Cold (36 page)
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 dynamic; 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.”