The Human Age (6 page)
From Colorado to British Columbia, due to twenty years of unusually warm weather, spruce and pine bark beetles have chewed through four million acres of trees. This is fabulous for the bark beetles, but bad news for all the drought-weakened trees. Wildfires gust across their dry remains, sending flares through vast swaths of vegetation, as in the historic wildfires that blackened over 170,000 acres of caramel-mesa-ed New Mexico, and the record-breaking wildfires in mountain-blessed Colorado.
These massive conflagrations are bad not just for timber harvesters
and tree lovers but for anyone who thrives on oxygen-rich air, since forests are the lungs of the planet, inhaling carbon dioxide and exhaling oxygen. We inhale their flammable waste to stoke the fires in our cells. They inhale ours. Bears, humans, and trees are as seamlessly connected as in and out breaths. And all this ash lies down quiet as snowfall, slowly settling to leave its trace, our trace, as the fire-debris weaves into the geological record. A fine line perhaps, but indelible as the cinders of Vesuvius.
Frostbite and torched forests may be the extremes, but 2012 and 2013 were legendary scorchers throughout the United States. Across the heartland, around the church suppers, cicada songs, and quiet nights of teenagers sitting on the paint-peeling white bandstands in the middle of town, frying heat doomed crops and broke 29,300 high-temperature records. Fall drought withered crops in 80 percent of the country’s farmlands. Broad-brimmed-hatted, slow-drawling Texans saw the driest year since record-keeping began in 1895, drier even than the rawhide soil of the Dust Bowl. So dry that, as farms resorted to irrigation, public water supplies plummeted. The Lone Star State alone had $5 billion in damages. Not just from crop losses, either. The earth became so parched that it cracked all over like a callused heel, in the process wrenching apart water mains (forty in Fort Worth alone) and buckling the pavement on bridges and roads.
Worldwide, the past year ushered in record-breaking snowfalls, droughts, rains, floods, heat, hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes, even plagues of locusts. The whole bag of tricks, biblical in their proportions, including weather pranks we usually expect, but not all and everywhere and wound up to such an extreme. Taken as a whole, as one weatherworks out of balance, it understandably starches the mind, widens the eyes, and fills parents with worry about their children’s future. Every six years or so, the United Nations Panel on Climate Change issues a report. In September 2013, the panel of 209 lead authors and 600 contributing authors, from 39 nations, poring over 9,200 scientific publications, came to these landmark conclusions: global warming is “unequivocal,” sea levels are rising, ice
packs are melting, and if we continue at this pace we “will cause further warming and changes in all components of the climate.” However, they added, we can slow the process down if we begin at once.
How the story plays out will be a tale told by the silent, everlasting rocks, in colorfully hued bandwidths. They’ll recall a time when Earth was swarmed over by intelligent apes who whipped the weather into something they hadn’t quite intended.
Yes, our tinkering has given Earth a low-grade fever, which we need to quickly calm before it climbs. But global warming won’t be tragic everywhere and for every species. That would only be true if Earth’s creatures, landforms, geology, waters, and climate were spread evenly around the planet, and they’re not. Earth is a patchwork of many different habitats, and climate change will visit them in uncanny ways: cool hot zones, heat cool zones, flood dry zones, dry temperate zones. Thanks to climate change, Europe’s growing season has been lengthening, with warm-season crops thriving farther north, to the delight of farmers (although in central and southern Europe, crops have suffered because of the extreme heat and drought). In Greenland, local farmers, seeing fertile soil for the first time, began avidly planting. Milder winters require less heating, which saves on energy, and travel and homesteading in the north is much easier in a warmer world. Not that long ago in the grand scheme of things, we had a famously balmy spell. During the Medieval Warm Period, from 950 to 1250, the Vikings found the lack of sea ice so good for travel that they established a colony in present-day Newfoundland.
A warmer world won’t be terrible for everyone, and it’s bound to inspire new technologies and good surprises, not just tragedy. Change is the byword everywhere, and if there’s one unchanging fact about humans it’s that we loathe change in nature, perhaps because we feel we can’t control it. We may thrive on changes in technology and locale, but we want nature to be permanent and predictable, even when shaken, like the world inside a snow globe. We yearn for continuity, and yet we live in a wildly changing world. We
love life fiercely, and yet we’re creatures who die. These aren’t reconcilable paradoxes.
We may not be noticing all of our leavings in the fossil record, but from the melting ice-skating rinks of Canada and the paling reefs of Samoa to dry creeks in Australia and receding glaciers in Chamonix, people are noticing the rude change in weather. We are beginning to see, firsthand, how our tinkering with the climate touches the globe from top to bottom. In my own extended backyard of New York State, the new normal recently wore the name of Sandy.
T
he weather app Budi touches opens with a fright that his wild relatives have witnessed firsthand many times: torrential rains, snorting winds, and trees snapping—the familiar trees that orangutans mentally map for food and travel, just as we do houses, streets, and stores. Lately, though, whipped up by climate change, hurricanes like this one are growing to unforeseen and unimaginable fury.
A FREAK WINTER
storm and tropical hurricane rolled into one, Sandy drew breath off Africa’s west coast, barreled across the Caribbean, and charged up the eastern seaboard of the United States, swinging left with a gut punch that smashed in houses, sucked boats out of harbors and hurled them, masts and rigging flying, into front doors and garages.
Only a day before Halloween, the scene was beyond macabre, as if a Chagall painting had suddenly come to life in a 90 mph whirlwind of whizzing trees, animals, and objects. People unlucky enough to be caught outside were pulled sideways down the streets.
It was as if a monster were wrestling electrical lines to the ground, clawing up roads, turning neighborhoods into sandboxes. Piers and boardwalks crumpled like cardboard as the superstorm slapped them into the sea.
In this most densely settled area of the United States, prone to both hurricanes and nor’easters, record tides are usually measured in fractions of an inch. A major hell-raiser, Sandy even shattered the record for record-keeping—its tides had to be measured in feet. In one seaside community in Queens, after tidal surges beat the local record by three feet, a twenty-foot wave washed the whole research station into the ocean. In another town, the storm smashed furnaces and gas pipes, igniting fires that leapt from home to home, where doubly stunned residents found their first floors flooded and their roofs alight. The homes burned like surreal Fourth of July sparklers. In the beachfront town of Breezy Point, Queens, a blaze devoured 110 homes in one neighborhood while firefighters struggled to reach them through fast-flowing streets. All three regional airports shut down and canceled twenty thousand flights; Amtrak halted service to the whole Northeast Corridor. Forty-three million gallons of water gushed through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. The pounding ocean filled tunnels and subways and submerged lower Manhattan, where a flotilla of cars bobbed like colorful beetles.
I’ll never get used to sweetheart names—Debby, Valerie, Helene—referring to land-scrubbing, wave-rearing, homewrecking, cyclonic mayhem. The name Sandy sounds like it belongs to an innocent, sun-kissed surfer. I’m not sure why we choose to domesticate cataclysmic violence in this way. It’s too reminiscent of World War II pilots painting their girlfriends’ names on warplanes, a paradox captured with lyric poignancy by the pilot and poet Randall Jarrell, who wrote, “In bombers named for girls, we burned / The cities we had learned about in school.”
Before the frenzy was over, Sandy killed fifty people in the United States and sixty-nine in the Caribbean, flattened the homes and gutted the lives of thousands, and left millions more without
food, water, or electricity. She also dropped three feet of wet snow in West Virginia and the Carolinas, and Tennessee received the heaviest snowfall on record. At times it seemed as if Gaia were so pissed off she finally decided to erase her workmanship, atomizing the whole shebang and flicking our Blue Marble back into the mouth of the supernovas where our metals were first forged.
Sandy is on my mind because it recently besieged my state, but 2012 also saw massive flooding in Australia, Brazil, and Rwanda; fifty major wildfires in Chile; wicked drought in the Sahel; record-setting cold, rain, and snow in Europe; and typhoons in China destroying sixty thousand homes. My head is still spinning from 2011’s Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. Who can forget Louisiana’s 2005 ordeal with Katrina? And, dwarfing all of these, Haiyan, the most powerful typhoon ever recorded, which charged through the Philippines in 2013 and killed over five thousand people.
New York and New Jersey had felt relatively safe, until Sandy rearranged their silhouettes, gouging inlets and bays, creating new marshes and sandbars, changing the map, literally and metaphorically. Climate change hits hard when it batters at childhood memories. Watching news footage of homes collapsing, over and over, I kept returning to the beacon of Atlantic City, where my family spent brief summer holidays. There were no casinos lining the boardwalk then, no fancy restaurants. But what a delicious, hot, sandy carnival it offered kids. The wide beach was duned deep with scorching sand that became soothingly damp a few inches down—the perfect consistency for sculpting.
The boardwalk held endless fascinations, including saltwater taffy vendors, Belgian waffles with whipped cream and strawberries, a penny arcade with a mechanical gypsy fortune-teller and Skee-Ball bowling machines, a kazoo-playing man in front of the 5 & 10, the giant Planters Peanut Man, the charcoal artists who did quick portraits, and the crablike processions of three-wheeled wicker chairs. Because the wooden planks were warped, riding over them became a bumbling, creaking amusement ride. Pushed along, we laughed as
high-heeled women kept getting stuck in cracks between the boards. And then there was Steel Pier, with all of its amusements and its diving horse.
All the run-of-the-mills neighborhoods rely on, and the balm of meaning absorbed by homes, objects, streets, and piers—all gone.
Hurricane season brings a humbling reminder that, despite our best efforts and prophesies, nature remains unpredictable. Even aided by hindcasts, as forecasters call reading the entrails of past hurricane seasons to predict the future, we really don’t know what stew of storms the Atlantic will dish up, especially now that we’ve dumped in strange seasonings. We can’t yet predict the location of the next typhoon or tornado, even with all our high-tech weather instruments, any more than we know the final scores of the Caribbean’s upcoming cricket matches.
For people living in coastal communities, the sea has always proved a generous or temperamental neighbor. But at least they knew broadly what mood swings to expect. Experts are duly unnerved. “Freak weather events happen, right, but twice in the last two years?” said meteorologist Jeff Masters. “I think something’s up,” he added. “I think we’ve crossed over to a new climate state where the new normal is intense weather events that kill lots of people.”
YUP’IK ESKIMOS HAVE
spent over a decade trying to relocate to higher ground. On the northwest coast of Alaska, only four hundred miles south of the Bering Strait, in the tiny Yup’ik village of Newtok, the residents can smell the salty breath of disaster, robed in liquid gray and pulling at their feet. Sabrina Warner suffers from a recurring nightmare: waking terrified to find the ice-clotted sea crashing in, washing the bed out from under her and collapsing her home. She and her young son swim for their lives, clinging to rooftops as their village is washed away. But there’s nowhere safe to shelter. One roof slips from her fingers after another, until no harbor remains but the roof of the school, the largest building in the village, perched
like a precarious osprey nest atop twenty-foot beams that have been driven into soft earth. And then that, too, is swallowed by the blue-black mouth of the sea.
This is a plausible nightmare. As the sun-reflecting ice melts, the planet is thawing much faster in the far north, where winters have warmed by 3°F since 1975 (double the world average). The widening riverbed and marshes of the Ninglick River, which snakes around three sides of the village, are tearing at its innards before pouring into the sea. Any day now the whole village and many neighboring indigenous communities will sink into the melting permafrost, as if it were white quicksand, to join the realm of polar bears and narwhals in the rich seams of Eskimo lore. By 2017, if the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ predictions are right, numerous native villages along the northwestern coast and barrier islands will be in the same fix.
As America’s first climate-change refugees, the Yup’ik have appealed to the state and federal government for help, but, according to international law, people only qualify as refugees if they’re fleeing violence, war, or persecution. And federal disaster relief laws only grant money to repair infrastructure and damage
in place
, not to help with relocation after slow-motion disaster. Our humanitarian laws aren’t keeping up with the Anthropocene’s environmental realities. Robin Bronen, an Anchorage-based human rights lawyer and a frequent visitor to Newtok, is working tirelessly to change them.
“This is completely a human rights issue,” she argues. “When you are talking about a people [the Yup’ik tribe] who have done the least to contribute to our climate crisis facing such dramatic consequences as a result of climate change, we have a moral and legal responsibility to respond and provide the funding needed so that these communities are not in danger.”