The Great White Bear

by Kieran Mulvaney

  By the time I had resolved my inner dialogue, the lights had faded and disappeared, and I closed my eyes once more.

  The morning revealed a pattern of bear tracks around and beneath the camp and, a couple of hundred yards away, the same two bears lying where they had wrestled away the evening before, resting now in the fresh layer of snow that had lightly dusted them overnight. When they awoke, they stretched and moved toward each other again. And we watched from a nearby buggy as once more they sparred.

  As polar bears almost always are, they were silent, their mood and intent conveyed through body language. They began with a kind of ritualized pre-dance, mouths open but tilted downward, heads held low. Only when each had convinced the other of a lack of aggressive intent did they begin, leaping at each other, grappling on their hind legs, nibbling and gnawing on each other, using their giant paws to push and shove each other, then collapsing to the ground and wrestling, one bear once more on its back, the other nipping at it until they squirmed once more to their feet, rose up on their hind legs, and began again. The bear that appeared to be on the receiving end of most of the exchanges sought on occasion to turn away and even run off a short distance but received by way of a response nothing more sympathetic than a bite on the rear and a resumption of the engagement.

  Only when both bears had had enough, the physical exertion causing them to overheat and seek the cooling comfort of the snow, did the engagement temporarily cease. As it did so, a female and cubs appeared over the horizon, the two offspring glued to their mother's side as she marched in the direction of the lodge and then, catching the scent of the males, paused and stood on her hind legs, smelling the air. Apparently satisfied that the sources of the odor posed at worst a mild threat, she continued onward, albeit on a path that took them a greater distance from the males than their original course would have done. Suddenly, the two cubs, perhaps themselves noticing the juvenile males, bolted in the opposite direction; but the mother did not break her stride, did not pause or in any way react to the cubs' fright, and within seconds they had collected their nerve and resumed their position at her side.

  The young males in turn showed only a casual interest in the visitors, raising their heads briefly but lacking either the energy or the inclination to pull their entire bodies away from the cool comfort of the snow. A new arrival, however, produced a greater stir. This was an adult male, its gender and maturity clearly evident in its size and its more rounded physique.* His approach caused more apparent concern in the mother, who now led her cubs away from the lodge, past the lounging adolescents, beneath our buggy, and to a safe distance, her pace fractionally more hurried than before, her gaze cast frequently in the direction of the approaching bull.

  Now, too, the subadult that had appeared the more enthusiastic to spar with his peer and appeared to have gained the upper paw in most of the exchanges rose to his feet and set off eagerly to intercept the interloper; in a more territorial species, his actions might be interpreted as a challenge or a threat, but in this instance his motivations could only be guessed at. Perhaps it was an invitation to spar, perhaps simply an overdose of teenage hubris. Whatever the case, it became immediately apparent that the move had been a mistake.

  The two bears had almost touched noses when the younger one froze on the spot. Whatever the means by which he had done so, the older male had evidently conveyed, in a fraction of a second, that the two animals were not in any way peers and that the subadult had clearly overstepped his boundaries. As if at once recognizing the error of his ways, the youngster began to move slowly away, but in so doing contrived to back himself up against the wheels of the lodge; still keeping his face toward the adult, who had barely moved, he painstakingly maneuvered his rump so that it was free of the obstruction and continued to withdraw. Only then, perhaps because the younger bear was no longer trapped and was free to escape, did the adult move after him, pacing forward, obliging the would-be rival to continue backing up with his head in a low, submissive position, his mouth open. Seemingly satisfied that a sufficient degree of obsequiousness had been displayed, the adult now lay down in the snow and began to groom himself. At this, the juvenile turned and started to jog away; but evidently he had, and not for the first time, misread the situation. The adult leaped to his feet, quickly chased the youngster down, bit him on the rear, and forced him to once more turn and demonstrate his fealty as the older bear lay down to clean himself anew. After another few minutes of submission, the adult was apparently satisfied; when the youngster turned to leave a second time, the adult did not protest, licking his fur quietly as the juvenile returned to his patch in the snow and went back to sleep.

  We moved on.

  The snow was icy and hardened, blown by the harsh winds into tightly packed mounds of crystal sugar. The sun repeatedly threatened to emerge from behind the clouds, and when, at the midpoint of the afternoon, it carried out that threat, its rays reflected sharply off the packets of silvery snow.

  We lurched across the tundra until we came upon two bears dozing in the sun by the left side of the trail. The snow appeared disturbed, suggesting they had been sparring. We drew up to them slowly; they looked at us casually. One hauled itself to its feet and wandered over, sniffed the front tire of the buggy, and began to lick and lightly chew it.* It walked in front of us, licked and chewed on another tire, found a patch of perfectly polar bear—size snow, and lay down in the shade cast by the buggy. In due course, the other bear joined it, each bear now resting its head on its paw, their noses close together and their rumps farther apart, forming a V shape in the shadow.

  I slipped outside onto the viewing deck, stood at the edge, my hands in my pockets, and gazed at the bears as they dozed. Periodically, one would open its eyes and look directly at me. I wondered what, if anything, it was thinking. Was it completely indifferent to our presence, so inured to buggy traffic that it barely even paid attention? Was it comfortable but wary? Or was it in fact displaying the predatory patience for which polar bears are famed, lying quietly in anticipation of the moment when one of us would lean too far forward and into striking range?

  The bear closed its eyes again.

  In the distance, the waters of the bay rippled slightly. I hunkered down into my coat as an angry wind whipped off the tundra. I pressed myself up against the rear of the buggy to protect myself, and then, all at once, the wind died down, and there was silence.

  Melt

  Evening on Buggy One.

  The descending sun angled the last of its light through the windows as we assembled tables and chairs and arranged paper plates of cheese and crackers. It would have required an especially enthusiastic realtor to describe the furnishings even as functional, but compared to the progressively less clement conditions on the other side of the thin walls, as a rapidly strengthening wind buffeted the buggy's exterior, the setting provided a feeling of protective comfort.

  Our visitors arrived, a dozen or so, blowing out their cheeks and rubbing their arms as they escaped the elements and entered our tiny sanctuary. Their journey had hardly been expeditionary in nature—a short walk from the Tundra Buggy Lodge, next to which, after a day of lurching across the tundra in vain search of polar bears, we were now docked—but sufficient in the circumstances for the air outside to chill fingers, bite at cheeks, and make the unremarkable surroundings in which they stood a welcome destination.

  To the accompaniment of the nibbling of snacks and sipping of the finest boxed wine northern Manitoba had to offer, Robert Buchanan provided a brief tour—if it could be so described, given that it required no physical movement on anybody's part other than a slight turning of the head. Here, below the floor, was the cage—"Except we don't like to call it a cage; we prefer to call it a platform"—from which it was possible to photograph polar bears closely and safely. Over there were computer monitors, camera equipment, and wireless Internet portals, which among them held the promise of making polar bear research more versatile and comfortable. No longer did wa
tching bears require endless days shivering on top of an observation tower at Cape Churchill; the installation of remote cameras meant that at least some observations could be conducted more comfortably and just as effectively anywhere from Buggy One to a base in more salubrious climes.

  "What we're looking to understand from this research," Buchanan continued, "are three things. What is the census of the bears and how is it changing? What is the movement of these bears? And we use satellite tracking, radio collars, and other mechanisms to determine that. And what are the geographic pockets where these bears are going to survive? Because in all honesty, it is our belief—and I pray every night that I am wrong about this—that this species will not be here for future generations. What you are seeing here will not be here in the next century. We can be sad about that, or we can be motivated to do something about it."

  The audience was captive and sympathetic. Buchanan could address his congregation without fear of contradiction or need for explication. Those assembled understood his meaning and nodded sagely and sadly in agreement.

  "I want you to do me a favor," he continued. "When you're out there tomorrow" (and here he nodded over his shoulder and out the window of the buffeted buggy to the tempestuous tundra outside) "and you look at a polar bear..."

  "If we see one!" interjected one of the small crowd good-naturedly; it had not been a successful couple of days for polar bear viewing, and buggy drivers had been reduced to feigning enthusiasm for sightings of ptarmigans and arctic hares.

  Buchanan pivoted to provide sympathetic explanation—"The problem is, when the weather's like this, the bears tuck themselves in the willows and stick their big butts out to protect themselves against the wind"—before returning swiftly to his theme.

  "When you're out there tomorrow, do me a favor," he repeated. "Look at a polar bear and close your eyes, just for a second, and imagine if we are the last generation to see a polar bear. We can't allow that to happen. We just can't."

  The call from the lodge that dinner was ready arrived on cue, Buchanan's words lingering in the air for a second before they were replaced by the sounds of zippers and Velcro fasteners as the assembly readied itself for the brief return journey. The small crowd made its way, one at a time forcing the door into the resistant wind, which announced its presence with an angry, high-pitched howl.

  On one level, warm is relative. Cold is a matter of opinion.

  To the visitors who shrank into their thick coats as they hustled out of Buggy One and back into the Tundra Buggy Lodge, there was no question. The fierce wind that roared off Hudson Bay was probing for any kind of entrance, any opening that would enable it to slice into exposed or inadequately insulated flesh. Its aggressive onslaught served only to exacerbate the ambient temperature, which nudged slowly downward with each passing day.

  It was cold.

  But for the polar bears that lay just out of sight, the wind carried a different message. Wrapped in protective layers of blubber and fur, built for comfort in the coldest of conditions, they huddled in the willows, their large rumps turned protectively outward. Hunger pangs were building, the need to hunt was growing, and the wind, far from chilling them to their ursine bones, served only to remind them with its relative mildness that the sea ice they depend on had yet to arrive.

  It was warm.

  But there is, of course, a more objective measure, and while weather may change from hour to hour and day to day—the mercury falling then rising, the wind rising then falling—over longer time periods, studies of temperature and climate can reveal a bigger picture. And as Buchanan had alluded to, and his visitors understood all too well, as cold as it may have felt to them at this particular time on this particular day, that bigger picture showed the emergence over the past several decades of an unmistakable trend.

  The planet generally, the Arctic particularly, and Hudson Bay specifically were growing warmer.

  Earth's climate is not, and never has been, constant. It varies from decade to decade, millennium to millennium, eon to eon.

  From about 750 to about 580 million years ago, for example, Earth, it seems, was all but covered with glaciers, a phenomenon referred to by some scientists as Snowball Earth. At the other end of the spectrum, from approximately 250 million years ago to roughly 50 million years ago, the planet was considerably warmer than today; on either side of the extinction event that spelled the demise of the dinosaurs, average temperatures were as much as 9°F above contemporary averages.

  At various points in its history, from relatively recently to hundreds of millions of years in the past, Earth's climate has been affected to varying degrees and in varying lengths of time by a suite of factors. Volcanic eruptions, if of sufficient quantity or ferocity, can slightly reduce the amount of solar radiation reaching the planet's surface, bringing about a degree (in the metaphorical, not literal, sense) of cooling for a number of years or even decades. Earth's orbit is slightly elongated rather than perfectly circular, its axis rotates around an imaginary centerline, and its tilt goes up and down, and all three shift on regular cycles; an intersection of two of these—its tilt and its axis—combined to flood the Northern Hemisphere with solar energy around 15,000 years ago and bring an end to the last Ice Age.

  But the most consistent factor in Earth's climate warming or cooling is the composition of its atmospheric gases, a notion that was first mooted early in the nineteenth century by French scientist Joseph Fourier. He wondered why, given that solar radiation was constantly hitting the surface of Earth, the planet didn't keep heating up and ultimately become as hot as the star it orbited. The obvious answer, he concluded, was that energy was being radiated back out to space; but when he worked out the arithmetic, the answer to his equations was an Earth that was below freezing. The explanation, he surmised, was that the atmosphere was trapping some of that heat—as if, he said, the planet were a box covered by a pane of glass, through which, as in a greenhouse, sunlight could enter but heat did not escape.

  In 1859, British scientist John Tyndall sought to identify which of the gases in the atmosphere would be most likely to perform such a feat. Through a series of tests in his laboratory, he determined that the atmosphere's primary constituents, oxygen and nitrogen, were transparent to the sun's infrared radiation and thus not a factor. Methane, however, was, as Spencer Weart describes it in The Discovery of Global Warming, "as opaque as a plank of wood"; so, too, was a gas of seemingly little consequence in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide. It seemed unlikely that carbon dioxide on its own could have much impact on temperatures, reasoned Tyndall, because it constituted such a small percentage of atmospheric gases. Of likely greater import, he proposed, was water vapor, which is a more voluminous greenhouse gas and which, Tyndall poetically declared, "is a blanket more necessary to the vegetable life of England than clothing is to man."

  Thirty-seven years later, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius realized that a small increase in carbon dioxide might warm up the atmosphere sufficiently to allow it to hold more water vapor—which would in turn lead to further warming. Arrhenius also recognized that such increases in carbon dioxide levels could result from industrial processes, specifically the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil. Because those fuels contain carbon, their combustion returns carbon to the atmosphere, where it combines with oxygen to create CO2. At the time, the amount of carbon that had been released was, he calculated, insufficient to make much difference; but, he reckoned, were the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to double, global temperatures could increase by as much as 8°F to 9°F. Based on the emission rate at the time, he estimated that such an eventuality would not unfold for at least two thousand years. A little more than a century later, his calculations are being put to the test far more rapidly than he imagined.

  Scientists employ a number of devices to measure past climate and atmospheric conditions. Because, absent the invention of a time machine, these conditions must be inferred, the evidence on which they rely is called proxy data. Those
can include anything from historical records—such as diaries and ships' logs—to the distribution of fossil corals and the rings in trees. Of particular value, however, in determining levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide up to 800,000 or so years into the past are ice cores, cylindrical samples gathered by drilling deep into the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, where thousands upon thousands of tiny air bubbles have collected over the eons, perfect snapshots of past atmospheric composition.

  By analyzing such ice cores, researchers have been able to determine that during the last Ice Age, levels of CO2 in the atmosphere were approximately 200 parts per million (ppm). In preindustrial times, those levels were closer to 285 ppm. Since the middle of the eighteenth century, however, and the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, those levels have grown, steadily at first and then with increasing rapidity. In 1958, the first year of a continuous measurement of atmospheric CO 2 levels from Mauna Loa in Hawaii, that figure had climbed above 310 ppm. It has increased since, and at the time of this writing, in late 2009, it is close to 390 ppm. The difference between now and the period before the Industrial Revolution, in other words, is greater than the difference between immediately preindustrial times and the Ice Age.

  As a consequence, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), global temperature has increased by an average of 1.3°F over the past century, and average Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the second half of the twentieth century were very likely greater than in any 50-year period over the past 500, and quite possibly the last 1,300, years. And global temperatures are continuing to climb, ever more steeply: the 1980s were the hottest decade on record, until the 1990s, which were, on average .25°F warmer. The first decade of the twenty-first century was warmer still—.36°F warmer than the nineties.