1. the carbon summer

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1. The Carbon Summer.

the key to survival in the twenty-first century will be to keep on moving.

But how will species manage such long-distance movements in the modernworld?Tim Flannery. The Weather Makers(2005):179

In North America, global warming is already changing the world around

us. Large mammals are on the move. Temperatures in the higher latitudes rise

faster than they do in the temperate and equatorial zones. Average annual

temperatures in the Arctic have risen 2 degrees Celsius since the 1970s. But in

polar regions like the Yukon, winter temperatures have climbed 6-8 degrees.2

This has enabled the Red Fox to invade and displace the Arctic Fox from its

traditional habitat. These white, ghostly, scurrying, creatures are disappearing

from the North. In addition, as the Arctic melts, the 20 - 25, 000 remaining

polar bears continue to starve and drown while grizzly bears penetrate to their

farthest northern territories. This raises the disturbing question is it the Arctic

Bears time to be extinguished?

At the height of the cold war (April 1966), the icepack was so thick that

a young Californian hiker named Dennis Schmitt accidentally crossed the

Bering Sea into Soviet territory and was promptly jailed. Such a crossing would

be impossible today. Rising temperatures are destroying ice that provides the

pagophilic (ice-loving) Arctic Bears with access to their major food source:


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ringed and bearded seals. For each day without food an Arctic bear loses 1 full

kilogram of bodyweight. Only full-grown, adult bears can survive such weight

loss for extended periods. There is now a 22% decline in the white bear

population of Hudson Bay. While in the cooler Beaufort Sea region the decline

has been limited to 17%. 3

By the winter of 2008, a few desperate polar bears had penetrated

southward into the interior of Alaska as far as Fort Yukon at the junction of

the Yukon and Porcupine rivers.4

In Canada, three Arctic bearsa mother and

two cubs-- traveled as far south as Deline on the shores of Great Bear Lake. 5

Most remarkably, the first examples of hybridization between polar and grizzly

bears (which until now have been savagely exclusionary species) had surfaced

through DNA analysis following the sport killing of a white-colored bear in

the Arctic. 6

Warming makes the extreme north more amenable to the polar bears

southern cousins. By June of 2007, biologist Charles Frances found grizzlies

500 kilometres north of their traditional habitat during a visit toMelville Islandin

the Arctic Archipelago.7 The grizzly, after all, is an accomplished survivor and

has been on the move since it was driven from its traditional home in the

foothills of the high plains by human settlement in the nineteenth century.8

To put the discovery of the grizzlys northern movement into its North

American context, weeks later, much farther to the south, hungry jaguars


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fleeing the droughts of Mexico were intercepted returning to the desert

highlands of the southernmost United States, something unheard of since the

1800s when

the jaguar, El Tigre, the great spotted cat now largely confined tothe tropical Americas, had ranged as far north as CentralCalifornia and maybe as far east as the Carolinas. 9

In the coming century, warming will encourage similar experimental

movements in the population of all fauna in North America from Tobasco to

Tuktoyaktuk.

Climate change will account not only for wholesale extinctions of

species like the polar bear and Pacific Walruses, but it will also account for

massive human population shifts as inhabitants abandon one area for another

when drought, desertification, flooding, extreme storms, megafires and failing

agriculture make large areas much less efficacious for human habitation. A

security report from a shadowy Washington think-tank concedes that

the most worrisome problems associated with rising temperaturesand sea levels are from large-scale migrations of peoplebothinside nations and across existing nationalborders[A]llscenariosprojectedthat rising sea levels inCentral America, South Asia, and Southeast Asiacouldconceivably lead to massive migrationspotentially involvinghundreds of millions of peoplethe number of people forced tomove in the coming decades could dwarf previous historical

migrations. The more severe scenariossuggest the prospect of perhapsbillions of peoplebeing forced to relocate. 10

In September of 2006, the perceived threat of massive immigration from

Mexico and Central America resulted in Congress hasty approval of the


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Secure Fence Act (H.R. 6061). This bill was signed into law the following

month. It makes theoretically possible the construction of a 700 mile-long

fence along the southern border of the United States, and is a provision that

may seem strikingly foolish to many readers. North America, after all, is not

like the developing world where overpopulation in a region like Darfur can

exhaust the land and turn it to a desert whose declining resources become the

focus of intertribal conflicts and genocide.

Unfortunately, this assumption is not completely true.

What is true is that North America has already experienced several

catastrophic ecological events that have sent waves of environmental refugees

spilling across the continent. In the coming years these events will undoubtedly

intensify and proliferate. Most disturbing is an ongoing lack of prior

preparation despite -in the cases of the Chicago Heat Wave and Hurricane

Katrina- ample and repeated warnings of the dire consequences that such a lack

of preparedness entails. It now seems that as many as two of every three

Americans currently live in areas that will be severely affected by some aspect

of global warming.

Global warming teaches that, for all our cleverness, we are still dirty,

greedy, little monkies. At best, we learn from our mistakes only when they

become so overwhelming they cannot be ignored. For this reason, I believe a

crisis costing millions of lives must happen before we begin a global


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mobilization to reverse the effects of an atmosphere saturated with carbon.

This may not occur any time soon. There are still too many short-term benefits

to ignoring climatic change. Multi-nationals are making big bucks selling oil and

coal-based energy. The mobilization to stop them will only happen after people

begin dying in verylarge numbers. Say in 10 years time.

During my research, I ran across a pithy bit of wisdom from the pen of a

long-dead magazine editor: The one piece of news we could gladly spare is

that we are going to be more miserable than we already are.1

While writing this

book, that sentence has rattled around in my brain like a tin can bouncing

down an endless flight of stairs. It challenged me whenever I thought of

presenting my work to a publisher. It kept me awake at night worrying I would

write a book that no one would ever read. Years ago, I left academia when I

discovered I was more of a writer-who-wanted-to-be-read than a scholar-who-

wanted-to-be-published. To continue with the work, to silence my inner critic,

and simply to finish what Id started, I needed a complete and honest answer to

this question: why whould anyone read a potentially disheartening book? And

yes, the issues Im going to explore could dishearten anyone.

What follows takes the view that preparation will begin only after the full

dimensions of the climate change crisis reveal themselves through costly

disasters. Unfortunately even in the 21stcentury, mankinds main strategy for its


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own survival is crisis management. And this brings us to the answer I have

developed to the question why would anyone read a disheartening book?

I believe that knowing all we can about what our children and grandchildren

will experience is vitally important as a first step in preparing to meet these

challenges. What is most needed is an immediate and large-scale pan-American

mobilization to confront the international threat of climatic change and to

enable us to preserve the essence of our current societies, their liberties and

respect for individual lives. The next 100 years may be the roughest patch yet in

human history. But while we wait for that mobilization, it will be useful to

begin with a firm grasp of what few facts we have and what we can reasonably

anticipate so that when humanity is confronted with the full dimensions of the

crisis some preparations will be in place and we will not be forced to react

quickly out of uninformed fear. A writer I admire puts it this way:

after you put on a few pounds, you stop weighing yourselfor at least Idobecause you dont want to know how many pounds you are goingto ha ve to shedthe same has been true of the green issue.Peopletalk about it in the total abstract without any connection to theactual scale of the challenge we have to meetSo before we takeanother step, we need to put this challenge on the scale, look down atthe digital readout, and behold, without blinking, just how big a projectthis really is. 11

This book is for my sons Corey (19), Liam (14), Kieran (4) and for their

children. It will be as honest, practical and thorough as I can make it. Where we

currently live (south-western Canada) is one of the many areas that will


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experience severe change. In British Columbias forests, an unstoppable

infestation of Mountain Pine Beetlesis the earliest manifestation of changing

climate. By raising temperatures from the Columbia River Basin, through

British Columbia to southern Alaska, global warming enables these beetles to

enjoy two reproductive cycles per year. As a result nearly 80% of our trees will

soon die. These dead, dry trees will make the region especially vulnerable to

another phenomenon related to global warming, megafires that now destroy

more than 8 million acres of forest per year in the continental United States.

I cannot comprehend what an entire country of dead or burned trees will

look like, and I am deeply discouraged that I might live to see such a thing. But

this immense disaster will be further compounded if northern boreal forests

warm sufficiently to support year-round beetles. Still, quite soon, a bleak sylvan

wasteland will be accompanied by a massive influx of environmental refugees

fleeing even greater environmental devastation in their own lands which

include Asia and Africa, the United States, Mexico and Central America. Where

we will stand, how we will respond and what future we will choose are topics

that require our earnest attention right now.

I intend this book for all North American parents. Whether you are black,

brown, yellow, red or white like me, I hope you will hear my voice and listen

for a little while. The storms are gathering and the sea is high. It is time for us

to come together and, for the sake of our children, to get very busy. So far, calls


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to address and remedy the causes of global warming during our own era have

met with a profound uncertainty that derives partly from a cost benefit analyses

of immediate actions to address climate change. Uncertainty say the most

reliable students of this question, is the most important attribute of climate

change as a policy problem.12

Many economists see expenditures for environmental restoration or

protection as externalities and use a practice called social discounting to

undervalue the cost of climate change to future generations. The result is a

pervasive uncertainty about the utility of current actions since they may become

less expensive in the future.13 Nicholas Stern, the World Banks Chief

Economist, has challenged this assumption, and while his analysis is often

accused of being slanted, he succeeds in making the very telling and human

point that monetary values are never simply mathematical: they always reflect

moral decisions and the values of their society. 14 Furthermore, whether you see

James Lovelock, author ofThe Gaia Theory, as a raving loony or a gifted

visionary, its hard to disagree with his observation that it is not up to us to

commit future generations to managing the earths climate through huge geo -

engineering projects that lock our descendants into a diminishing relationship

with the biosphere.15 As responsible parents, we should tidy up our mess as

best we can, and leave the smallest possible environmental debt to be resolved

and accommodated in our childrens century. This is the very least we should


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do. It is what our forebears did for us. It doesnt matter whether we think of it

as a debt, a duty or a labour of love, we simply need to get started.

Of course, most of us would be very happy to begin a committed, truly

global, clean-up today. Even so, it is generally acknowledged that it is already

too late to prevent progressive degradation of the environment for the next 30

or 40 years. During that lag time, what concerns me most is guiding our

children and grandchildren through the narrowest passage that humanity has

ever encountered. As much as I love each of my boys, I do not think any of

them is as sturdy or as indestructible as a pine forest or a polar bear. Their

century has already begun, and for the time that I remain with them I would

like to prepare them for hardship as best I can. My hope is that in a hundred

years or so, we can begin to restore the earth to the fecundity that preceded the

twentieth century and that our children and grandchildren will enjoy kayaking

the coastal waters of British Columbia as I now do. Others are not nearly as

optimistic as I am. In 2007, John Holdren, President Obamas principal science

advisor, told a Harvard audience that:

Global warming is a misnomer. It implies something gradual,something uniform, something quite possibly benignwhat we're

experiencing is none of thoseThere is already widespreadharmThis is not just a problem for our children and ourgrandchildren.


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I am not a religious man, but I will pray that John Holdren is slightly

wrong, and that there is still time enough for us to act. It is for this reason I

have written this little book.

What you do after reading it is entirely up to you.

READER PLEASENOTE:

In May 2007, much to my surprise, I won an environmental book award so I then beganresearching environmental issues. I started writing this book in the fall of 2007 when I

was 53. This month I turn 56. During that time, publishers reactions to what I plannedchanged from Oh, youre just plain crazy to Oh, that tired old thing.

Despite these discouragements, I kept working. This is the book I needed to write. It

contains answers to questions I had to ask. Unfortunately, I now find myself giving awaytwo years work. It hurts, but Im grateful I live in an age when publishing is so easy. In

another era, my manuscript would simply have disappeared behind the barriers of dustsilence.

My thanks to the people at SCRIBD. I hope the book finds a few readers who take itseriously. During all the months of writing, I was hoping it might save some lives. My

thanks to my wife and my sons and to anyone who sees and understands the bottleneck

but does not give themselves up to despair. Instead of despair, Afghanis themselves a

simple question

What did he make first?The hard bread of suffering?

Or mans hard teeth?


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1. the carbon summer

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