The Yamal and the Fence — Come North with Me
108 sequence where the heroes’ faith gets tested: Roger Revelle says of this situation (the full quote is below), “As long as the world was cooler year after year, it was very hard to see that there could be much of an effect.” The scientist said this, Jonathan Weiner points out, “with a sardonic smile.”
Part of the thrill to Weiner’s The Next One Hundred Years is his speaking with the principals—Keeling, Revelle—while they were still above-ground experts researching and predicting. Names that have since acquired the confidence and inevitability of legend.
Weiner is here talking about G.S. Callendar’s 1938 paper; the one delivered before the Royal Meteorological Society.
After Callendar’s paper appeared, however, the globe’s average temperature began to fall and it fell for a quarter of a century . . . For poor Callendar, though, it was as if a trapdoor had opened beneath his soapbox. He went on talking about the power of the greenhouse effect for the rest of his life but almost no one stopped to listen. “As long as the world was cooler year after year,” Revelle says now, with a sardonic smile, “it was very hard to see that there could be much of an effect.”
After Keeling’s network detected the rise of carbon dioxide, in the early 1960s, world temperatures started dropping even faster. . . The cooling kept the greenhouse effect unfashionable. Every kind of evidence was piling up except the kind that mattered most.
Jonathan Weiner, The Next One Hundred Years: Shaping the Fate of Our Living Earth, Bantam 1990. Chapter Five, “A Slow Eureka,” 73.
108 to President Kennedy’s Secretary of the Interior: The New York Times, “Science Adviser Named,” July 13, 1961.
Walter H. Munk, “Tribute to Roger Revelle and His Contribution To Studies of Carbon Dioxide and Climate Change,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, August 5, 1997.
https://www.pnas.org/content/94/16/8275
Accessed 10-21-22.
108 Center for Population Studies at Harvard: Harold M. Schmeck Jr., “Revelle Is Named To Harvard Post: Will Head Its New Center for Population Studies,” The New York Times, June 12, 1964.
108 the young Al Gore: With a big impact.
Dr. [Dave] Keeling’s mentor, Dr. Revelle, moved to Harvard, where he lectured about the problem. Among the students in the 1960s who first saw the Keeling Curve displayed in Dr. Revelle’s classroom was a senator’s son from Tennessee named Albert Arnold Gore Jr., who marveled at what it could mean for the future of the planet.
Justin Gillis, “A Scientist, His Work and a Climate Reckoning,” The New York Times, December 21, 2010.
Howard Fineman, Karen Breslau, “Gore Feels The Heat,” Newsweek, October 27, 1997. “At Harvard [Gore] fell under the spell of the late Roger Revelle, a brilliant oceanographer with a presciently holistic view of environmental issues,” Fineman and Breslau report. “When Gore came to Congress in 1977, Revelle was the first witness at his first hearing.”
108 “adequate”: The New York Times, “U.S. Water Supply Termed Adequate,” March 29, 1962. This was in Revelle’s capacity as science advisor to Kennedy’s Secretary of the Interior, Stewart Udall.
108 Egyptian flood zone: Harold Thomas Jr., Roger Revelle, “On the Efficient use of High Aswan Dam For Hydropower and Irrigation,” Management Science, Vol. 12, No. 8, April 1966.
Revelle was peripatetic and intellectually generous. He served, for example, as one of five non-Indian permanent members of the Indian Commission on Education.
This is from the oceanographer Walter Munk’s National Academy Revelle tribute. “I need to mention one activity which goes back a long time: Roger’s continuing love affair with India. Roger took many trips to India and served as an advisor to various government agencies on a broad range of topics, centered on food and population problems. I was amazed on a recent trip to learn of how many Indian careers and lives had been influenced by Roger.”
Walter H. Munk, “Tribute to Roger Revelle,” PNAS, 1997.
And this is from The New Yorker’s piece on the still-novel post of government science advisor. Another Revelle action portrait. This time in sun helmet, behind the wheel of a jeep. Daniel Lang, “A Scientist’s Advice—II,” The New Yorker, January 25, 1963.
Udall’s adviser, whom he appointed on [White House Science Adviser Jerome] Wiesner’s recommendation, is Dr. Roger Revelle, of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. “Revelle has been of immense help to me, and I have Jerry to thank,” Udall told a friend recently. . .
In the summer of 1961, when Mohammed Ayub Kahn, the President of Pakistan, came to Washington on a state visit, Udall had particular reason to be grateful for Revelle’s presence on his staff. President Ayub used the occasion to inform President Kennedy that water was drowning Pakistan’s crops, ruining a hundred thousand acres yearly. Pakistan, it appeared, lay atop the world’s largest underground reservoir; the water had risen close to the surface, absorbing salts as it did so, and consequently had prevented plants from growing, and even made the land barren. Mr. Kennedy told the Asian leader that he would have his scientific adviser look into the matter, and Wiesner, in turn, sought Revelle’s advice. “I’m lucky that we have Roger in Interior—a man who not only knows water but has a broad outlook,” Wiesner said at the time. Subsequently, he and Revelle made a field trip to Pakistan, where, protected from the sun by pith helmets, they traveled by jeep through much of the Punjab. The two men, with the assistance of a host of hydrologists, agronomists, chemists, economists, and other experts, came to the conclusion that they could turn the underground water into an asset by pumping it to the surface and using it for irrigation.
108 “the loneliest, hardest-working”: Harold M. Schmeck Jr., “Mechanized Society Is Isolating American Women, Scientist Says,” The New York Times, December 16, 1966.
Revelle adds—sounding very like Albert Einstein on the occasion of the Edison golden jubilee— “Ever since men began to modify their lives by using technology they have found themselves in a series of technological traps.”
(What Einstein had observed four decades earlier, while Edison and President Hoover and all those corporate heads stood with toast glasses in their hands: “The great creators of technics, among whom you are one of the most successful, have put mankind into a perfectly new situation, to which it has as yet not at all adapted itself.”)
Revelle was himself hardworking, if not so terribly isolated. (For the public scientist, the needle would tend to point toward a lack of work-conducive isolation.) In addition to his other labors, Revelle was U.S. representative to the forty-nation International Oceanographic Commission at UNESCO. He eventually became President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
An (exhausting) list of the period’s accomplishments can be found in Deborah Day, “Roger Randall Dougan Revelle Biography,” Scripps Institution of Oceanography Archives 2008.
For another thing, he helped found the University of California at San Diego. It’s first school was named Revelle College in the oceanographer’s honor. Revelle was then 56 years old.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100626153123/www.scilib.ucsd.edu/sio/biogr/Revelle_Biogr.pdf
Accessed 10-22-22.
108 “Look at that Yankee”: Weiner, Next One Hundred Years, Chapter Four, “Atropos,” 43.
108 “The implications”: Al Gore, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit, Houghton Mifflin 1992, Introduction, 5. A sort of unforeseeable apostolic succession: Revelle to Keeling to Al Gore.
I was introduced to the idea of a global environmental threat as a young student when one of my college professors was the first person in the world to monitor carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. Roger Revelle had, through sheer persistence, convinced the world scientific community to include as part of the International Geophysical Year (1957-58) his plan for regularly sampling CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. His colleague C. D. Keeling actually took the measurements from the top of the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii. In the middle 1960s Revelle shared with the students in his undergraduate course on population the dramatic results of the first eight years of measurements: the concentrations of CO2 were increasing rapidly each year (see illustration). Professor Revelle explained that higher levels of CO2 would create what he called the greenhouse effect, which would cause the earth to grow warmer. The implications of his words were startling: we were looking at only eight years of information, but if this trend continued, human civilization would be forcing a profound and disruptive change in the entire global climate.
108 Roger Revelle chaired a panel: Revelle chaired the Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide section of the President’s 1965 environmental report.
President’s Science Advisory Committee, Panel on Environmental Pollution, Restoring the Quality of Our Environment: Report of the Panel on Environmental Pollution, The White House, 1965.
Serving under Revelle on the panel were Wallace Broecker and, of course, Dave Keeling.
Joshua P. Howe, Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming, University of Washington Press 2014. Chapter One, “The Cold War Roots of Global Warming,” 38.
109 “This generation has altered”: Lyndon Baines Johnson, “Text of White House Message on Guarding U.S. Beauty,” The Washington Post, February 9, 1965.
109 It needed to be done “now”: Howard Simons, “Report to LBJ Urges Taxing All Polluters,” The Washington Post, November 7, 1965.
109 “By the year 2000”: Roger Revelle et al, “Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide,” in: President’s Science Advisory Committee, Panel on Environmental Pollution, Restoring the Quality of Our Environment: Report of the Panel on Environmental Pollution, The White House, 1965.
Naomi Oreskes, Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt, Bloomsbury 2010. Chapter Six, “The Denial of Global Warming,” 170.
Julia A. Olson, Curtis Morrison, “Fifty years ago: The White House Knew All About Climate Change,” The Hill, November 6, 2015.
“Catastrophically, on the 50th anniversary of the White House report, CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are indeed at 399 ppm: 25 percent over 1965 levels, exactly as predicted 50 years ago. Science.”
Revelle “brought the subject to the attention of the public as a member of the President’s Science Advisory Committee Panel on Environmental Pollution in 1965. The committee under Revelle’s leadership published the first authoritative U.S. government report in which carbon dioxide from fossil fuels was officially recognized as a potential global problem.”
Deborah Day, “Roger Randall Dougan Revelle Biography,” Scripps Institution of Oceanography Archives 2008.
109 It ran them on page one: Howard Simons, “Report to LBJ Urges Taxing All Polluters,” The Washington Post, November 7, 1965.
Other recommendations, per the Post: “establish standards for a clean life,” “withhold Federal funds from every developer who literally kicks up dust,” develop non-polluting public transit. There has at last been progress on electronic-powered cars—though some fuel will still be needed for the generator turbines. And, as of June 2021, 56 years later, only 2 percent of American new car sales were electric.
“Among the pollution problems cited in the Report, two are underscored: one of immediate concern, and the other of potentially catastrophic future concern for the whole planet. These are the automobile and carbon dioxide.”
The data about electric cars is from Drew Desilver, “Today’s Electric Vehicle Market: Slow Growth in U.S., faster in China, Europe,” Pew Research, June 7, 2021.
“In each of the past three years, EVs [Electric Vehicles] accounted for about 2% of the U.S. new-car market.”
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/06/07/todays-electric-vehicle-market-slow-growth-in-u-s-faster-in-china-europe/
Accessed 10-22-22.
109 “Mankind’s ability to protect itself”: Editorial, “The Air Supply,” The Washington Post, November 22, 1965.
110 “The purposeful management”: William Fulton, “Report From The United Nations,” Chicago Tribune, September 25, 1969.
110 “only a few decades to solve the problem”: The New York Times, “Scientists Caution on Changes In Climate as Result of Pollution,” December 21, 1969.
110 “favorite new staffer”: Rick Pearlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, Scribner 2008, Chapter 18, “Trust,” 394.
110 “This very clearly is a problem”: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Stephen Wiseman (Ed.), Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary, PublicAffairs 2010, 202.
110 first pilot to cross the South Pole: Bruce D. Callander, “Poles Apart,” Air Force Magazine, November 1, 2004.
https://www.airforcemag.com/article/1104pole/
Accessed 10-21-22.
110 “would probably have cataclysmic effects”: Walter Sullivan, “Expert Says Arctic Ocean Will Soon Be An Open Sea: Catastrophic Shifts In Climate Feared If Change Occurs,” The New York Times, February 20, 1969.
111 Wallace Broecker: Wallace Broecker, The Great Ocean Conveyer, Princeton University Press 2015.
Wallace Broecker, Robert Kunzig, Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal About the Current Threat—and How To Counter It, Hill and Wang | Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2008. Preface, “Taming the Beast,” xiii.
Here writing about himself in the third person. “Similar swings happened repeatedly during the Ice Age itself. Broecker’s theory is that they were caused by a sudden jamming or restarting of what he dubbed the conveyor belt, a globe-spanning system of ocean currents that transports heat to the North Atlantic.”
Richard Alley, “Wally Was Right: Predictive Ability of the North Atlantic ‘Conveyor Belt’ Hypothesis for Abrupt Climate Change,” Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 2007, Vol. 35.
111 Balchen’s prediction: For a sense of how culture changes—and how solid and unchangeable the icy parts of the world once seemed—here’s a quote from Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s Slaughter-House Five. Published 1969, same year as Balchen’s prediction.
“You know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing anti-war books?”
“No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?”
“I say, ‘Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?’”
What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.
It turned out glaciers were much easier to stop. It turned out, by our time, that every newspaper (because in a sense every light switch and every phone charge and ignition key) was an anti-glacier book. You could stop glaciers just by waking up, heading to work, heading to the store, heading home. Stop them without any suppressive intent at all.
Like Fitzgerald’s 1928 line about the “everlasting hazeless sunlight” of Los Angeles, it’s a demonstration of how casually transformative machines and people did in fact prove to be.
111 Just extremely slowly: Sam Pope Brewer, “Study Says Man Alters Climate—U.N. Report Links Melting of Ice to His Activities,” The New York Times, September 23, 1971.
111 “Some Polar Ice”: Walter Sullivan, “Some Polar Ice Melting Linked To Global Heating,” The New York Times, January 8, 1982.
111 “Climate Change ‘Irreversible’”: Steve Connor, “Climate Change ‘Irreversible’ As Arctic Sea Ice Fails To Re-Form,” The Independent, March 14, 2006.
111 “Is Almost Certainly Gone”: The Economist, “The Arctic As It Is Known Today Is Almost Certainly Gone,” April 29, 2017.
111 “There isn’t any”: ABC News, Nightline, February 24, 1994.
This early in the fight, host Ted Koppel properly summarized the situation with the broadcast’s opening words. “It’s a battle for the hearts and minds of the public.”
It was, like all denial campaigns, a battle for opinion: to supply the public with weapons of assertion; with stuff to say.
111 “The Arctic area”: Robert C Balling, Jr., “Keep Cool About Global Warming,” The Wall Street Journal, October 16, 1995.
111 Krill: CNN, “Antarctic krill populations decreasing,” July 6, 1997. “ ‘There has been almost a 90 percent decrease in krill abundance since 1980,’ said Valerie Loeb of the Moss Landing Marine Laboratory.”
Thomas Hayden, Sharon Begley, “Cold Comfort,” Newsweek, August 11, 1997.
111 Antarctic penguins: Thomas Hayden, Sharon Begley, “Cold Comfort,” Newsweek, August 11, 1997.
But now penguins may be paying for their superb fit to the frigid clime. For Antarctica, according to a mounting pile of studies, isn’t as cold as it used to be. Although penguins are under siege on other fronts — a chicken virus that predisposes hatchlings to lethal infections has shown up in some emperors and Adelies — none can account for the die-offs and decreased breeding success among the Adelies, gentoos and chinstraps of the southern continent. But scientists have made a discovery that might explain penguins’ problems — a discovery that reduced one veteran of Antarctic research to an astonished “holy s---!” Average annual air temperatures on the Antarctic Peninsula have climbed 5 degrees Fahrenheit over the last 50 years, 10 times faster than the global rate. Average midwinter temperatures there are up 9 degrees. . .
And sea ice, in fact, isn’t there, at least not like it used to be. Over the last 50 years there have been fewer winters cold enough to produce extensive sea ice around the peninsula . . . Result? According to a paper submitted to the journal Ecology, there has been “a significant decline in fledgling survival” since the mid-1970s. Before 1987 about 22 percent of Adelie chicks survived and returned to breed. Since then only 10 percent have, finds coauthor Wayne Trivelpiece of Montana State. The population of Adelies in Admiralty Bay has dropped at least 35 percent since 1987, he finds: from almost 10,000 to between 5,000 and 6,000. And chinstraps are also taking it, dare one say, on the chin. When not breeding or brooding, chinstraps go to sea, covering hundreds of thousands of square miles. That they, too, are now declining hints that krill abundance is down over a huge area.
PBS, “The World Of Penguins,” Nature, December 3, 1995; PBS, “Protecting Penguins,” March 24, 1997. “On one island, for instance, the number of breeding Rockhopper penguins dropped from 1.7 million in the 1940s to about 100,000 today, probably because surrounding seas became warmer . . . some researchers believe recent warming is responsible for the dramatic, 20-year decline in Adelie penguin populations on the Antarctic Peninsula. Researcher Wayne Trivelpiece of Montana State University suspects that warming has reduced winter sea ice, which hosts the algae that is the basis of the local food chain. Less sea ice means less food for the shrimp-like krill that is the Adelie’s major food source. The decline, he says, may be a disturbing ‘harbinger of what’s coming.’”
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/the-world-of-penguins-protecting-penguins/1913/
Accessed 10-22-22.
William Mullen, “Penguins’ Struggle Is A Warning To World,” Chicago Tribune, July 1, 2007.
The Adelie penguin is regarded as an “indicator” species, an animal so delicately attuned to its environment that its survival is threatened as soon as something goes wrong. So as temperatures rise, Adelies are among the first to feel the effects, early victims of the devastating worldwide changes that scientists expect if the warming persists and intensifies . . .
“Adelie populations where we work have decreased by 80 percent over the last 30 years,” said [biologist William] Fraser. “We’re at a point that of the 56 active colonies we work with, 80 percent of them are no longer numerically viable; they have too few pairs to sustain them.”
Nature, “Enormous Penguin Population Crashes By Almost 90 Percent,” July 30, 2018. “The world’s second-largest penguin colony has collapsed in just a few decades, falling from half a million breeding pairs in the 1980s to just tens of thousands in 2017.”
It’s firewalled; but the photo—of the good old 1982 days—is crushing.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05850-2
Accessed 10-23-22.
112 “roller coaster roads”: Eugene Linden, “The Big Meltdown,” Time, September 4, 2000.
112 “drunken trees”: “Understanding and Responding to Climate Change: Highlights of National Academy Reports,” National Academy of Sciences 2008.
Brian Clark Howard, “Drunken Trees: Dramatic Signs of Climate Change,” National Geographic, April 17, 2014.
112 Some Alaskan homes: Eugene Linden, “The Big Meltdown,” Time, September 4, 2000.
112 pack ice had thinned: Alexandra Witze, “Reports of Open Waters in Arctic Don’t Enhance Warming Evidence,” The Dallas Morning News, August 29, 2000.
John Noble Wilford, “Open Water at Pole Is Not Surprising, Experts Say,” The New York Times, August 29, 2000.
John Noble Wilford, “Ages-Old Icecap at North Pole Is Now Liquid, Scientists Find,” The New York Times, August 19, 2000.
112 “an astonished ‘Holy s___!’”: Thomas Hayden, Sharon Begley, “Cold Comfort,” Newsweek, August 11, 1997.
112 it had cracked through: The Los Angeles Times, “Dick Rutan, 4 Other Fliers Stuck at North Pole as Plane Sinks; None Hurt,” May 16, 2000.
Associated Press, “Adventurers Rescued From Icy North Pole After Biplane Sinks To Ocean’s Floor,” May 17, 2000.
112 the Yamal set out for the Pole: John Noble Wilford, “Ages-Old Icecap at North Pole Is Now Liquid, Scientists Find,” The New York Times, August 19, 2000.
Spitsbergen, Norway. The Snow Queen’s palace and grounds in the H.C. Anderson story; and so, in Pixar’s Frozen.
112 a deluxe academic crew: James J. McCarthy, Malcolm C. McKenna, “How Earth’s Ice Is Changing,” Environment, December 2000. Many of the details in these next pages are drawn from McCarthy’s detailed and charming account of this trip.
113 “There is no debate”: It’s as if we’re reading about the most amply documented, slowest-motion automobile crash in history.
Ross Gelbspan, “Hot Air, Cold Truth,” Washington Post, May 25, 1997.
“There is no debate among any statured scientists of what is happening,” says Harvard University earth scientist James McCarthy. “The only debate is the rate at which it’s happening.”
Even as global warming intensifies, the evidence is being denied with a ferocious disinformation campaign. Largely funded by oil and coal interests, it is being carried out on many fronts: behind closed doors, where the affairs of state and industry are conducted; in the media, where public opinion is formed; in the halls of Congress, where laws are made; and in international climate negotiations. In their most important accomplishment, global warming critics have successfully created the general perception that scientists are sharply divided over whether it is taking place at all.
Key to this success has been the effective use of a tiny band of scientists—principally Patrick Michaels and Robert Balling, together with Sherwood Idso, S. Fred Singer, Richard S. Lindzen and a few others—who have proven extraordinarily adept at draining the issue of all sense of crisis.
A good guess by Gelbspan, who plays the role in the denial story Revelle does in the climate-discovery half; the person who saw what was coming early.
113 “None of us had ever seen”: CNN, “Melting Ice at the North Pole,” Guests James McCarthy, Ross Gelbspan, September 4, 2000.
113 about two dozen polar visits: CNN, September 4, 2000.
113 five-hundred-mile route: CNN, September 4, 2000.
113 the ice pilot was in his office: This detail, and some of the previous, are from James J. McCarthy, Malcolm C. McKenna, “How Earth’s Ice Is Changing,” Environment, December, 2000.
113 a mile-wide lake: If you’d like to see the photo, it’s here, courtesy of the book On Thin Ice: The Changing World of the Polar Bear. The picture ran on the Times front page—snapped by Matthew McKenna, a paleontologist and lecturer at the American Museum of Natural History. McKenna had been one of the trip’s deluxe educators.
Richard Ellis, On Thin Ice: The Changing World of the Polar Bear, Knopf 2009.
https://tinyurl.com/mr275fnx
Accessed 10-22-22.
113 ivory gulls: John Noble Wilford, “Ages-Old Icecap at North Pole Is Now Liquid, Scientists Find,” The New York Times, August 19, 2000.
Martin Kettle, “Mile-Wide Hole in North Pole Ice,” The Guardian (U.K.), August 21, 2000.
113 The Yamal detoured six miles: John Noble Wilford, “Ages-Old Icecap at North Pole Is Now Liquid, Scientists Find,” The New York Times, August 19, 2000.
113 “The editorial cartoon is a metaphor”: James J. McCarthy, Malcolm C. McKenna, “How Earth’s Ice Is Changing,” Environment, December, 2000.
114 “There’s nothing to be necessarily”: John Noble Wilford, “Open Water at Pole Is Not Surprising, Experts Say,” The New York Times, August 29, 2000
114 “We’ve seen features like this before”: CNN, “Recent North Pole Photos Fuel Debate Over Global Warming,” August 25, 2000.
114 “It’s probably too early”: Ann Schrader, “Arctic ice, snow dropping Global warming hints cited at CU,” The Denver Post, July 11, 1995.
114 “I haven’t toppled yet”: Peter N. Spotts, “Arctic-Climate Findings Defrost Global-Warming Doubters,” Christian Science Monitor, August 17, 2000.
114 “Something weird is going on”: Susan Stamberg, “Scientists Reporting Major Changes In The Arctic,” NPR, December 17, 2002.
114 “almost twice the rate”: Susan Hassol et al, Impacts of A Warming Arctic, Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, Cambridge University Press 2004, 10.
Chris Mooney, “Some Like It Hot,” Mother Jones, May/June 2005.
114 “Do you support the president?”: Andrew C. Revkin, “Bush Versus the Laureates: How Science Became A Partisan Issue,” The New York Times, October 19, 2004.
The scientist was Sharon L. Smith, a University of Miami expert in Arctic marine ecology.
On March 12, she received a call from the White House. She had been nominated to take a seat about to open up on the Arctic Research Commission, a panel of presidential appointees that helps shape research on issues in the far north, including the debate over oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
The woman calling from the White House office of presidential personnel complimented her résumé, Dr. Smith recalled, then asked the first and — as it turned out — only question: ‘‘Do you support the president?’’
‘‘I was taking notes,’’ Dr. Smith recalled. ‘‘I’m thinking I’ve lost my mind. I was in total shock. I’d never been asked that before.’’
She responded she was not a fan of Mr. Bush’s economic and foreign policies. ‘‘That was the end of the interview,’’ she said. ‘‘I was removed from consideration instantly.’’
115 the first time “since prehistory”: William Underhill, “The North Pole Heats Up,” Newsweek, December 5, 2005.
115 than any other period: Editorial, “Even The Skeptics Now Agree: Global Warming Is Real; New Research Has Closed The ‘Uncertainty Gap.’ Now, What Do We Do About It?”, Portland Press Herald, December 3, 2005.
115 trees and robins in the Arctic: James Brooke, “Even in Frigid North, Hints of Warmer Temperatures,” The New York Times, October 10, 2000.
Portland Press Herald, “Even the Skeptics Now Agree,” December 2005. “Since 2001, scientists have compiled a wealth of additional evidence: Melting permafrost, trees in formerly treeless valleys, unprecedented outbreaks of tree-killing beetles, sea level rise. Robins in the Arctic.”
115 “At this point”: Editorial, “Even The Skeptics Now Agree: Global Warming Is Real; New Research Has Closed The ‘Uncertainty Gap.’ Now, What Do We Do About It?”, Portland Press Herald, December 3, 2005.
115 “Two ways”: Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (New York: Scribner’s, 1926), Chapter 13, 127.
115 In March 2006: David Adam, “Meltdown Fear As Arctic Ice Cover Falls To Record Winter Low,” The Guardian (U.K.), May 15, 2006.
115 “We keep going further”: David Adam, “Meltdown Fear As Arctic Ice Cover Falls To Record Winter Low,” The Guardian (U.K.), May 15, 2006. The scientist is Walter Meier, with the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center. (Which is located in Colorado; which is seemly.)
Dr Meier said there was “a good chance” the Arctic tipping point has been reached. “People have tried to think of ways we could get back to where we were. We keep going further and further into the hole, and it’s getting harder and harder to get out of it.”
115 “Now we’ve got the flags”: Jim Erickson, “Boulder Researchers At Center Of Ice Storm,” Associated Press, September 6, 2006.
115 “We’re seeing an overall pattern”: Seth Borenstein, “Winter Sea Ice In Arctic Melting Faster Than Before, NASA Study Says, A Danger To Ecosystem,” Associated Press, September 13, 2006.
115 “What we see in the Arctic”: Jane Kay, “Even In Winter, Arctic Ice Melting; Alarmed Scientists Warn That Polar Thawing Threatens Wildlife And Is ‘Strongest Evidence Yet Of Global Warming’ In Region,” The San Francisco Chronicle, September 14, 2006.
115 The 2007 sea ice: Doug Struck, “At the Poles, Melting Occurring at Alarming Rate,” Washington Post, October 22, 2007.
115 crows and salmon: Struck, Washington Post.
115 beech trees and grass: Struck, Washington Post.
William Mullen, “Penguins’ Struggle Is A Warning To World,” Chicago Tribune, July 1, 2007. “In fact, the northern half of the Antarctic Peninsula already is undergoing that transformation, with plants and animals that cannot tolerate extreme cold and ice migrating to the area as it warms up. Grasses not seen on the peninsula since humans arrived 200 years ago are now growing luxuriantly in northern areas.”
116 “Things are on more of a hair trigger”: Struck, Washington Post.
This was the National Snow and Ice Data Center’s Ted Scanbos. Who told the Post, “I just don’t see a happy ending for this.”
When this reader first read the below—
Consider the permafrost. The vast Arctic region in the north encompasses land on three continents that has been deeply frozen since the last ice age. A thin layer thaws each summer. By mid-century, half of it will thaw to 10 feet, according to computer models of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, and long-trapped greenhouse gases will be released.
—he became emotional. This mood did not lighten when, a few paragraphs on, Dr. Scanbos added, “That’s a serious runaway. A catastrophe lays buried under the permafrost.”
My research note in the margin beside things are on more of a hair trigger is “It’s hard to express the nausea I felt reading this article.” One of the reasons for putting together this book and these notes: The expression of that nausea.
116 “than we thought”: This comes from the opposite side, the Antarctic side: a century reflection by the paleoclimatologist Richard Alley.
Dr. Alley reminds us, “The IPCC said, ‘We’ve got a hundred years before anything happens to the ice sheets.’ It looks like the ice sheets are a hundred years ahead of schedule.”
Wallace Broecker, Robert Kunzig, Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal About the Current Threat—and How To Counter It, Hill and Wang | Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2008. Chapter Ten, “Ice Melts, Sea Level Rises,” 156.
116 “happening on a scale scientists describe as overnight”: Struck, Washington Post.
116 “The Arctic is screaming”: Seth Borenstein, “‘Arctic Is Screaming,’ Say Scientists Seeing New Data,” Associated Press, December 13, 2007.
116 In 2001, the United Nations panel: Sandi Doughton, “Artic Ice Cap to Melt Faster Than Feared, Scientists Say,” September 7, 2007.
116 In 2007, Serreze estimated: Margaret Munro, “Arctic ice retreats at a record pace; Scientists with 40-years experience are ‘all stunned,’” Vancouver Sun, October 3, 2007. “ ‘The sea ice cover is in a downward spiral and may have passed the point of no return,’ Mark Serreze, a senior scientist at the U.S. center said in the statement that warned the Arctic could be ice-free in summer by 2030.”
116 it could be gone: The geochemist and oceanographer Wallace Broecker—with a very strong predictive record behind him—put the summer disappearance two decades later, at 2050. “A condition [the Arctic] has not seen,” he observed, “for one million years.”
Wallace Broecker, Robert Kunzig, Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal About the Current Threat—and How To Counter It, Hill and Wang | Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2008. 136.
116 “They look really scared”: Michael Pollan, “Why Bother?”, The New York Times, April 20, 2008.
116 “the visual image and symbolism”: James J. McCarthy, Malcolm C. McKenna, “How Earth’s Ice Is Changing,” Environment, December 2000.
116 “There is supposed to be ice”: Steve Connor, “No Ice At The North Pole,” The Independent (U.K.), June 27, 2008.
116 “an unusual opportunity to see the future”: James J. McCarthy, Malcolm C. McKenna, “How Earth’s Ice Is Changing,” Environment, December 2000.
116 Forty years earlier, the Washington Post: Editorial, “The Air Supply,” The Washington Post, November 22, 1965.
