From there it was a short step to an exciting question: if we could cut Arctic air pollution, especially fine “black carbon,” an aerosol that is particularly good at soaking up the sun’s rays, could we do something to slow Arctic warming? It turned out to be a hot topic. Garrett had been to a workshop a few months earlier.6 “There is an idea that aerosols are contributing to the warming of the Arctic, so the logical conclusion is that reducing aerosol transport to the Arctic could help ameliorate Arctic warming in a way that is easier to address than carbon dioxide emissions,” he explained.
Of course, I should have known that the idea that soot might help melt enormous areas of Arctic ice is not entirely new. When I was chatting with Olav Orheim, head of the Norwegian International Polar Year program, he told me that the Soviets had thought hard about it long ago. They even considered dropping soot on the ice in the spring in order to keep open an Arctic sea route across the top of Siberia. The soot would help melt the ice, making a fleet of icebreakers unnecessary. “Once they had made the calculation, they discovered that it would take over one thousand planes every day to do it, so they dropped the idea,” said Orheim. “But it was actually quite seriously proposed.”
Charles Zender, at the University of California at Irvine, has been studying the impact of “dirty snow” on climate for a decade. Zender, working with Mark Flanner from the University of Michigan, estimates that black carbon falling on snow and ice has contributed 0.5°C to the overall warming of between 1°C and 2°C of the Arctic since the “preindustrial era.”7 That is quite staggering. It implies that between a half and a quarter of the Arctic warming is caused by air pollution, not greenhouse gases. His colleague Mark Flanner has published data showing that the air pollution from burning fossil fuels combined with burning “biofuels” (the wood burned in stoves, mainly in the developing world) causes almost as much springtime snow-cover melt across Eurasia as does the greenhouse warming caused by carbon dioxide.8
The possibility of cutting air pollution to quickly cool the climate and help the ice is gaining credence, says Zender. Black carbon leaves the atmosphere in weeks, not the hundred or so years of carbon dioxide. In late 2007, he and several other scientists testified before the U.S. Congress about the possibility. “[Congressional] staffers and members of Congress who are considering legislation to mitigate climate change know that greenhouse gas reductions are necessary, and in the end, they are the only means of dealing with climate change,” Zender said. “But they are aware that reducing greenhouse gas emissions has no instantaneous effect on climate. They are looking for something that can have a more immediate effect.”
In his testimony, Zender explained that 30 percent of the current warming would be removed if all the different aerosols emitted by burning fossil fuels and biofuels were cut. “We must consider the combination as a whole,” explains Zender, “because they are emitted by the same combustion processes; you can’t stop one without the other. We have shown that if you stop emitting them, you can get a fairly quick climate benefit.”
The sooner action is taken the better. “If you wait twenty years and say, OK, it really is getting warm, let’s do something; then you won’t get as much benefit from reducing black carbon simply because snow has melted away in the meantime. The amount of mitigation is really proportional to the area of snow and ice there is left,” Zender says.
If it is all so logical, why isn’t the world rushing to tackle black carbon emissions? One reason is that the calculations are complicated. Remember that volcanic eruptions can cool the earth by injecting aerosols high into the atmosphere where they act like a giant sun shade. Yet dust that falls on ice warms the earth. Depending on the type of aerosol and where it goes, aerosols may cool the planet or warm it. That is why Zender insisted that he had to look at all the aerosols produced by burning fuels. He had to take into account both effects to be sure that cutting those aerosols would cool the planet.
That cooling is hard to calculate precisely. The impact on ice cover is even harder to determine. I asked Patricia Quinn from the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, who has been making measurements of black carbon up in Barrow, Alaska, for almost a decade, 9 whether she thought we could predict the impact of cutting black carbon on the ice. “It would be hard to put a number on that,” she explained, “because there is so much that affects the ice including all that natural variability, but it is something we can do in the near term. Doing something about carbon dioxide is going to take decades and decades to see an effect.”
At that point I left the scientists and went in search of activists to see if there was any hope that the world would act really quickly and take a gamble on cutting Arctic air pollution. Before long I found Clean Air-Cool Planet, a pressure group based in Washington, D.C., that tackles exactly that issue and was set up by Rafe Pomerance, a well-known campaigner whose career has spanned Friends of the Earth and the U.S. State Department. He directed me to Pam Pearson, a former U.S. diplomat with a long track record in international environmental affairs. She was pushing the idea of cutting black carbon emissions at the UNFCCC climate negotiations in Poznan, Poland, in December 2008 and to the Arctic Council nations.10
I quickly learned that the lack of certainty makes it tougher to overcome the key obstacle to progress: the need for international action.11 “The issue is that you can’t right now say exactly how much cutting black carbon is going to get you in the Arctic,” Pearson told me when I called her in Sweden where she now lives. “We can say that it will help, but of course policy makers want a cost-benefit analysis and we don’t have those kinds of figures right now.”
Still, she is optimistic. There is one potential win in her sights, being helped along by some startling imagery from the scientists’ town of Ny Alesund back in Svalbard. When I visited Ny Alesund I experienced the pure, unspoiled Arctic the way it should be. Sitting by the old mooring mast for the zeppelin that carried the explorers Roald Amundsen and Umberto Nobile to the North Pole in 1926, I could see right across the fjord in front of me to a huge glacier and a striking pair of matching pyramidal mountains in the far distance.
Researchers at the air pollution monitoring station on the mountain behind the tower, appropriately named Zeppelin and reached by a ski lift from the town, can tell you horror stories of what happens when pollution arrives. Then, the mountains across the fjord fade into the haze and the air turns a deep orange-brown. Soon the concentrations of pollutants are as high here in the middle of the Arctic as they would be in a big-city rush hour.
Andreas Stohl of the Norwegian Institute for Air Research in Kjeller, Norway, tracked the worst pollution event on record, in April and May 2006, by examining satellite pictures.12 As he puts together a series of images, he can follow a great plume of smoke that blots out the Arctic land back to where it came from: enormous agricultural fires in Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, and the Baltic nations. Fields were being burned before planting to control insects and disease.
Pearson sent me maps of agricultural fires around the world taken by heat-detecting satellites. In early spring there is just a sprinkling of fires around the northern hemisphere. Come April, they have grown into a terrifying band of fire between the 50th and 60th parallels, right across Europe and deep into Asia. The fires reach across Russia, Ukraine, and farther east. In May, the band of fire is wider and brighter still, with fires now reaching across the top of Mongolia and right to Russia’s Pacific coast. Smaller patches light up the central United States and Canada, from Saskatchewan and Manitoba down through the Dakotas and on to Iowa.
This worldwide spring burn of fields comes at a bad time for the Arctic—and the world. Smoke makes its way to the Arctic and on to the ice just as the sun returns to the north. The changed albedo speeds the spring melt and kick-starts a wider feedback that melts even more ice. Ironically, as the Arctic grows warmer, it becomes more vulnerable to pollution from the south. The dome of cold air over the Arctic effectively blocks warmer air from comin
g up from the south in spring and summer. With a warmer Arctic, the barrier is lower and pollution from warmer areas ever farther south can get though to the Arctic. “In 2006 there was an abnormally warm springtime in the Arctic so pollution that may not have been able to penetrate the Polar Dome if it had been a colder year in the Arctic was able to get through,” explains Quinn.
Black carbon from these fires is reaching Alaska, too. In April 2008, a NOAA aircraft picked up samples of haze from the northern Alaskan skies and traced them back to forest fires around Lake Baikal in Russia and field burning in Kazakhstan. Carsten Warneke and colleagues from the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, warned of yet another feedback loop. As the Arctic warms, snow vanishes earlier, the forest fire season begins earlier and lasts longer, and yet more black carbon is sent north, warming the Arctic even more.13
The good news is that thanks to horror stories like that 2006 pollution event, the wider political world is beginning to wake up to the climate threat from black carbon. In early April 2009, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledged new initiatives to hit black carbon. Later in the month the Arctic Council, at its biannual ministerial meeting, recognized the potential for slowing ice melt quickly. That is important as action needs to come from Russia, one of the council members. It won’t be easy. As a report from the campaigning group Clean Air Task Force points out, the top emitters of Arctic black carbon from agricultural fires are Russia, Kazakhstan, China, the United States, and Canada. In the first three big polluting nations, open field burning is already banned but the ban is very hard to enforce.14
The next target is a lot harder: the fine black carbon that pours out of diesel engines in countries all around the world, including the United States, which is responsible for about 6 percent of the world total. The dirtiest forms of diesel are being slowly phased out and particle traps that remove black carbon particles before they leave the engine exhaust are being mandated. The problem is that new regulations are going to be too late for the Arctic. “You need to accelerate it and you need to retrofit. Retrofitting is the big issue,” says Pearson. Some of the Arctic nations are showing willingness to move forward and others are not. Bringing public pressure to bear will be critical. So too will the future message from the sea ice. If more spectacular collapses in the ice area seize the public imagination and the attention of politicians, then action might be fast. “The Arctic nations are becoming real leaders on this question because the Arctic is coming apart,” says Pomerance.
My encounter with Baron Nordenskiöld has led me far and left me optimistic. Something can be done. We don’t know how big the impact will be, but it might slow warming and it might slow the ice melt. Every extra bit of time is time to find better solutions. I’ve also grown fond of the baron. Reading his travel journals I can’t help feeling envious of how innocently he went on his adventures to unexplored places in a great wild world, where he never dreamed that “ice dust” could have come all the way from Europe’s industrial furnaces. He describes setting off on the Greenland ice with his faithful servant, “the Lapp Lars,” who carried “a wooden club, with which he had slain more than twenty-five brown bears, full of marks from their teeth; and his eyes sparkled at the thought of encountering a white one.”15 We would spare the white bears now, but with the same spirit we might yet be able to keep the black carbon away from the white ice.
Chapter Seventeen
THE FUTURE OF THE ARCTIC
When I began this book, not long after that first fateful encounter with a polar bear, I saw a sped-up movie of the Arctic and its ice. I remember my surprise at how the ice whirled around the Arctic and flew through the channels between the Canadian islands as a year ran by in a few minutes.
That movie was shown by Douglas Bancroft, the enthusiastic new director of the Canadian Ice Service at a conference in Washington, D.C., in August 2007. He had put it together before anyone knew that the ice would just go on shrinking away that summer. Bancroft did have another catastrophe to report: a nine-mile-long chunk of the Ayles Ice Sheet, which had been sitting there for 3,000 years, had recently broken away from the north of Ellesmere Island.
As I approached the end of this book, I called Bancroft to see what he had made of the eighteen months since that conference. He was still enthusiastic. “Ice is hot,” he said. “I’ve never been busier and I’ve never been less bored in my whole life.” I mentioned that enormous ice sheet breaking away.
“Yes, we did lose Ayles over two years ago,” he said. “But last year [2008] we lost three ice sheets. Losing one is interesting, but losing three in a single summer! A whole multiyear ice shelf pulled away from the Arctic archipelago. We have a billion-ton iceberg that calved off the Petermann glacier which is now down at 64° north. We had Beaufort Sea multiyear ice fragmenting and blowing away. We had holes in the ocean open up in the fairly far north.” I could almost see the movie of the Arctic falling apart. But what of the future?
“I was stunned by 2007,” Bancroft said. “The summer of 2008 was very close. I still have great difficulty to forecast what’s going to happen on an annual and interannual basis. But it is very clear that the projections that were made five years ago that the Arctic will be ice-free in 2100 are wrong. It’s going to happen a lot sooner than that. Some forecasts talk about 2015 as being seasonally ice-free and others 2040 or 2045. I don’t know precisely where it will lie between these two bookends. But after seeing another year I may have an opinion.”
That summary of the central issue of this book fits everything I have learned. The Arctic ice is going, but we don’t know quite how fast it will go. Predicting what will happen in any one year remains tough. With new data and a little more time to see how the natural variability of the Arctic interacts with the underlying thinning, the future may be a lot clearer. One more year is important. The winter of 2009 was very cold and built ice, but by August the area of surviving ice was below that of 2008. What happens next may tell us whether we are on a trajectory to ice-free summers in 2015 or somewhere closer to 2045.
Whichever route the ice is headed on, it is going too fast for all the creatures that depend on it. There are the iconic big beasts of the Arctic: the polar bear, walrus, narwhal, ringed seal, and the beluga and bowhead whale. And there are the smaller creatures we scarcely know, but which larger life relies on, from the Arctic cod down to the cold-water copepods and the ice algae at the base of the Arctic food chain. All will have to struggle to adapt and survive in the coming transformation of the Arctic. A transformation is what it will be—if you are able to take a philosophical view of the future. Louis Fortier, who had explained the mysteries of Arctic cod to me, put it like this:
“If you look at it simply from the point of view of biological productivity, that will increase as the ice disappears. It’s just that the life there, the specialists which we are all fond of, like the polar bear, walrus, and some other species which we all have in our unconscious mind, are going to get into trouble. For the rest, the ecosystem is going to be much more productive.”
He is right, of course, but is there comfort in knowing that the polar bear will be replaced by the killer whale as the Arctic’s top predator, in a sea alive with southern fish? I am not so sure. But less ice will most likely mean sunnier, more productive oceans. There are already seasonally ice-covered seas farther south, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, for example, which are very different from the Arctic now but which it may come to resemble in the future.
For the people of the Arctic the opening seas may also bring a transformation, but of what kind is even more uncertain than the fate of the polar bear, as it is tied up with the global economy and regional and international politics. I do not make too much of the possibility of military conflict or fights over the riches of the North Pole. Most of the wealth of the Arctic lies within clear boundaries already, and there are rules laid out in the Law of the Sea for those who want to claim more.
The oil, gas, mining, and shipping ind
ustries may all benefit from the thinning ice as it makes the Arctic more accessible. But I’m not going to predict an automatic bonanza for the Arctic people. I have just seen too many ghost towns and too many of the perils of relying on resource development.
Pyramiden, the mine in the sky, is the greatest ghost town of all. It is not easy to get to: you must take a small boat in Svalbard for a three-hour journey across the Isfjord.
Pyramiden lies at the foot of a vast pyramid-shaped mountain, topped off by a giant square mass of cliffs that recall an Aztec temple.1 You can spot the mine long before the boat reaches the shore. Its entrance is halfway up the mountain, where two covered conveyor systems snake steeply up the slope to meet a great black heap of spoil running down over the red-brown rock. The coal seams are buried inside the mountain rather than down under the ground. Close to the water are huge gantry cranes for loading the coal and a giant power station with two tall metal chimneys. Nearby stands a once white, four-story building, its empty windows looking out to the sea over heaps of rusted cargo containers. A vertical line of giant Russian letters spells out “PYRAMIDEN” on its front.
This was where the Soviet Union used everything in its power to subdue the Arctic and lost. No one lives in Pyramiden now, but it was once home to an army of 800 proud Soviet miners and their families. Thousands of tons of soil were brought in from Murmansk so that grass could be grown. In summer the silent fields are still lush with purple-stemmed grasses swaying in the wind, but the pigs they once fed are long gone. You pass the rows of heated greenhouses where vegetables were grown. Deeper inside the town are two heated swimming pools, schools, and rows of tall apartment blocks and administration buildings. The giant power station had plenty of coal to keep everyone warm
After the Ice Page 28