the ground in any way influenced by the presence of heat-absorbing gases in the atmosphere?” he asked. “Fourier maintained that the atmosphere acts like the glass of a hothouse, because it lets through the light rays of the sun but retains the dark rays from the ground.” Arrhenius went on to estimate that a doubling of carbon dioxide in the air would lead to a five-degree increase in average temperature. He believed that natural increases in carbon dioxide levels might have melted the great ice sheets of the Pleistocene. He speculated, for the first time, on how carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere from the smokestacks of the Industrial Revolution would warm the planet. Like Fourier, he appears to have harbored a certain aversion to cold: he welcomed the greenhouse effect and looked forward to a warmer world.

  For some time, no one worried much about climate change. The predictions were interesting but not relevant. It was a time of exploration and of scientific and technical revolution. The Franklin expedition, freezing and starving, probably resorted to cannibalism before perishing on a windswept gravel coast. Greely, after leaving a wake of corpses in the Arctic, failed to predict the School Children’s Blizzard. Hydrogen was liquefied, and then helium, at only seven degrees Fahrenheit above absolute zero. Einstein and Bose described a new state of matter, a condensate that would exist only near absolute zero. Onnes discovered superconductivity at seven degrees Fahrenheit above absolute zero. Clarence Birdseye marketed frozen foods. There were other distractions: the rise of communism, a deadly flu epidemic, a world war.

  And then, in the late 1930s, an English steam engineer named Guy Callendar found that the world’s temperatures had been increasing over the past century. Digging a bit more, he found that carbon dioxide levels also had increased. But the historical data were suspect. Old thermometers had precision problems. Carbon dioxide measurements changed every time the wind changed direction. Conventional wisdom suggested that carbon dioxide would dissolve in the world’s oceans. Callendar became a footnote in climatology textbooks.

  By the 1950s, scientists were measuring atmospheric carbon dioxide more accurately. A gifted oceanographer named Roger Revelle was writing about climate change and sea level rise. His key point was that carbon dioxide unleashed from fossil fuels would not simply dissolve in the oceans and disappear, as had been previously believed. “Human beings,” he wrote, “are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future.” Coupled with a new understanding of world population growth and its implications, the prophets warmed up to the idea that the world’s temperature might increase as a result of human emissions. They did not like the world they envisioned. They began to worry.

  For a time, climate change became something of a religious cause. One either believed or did not believe. The data were far from certain. The implications were huge. Industry representatives talked of climate change kooks and global warming crazies. Right-wing politicians ridiculed scientists. With each summer heat wave, the media recycled stories of a warming earth. With warming winters, the papers reran the stories from a slightly different angle. Often reporters botched the facts. People talked of a climate change debate, as if the reality of increased carbon dioxide and warmer temperatures could be discussed onstage, as if science could somehow be conducted under parliamentary rules.

  The confusion left the science vulnerable. Naysayers pointed to events of fifty-five million years ago, to the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, noting that the Arctic Ocean had warmed to seventy degrees, that global average temperatures had shot up five or ten degrees in a few thousand years, that the world had been hotter then than now. Yet the world had not ended. In fact, warming also had occurred in the midst of an ice age, in the heart of the Pleistocene. The climate change kooks and the global warming crazies pointed out that temperatures were rising quickly. Temperatures were rising much faster than they had fifty-five million years ago. The world, they said, did not end fifty-five million years ago, but habitats were flooded by rising sea levels. Animal and plant communities changed quickly. Today’s warming would be more abrupt. And today we call those habitats cities. Among the plant communities likely to change quickly are fields of grain and corn and okra and broccoli. Among the animal communities likely to change quickly are those that include cows and chickens and humans.

  The geologists, with a four-and-a-half-billion-year perspective, tended to camp with the naysayers. The biologists and the climatologists tended to camp with the climate change kooks. Over time, data and common sense made the kooks less kooky. For half a million years, carbon dioxide levels never passed three hundred parts per million, but the Industrial Revolution had sent them toward four hundred parts per million. Average temperature had risen a degree in a century. The risk that temperatures might keep rising was not acceptable. For the naysayers, the temperature rose and the warming tide turned. The heat-activated pendulum swung the other way and struck them squarely between the eyes. The kooks started to look wise. The naysayers started to look like kooks. Chemical companies started coming around. Oil companies started coming around. Car manufacturers started coming around. It suddenly seemed inevitable that the world would warm. Crops would fail as farms turned to desert. Sea level would rise as the remaining Pleistocene ice sheets melted away from Greenland and the snowfields and glaciers of Alaska and Canada turned to liquid. Long-term investments in low-lying Miami and Louisiana and the Maldives looked imprudent. Polar bears drowned in the growing stretches of open water that scarred the Arctic sea ice. Their cubs appeared undernourished and slow growing. Four reports of bear cannibalism were attributed to warming temperatures and less ice. If nothing could be done, the white bear would go extinct.

  Thanks to the Industrial Revolution, thanks to coal and oil and natural gas, thanks to more than six hundred million cars and trucks and buses, spring is fading into hothouse summer on planet Earth. Ten thousand years ago, spring arrived, and the Pleistocene Ice Age’s most recent bout of extensive glaciation began to fade, but not so much as to melt the polar ice. Now the real demise of the Pleistocene Ice Age, full-blown summer, may be on the way.

  The good news is this: the planet is not warming evenly. As ocean currents change, temperate Europe may become pleasantly frigid. And the Antarctic interior, surrounded by swirling winds thought to be driven in part by the hole in the ozone layer, has cooled. There will still be some use for Thinsulate and Gore-Tex, Hollofil and Quallofil. There will still be opportunities to wear a double layer of caribou skin.

  And there is this: the naysayers have not given up. At the very least, they feel that the threat is overstated, and they challenge the connection between changing climate and human activities.

  From Professor Bob Carter, Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Australia, with regard to Al Gore’s popular movie about global warming: “Gore’s circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic.”

  From Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “A general characteristic of Mr. Gore’s approach is to assiduously ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynami
c; they are always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that fear is much worse.”

  From Patrick Michaels, University of Virginia, on shifting animal and plant communities: “With all due respect, you would expect to see some slight changes in the distribution of plants and animals as the planet warms — or as the planet cools for that matter. It’s hardly newsworthy.”

  It is June ninth and fifty degrees in Anchorage. The caterpillars Fram and Bedford are dead. Their bodies, curled up in the bottom of their jar among dry leaves and branches, support a forest of fungus. The frozen mud I gathered, now thawed, is equally lifeless. The cold of the freezer may have been too sudden and perhaps too cold. Spring did not come for Fram and Bedford, nor for the frozen mud, any more than it is likely to come for James Bedford. Remove Bedford from his cryonic sepulcher filled with liquid nitrogen, lay him on a bed to warm, and all that is likely to result is a forest of fungus and the smell of death, a smell cryonically postponed but as inevitable as spring itself.

  In a ten-page open letter addressed to James Bedford “and those who will care for you after I do,” written in 1991 by a man describing himself as one of the caretakers of Bedford’s frozen body, the author talks about moving Bedford’s frozen remains from one unit to another. During the move, the author wrote, “we wrapped you in an additional sleeping bag, secured you in an aluminum ‘pod’ and transferred you to one of our new, state-of-the-art Dewars.” It is not clear if the author of the letter understood that the Dewar in which James Bedford was suspended — little more than an oversize thermos bottle — was named after its inventor, James Dewar, who had been the first to liquefy hydrogen at 418 degrees below zero, almost a hundred degrees colder than the temperature at which James Bedford now resides. The author saw other advantages to the new Dewar thermos that held Bedford: “No more careening around the freeway every year or so” to have the unit serviced, and the new unit could store patients vertically, holding four of them together in a single Dewar thermos, taking up less space than Bedford’s original horizontal unit had required.

  From Dr. Ralph Merkle, a believer in cryonics as a means of avoiding the alternative, which, he points out, is certain death: “Cryonics is an experiment. So far the control group isn’t doing very well.”

  From science and science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, during the early days of cryonics: “Although no one can quantify the probability of cryonics working, I estimate it is at least ninety percent — and certainly nobody can say it is zero.”

  From cryobiologist Dr. John Baust: “The individual who freezes himself or herself to come back in the future makes the assumption he will be a contributor to that society.”

  From cryobiologist Dr. Arthur Rowe, more adamantly a naysayer: “Believing cryonics could reanimate somebody who has been frozen is like believing you can turn hamburger back into a cow.”

  I telephone Alcor, a foundation that specializes in human and pet cryonics and that now looks after Bedford. Alcor refers to all its frozen wards as “patients.” Alcor depends on members for financial support. In exchange, members have the option of postmortem preservation by freezing, with future resuscitation dependent on currently unknown means. That is, members have the option of becoming patients. A recorded message thanks me for calling. “If you are reporting the death or near death of an Alcor member,” the recording says, “press two now.”

  I do not press two. Instead, I leave a message inquiring about Bedford’s well-being, but I do not expect a return call.

  At the start of the twenty-first century, certain migratory birds seem to be showing up at the wrong places and the wrong times. Cranes that once wintered in Spain and Portugal now stop in Germany. For red knots, which nest in Siberia and winter in Africa, the expansion of African deserts may be the end of the road. In Australia, sandpipers, kingfishers, and plovers arrive two weeks earlier and stay three weeks later than they did in 1960. In the Shetland Islands, seven thousand pairs of skuas, starving because of a change in water temperature and the subsequent exodus of the fish they relied on for food, fail to rear chicks. According to the National Wildlife Federation, Maine will lose nineteen species to a warmer climate, including the olive-sided flycatcher, the boreal chickadee, and the dark-eyed junco, but it will gain eleven, including the Carolina chickadee, the Kentucky warbler, and the loggerhead shrike. The willow flycatcher and the black-capped chickadee may leave California, but they will be replaced by the cave swallow and the prothonotary warbler.

  From Bert Lenten, executive secretary of the African-Eurasian Waterbird Agreement, on climate change: “Migratory birds are particularly vulnerable because of their use of several habitats during migration as stopover sites for feeding, resting, or to sit out bad weather.”

  From Robert Hepworth, executive secretary of the Convention on Migratory Species: “Species that adapted to changes over millennia are now being asked to make these adaptations extremely quickly because of the swift rise in temperatures.”

  From the World Wildlife Federation: “Birds are quintessential ‘canaries in the coal mine’ and are already responding to current levels of climate change.”

  Flowers and butterflies are canaries, too. Aspens are said to bloom twenty-six days earlier than they did a century ago. In the recent past, a Spaniard living in Barcelona could see the pretty little sooty copper butterfly in city gardens, but now he has to drive sixty miles north.

  Glaciers sing like canaries. Fifteen hundred square miles of Alaska’s Denali National Park are covered by glaciers. This is an area roughly equivalent to that of Rhode Island. The difference between the two: Rhode Island’s area remains reasonably stable, while that of Denali’s glaciers is shrinking. Compare photographs of Sunset Glacier in 1939 and 2004, and you will compare black-and-white mountainsides covered with snow and what must be blue ice to full-color mountainsides with patches of snow and no blue ice. Ditto for Mount Eielson photographs, Kahiltna Glacier photographs, and Muldrow Glacier photographs.

  What the photographs do not show is that glaciers retreat in thickness as well as extent. Park scientists fly out to glaciers in carbon-emitting helicopters, use ice radar to measure the thickness, and shake their heads in disbelief. At Wrangell–St. Elias National Park, deep in Alaska’s interior, where ice and snow cover an area larger than Connecticut, arrow shafts with intact feathers and spear points made from antlers pop up from newly thawed ground. At Glacier Bay National Park, along Alaska’s southeast coast, the ground itself, relieved of the weight of snow and ice, rebounds at a rate of more than an inch each year.

  The Beaufort Sea sings a song of less ice. In a second verse, it sings of openings in the pack ice that will be more abundant but less predictable than they were in the past. For narwhals, belugas, and bowhead whales hungry for a breath of air, this loss of predictability is not a pleasant song.

  On Alaska’s North Slope, when snow melts and then refreezes to form ice layers, as it sometimes does during warm winters, caribou that scratch out a living by hoofing aside snow may find themselves on unplanned diets. The same ice layers may trap voles and lemmings in their subnivean lairs.

  Capitalism itself sings like a canary. From the chief executive of a clothing chain whose sales plummeted with rising temperatures: “All my analysis and all our data within the business is saying that it’s a weather thing.”

  From Bill Ford Jr., executive chairman of Ford Motor Company: “We see climate change as a business issue as well as an environmental issue and we’re accelerating our efforts to find solutions.”

  From an international oil company: “Greenhouse gas levels are rising and the balance of scientific opinion links that rise to the increase in our planet’s surface temperatures. As a major provider of energy, we believe we have a responsibility to take a lead in finding and implementing solutions to climate change.”

  And from Alexander Cockburn in the June 9, 2007, edition of CounterPunch: “
Capitalism is ingesting global warming as happily as a python swallowing a piglet.”

  It is June nineteenth and fifty-five degrees on Alaska’s North Slope. I drive across the oil fields. The larger lakes remain half-covered with ice, but the only remaining snow stands in piles deposited by plows. The piles are filthy, laced with dust and road gravel.

  The landscape, though snow-free, remains brown. Arctic foxes, their coats mangy as they turn from winter white to summer brown, run across tundra soaked by meltwater. Skinny caribou, back from the migration and shedding winter fur, appear mangy, too. I pass king eiders and loons in now liquid ponds and hundreds of white-fronted geese staggering around on the tundra. Groups of ten or twenty snow geese forage along the edge of a road near the coast. Over the next twelve weeks, their chicks will hatch. The flightless hatchlings and their parents will march fifteen miles east across the tundra to feed in salt marshes. As summer progresses, the goslings will grow and fatten up and learn to fly. They will head south just as the snow starts to accumulate, staying ahead of the short days and the bitter winds.

  On the edge of a gravel road, I listen to a biologist describe his experiments with hibernating ground squirrels. “They look dead,” he says. “They are curled up. If you uncurl them, and they are alive, they will curl up again. If they are dead, they will not curl up again.” He collects hibernating animals from the field and takes them back to his laboratory. While they hibernate, he inserts probes in their brains. He measures their temperature. Funding, he says, comes from the military and the medical community. In addition to being world-class hibernators, they can, for reasons not fully understood, survive massive blood loss. Behind him, out of his line of sight on the tundra, a ground squirrel stands on its hind feet, uncurled and vigilant, posing like a prairie dog. Until a few weeks ago, this squirrel had been nearly frozen, curled up. Farther behind, the Putuligayuk River flows gently, ice-free, the sudden flush of breakup already over. Between me and the river, wooden piles, left over from a long-abandoned drilling operation, have been frost-heaved out of the ground. Little mounds of gravel cover the tops of the piles several feet above the ground. Between the piles with their mounded gravel, male plovers dance about, spreading their wings and hopping above sprigs of grass, hoping to attract females. It has been said that they fly halfway around the world with no greater purpose in mind than sex. It might be better said that they fly halfway around the world with no lesser purpose in mind than sex. With sex out of the way, they will fly south again, leaving to the females the responsibilities of nesting, egg sitting, feeding of young, and flight school.