Part Two
CLIMATE
4
A NEW WORLD
BILL MCKIBBEN
Imagine we live on a planet. Not our cozy, taken-for-granted earth, but a planet, a real one, with dark poles and belching volcanoes and a heaving, corrosive sea, raked by winds, strafed by storms, scorched by heat. An inhospitable place.
It's hard. For the ten thousand years that constitute human civilization, we've existed in the sweetest of sweet spots. The temperature has barely budged; globally averaged, it's swung in the narrowest of ranges, between fifty-eight and sixty degrees Fahrenheit. That's warm enough that the ice sheets retreated from the centers of our continents so we could grow grain, but cold enough that mountain glaciers provided drinking and irrigation water to those plains and valleys year round; it was the “correct” temperature for the marvelously diverse planet that seems right to us. And every aspect of our civilization reflects that particular world. We built our great cities next to seas that have remained tame and level, or at altitudes high enough that disease-bearing mosquitoes could not overwinter. We refined the farming that has swelled our numbers to take full advantage of that predictable heat and rainfall; our rice and corn and wheat can't imagine another earth either. Occasionally, in one place or another, there's an abrupt departure from the norm—a hurricane, a drought, a freeze. But our very language reflects their rarity: freak storms, disturbances.
In December 1968 we got the first real view of that stable, secure place. Apollo 8 was orbiting the moon, the astronauts busy photographing possible landing zones for the missions that would follow. On the fourth orbit, Commander Frank Borman decided to roll the craft away from the moon and tilt its windows toward the horizon—he needed a navigational fix. What he got, instead, was a sudden view of the earth, rising. “Oh my God,” he said. “Here's the earth coming up.” Crew member Bill Anders grabbed a camera and took the photograph that became the iconic image perhaps of all time. “Earthrise,” as it was eventually known, that picture of a blue-and-white marble floating amid the vast backdrop of space, set against the barren edge of the lifeless moon. Borman said later that it was “the most beautiful, heart-catching sight of my life, one that sent atorrent of nostalgia, of sheer homesickness, surging through me. It was the only thing in space that had any color to it. Everything else was simply black or white. But not the earth.” The third member of the crew, Jim Lovell, put it more simply: the earth, he said, suddenly appeared as “a grand oasis.”
But we no longer live on that planet. In the four decades since, that earth has changed in profound ways, ways that have already taken us out of the sweet spot where humans so long thrived. We're every day less the oasis and more the desert. The world hasn't ended, but the world as we know it has—even if we don't quite know it yet. We imagine we still live back on that old planet, that the disturbances we see around us are the old random and freakish kind. But they're not. It's a different place. A different planet. It needs a new name. Eaarth. Or Monnde, or Tierrre, Errde, . It still looks familiar enough—we're still the third rock out from the sun, still three-quarters water. Gravity still pertains; we're still earthlike. But it's odd enough to constantly remind us how profoundly we've altered the only place we've ever known. I am aware, of course, that the earth changes constantly, and that occasionally it changes wildly, as when an asteroid strikes or an Ice Age relaxes its grip. This is one of those rare moments, the start of a change far larger and more thoroughgoing than anything we can read in the records of man, on a par with the biggest dangers we can read in the records of rock and ice.
Consider the veins of cloud that streak and mottle the earth in that glorious snapshot from space. So far humans, by burning fossil fuel, have raised the temperature of the planet nearly a degree Celsius (more than a degree and a half Fahrenheit). A NASA study in December 2008 found that warming on that scale was enough to trigger a 45 percent increase in thunderheads above the ocean, breeding the spectacular anvil-headed clouds that can rise five miles above the sea, generating “super-cells” with torrents of rain and hail.3 In fact, total global rainfall is now increasing 1.5 percent a decade. Larger storms over land now create more lightning; every degree Celsius brings about 6 percent more lightning, according to the climate scientist Amanda Staudt. In just one day in June 2008, lightning sparked 1,700 different fires across California, burning a million acres and setting a new state record. These blazes burned on the new earth, not the old one. “We are in the mega-fire era,” said Ken Frederick, a spokesman for the federal government. And that smoke and flame, of course, were visible from space—indeed anyone with an Internet connection could watch the video feed from the space shuttle Endeavour as it circled above the towering plumes in the Santa Barbara hills.
Or consider the white and frozen top of the planet. Arctic ice has been melting slowly for two decades as temperatures have climbed, but in the summer of 2007 that gradual thaw suddenly accelerated. By the time the long Arctic night finally descended in October, there was 22 percent less sea ice than had ever been observed before, and more than 40 percent less than the year that Apollo capsule took its picture. The Arctic ice cap was 1.1 million square miles smaller than ever recorded in history, reduced by an area twelve times the size of Great Britain. The summers of 2008 and 2009 saw a repeat of the epic melt; that summer both the Northwest and Northeast passages opened for the first time in human history. The first commercial ship to make the voyage through the newly opened straits, the MV Camilla Desgagnes, had an icebreaker on standby in case it ran into trouble, but the captain reported, “I didn't see one cube of ice.”
This is not some mere passing change; this is the earth shifting. In December 2008, scientists from the National Sea Ice Data Center said the increased melting of Arctic ice was accumulating heat in the oceans, and that this so-called Arctic amplification now penetrated 1,500 kilometers inland. In August 2009, scientists reported that lightning strikes in the Arctic had increased twentyfold, igniting some of the first tundra fires ever observed. According to the center's Mark Serreze, the new data “is reinforcing the notion that the Arctic ice is in its death spiral.” That is, within a decade or two, a summertime spacecraft pointing its camera at the North Pole would see nothing but open ocean. There'd be ice left on Greenland—but much less ice. Between 2003 and 2008, more than a trillion tons of the island's ice melted, an area ten times the size of Manhattan. “We now know that the climate doesn't have to warm any more for Greenland to continue losing ice,” explained Jason Box, a geography professor at Ohio State University. “It has probably passed the point where it could maintain the mass of ice that we remember.” And if the spacecraft pointed its camera at the South Pole? On the second-to-last day of 2008 the Economist reported that temperatures on the Antarctic Peninsula were rising faster than anywhere else on earth, and that the West Antarctic was losing ice 75 percent faster than just a decade before.
Don't let your eyes glaze over at this parade of statistics (and so many more to follow). These should come as body blows, as mortar barrages, as sickening thuds. The Holocene is staggered, the only world that humans have known is suddenly reeling. I am not describing what will happen if we don't take action, or warning of some future threat. This is the current inventory: more thunder, more lightning, less ice. Name a major feature of the earth's surface, and you'll find massive change.
So how did it happen that the threat to our fairly far-off descendants, which required that we heed an alarm and adopt precautionary principles and begin to take measured action lest we have a crisis for future generations, et cetera—how did that suddenly turn into the Arctic melting away, the tropics expanding, the ocean turning acid? How did time dilate, and “100 or 200 years from now” become yesterday?
The answer, more or less, is that global warming is a huge experiment. We've never watched it happen before, so we didn't know how it would proceed. Here's what we knew twenty years ago: the historic level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the level that produced those ten thousand years of stability, was roughly 275 parts per million. And also this: since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution we've been steadily increasing that total, currently raising it more than two parts per million annually. But no one really knew where the red line was—it was impossible to really know in advance at what point you'd cross a tripwire and set off a bomb. Like, say, melting all the ice in the Arctic.
The number that people tossed around for about a decade was 550 parts per million. Not because we had any real data showing it was the danger point, but because it was double the historic concentration, which made it relatively easy to model with the relatively crude computer programs scientists were using. One paper after another predicted what would happen to sea levels or forest composition or penguin reproduction if carbon dioxide levels doubled to 550 parts per million. And so—inevitably and insidiously—that's the number we fixated on. Since it wouldn't be reached until the middle of the twenty-first century, it seemed to offer a little margin; it meshed plausibly with political time, with the kind of gradual solutions leaders like to imagine. That is, a doubling of carbon dioxide would happen well beyond the time that anyone now in power w