Bill McKibben says the planet is becoming unrecognizable
Climate change legislation has stalled in the Senate, to the dismay of environmentalists. But as Bill McKibben notes, the time for modest measures may already be behind us. The earth has changed so much in the last two decades that he proposes it should have a new name. Here’s an excerpt from Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet (Times Books/ Henry Holt).
Imagine we live on a planet. Not our cozy, taken-for-granted earth, but a planet, a real one, with melting poles and dying forests 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 perhaps the iconic image 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 later said that it was “the most beautiful, heart-catching sight of my life, one that sent a torrent 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 seas, generating “super-cells” with torrents of rain and hail. In fact, total global rainfall is now increasing 1.5 percent a decade. Larger storms over land now create 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 have 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 slowly melting 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 the Apollo capsule took its picture. The Arctic ice cap was 1.1 million square miles smaller than ever in recorded history, reduced by an area twelve times the size of Great Britain. The summers of 2008 and 2009 saw a virtual repeat of the epic melt; in 2008 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 miles 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 are “reinforcing the idea 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 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 trajectory: more thunder, more lightning, less ice. Name a major feature of the earth’s surface and you’ll find massive change.
For instance: a U.S. government team studying the tropics recently concluded that by the standard meteorological definition, they have expanded more than two degrees of latitude north and south since 1980 – “a further 8.5 million square miles of the Earth are now experiencing a tropical climate.” As the tropics expand, they push the dry subtropics ahead of them, north and south, with “grave implications for many millions of people” in these newly arid regions. In Australia, for instance, “westerly winds bringing much needed rain” are “likely to be pushed further south, dumping their water over open ocean rather than on land.” Indeed, by early 2008 half of Australia was in drought, and forecasters were calling it the new normal. “The inflows of the past will never return,” the executive director of the Water Services Association of Australia told reporters. “We are trying to avoid the term ‘drought’ and saying this is the new reality.” They are trying to avoid the term drought because it implies the condition may someday end. The government warned in 2007 that “exceptionally hot years,” which used to happen once a quarter century, would now “occur every one or two years.” The brushfires ignited by drought on this scale claimed hundreds of Australian lives in early 2009; four-story-high walls of flame “raced across the land like speeding trains,” according to news reports. The country’s prime minister visited the scene of the worst blazes. “Hell and its fury have visited the good people of Victoria,” he said.
And such hell is not confined to the antipodes. By the end of 2008 hydrologists in the United States were predicting that drought across the American Southwest had become a “permanent condition.” There was a 50 percent chance that Lake Mead, which backs up on the Colorado River behind Hoover Dam, could run dry by 2021. (When that happens, as the head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority put it, “you cut off supply to the fifth largest economy in the world,” spread across the American West.) But the damage is already happening: researchers calculate that the new aridity and heat have led to reductions in wheat, corn, and barley yields of about 40 million tons a year. The dryness keeps spreading. In early 2009 drought wracked northern China, the country’s main wheat belt. Rain didn’t fall for more than a hundred days, a modern record. The news was much the same in India, in southern Brazil, and in Argentina, where wheat production in 2009 was the lowest in twenty years. Across the planet, rivers are drying up….
