THE ARCTIC HAS CANARIES, TOO
Another four million people make their home at the top of the world, in the Arctic. Many of them are finding the ground shifting beneath their feet. Permafrost is constantly frozen ground that doesn’t thaw, even in the summer; hence its name. But temperatures across the Arctic are increasing twice as fast as the global average, so a lot of that permafrost is now starting to thaw. Thawing permafrost turns into quagmire, unstable ground for anything built on it. This leads to warped asphalt, cracked building foundations, and, ironically, imperiled pipelines. It’s estimated that Russia is already spending about $2 billion a year to shore up oil and gas pipelines on thawing permafrost in Siberia.
In 2003, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers found that most of the more than two hundred Native American villages in Alaska were already at imminent risk. Many remote communities in the far north are accessed solely by “winter roads” (such as those made famous in the History Channel TV series Ice Road Truckers) or rail lines. Villagers depend on these to stockpile basic necessities such as food, fuel, and building materials. As the Arctic warms, the winter road season is getting shorter, isolating many of these communities and cutting off key supply chains and transportation routes. In Canada, the cost of replacing these with all-season roads is estimated at $373,000 Canadian per kilometer of road or $600,000 U.S. per mile.
Terry Chapin is an ecologist who’s been tracking the impacts of a warming planet on Alaska for over fifty years. He has a bushy gray beard and, like many Alaskans, favors plaid shirts, fleece, and jeans. A former president of the Ecological Society of America, he created the concept of “earth stewardship” and, like most scientists, he’s worried about the future and wants everyone to understand why. So in 2019, he invited me to Alaska to share what I knew with community and faith groups throughout the state—and he wanted to show me what he and his colleagues were seeing, too.
TRACKING THE TICKING METHANE BOMB
I first arrived in Fairbanks, where we piled into a well-worn university van along with a group of high school students. With Terry at the wheel, we drove north over the roller coaster roads to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Permafrost Tunnel Research Facility. Chris Hiemstra, one of the scientists who works on this underground passageway, cheerfully handed us hard hats and instructed us to bundle ourselves into extra jackets before opening the door to a whole new world: a tunnel of frozen earth stretching deep into the darkness, with veins of ice running through it. Some veins were just a few fingers wide; others stretched all the way up the wall and overhead.
As permafrost thaws, so, too, do these giant veins of ice. That leaves huge cavities under the ground: without a proper foundation, roads can quickly drop a few feet or more. The permafrost under the roads in many places has thawed and refrozen many times. That’s why the roads surrounding Fairbanks were the bumpiest I’ve ever seen. Our hotel was full of road crews who’d been brought in to fix them. But it was often a futile task, considering that the next thaw would just crack them even further.
Entering the slanting permafrost tunnel, it was hard to comprehend the wonder of everything I was seeing. “This is the closest I’ll ever come to time travel,” I thought, as the students and I traversed the metal walkway through the tunnel. The tunnel’s portal had been cut through a layer of permafrost from a few thousand years ago, but by the end of the tunnel we had traveled back some forty thousand years.
As we walked, I noticed bones sticking out of the rough-hewn layers of ice and soil that made up the walls, from animals that had roamed the tundra millennia ago. “What’s that one?” I asked Chris, pointing to a jagged piece of bone. Casually, he replied, “Oh, that’s probably the leg bone of a mammoth.” Hanging from the roof were the roots of plants that were thousands of years old. They were still intact and, for Terry, completely recognizable. “Shrub willow,” he said, touching a set of frozen dirt-covered roots hanging down from the ceiling.
Farther down, along a shelf of ice that stuck out into the tunnel at eye level, Chris reached up and gently lifted a few perfectly intact and preserved leaves off the ice. They had dropped out of the permafrost in the last few days, he said. He put them in my hand; they looked like they had just fallen off the tree and shriveled up that week. They were still tinged with green, and you could see the veins. Willow again, said Terry. Yup, said Chris, probably about twenty to thirty thousand years old at this depth.
The entire tunnel smelled of very old cheese. When I was leaving, I finally asked why. Chris said they weren’t totally sure, but it was probably the smell of thousands-of-years-old organic material, including poop, thawing.
The plants and animal remains and, yes, the poop are why thawing permafrost matters to us all. As the organic material from plants and animals from so long ago begins to thaw and decompose, it produces methane, a gas that is thirty-five times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. And scientists are measuring it coming out of the thawing ground in the Arctic faster and faster.
After the tunnel, Terry loaded us all back in the van, and we drove out to Katey Walter Anthony’s study site at a lake outside Fairbanks. Katey is a biogeochemist who’s trying to get a handle on exactly how much methane is leaking into the atmosphere as the permafrost thaws. She’s built a methane collection system from garbage she originally collected while working in Siberia: a thick tarpaulin with a hole in the middle that opens into an empty two-liter soda bottle, a tap on the end of the bottle that can be opened or closed, and all of this held together with some elastic bands and a stick. She submerges the tarp in the water while a student stirs up the mud at the bottom of the lake with the stick. This releases the methane that’s been seeping up from the thawing ground under the lake. As it bubbles up through the water, it’s trapped by the tarp and funneled into the empty soda bottle. When the bottle’s about two-thirds full, she opens the tap and lights a match. Boom!
Every year, it seems, the numbers tick up. If human emissions continue unchecked, by the end of this century, scientists like Katey estimate that most of the world’s surface permafrost could thaw. This will release even more heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere that amplify the direct impacts of human-induced warming. As Katey says, these emissions are like a headwind our mitigation efforts are fighting against. And that affects us all—not just those of us who live in the Arctic.
INTRODUCING SOLASTALGIA
There’s a name for the mental or existential distress of our environment being changed in unwelcome ways. It’s solastalgia, and I heard it again and again as I traveled through Alaska, from people who could see their home changing literally before their eyes.
After Fairbanks, I went on to Anchorage. As I walked out of the airport, I could see someone at the bottom of the elevators jumping up and down holding a big welcome sign. It was Scott, who for years now had been providing patient and kind explanations to people on my Facebook page who were trying to pick a fight over the science.
Scott is an engineer who has lived in Alaska all his life. He told us how he grew up hiking its glaciers with his parents, as he drove caribou ecologist Tim Fullman and me up to the Byron Glacier. Its “observing station” is now far from the glacier’s edge. To catch a glimpse of the glacier through the blinding rain, we had to scramble across the slippery jumbled black rocks and ledges. These are uncovered as the glacier retreats faster and faster up the mountain, leaving the valley free of permanent ice and snow. Scott said he feels as if he’s missing a friend; what he loves is disappearing.
A few days later, in the coastal city of Juneau, Linda took me up to the highest point above the city. She’s a retiree who’s become a strong climate advocate in her community. She pointed across the channel to the mountains she and I could see on the other side. “Those are the Tongass peaks,” she said, blinking away a tear. “I’ve lived in Juneau for forty years. And every day of those forty years, whenever I looked out across the water, I could see the snowy peaks. But three years ago, that snow melte
d. Land was revealed that no human eye had ever seen, not even the Tlingit people whose descendants still live here today.” The Tongass Mountains are home to one of the few remaining old-growth temperate rainforests on the planet. The mountains were already threatened by logging; now, the loss of their summer snowpack puts their water supply at risk.
WHY SEEING IS BELIEVING
Climate change isn’t a future issue. It is here and now, for all of us. When we’re able to see its impacts with our own eyes, and understand what we’re looking at, this experience can breach many of the emotional and political frames we’ve built up in our minds.
My last talk in Anchorage was at a local evangelical church. There were some other Texans there that day: David Schechter, host of a television show called Verify that gets to the bottom of issues people aren’t sure about; his video crew; and Justin, a roofer from Dallas. The point of the show was to see if they could take someone who was extremely doubtful about climate change, although not a Dismissive, and change his mind.
A month before, David had taken Justin on a road trip around Texas. They sat down with me, with my colleague Andy Dessler at Texas A&M University, who’s an expert on climate modeling and policy, and with another colleague, Jay Banner from the University of Texas at Austin, who studies past climate using data from stalactites and stalagmites in caves. Justin and David also spoke with one of the few U.S. scientists with expertise in climate who dismiss the science and downplay the impacts—but that had to be by video, because we don’t have any such scientists in Texas.
After talking to the scientists and learning about the science and seeing how climate change was affecting Texas, Justin moved from being doubtful to being cautious—clearly, there was a lot more to this than he’d thought. But it was still hard to overcome a lifetime of thinking that this was just a liberal hoax. So David took him to Alaska, where they could see the melting permafrost and receding glaciers with their own eyes. They hiked out to one glacier with Brian Brettschneider, a climatologist who told Justin all about the crazy high temperature records that had been broken that very year. He explained how sea ice around the state melted completely for the first time in recorded history and wildfires had devastated the forests around Anchorage.
Then Justin attended my talk at the church, where I focused on how climate change was affecting real people, today. What we believe as Christians, about being good stewards or caretakers of the planet and caring for those less fortunate than us, is exactly why climate change matters to us.
I could see his mind connecting all the things he’d learned in the last few weeks as I spoke. Immediately afterward—with the cameras rolling—I finally got to ask him the question we’d all been dying to know the answer to: Had he changed his mind?
“Yes,” he said. “How could I not?
“But,” he continued, “how am I going to tell my friends about it?”
He has never met former Kiribati president Anote Tong, but he unconsciously echoed the sentiment of his words: “It is time for the world to wake up and understand: we are all Kiribati.”
10 NO TIME TO WASTE
“Every bit of warming matters. Every year matters and every choice matters.”
PETTERI TAALAS AND JOYCE MSUYA, IPCC SPECIAL REPORT ON GLOBAL WARMING OF 1.5 DEGREES
“You don’t have to know where we’ll end up. You just have to know what path we’re on.”
KIM COBB, A CLIMATE SCIENTIST COLLEAGUE OF KATHARINE’S
The window of time to prevent truly dangerous levels of change is closing fast. Despite what you may have heard, there’s no magic number, date, or threshold that will entirely save us from climate change’s effects. Trying to put a number on exactly how much global temperature change is “dangerous”—and how much carbon we can put into the atmosphere before we hit that level—is like trying to put a number on exactly how many cigarettes we can smoke before we develop lung cancer.
We know that the more we smoke, the greater the risk. But we also know there’s no single threshold before which our health is perfectly fine and after which it’s all over. It’s not as if we could smoke 9,999 cigarettes and we’d suffer no consequences at all, but if we smoked that 10,000th one, then lung cancer would bloom overnight. With both cigarettes and carbon emissions, all science can say is: the sooner we stop, the better.
* * *
As a climate scientist, my research focuses on how climate change affects people, places, and other living things. To do that, we have to calculate how fast, and by how much, climate could change in the future. This isn’t a new question. The very first person to ask—and answer—it was Swedish physical chemist Svante Arrhenius. His mother was a Thunberg, making him a distant cousin of a modern Thunberg you may have heard of, Greta.
Arrhenius won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1903, but he must have been a curious person, because in the 1890s he was wondering about something that had nothing to do with his work on ionic dissociation. Rather, he was asking, what will happen to Earth’s temperature as burning coal increases carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere? He figured it should be possible to calculate this using the physics and chemistry of the day. So he rolled up his sleeves and got on with it.
In 1895 he presented the results of his research to the Royal Swedish Academy of Science. The next year he summarized them in a study titled, “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground.” By season and by latitude, he calculated how much the planet would warm if humans increased the level of carbon dioxide by 50 percent, 100 percent (a doubling), or 200 percent (a tripling) compared to the 1890s.
Using what scientists understood of the physics of the atmosphere at that time, Arrhenius was also able to calculate how much faster the Arctic would warm than the rest of the planet, exactly as I saw when I visited there with Steve Amstrup and the Polar Bears International team in October 2015. As the polar bears see their world changing around them, so do we; but with one big difference. We’re the ones causing it.
At the time Arrhenius was doing his calculations, carbon dioxide levels had only risen by about 5 percent relative to their pre-industrial values of 280 ppm. He thought it would take centuries, maybe even millennia, for them to double or more. But as the Industrial Revolution accelerated, carbon emissions began to increase exponentially. By 1958, when another pioneering chemist, Charles Keeling, began to measure carbon dioxide at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, atmospheric levels were at 316 ppm, a 13 percent increase. Today, they’re over 420 ppm. That’s a 50 percent increase relative to pre-industrial levels. And carbon dioxide is well on its way to a tripling within this century if we humans don’t radically alter the trajectory we are on. Today, we know one crucial thing Arrhenius didn’t: how urgent this is.
HOW MUCH CARBON IS TOO MUCH?
The more carbon we produce, the faster the climate changes, and the greater the danger for all of us. The reason we can’t put exact dates or figures on risks is not because scientists don’t have a good idea of what the impacts will be at different levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It’s because different people assess risk differently and are differentially vulnerable to climate impacts.
So, the magic number? It’s as low as we can go. As far as we humans are concerned, the perfect temperature for us is the temperature we’ve already had for the past few thousand years. And the lower our total emissions are, the greater our chances of avoiding the vicious feedback cycles like methane emissions from thawing permafrost. As Petteri Taalas, secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization, and Joyce Msuya, deputy executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, wrote in the foreword to the IPCC’s Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 Degrees in October 2018: “Every bit of warming matters. Every year matters and every choice matters.”
Even if we meet the most stringent targets of the Paris Agreement, slashing global carbon emissions in half by 2030 and achieving net zero (where the amount of carbon we take up equals wha
t we produce) before 2060, Earth has already warmed by more than 1°C, or nearly 2°F, over the past hundred and fifty years. For some people in some parts of the globe, that’s already enough to be “dangerous.”
The Native American villagers in Alaska whose homes were judged to be at “imminent risk” almost two decades ago would agree. Some are already being forced to abandon their homes due to the warming they’ve already experienced. In Europe, if you talked to the family members of some of the seventy thousand people who died in the heat wave of 2003—a heat wave that was twice as likely as a result of a changing climate—they’d probably say the amount of change we’ve already experienced qualifies as dangerous. In western Canada and southern Australia, many whose homes are being lost to increasingly destructive wildfires would agree—climate change is dangerous now.
But for others, the impacts of climate change on our food, our water, and our safety are only now starting to become concerning. Changes aren’t likely to be widespread and persistent enough to pose a serious threat to our lives and livelihoods until we reach the Paris targets of 1.5 or 2°C. For still others, maybe some who live in a higher-latitude location with ample resources but few concerns about permafrost, sea level rise, or wildfire, it might be even longer before the mercury reaches a level that they would consider dangerous—perhaps 2.5 or even 3°C of warming.I
Here’s the problem, though. The time to limit the warming isn’t when we actually hit whatever target we choose. By then, it’s too late. It’s like quitting smoking after you’ve been diagnosed with some scary spots on your lungs. In the same way, we humans have to decide what’s dangerous well ahead of time and act now to prevent it. That’s why the goal of my own research has been to quantify the damage rising temperatures will inflict on the systems that sustain our lives—water, food, infrastructure, health—so that we can make wise decisions now.
Saving Us Page 11