ice-free Arctic

Losing Earth: A Recent History

by Nathaniel Rich  · 4 Aug 2018  · 148pp  · 45,249 words

. “Perhaps the most ominous feature,” however, would be the effect on the poles. Even minimal warming could “lead to rapid melting” of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which contained enough water to raise the oceans sixteen feet. The Jasons sent the report to dozens of scientists in the United States and

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, printouts from Hansen and Manabe blanketing his double bed. The discrepancy, Arakawa concluded, came down to ice and snow. The whiteness of the world’s snowfields reflected sunlight; if a warmer climate caused more ice to melt, less radiation would escape the atmosphere, leading to even greater warming. Shortly before dawn, Arakawa

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concluded that Manabe had underestimated the influence of melting sea ice, while Hansen had overemphasized it. The best estimate lay exactly in between. Which meant that the Jasons’ calculation was too optimistic. When carbon dioxide doubled

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higher: a failure to recommend policy would be the same as endorsing the present policy—which was no policy. “Would anyone like to break the ice?” he asked, failing to grasp the pun. “We might start out with an emotional question,” proposed Thomas Waltz, an economist at the National Climate Program

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which he was photographed standing on the steps of the Capitol, pointing above his head to the level the water would reach when the polar ice caps melted. “If Gordon MacDonald is wrong, they’ll laugh,” the article read. “Otherwise, they’ll gurgle.” But Pomerance knew that to sustain major coverage

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previous century. By comparing old shipping records with current satellite data, he had found that since the 1930s Antarctica had already lost a band of ice, 180 miles in width, rimming the continent. Most disturbing of all, century-old glass astronomy plates had revealed a new problem: some of the more

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three minutes of CBS Evening News to the greenhouse effect. A correspondent explained that temperatures had increased over the previous century, great sheets of pack ice in Antarctica were rapidly melting, the seas were rising; Melvin Calvin announced that “the trend is all in the direction of an impending catastrophe”; and

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the executive summary. “We may get into trouble in ways that we have barely imagined.” The authors did try to imagine some of them: an ice-free Arctic, for instance, and Boston sinking into its harbor, with Beacon Hill surfacing as an island two miles off the coast. There was speculation about political

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called it “the height of irresponsibility” to alter the global environment without grappling with the consequences. Wallace Broecker presented an ominous new prophecy: deeply buried ice, recently excavated from Antarctica and Greenland, revealed that radical climate changes did not occur gradually, as previously assumed, but in sudden wild “jumps” that reorganized

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. A short walk from Pomerance’s home brought him to a pond on which his mother taught him to ice-skate. He remembered the muffled hush of twilight, the snow dusting the ice, the ghostly clearing surrounded by a wood darker than the night. His house had been designed by his father

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-enveloped structures mocked the vanity of humankind’s efforts to improve on nature; the broad expansive windows invited the elements inside, the trees and the ice and, in the rattling of the broad panes, the wind. Winter, Pomerance believed, was part of his soul. When he imagined the future, he worried

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about the loss of ice, the loss of spiky Connecticut January mornings. He worried about the loss of some irreplaceable part of himself. He wanted to recommit himself to the

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little known in the field, who made regular visits to research stations in Antarctica—one on the Argentine Islands, the other on a sheet of ice drifting out into the sea at the rate of a quarter mile per year. At each site, the scientists had set up a machine invented

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hypothesis advanced by some of the nation’s leading authorities on global climate—among them Carl Sagan, Stephen Schneider, and Ichtiaque Rasool—that a new ice age was dawning, thanks to the proliferation of synthetic aerosols. All were theories of questionable scientific merit, portending vast, authoritarian remedies to halt economic progress

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, What strange things I see below. Cars are waiting, Windshields wiping, Nowhere left to go! The ice caps are melting, Oh ho, ho ho! All the world is drowning, Ho, ho ho, ho ho! The ice caps are melting, The tide is rushing in, All the world is drowning, To wash away

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day of the Noordwijk conference, than in the entire history of civilization preceding it. Earth is now as warm as it was before the last ice age, 115,000 years ago, when the seas were more than twenty feet higher. In 1990, humankind emitted more than 20 billion metric tons of

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, GCC-like front groups began to proliferate, their cynicism laid bare by their parodic names: Citizens for the Environment, the Information Council on the Environment (ICE), the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, the Cooler Heads Coalition, the Global Climate Information Project, and the George C. Marshall Institute, named after the great

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an underwater city, Dr. Research confirms that it is very bad indeed: A few degrees’ rise in the earth’s temperature would melt the polar ice caps. And if this happens, an inland sea would fill a good portion of the Mississippi Valley. Tourists in glass-bottomed boats would be viewing

This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook

by Extinction Rebellion  · 12 Jun 2019  · 138pp  · 40,525 words

land and in the sea. Climate change is warming up the atmosphere, oceans are acidifying and the cryosphere – the parts of the world covered in ice – is literally in meltdown. Abrupt, non-linear, irreversible changes are underway in the Arctic, Antarctica, Greenland and the world’s glaciers, which are crucial to

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are living witnesses of climate change. The grandmother of my sister Jannie, from the Sámi people of the Arctic, can describe precisely the disappearance of ice and snow. The grandfather of my brother Cerda, from the Quechua people of Amazonia, can tell how the rainforest was once infinite, and how it

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scale, the less we seem to be able to take on the calamities that are brought to our screens. Flooding in the UK, the Arctic ice melts, the tsunami in Indonesia, the poisoning of water in Canada. Five years ago, a flood in lower Manhattan knocked out the electricity, devastated New

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was the IPCC – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – but it turns out they’ve been consistently underestimating the changes. In 2007 they said an ice-free Arctic was a possibility by 2100. That sounds far enough away to calm the nerves. But real-time measurements are documenting such rapid loss of

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ice that some of the world’s top climate scientists are saying it could be ice free in the next few years. Sea-level rise is a good indicator of the rate of change

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is not sure if the river will burst its banks. It turned out that when scientists could not agree on how much the melting polar ice sheets would be adding to sea-level rise, they left out the data altogether. That’s so poor, it’s almost funny. Once I realized

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looms large. It acts as the planet’s refrigerator, by reflecting sunlight back into space and by absorbing energy when the ice melts from solid to liquid. Once the Arctic ice has gone and the dark ocean starts absorbing sunlight, the additional global warming blows the global two-degree warming target out

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for All’ team were amazing, taking pressure off our main kitchens at peak hours, preparing food off-site, keeping it warm in well-insulated portable ice-boxes to serve right at the heart of the action. Don’t forget to factor in washing-up. Encourage people to bring plates, cutlery. Create

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the true power source of a successful rebellion. — Buckminster Fuller 24/ A POLITICAL VIEW CAROLINE LUCAS MP Climate breakdown is inseparable from politics. The melting ice caps, the scorching heatwaves and the staggering declines in animal and insect populations are the direct result of failures by people in power. Irreversible changes

Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet

by Mark Lynas  · 1 Apr 2008  · 364pp  · 101,193 words

the precise global average temperature change that their study refers to, particularly if they are focusing on a regional change. A study on Arctic sea ice, for example, may be based on a range of different future carbon dioxide concentrations, none of which are interpreted as global temperature averages by the

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today, but the idea of a significantly warmer world in the Middle Ages is actually false. Recent research piecing together ‘proxy data’ evidence from corals, ice cores and tree rings across the northern hemisphere demonstrates a much more complicated picture, with the tropics even slightly cooler than now, and different regions

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a freshening and warming of the Norwegian and Greenland seas-due to higher rainfall, run-off from melting land glaciers and the disappearance of sea ice-could stop this water sinking, and shut down the great ocean conveyor. Hence the famous ‘Shutdown of the Gulf Stream’ scenarios familiar from newspaper

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summer melting still left to go, the expectation is that the previous record low, recorded in 2005, will be ‘annihilated’. Particularly worrying is that dramatic ice extent reductions are being recorded for every sector of the Arctic basin, whereas in previous years only certain areas were affected. Perhaps this is what

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recently: ‘The Arctic system is moving toward a new state that falls outside the envelope of recent Earth history.’ As future chapters show, this new ice-free Arctic will see extreme levels of warmth unlike anything experienced by the northern polar regions for millions of years. Danger in the Alps When the Englishmen

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to reverse, switching eventually into a mass scramble to abandon barely habitable temperature zones-as Saharan heatwaves sweep across the Med. The coral and the ice cap Back in 1998, three Canadian geologists took a trip to the Cayman Islands. They were not there to sunbathe or launder money (two

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been in an earlier (and slightly warmer) interglacial than the Eemian. With a lower summit, steeper sides and a drastically reduced extent, the Eemian ice sheet would have contributed, the scientists concluded, between 4 and 5.5 metres to higher global sea levels at the time. This, together with smaller

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2 and 5 metres. The 2001 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) did conclude that higher temperatures would eventually melt the Greenland ice sheet-but only over centuries to millennia, and very little contribution from Greenland was factored into the twenty-first-century sea level rise projections of

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in Hawaii and submerging low-lying coasts. This dramatic flood, termed ‘Meltwater Pulse 1a’ by scientists, occurred 14,000 years ago as the giant ice sheets of the last glacial age finally crumbled and gave way to the warmer Holocene. What has happened before can happen again, argued Hansen, especially

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devastating: ‘If other glaciers in Greenland are responding like Helheim, it could easily cut in half the time it will take to destroy the Greenland ice sheet.’ Other scientists concur. Speaking at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December 2005, the University of Maine's Dr Gordon Hamilton

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Instead, ‘the question remains whether changes in the past five years have left the system as a whole more vulnerable’. Clearly these giant rivers of ice are complex beasts that scientists are still struggling to understand. But whatever the behaviour of individual outlet glaciers, widerscale satellite studies of Greenland's entire

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therefore more able to absorb sunlight. This raises temperatures further, sparking wider melting, in a classic positive feedback. The albedo-flip is why, Hansen suggests, ice sheet disintegration can be ‘explosively rapid’ rather than a more stately process taking millennia to play out. And given that large areas of Greenland and

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world's undiscovered oil and gas reserves lie under the Arctic Ocean, in areas which have historically been seen as undrillable because of thick drifting ice floes. Massive investments are already being made to tap into this economically valuable resource: the Norwegian government is spending billions of dollars building a liquefied

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of remorseless economic imperative. Polar bears-Ursus maritimus-have an umbilical relationship with the sea. Adult bears spend most of their lives out on the ice, hunting seals and other prey, and can travel thousands of kilometres each year across the polar seas. They are remarkable animals by any standard:

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omissions of the United States’. Signatories include residents of Shishmaref, the Alaskan village which I visited in High Tide to discover how the disappearing sea ice is threatening the survival of the community through higher rates of coastal erosion. The 130-page document points out that the impacts of climate change

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scale and height, the mighty Himalayan glaciers are not about to disappear entirely just yet. The same cannot be said for the more vulnerable Andean ice fields, however. Here global warming has already reduced the area covered by glaciers by a quarter in the last three decades. Lonnie Thompson, the

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the Cordillera Blanca chain of summits (including the 6,768-metre Huascarán, Peru's highest peak, and the scene of another of Lonnie Thompson's ice-drilling escapades), depends almost entirely for its dry-season run-off on glacial melt, according to a joint Austrian-Peruvian hydrological study. Downstream from the

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capital Quito currently gets part of its drinking water from a glacier on a nearby volcano called Antisana-where, as elsewhere in the Andes, the ice is already retreating fast. All these nations also rely on mountain water for hydroelectricity production-and as river flows falter during future dry seasons, either

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by their constructors but on the fundamental laws of physics. These observable physical laws, governing everything from convection within clouds to the reflectivity of sea ice, cannot be changed by anyone, whatever their politics. After all, models don't do anything magical. All they do is solve physical equations. All

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warning signs for today. According to Dr Haywood's model, both the Arctic Ocean and the seas around Antarctica became seasonally ice-free. Winter ice was also vastly reduced. Since ice at the poles acts like a giant mirror reflecting away the Sun's heat, its disappearance works together with carbon dioxide

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to help predict the future. Studies suggest that El Niños were weaker or absent altogether during colder periods like the deepest part of the last ice age. Moreover, during the Pliocene warm period discussed above-when global temperatures averaged nearly 3°C warmer than now-there are strong indications that permanent

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well be more than the models suggest’, and that the ‘transition to a new Arctic state’ will occur ‘well within this century’. On land, ice caps and glaciers will also be melting rapidly. The three-degree world will see water sluicing off Greenland in phenomenal quantities, converging into immense glacial

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off doubles as the meltdown gets into gear, sending huge amounts of muddy water gushing across the plains and into the sea. The smaller Icelandic ice caps like Hofsjökull disappear even faster. Alpine mountain glaciers in Sweden and Norway also melt rapidly, along with those in Alaska and northern Canada. Although

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that air temperatures in the highland region are rising at twice the global average, and accelerated glacial retreat has been recorded across all the major ice-capped ranges. Even mighty Everest has been losing glacial mass: the Khumbu Glacier has retreated over 5 kilometres from the spot where Hillary and Tenzing

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even the most isolated location cannot escape a worldwide change such as rising temperatures. From the deepest ocean to the frigid wastes of the Antarctic ice cap, climate change will be making an impact, imperceptible at first, but gradually becoming more and more disruptive as climatic zones shift and natural

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response to pounding thunderstorms-interspersed with increased droughts-the soils which had built up over previous millennia simply began to wash away. The warming post-ice-age climate apparently triggered more intense cloudbursts, hammering the drying landscape and washing sediment off the land surface and down into the rivers. Cooke also

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become ever more tentative. Siberian roulette In previous chapters we saw an Arctic which was physically unravelling. With global temperatures nearing three degrees, summer sea ice was reduced to a remnant patch at the pole and the far north of Greenland. Now, with temperatures past the three-degree mark and moving

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With five degrees of global warming, an entirely new planet is coming into being-one largely unrecognisable from the Earth we know today. The remaining ice sheets are eventually eliminated from both poles. Rainforests have already burned up and disappeared. Rising sea levels have inundated coastal cities and are beginning to

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subtropics and mid-latitudes in contrast stricken by drought. As you might expect from the temperature, the polar Arctic Ocean remained entirely unfrozen: indeed, no ice at all was to form there for another 15 million years. This was a world where carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached dangerously high levels

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the shore. The prospect for humanity In some respects, despite the tsunamis, the world at the beginning of the Eocene sounds quite pleasant. Without chilly ice caps to cool things down, lush forests grew right up to the poles. Places which would normally experience a temperate climate became subtropical, and a

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States, Germany (much of it as dirty ‘brown coal’, or lignite), northern China, Australia and New Zealand. Significant coal deposits may also sit under the ice cap in Antarctica, testament to a warmer period when the polar continent still supported major forests. Large amounts of carbon were also trapped in ocean

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distinguishing between the timescales involved in the Earth's feedback processes. ‘Fast feedbacks’, he points out, include changes in water vapour, clouds, atmospheric dust, sea ice and snow cover, and these are well accounted for in the models. Add them all together, and you get the generally agreed figure of about

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3°C for a doubling of CO2. But slower feedbacks-such as ice sheet collapse, and greenhouse gas changes resulting from alterations in vegetation and the carbon cycle-are not well modelled, and increase climate sensitivity substantially over

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before it was too late. More than anything, it would be a society which survived and prospered, and which passed on this glorious inheritance-of ice caps, rainforests and thriving civilisations-to countless generations, far into the future. NOTES INTRODUCTION p. xvii six degrees colder: Schneider von Deimling, T, et

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‘chance of avoiding’: Hansen, J., et al., 2007: ‘Climate change and trace gases’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 365,1925-54 p. 27 ice extent reductions: Reported on http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/, for 9 August 2007 p. 27 tipping point: Foley, J., 2005: ‘Tipping points in the

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Quoted in Foley, J., 2005: ‘Tipping points in the tundra’, Science, 310, 627-8 p. 30 summer of 2003: Schiermeier, Q., 2003: Alpine thaw breaks ice over permafrost's role', Nature, 424, 712 p. 30 scientific paper: Gruber, S., Hoezle, M., and Haeberli, W., 2004: ‘Permafrost thaw and destabilisation of Alpine

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2003: ‘Greenland glacial history, borehole constraints and Eemian extent’, Journal of Geophysical Research, 108, B3, 2143; Overpeck, J., et al., 2006: ‘Paleoclimatic evidence for future ice-sheet instability and rapid sea-level rise’, Science, 311, 1747-50 p. 64 about 1°C higher than now: James Hansen estimates about 1°C

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change: Comparison to observations and climate modelling results’, Geophysical Research Letters, 32, L14705 p. 67 6 cm a year: Johannessen, O., et al., 2005: ‘Recent ice-shet growth in the interior of Greenland’, Science, 310, 1013-1 p. 67 offset rising sea levels: Bugnion, V., and Stone, P., 2002: ‘Snowpack model

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p. 68 Jakobshavn Isbrae: Joughin, I., et al., 2004: ‘Large fluctuations in speed on Greenland's Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier’, Nature, 432, 608-10 p. 68 ice flow speeded up: Howat, I., et al., 2005: ‘Rapid retreat and acceleration of Helheim Glacier, east Greenland’, Geophysical Research Letters, 32, L22502 p. 69 Kangerdlugssuaq

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Glacier: Luckman, A., et al., 2006: ‘Rapid and synchronous ice-dynamic changes in East Greenland’, Geophysical Research Letters, 33, L03503 p. 69 doubled the rate: Ibid. p. 69 normality: Howat, I., et al., 2007: ‘

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S., et al, 2007: ‘Recent climate observations compared to projections’, Science, 316, 709 p. 73 new Arctic rush: Krauss, C, et al., 2005: As polar ice turns to water, dreams of treasure abound', New York Times, 10 October 2005 p. 74 ‘“claiming this territory”’: Solovyov, D., 2007: ‘Russia explorers snub critics

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Nepal: Agrawala, S., et al., 2003: ‘Development and climate change in Nepal: Focus on water resources and hydropower’, OECD Environment Directorate, 64pp p. 80 Andean ice fields: Barnett, T., et al., 2005: ‘Potential impacts of a warming climate on water availability in snow-dominated regions’, Nature, 438, 303-9 p. 81

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20pp p. 110 ‘critical to understanding’: British Antarctic Survey, 2005: ‘Carbon dioxide role in past climate revealed’, press release, 11 April 2005 p. 110 seasonally ice-free: Haywood, A., et al., 2005: ‘Warmer tropics during the mid-Pliocene? Evidence from alkenone paleothermometry and a fully coupled ocean-atmosphere GCM’, Geochemistry, Geophysics

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The History and Science of Hurricanes, Oxford University Press, p. 258 p. 129 exacerbate the drying: Sewall, J., and Sloan, L., 2004: ‘Disappearing Arctic sea ice reduces available water in the American west’, Geophysical Research Letters, 31, L06209 p. 129 80 per cent: Johannessen, O., et al., 2004: Arctic climate change

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Project, 42pp p. 131 rise by a quarter: Raper, S., and Braithwaite, R., 2005: ‘The potential for sea level rise: New estimates from glacier and ice cap area and volume distributions’, Geophysical Research Letters, 32, L05502 p. 131 Norway enjoys a growing season: Skaugen, T., and Tveito, O., 2004: ‘Growing-season

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M., et al., 2006: Arctic hydrology during global warming at the Palaeocene/Eocene thermal maximum', Nature, 442, 671-5 p. 203 no ice: Kerr, R., 2004: ‘Signs of a warm, ice-free Arctic’, Science, 305,1693 p. 203 temperatures soared: Pagani, M., et al., 2006: An ancient carbon mystery', Science, 314,1556-7 p

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9 mass 174 Sahel 18 Faroe Islands 207 feedbacks 190, 252, 255 carbon-cycle 60-1, 116-19, 190, 245, 250, 255 desertification 194 ice-age 255 ice-albedo 28, 70-1 methane 188-90, 202, 204-6 Fiji 38-9, 166 Finland 177 flood barriers 147, 148, 165 flooding: Africa 151

Fall of Civilizations: Stories of Greatness and Decline

by Paul Cooper  · 31 Mar 2024  · 583pp  · 174,033 words

come up with a historical event that may have inspired it. But it may genuinely find its roots in real human experience. When the last ice age, or glacial maximum, began to end around 18,000 years ago, global temperatures started to rise, and would ultimately increase between 4 and 7

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had reached from the North Pole as far south as modern-day Berlin. But as temperatures rose, these ice caps melted, and their water poured back into the oceans. Combined with the expansion of oceanic water on a warming planet, this caused global sea

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-lying regions of what is now the North Sea, turning Great Britain into an island. In Mesopotamia, the effects were just as dramatic. During the ice age, the Tigris and Euphrates had flowed on for a further 900 kilometres down a flat fertile valley of marshlands and forests, emerging into the

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one of a constellation of small Sumerian cities that dotted southern Iraq. At that time, populations of woolly mammoths, survivors of the end of the ice age, still roamed in remote parts of the Arctic. The cities of Sumer were not the first large human settlements. Excavations at the sites of

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into his reign, a celestial sign appeared in the skies overhead. Around 2215 BCE, nearly 200 million kilometres out into space, a giant ball of ice and dust 40 kilometres across flew past Earth. This was the comet Hale-Bopp. It would spend the next 4,200 years or so hurtling

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is known only by the cryptic name, the ‘4.2-kiloyear event’. It has been tentatively connected to changes that took place in the sea ice of the North Atlantic, causing ripples throughout the world’s delicately interlinked climate systems. Whatever the cause, its effects were dramatic. In various places around

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, equipment and elephants across. Hannibal followed the Rhône north and reached the Alps in October. Winter was closing in, and the passes were choked with ice and snow. The later Roman writer Ammianus Marcellinus writes one account of these treacherous alpine roads: In these Cottian Alps … there rises a lofty ridge

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from Gaul it falls off with sheer incline, terrible to look upon because of overhanging cliffs on either side … the spreading valleys, made treacherous by ice, sometimes swallow up the traveller.26 The march to the top of the pass took nine gruelling days, but the descent proved even more treacherous

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Classic Period of 800–950 CE, when rainfall reduced by as much as forty per cent. The cause of these droughts is still much debated. Ice cores taken in Greenland show that levels of solar radiation around this time reached lows that hadn’t been seen for millennia, and it’s

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’s downturn may have been caused by shifts in the region’s climate, and the global transition from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age. Looking at the enormous canals to the south of Angkor, we see that around this time they became filled with a large amount of

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ago’.1 These populations either crossed a land bridge in the region of the Bering Strait, exposed by the low sea levels of the last ice age, or travelled along the Pacific coast in canoes. From there, they occupied the entire continent. Much of this story will take place in a

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of the Aztec age. As we saw earlier, Stone Age humans had likely crossed into the Americas by 20,000 years ago, during the last ice age. When the planet’s climate warmed and sea levels rose, the North Pacific crept in to separate Asia and the Americas. The world’s

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the bottom of the valleys, it is rare to find any fertile soil. The mountains above about 4,800 metres are capped with snow and ice all year round, and the snows creep much lower in the winter months. Their narrow gorges are home to quick-flowing rivers, and can only

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an idle calculation — and in fact may have felt reassuring, given that many people at the time were concerned about the speculated return of the Ice Age. But now more than a century later, we are living in the world that Arrhenius foresaw. Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, we

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, we are now living in what was previously considered the ‘worst-case scenario’. One of these tipping points is the melting of the Arctic sea ice, which currently reflects up to eighty per cent of the sunlight that falls on it back into space, thus cooling the planet. We have now

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has seen temperatures 20°C higher than average, with record low ice levels, and the sea is projected to have its first ice-free summer as early as the 2030s, ‘irrespective of emission scenarios’. After that, ‘Extended occurrences of an ice-free Arctic in the early summer months are projected later in the century.’6

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With the reflective power of the ice cap gone, the energy of the sunlight will be absorbed by the sea instead. The feedback

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effect of all global ice and snow loss has been calculated to add fifty per cent to the global warming effect. This process is to some extent already locked in. ‘

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, 20 April 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/04/20/science/rapid-unscheduled-disassembly-starship-rocket.html. Accessed 14 November 2023. Wadhams, Peter. A Farewell to Ice: A Report from the Arctic. United Kingdom, Oxford University Press, 2017. Weisman, Alan. The World Without Us. United Kingdom, Ebury Publishing, 2012. Welzer, Harald. Climate

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For in the 21st Century. Germany, Polity Press, 2015. Yeon-Hee Kim, Seung-Ki Min, Nathan P. Gillett, et al. ‘Observationally-constrained projections of an ice-free Arctic even under a low emission scenario.’ Nature Communications, 14, 3139 (2023). First published in the United Kingdom by Duckworth in 2024 Duckworth, an imprint of

The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans

by Mark Lynas  · 3 Oct 2011  · 369pp  · 98,776 words

gets everywhere, from the highest mountains to the deepest oceans: Abandoned plastic bags drift ghostlike in the unfathomable depths, even kilometers beneath the floating Arctic ice cap. Wherever you look, this truth is there to behold: Pristine nature—Creation—has disappeared forever. There is a name for this new geological

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era. The Holocene—the 10,000-year, climatically equable post–ice age era during which human civilization evolved and flourished—has slipped into history, to make way for the Anthropocene. For the first time since life

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want the Anthropocene to resemble the Holocene rather than the Eocene (roughly 55–35 million years ago, which was several degrees hotter and had neither ice caps nor humans) we will need to act fast. On climate change, meeting the proposed planetary boundary means being carbon-neutral worldwide by mid-

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Earth system is that its main elements move around rather than all ending up in one place. Water, for instance, cycles through rivers, oceans, ice caps, the atmosphere, and us. An H2O molecule falling in a snowstorm on the rocky peak of Mount Kenya may have been exhaled in the

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If carbon dioxide levels fall low enough for weathering to cease—as perhaps was the case during the early “snowball Earth” episodes, when global-scale ice caps put a stop to the weathering of rocks—volcanic emissions continue uninterrupted, allowing CO2 to build up until a stronger greenhouse effect melts the

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, new species evolved to fill the niches vacated by extinguished ones, and some kind of balance was restored. Over the last million years, recurrent ice ages demonstrate how regular cycles can lead to dramatic swings in temperature, as orbital changes in the Earth’s motion around the sun lead to

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small differences in temperature, which are then amplified by carbon-cycle and ice-albedo (reflectivity) feedbacks. Our planet may be self-regulating, but it is also extraordinarily dynamic. GOD SPECIES OR REBEL ORGANISM? Life is now an

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, it afforded protection against predators and warmth on cold nights, allowing early humans to spread north out of Africa during the depths of the last ice age. Fire may have facilitated the spread of genes for hairlessness, as the need for body insulation diminished. However, once our hair was lost

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The resulting prognosis is not for straightforward warming everywhere: One model projection by scientists working in Germany, published in November 2010, suggested that disappearing sea ice in the Arctic Ocean north of Scandinavia and Siberia could in fact drive colder winters in Europe. The researchers proposed that warmer unfrozen waters in

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U.S. Endangered Species Act thanks to climate change.18 Given its current rate of precipitous decline, there is little hope that the Arctic ice cap’s death spiral can be arrested. But it is theoretically still possible to save or restore the frozen North Pole—by urgently retreating back

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other warming agents like black carbon. As NASA’s James Hansen, a member of the planetary boundaries expert group, writes: “Stabilization of Arctic sea ice cover requires, to first approximation, restoration of planetary energy balance.”19 Reducing carbon dioxide levels to between 325 and 355 ppm would achieve this initial

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outcome, Hansen suggests—however, a further reduction, with CO2 down between 300 and 325 ppm, “may be needed to restore sea ice to its area of 25 years ago.” Serious climate impacts have of course also been identified outside the polar regions. In a June 2010 piece

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has fallen by a fifth since the 1970s, leading to permanent water shortages in Perth.30 All these lines of evidence—of rising temperatures, thawing ice caps, shifting weather patterns, and increasingly dangerous impacts—emphasize that limiting CO2 concentrations at 350 ppm in order to prevent substantial future global warming

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Taking months of supercomputer time to crunch all their complex equations, these modeling studies allow scientists to simulate changing conditions on Earth as CO2 rises, ice melts, and temperatures climb inexorably. Although computer models are always going to be an imperfect representation of the real planet we live on, they are

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what is happening in the real world tends to be worse than anything projected by the models. Given this, the experts concluded, “a summer ice-loss threshold, if not already passed, may be very close.” Only a 350 ppm target would likely prevent it, corresponding to 0.5 to 2

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°C future global warming. But even this may not be enough. Second on the tipping points list came the melting of Greenland’s vast ice sheet. Thick enough to raise the global oceans by seven meters if it melted entirely, the stability of Greenland matters hugely to faraway nations

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in the case of the latter) if it melts because of global warming. So where does the tipping point lie that might doom the Greenland ice cap to eventual destruction? Between just 1 and 2 degrees above today’s temperatures, the experts concluded, meaning that a 350 ppm trajectory is

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to achieve to protect it. Here too the process could become self-reinforcing. The center of Greenland is extremely cold because the thickness of the ice sheet means that it extends into high altitude: Greenland’s Summit Camp is located 3,200 meters above sea level. But as global warming

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complete collapse. So the 350 ppm boundary would appear to be well within the safety margin according to the models. As with the Arctic sea ice, however, the real world may prove the models of Greenland and the West Antarctic to be overly conservative. The most recent satellite data from

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the GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) mission shows a doubling in ice mass lost from both Greenland and Antarctica over the last decade32—despite a thickening of Greenland’s higher interior where warmer winds have increased snowfall

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familiar tipping point was examined next, one that has even been made into a dramatic Hollywood film. In The Day After Tomorrow, a sudden ice age is seen flooding and then freezing New York (why is it always New York?) after global warming destabilizes the circulation of the Atlantic Ocean

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the circulation pattern that brings comparatively balmy temperatures to the eastern U.S. and high-latitude Western Europe. This shutdown would not trigger a new ice age, but temperatures in these regions could fall for several decades, causing serious impacts on societies and ecosystems alike.37 Again unlike the Hollywood

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times more potent than CO2—is likely to bubble out of swamps on land; vastly more is contained in subsea sediments in the form of ice-like methane hydrates. If these hydrates melt rapidly as the oceans warm up, then all global warming bets are off—a scenario that has

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by the IPCC tend to project nice smooth—albeit upward-pointing—curves of likely future temperature trends. But a glance back in time, courtesy of ice-core records drilled in Greenland and Antarctica, shows that gentle, slow changes are far from being the norm in the Earth’s past. Instead,

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planetary boundary. For example, during the Pliocene epoch, about 3 million years ago, sea levels were 25 meters higher than today because the major ice sheets were much smaller than now due to a warmer climate. The CO2 concentration then? About 360 ppm—a line we crossed in 1995.48

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The Earth was completely ice-free—and sea levels 80 meters or more higher—until about 33 million years ago, early in the geological epoch called the Oligocene. After

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ppm or higher throughout the Cretaceous, Eocene, and Paleocene, this was the moment when CO2 levels dropped past a crucial threshold allowing continental-scale ice sheets to form on Antarctica for the first time in perhaps a hundred million years.49 This CO2 level was 750 ppm, a level expected

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fertilizer could be good news both for human nutrition and the nitrogen planetary boundary.40 None of these potential benefits of genetic engineering cut any ice with Greens, however. “The introduction of genetically engineered organisms into the complex ecosystems of our environment is a dangerous global experiment with nature and

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our eyes. No one can plausibly deny the utterly transformative impact we have had on the land. The vast majority of the planet’s ice-free land surface—83 percent according to one study1—is now influenced by humans in some way or another. This may seem surprising, shocking—

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are silently accumulating in thick drifts. Submersibles have photographed plastic bags suspended eerily above the seafloor a mile (1.6 km) below the Arctic ice cap. In other sea areas 10,000 man-made items have been found scattered over a single hectare of the ocean bottom.1 Plastic from

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is dark and absorbs it. But aerosols can also act as nuclei for cloud droplets to condense around, forming white clouds that—like snow and ice—reflect incoming solar radiation. Darker dust and soot, however, make duller clouds, which can absorb more heat and therefore be faster evaporated than their

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underneath it. If it screens sunlight hitting dark-colored ocean, it will have a cooling effect. If it dims sunshine heading toward the highly reflective ice caps, on the other hand, it could warm the planet overall. Confused? So are the scientists. And so, consequently, are the climate models they

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The challenge is to solve the problem in a way that complements, rather than conflicts with, the other more challenging planetary boundaries. FIRE, FLOOD, AND ICE Perhaps the most famous pall of pollution anywhere in the world sits over India. The so-called Asian Brown Cloud is the combined product of

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may be the only method of significantly slowing Arctic warming within the next two decades,” and thereby avoiding a runaway collapse of the Arctic sea-ice sheet.25 Because of the different timescales involved, dealing with black carbon is not a substitute for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but it is

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,” which significantly cooled the Earth’s climate. Some cold winters during these decades were even frigid enough to convince early climatologists that a new ice age might be on its way.38 But as the West became wealthier, its inhabitants—forming the nascent environmental movement in the early 1970s—began

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is worsening rapidly.8 Because colder water dissolves more CO2 than warmer oceans, another acidification hot spot occurs in the Arctic, where melting sea ice in addition leaves more of the sea surface in contact with the atmosphere and therefore able to absorb carbon dioxide today than previously. In the

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seawater they sampled, the scientists were able to conclude that this rising acidity was “a direct consequence of the recent extensive melting of sea ice” in the area.9 This suggests that the climate change and ocean acidification boundaries are linked not only in their cause but also in their

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destroyed in the highest regions of the stratosphere by chlorine-containing CFCs, with the most important ozone-destroying reactions taking place in extremely cold, thin ice clouds high in the springtime polar stratosphere. And so it proved: In 1985 scientists based at the British Antarctic Survey’s Halley Base noticed

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A. Sibley, 2010: “Analysis of Extreme Rainfall and Flooding in Cumbria 18–20 November 2009,” Weather, 65, 287–92. 10. R. Boswell, 2010: “Another Big-ice Arctic Thaw, Say Experts,” The Vancouver Sun, September 8, 2010, http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Another+Arctic+thaw+experts/3496268/story.html. 11. R. Kwok

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Extent, Unusual Mid-latitude Weather,” February 2, 2011, http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2011/020211.html. 13. M. Wang and J. Overland, 2009: “A Sea Ice Free Summer Arctic Within 30 Years?,” Geophysical Research Letters, 36, L07502. 14. T. Cronin et al., 2010: “Quaternary Sea

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-ice History in the Arctic Ocean Based on a New Ostracode Sea-ice Proxy,” Quaternary Science Reviews, 29, 35–36. 15. V. Petoukhov and V. A. Semenov, 2010: “A Link Between Reduced Barents-Kara Sea Ice

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2009: “Observational Constraints on Recent Increases in the Atmospheric CH4 Burden,” Geophysical Research Letters, 36, L18803. 46. J. Steffensen et al., 2008: “High-Resolution Greenland Ice Core Data Show Abrupt Climate Change Happens in Few Years,” Science, 321, 5889. 47. A. Brauer et al., 2008: “An Abrupt Wind Shift in Western

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49. R. DeConto et al., 2008: “Thresholds for Cenozoic Bipolar Glaciation,” Nature, 455, 652–6. 50. A. Tripati et al., 2009: “Coupling of CO2 and Ice Sheet Stability over Major Climate Transitions of the Last 20 Million Years,” Science, 326, 5958, 1394–7. 51. T. Naish et al., 2009: “Obliquity-paced

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Pliocene West Antarctic Ice Sheet Oscillations,” Nature, 458, 322–8. 52. J. Hansen et al., 2008: “Target atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?,” Open Atmospheric Science Journal, 2,

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Arctic Aerosol from Biomass Burning in Russia,” Geophysical Research Letters, 37, L01801. 18. J. Hansen and L. Nazarenko, 2004: “Soot Climate Forcing via Snow and Ice Albedos,” PNAS, 101, 2, 423–8. 19. M. Fiebig et al., 2009: “Tracing Biomass Burning Aerosol from South America to Troll Research Station, Antarctica,”

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, 106, 52, 22114–18. 23. M. Jacobson, 2010: “Short-Term Effects of Controlling Fossil-Fuel Soot, Biofuel Soot and Gases, and Methane on Climate, Arctic Ice, and Air Pollution Health,” J. Geophys. Res., 115, D14209. 24. Hansen and Nazarenko, cited above. 25. J. McNally, 2010: “Best Hope for Saving Arctic

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Continental Shelf,” Science, 320, 1490–2. 9. M. Yamamoto-Kawai et al., 2009: “Aragonite Undersaturation in the Arctic Ocean: Effects of Ocean Acidification and Sea Ice Melt,” Science, 326, 5956, 1098–1100. 10. G. De’ath et al., 2009: “Declining Coral Calcification on the Great Barrier Reef,” Science, 323, 5910,

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Monbiot, George Monsanto monsoon Montreal Protocol, 1987 Mousseau, Tim mudflats Muller-Landau, Helene NASA Nasheed, President national parks National Science Academy, US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) National Trust National Water Carrier, Israel natural capital Nature Nature Conservancy, 1148 New Economics Foundation (NEF) New Forests New Internationalist NGOs

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of ownership Venter, J. Craig Vestas Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer, 1985 Vietnam Volga, river Watt, James Wen Jiabao West Antarctic Ice Sheet wetlands whaling industry Whole Earth Discipline (Brand) wildfires Williams, Hywell Williams, Steve Wilson, E. O. wind power World Bank World Future Council World

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization

by Parag Khanna  · 18 Apr 2016  · 497pp  · 144,283 words

which we’ll board the Eurostar train, travel under the Dover Strait to Paris, followed by a high-speed TGV to Munich and a German ICE to Budapest. An overnight train along the Danube River brings us to Bucharest, Romania, and another overnight along the Black Sea to Istanbul. Where once

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Astronauts in low Earth orbit (about 215 kilometers high) have snapped stunning pictures of our majestic planet. They’ve captured natural features like oceans, mountains, ice caps, and glaciers, and even caught glimpses of man-made structures. It turns out that the Great Wall of China and the Great Pyramid of

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up to its (theoretical) ambitions. Instead, supply-demand dynamics have always driven our social organization. For fifty thousand years since the end of the last ice age, the human diaspora has been organizing itself into polities of ever-shifting shapes and sizes that combine vertical authority across horizontal territory, from empires

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for harnessing arable land and shale oil and colonizing the increasingly livable northern Canadian bounty. The melting of the polar ice caps is giving birth to new nations such as Greenland, whose ice sheet melt is ironically most responsible for rising sea levels. Greenland is set to become the first country born

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’s Tibetan-populated Arunachal Pradesh (which China claims as “South Tibet”) on the other side of Bhutan.*4 But after the dust has settled, the ice has melted, the wreckage has been cleared, the bodies have been counted, the treaties have been signed, and the borders have shifted, the “Southern Silk

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than any place in the world, its buildings propped up by stilts that need to be dug deeper and deeper each year to find solid ice below. For Yakutis, climate change is quicksand. They will have to leave their land, their history, and their natural riches to be tugged south on

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. China, of course, has more constructive plans than merely occupying North Korea. It has invested in an industrial zone at North Korea’s Rason, an ice-free port nestled near the corner where all three countries meet on the Sea of Japan. By building a railway to Rason’s port, China

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every year. Stoked by human-accelerated climate change, Arctic temperatures have risen a full four degrees Celsius in just the past half century; the summer ice coverage is only half what it was in 1979. Almost two hundred Alaskan towns are at risk of sinking into the softer foundations beneath them

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cities are sprouting where once there was only frozen tundra, becoming vital nodes of the new Arctic economy. There is an irony to Greenland’s ice sheet being a key driver of Indian and Pacific islands sinking while it gains its own sovereignty from Denmark. The Arctic has become an entire

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faster at the earth’s poles (while water levels rise faster at the equator), the Arctic could become a major reliable shipping route by 2020. Ice-free Arctic shipping features two major corridors: The Northern Sea Route, taken by China’s Yong Sheng, connects the two ends of Eurasia (the Far East and

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, giving Denmark claims over the North Pole previously held only by Canada and Russia. But how many nuclear submarines does Denmark have? As the Arctic ice cap melts away, similar maneuvers are beginning to play out on the world’s opposite pole, Antarctica. The only continent without a native human population

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pizza with overlapping slices of various sizes, the 1961 Antarctic Treaty bans any military activity or oil prospecting. That has not stopped China from sending ice-breaking ships to clear the way for geologic surveying to determine if hundreds of billions of barrels lie beneath the

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ice and rock. In 2015, China signed a ship refueling agreement with Australia to facilitate these long-distance voyages of commercial colonization. Asia’s economic giants

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the region’s arbitrary political divisions: a hockey game played on a frozen lake between Russia and Norway where the midline is drawn on the ice along the “border,” and a chessboard that resembles the four-country Nordic border zone on which all the pieces are white and each move further

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routes, direct Internet cable connections will gradually expand between South America, Africa, and Asia, reflecting their growing ties as well. The melting of the Arctic ice sheet has even made it possible to lay a new Polarnet cable over the North Pole directly connecting London and Tokyo. As the science fiction

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first depression, and caused the breaking of Arctic and Greenland glaciers that sparked Arctic sea exploration. That was some eruption. From meteor strikes to the ice ages, geophysical phenomena have profoundly shaped mankind. The fundamental geology of plate tectonics is always in motion, with earthquakes and tsunamis constantly shifting coastlines. But

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the oceans and seas, but should the rest of precious nature only have colors (green for forests, tan for deserts, brown for mountains, white for ice) rather than names? The biodiversity of South American and African rain forests, the mineral-rich oceanic seabed, the Arctic habitats, and other natural resource tracts

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and cities at any point in history around the entire globe. COASTAL SEA LEVEL RISE CALCULATOR http://ngm.​nationalgeographic.​com/​2013/​09/​rising-seas/​if-ice-melted-map National Geographic’s interactive map adjusts coastlines for all continents based on variable scenarios for sea level rise up to more than fifty

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meters (if both polar ice caps fully melt), depicting new shorelines and submerged coastal regions. ESRI http://storymaps.​arcgis.​com/​en/ Esri’s Story Map apps can be customized to

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Russia, while new Russian pipelines avoiding Ukraine diminish its role as a transit state. 31. THE NEW ARCTIC GEOGRAPHY Credit pai1.31 As the Arctic ice melts, the terrain and resources beneath are increasingly contested. At the same time, the combination of rising temperatures, new resource discoveries, and emerging transportation corridors

The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future

by Laurence C. Smith  · 22 Sep 2010  · 421pp  · 120,332 words

returned from the warmed Earth back to space, instead absorbing it and thus becoming infrared radiators themselves. Arrhenius was trying to solve the puzzle of ice ages, so was initially interested in global cooling, not warming, but his calculations worked easily well in either direction. He later wondered if humans,

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memories of glaciers, deep ocean sediments, tree rings, cave speleothems, and other natural archives. Most spectacular are tiny air bubbles trapped within Greenland and Antarctic ice, each a hermetically sealed air sample from the past. Loose air inside a glacier’s surface snowpack gets closed off into bubbles as the weight

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unlike oil, is a circulating resource. It recycles constantly through the hydrologic cycle, in infinite loops of rain, runoff, evaporation, and various storage compartments, like ice. From a practical standpoint the throughput of freshwater (or “flux”) is just as important as the absolute size of its various containers. The total volume

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Imagining 2050 The trends I’ve described—rising water demand; oversubscribed and/or polluted water sources; reduced time-delays and free storage from snow and ice; sharper floods and droughts that are also harder to predict and insure against; the competitive marriage of water to energy; and booming port cities on

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talk we milled around some more, wrangling over things like “model downscaling,” “cloud forcing,” and “nonlinear dynamics.” Some were revising the old projections for an ice-free Arctic Ocean from 2050 to 2035, or even 2013. Others—including me—argued for natural variability. We thought the 2007 retreat could just be a freak

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will drive important climatic feedbacks that flow out to the rest of the world, influencing atmospheric circulation, precipitation patterns, and jet streams. Unlike land ice, melting sea ice does not directly affect sea level (in accordance with Archimedes’ Principle291), but its implications for northern shipping and logistical access are so profound they

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permanent, kilometers-thick glaciers. For this and several other reasons, climate warming is more amplified in the Arctic than the Antarctic. 293,294 As an ice-free Arctic Ocean warms up, it acts like a giant hot-water bottle, warming the chilly Arctic air as the Sun crawls off the horizon each winter

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a staggering ten degrees of latitude—almost seven hundred miles—supplanting cold-water species that are in turn retreating north. The Displaced The 2007 sea-ice contraction triggered a new wave of public consternation about the future of polar bears, including an environmentalist push in the United States to classify them

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larger, less fragmented, and less polluted than where they came from. Longer, deeper penetration of sunlight into the sea (owing to less shading by sea ice) will trigger more algal photosynthesis, again increasing primary productivity and reverberating throughout the Arctic marine food web. The end result of this can only be

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Stephen Harper was speaking often about reasserting Canada’s sovereignty over her northern territories and the Northwest Passage,333 and backing it up with new ice-strengthened patrol ships, a military training base in Resolute Bay, and a $720 million icebreaker. Norway was acquiring five new frigates armed with Aegis

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experiment. But what of intrinsic pressures within the Arctic itself ? Is the “mad scramble” so fevered, the oil and gas assessments so compelling, the retreating ice and new shipping lanes so transformative, that extreme tension or violent conflicts in the region become inevitable? There are good reasons to think not. One

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periphery (there were at least six thousand ships operating in the Arctic in 2004, the year that these two maps capture).361 In January, sea ice confines them to the Aleutian Islands, northern Fennoscandia, Iceland, and southern Greenland. Even the icebreakers retreat then. Only Russia did any serious icebreaking—to

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canals? Impossible. Those operate 365 days per year with no ice whatsoever. At best the Arctic Ocean will become ice-free for a few days to a few weeks in summer and even then, there is no such thing as a truly “ice-free” Arctic Ocean. From autumn through spring, there will be expanding first

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-year ice cover, slowing ships down even with icebreaker escort. In summer, there will always be lingering bits of sea

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as dreamed of in the fifteenth and early twenty-first centuries. Doubtless some international trade will be diverted through the region as the summer sea-ice retreats northward. It is happening now through the Aleutian Islands, Murmansk, Kirkenes, and Churchill. But few of the vessels I envision are giant container

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temperatures will make remote northern landscapes less accessible is by reducing our ability to travel on them using winter roads. Winter roads, also variously called ice roads, snow roads, temporary roads, and other names, are a remarkably well-kept secret. As their name suggests, they are temporary features, requiring a

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For all but the most lucrative operations, many industries will become increasingly uneconomic and finally abandoned. The significance of this goes beyond the major Ice Road Trucker-type ice highways that are rebuilt in the same place each year. It means reduced access everywhere. Take, for example, off-road oil and gas

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corners of the world. Among these is the Arctic Ocean, where investment capital is flowing north as the peaceful settlement of seafloor claims, diminished sea ice, new maritime port facilities, and specialized LNG tankers have made offshore gas extraction increasingly economic. The NORCs’ relative water riches are envied by all.

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Tlingit, and many others migrated and grew. Our circumpolar colonization was nearly complete. Northern Europe got a later start because it was buried under an ice sheet. But after the glaciers retreated it was invaded and reinvaded many times, beginning about twelve thousand years ago. From genetic studies it appears that

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intense) growing season. Abundant water and hot summers create a moist haven for hordes of mosquitoes. The freshly scoured landscape, exposed only since the last ice age, has poorly developed soils. Biological richness is low and essentially still colonizing since the glaciers’ retreat. It’s not surprising, therefore, that our

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these Arctic waters by 2050? Possibly, but don’t bet on it. Offshore energy development is more likely to grow cautiously and incrementally. Even in ice-free oceans—which the Arctic Ocean most certainly is not—offshore drilling is complicated and expensive. Northern environments are environmentally delicate, so they demand above

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-normal protections. Existing ports and other maritime facilities, as discussed in Chapter 5, are scarce. Ice-resistant platforms and other new technologies still need to be invented. Outside of the Alaska Platform, the vast share of hydrocarbon in the Arctic is

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models. I’d envisioned being welcomed with gratitude, after traveling thousands of miles to record personal accounts of meatless hunts, starving wildlife, and perilously thinning ice. In my year-plus vacation from number crunching, I would become the Anna Politkovskaya of Arctic climate change. In retrospect it’s a bit embarrassing

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long reconstruction of past climate variations is obtained. We even get tiny samples of the ancient atmosphere, by cracking into air bubbles trapped in the ice. From these high-resolution annual measurements in Greenland, Alley and his colleagues had discovered that around twelve thousand years ago, just when we were pulling

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Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security,” is not based on climate model projections, but instead on a known prehistoric event seen in ice cores, sediments, and fossils. About 8,200 years ago, several thousand years after the really big swings that Alley had studied, temperatures near Greenland

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ancestors. Some decomposition continues underground, but once permafrost sets in, even that halts, and the stuff becomes cryogenically preserved. Since the end of the last ice age, this excess of plant production over plant decomposition has slowly accumulated one of the biggest stockpiles of organic carbon on Earth. To put that

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and a magnificent animal doomed to extinction. Both are stylized, of course. The craggy spires ensnaring the Jeannette more closely resemble alpine mountains than sea ice; upon magnification, shadow angles and other subtle details in the photo reveal that the polar bear has almost surely been digitally inserted. Each has its

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spending money, this growing perception is as equally important—perhaps even more important—as the climate changes themselves. Viewed in this light, disappearing sea ice in the Arctic Ocean is profound—but so also are the decisions of NORC governments to begin military exercises there, to start buying frigates and

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Flows in Northern Eurasian Rivers: A Growing Influence of Groundwater in the High-Latitude Hydrologic Cycle,” Journal of Geophysical Research 112, G4, (2007): G04S47. 287 Ice caps are large glacier masses on land. Unlike Antarctica, a continent buried beneath mile-thick glaciers and surrounded by oceans, the Arctic is an ocean

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Sees Bright Side of Warming,” BBC News, September 14, 2007; C. Woodward, “Global Warming Is a Boon for Farmers and Fishermen but a Hardship for Ice-Dependent Inuit,” Christian Science Monitor, October 1, 2007; and “Greenlandic Super Potatoes,” The Copenhagen Post, May 18, 2009. 312 Workshop on Conservation of Crop

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to consider the prospect of new economic opportunities for oil and gas exploration, shipping, and fisheries made possible by the reduction of summer Arctic sea ice. Under the Putin administration, Russia began funding her own scientists again, while also rolling up the welcome mat for western scientists. I and two

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temperatures and/or deeper winter snowpack (deeper snow insulates the ground). In general, warmer permafrost means lower load-bearing capacity, but other factors like geology, ice content, and thermal properties are also important. These processes have recently been incorporated into Streletskiy’s semiempirical model, driven here by NCAR CCSM3 projections of

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brief operating season. In 2007 it absorbed eleven thousand loaded trips in just seventy-two days. D. Hayley and S. Proskin, “Managing the Safety of Ice Covers Used for Transportation in an Environment of Climate Warming,” 4th Canadian Conference on Geohazards, May 20-24, 2008, Québec City, Canada. 382 Geologically speaking

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and used winter roads have surprisingly low impact on the environment, especially over lakes and wetlands. See S. Guyer, B. Keating, “The Impact of Ice Roads and Ice Pads on Tundra Ecosystems,” National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, U.S. Bureau of Land Management, BLM-Alaska Open File Report 98 (April 2005), 57 pp

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www.oecd.org/dataoecd/34/59/35043046.pdf. 444 Unusual warm spells in winter cause snow to partly melt, then refreeze, encasing the snowpack in ice. Starvation can result for herbivores unable to break through. Rain-on-snow events are particularly deadly; in October 2003 a particularly severe rainstorm killed approximately

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continents and size and rotation rate of the planet, proper parameterizations for subgrid processes, and aerosols. 487 R. B. Alley, The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 229 pp. 488 K. C. Taylor et al., “The ‘Flickering Switch’ of

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Smith, D. L. Turcotte, B. L. Isacks, “Streamflow Characterization and Feature Detection Using a Discrete Wavelet Transform,” Hydrological Processes 12 (1998): 233-249. 491 Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2, drilled between 1989 and 1993 near the center of Greenland. 492 R. B. Alley et al., “Abrupt Increase in Greenland Snow Accumulation

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Assessment Arctic Council Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy Arctic Ocean: and indigenous peoples; and natural resources; and river runoff; and the rule of law; and sea ice levels; and the seabed; and shipping; and UNCLOS Argentina Arrhenius, Svante Asia. See specific countries Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Asian Development Bank Association

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demographic trends; described; and drought; and electric vehicles; and endangered species; and geophysical impacts; and inertia of global forces; and medieval warming period; and melting ice sheets; and melting permafrost and migration of species; monitoring climate; and national security; and nuclear power; and ocean temperatures; and prospects for NORCs; and risk

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management; and river runoff; and sea ice; and sea levels; and short-term fluctuations; and snowpack and glaciers; SRES scenarios; and water resources; and winter roads Clinton, Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham coal

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Ike Hurricane Katrina hurricane vulnerability hybrid cars hybridization of species hydrocarbon fuels. See also coal; natural gas; oil hydroelectric power hydrogen fuel hydrology ice-albedo feedback Ice Road Truckers ice sheets icebergs icebreakers Iceland: and aboriginal demographics; and the Arctic Council; and Arctic resources; and demographic trends; and human settlement patterns; and

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La Niña La Plata basin Lagos, Nigeria Lake Maracaibo basin Lake Mead Lake Oroville Lake Powell Lammers, Richard land subsidence Landsat Lapland Laporte, Pierre Laurentide ice sheet Lawrence, David Lebanon Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich Lesotho Lettenmaier, Dennis Libya liquefied natural gas (LNG) Lisbon, Portugal Little Mosque on the Prairie Lobell, Dave

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Organization (NATO) North Korea North Pole North Sea North Slope Northern Rim Countries (NORCs). See also specific countries: and aboriginal demographics; and agriculture; and the Arctic; free trade; and human settlement patterns; and immigration policies; listed; map of; population growth of; prospects for; and the Siberian Curse Northern Sea Route Northern Transportation

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and North Pole expeditions; and nuclear power; and territorial boundaries; and UNCLOS; and winter roads synthetic natural gas (SNG) Syria Taiwan Tajikistan technology: arctic sea ice mapping; and ethanol production; as global force; and global warming; and hydrogen fuel cells; and nuclear power; and satellites; and smart power grids; and solar

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glaciers; and transboundary rivers; and urbanization; and virtual water trade WaterGAP Watt-Cloutier, Sheila weather patterns. See also climate change Wellinghoff, Jeff wells West Antarctic Ice Sheet West Bank West Siberia When the Rivers Run Dry (Pearce) wildfires wildlife Williamson, John wind power winter roads Wolf, Aaron women’s empowerment World

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein  · 15 Sep 2014  · 829pp  · 229,566 words

of the Rainforest Action Network, 1973–20121 “In my books I’ve imagined people salting the Gulf Stream, damming the glaciers sliding off the Greenland ice cap, pumping ocean water into the dry basins of the Sahara and Asia to create salt seas, pumping melted

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ice from Antarctica north to provide freshwater, genetically engineering bacteria to sequester more carbon in the roots of trees, raising Florida 30 feet to get it

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: so far, temperatures have increased by just .8 degree Celsius and we are already experiencing many alarming impacts, including the unprecedented melting of the Greenland ice sheet in the summer of 2012 and the acidification of oceans far more rapidly than expected. Allowing temperatures to warm by more than twice that

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global warming approaches and exceeds 2-degrees Celsius, there is a risk of triggering nonlinear tipping elements. Examples include the disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet leading to more rapid sea-level rise, or large-scale Amazon dieback drastically affecting ecosystems, rivers, agriculture, energy production, and livelihoods. This would further

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modeling, it is becoming safer to assume that 4 degrees could bring about a number of extremely dangerous feedback loops—an Arctic that is regularly ice-free in September, for instance, or, according to one recent study, global vegetation that is too saturated to act as a reliable “sink,” leading to

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glacier melt in a section of West Antarctica roughly the size of France now “appears unstoppable.” This likely spells doom for the entire West Antarctic ice sheet, which according to lead study author Eric Rignot “comes with a sea level rise of between three and five metres. Such an event will

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of warming is likely to set in motion several major tipping points—not only slower ones such as the aforementioned breakdown of the West Antarctic ice sheet, but possibly more abrupt ones, like massive releases of methane from Arctic permafrost.) The accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers has also published a report warning businesses

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process powered by the liberation of unprecedented amounts of fossil fuels from the earth, has dramatically sped up the same process that is liberating Arctic ice from existence. As a result, we now find ourselves in a very difficult and slighty ironic position. Because of those decades of hardcore emitting exactly

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latitudes—may experience some economic benefits from a slightly warmer climate, from longer growing seasons to access to shorter trade routes through the melting Arctic ice. At the same time, the wealthy in these regions are already finding ever more elaborate ways to protect themselves from the coming weather extremes. Sparked

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burning basis for demanding a robust and reinvented commons, rather than an often forgotten footnote? Why do liberal media outlets still segregate stories about melting ice sheets in their “green” sections—next to viral videos of cuddly animals making unlikely friendships? Why are so many of us not doing the things

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’t be surprised that some climate scientists are a little spooked by the radical implications of their own research. Most of them were quietly measuring ice cores, running global climate models, and studying ocean acidification, only to discover, as Australian climate expert and author Clive Hamilton puts it, that in breaking

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typically takes two to five years.)” He concludes that “if we invest in nuclear versus true renewables, you can bet that the glaciers and polar ice caps will keep melting while we wait, and wait, for the nuclear age to arrive. We will also guarantee a riskier future for us all

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extraction projects like the Alberta tar sands, to saying no to demands to open up new carbon frontiers (like the oil trapped under melting Arctic ice). * * * In the 1960s and 1970s, when a flurry of environmental legislation was passed in the U.S. and in other major industrial countries, saying no

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of Mexico on the oil rigs, or when Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is a parking lot for coal tankers, or when Greenland’s melting ice sheet is stained black from a spill we have no idea how to clean up. Because these companies will always need more reserves to top

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. In its early stages, and in between the wrenching disasters, climate is about an early blooming of a particular flower, an unusually thin layer of ice on a lake, the late arrival of a migratory bird—noticing these small changes requires the kind of communion that comes from knowing a place

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options. The world is headed down a similar path with the relentless burning of coal and oil, which is altering the planet’s climate, melting ice caps, making oceans more acidic and edging us ever closer to a day when no one will be able to take clean water, fertile soil

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the levels of the oceans, in their chemical composition, in the slow erasure of islands like Nauru; in the retreat of glaciers, the collapse of ice shelves, the thawing of permafrost; in the disturbed soil cycles and in the charred forests. Indeed, it turns out that coal’s earliest casualties—the

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predicting the broad patterns of climate change—they are not infallible. As we have seen from the failure to anticipate the severity of summer sea ice loss in the Arctic as well as the rate of global sea level rise in recent decades, computer models have tended to underestimate certain risks

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effects of a Mount Pinatubo–like eruption, a real Mount Pinatubo erupts. Would we risk bringing on what David Keith has described as “a worldwide Ice Age, a snowball earth,” just because we forgot, yet again, that we are not actually in the driver’s seat?46 The dogged faith in

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of monstrous calculations implicit in geoengineering—sacrifice part of Latin America in order to save all of China, or save the remaining glaciers and land ice to prevent catastrophic global sea level rise but risk endangering India’s food source—might be unavoidable. But even if we acquire enough information to

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rearing its head in geoengineering discussions like the one at Chicheley Hall. It is awfully reassuring to imagine that a technological intervention could save Arctic ice from melting but, once again, far too little attention is being paid to the billions of people living in monsoon-fed parts of Asia and

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, when thirty Greenpeace activists staged a protest in the Russian Arctic to draw attention to the dangers of the rush to drill under the melting ice. Armed Coast Guard officers rappelled onto the vessel from a helicopter, storming it commando-style, and the activists were thrown in jail for two months

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, continue to monitor the situation to see if the dynamics changed. And with that we were back on the street, surrounded by New Yorkers clutching iced lattes and barking into cell phones. Manuel snapped a few pictures of Guujaaw underneath the Standard & Poor’s sign, flanked by security guards in body

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trapping grounds have already been fouled, just as no one has more legal power to halt the rush to drill under the Arctic’s melting ice than Inuit, Sami, and other northern Indigenous tribes whose livelihoods would be jeopardized by an offshore oil spill. Whether they are able to exercise those

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damages, a company spokesman famously said: “We’re going to fight this until hell freezes over—and then we’ll fight it out on the ice.” (And indeed, the fight still drags on.)22 I was struck by this profound imbalance when I traveled to the territory of the Beaver Lake

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extractive industries. That’s because disruptive weather changes, particularly in northern regions, are making it much harder to hunt and fish (for example when the ice is almost never solid, communities in the far north become virtually trapped, unable to harvest food for months on end). All this makes it extremely

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climate change, there often seems no other option. The paucity of good choices is perhaps best on display in Greenland, where receding glaciers and melting ice are revealing a vast potential for new mines and offshore oil exploration. The former Danish colony gained home rule in 1979, but the Inuit nation

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science of climate change doesn’t leave much room for that kind of disagreement. Carbon leaves an unmistakable trail, the evidence etched in coral and ice cores. We can accurately measure how much carbon we can collectively emit into the atmosphere and who has taken up what share of that budget

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more such examples of bottom-up threats, endangering the youngest members of species ranging from wolverine cubs (whose parents are having trouble storing food in ice) to peregrine falcon chicks (which are catching hypothermia and drowning in unusual downpours) to Arctic ring seal pups (whose snowy birthing dens, like those of

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frenzied consumer culture. All of this has changed so rapidly as I have been writing that I have had to race to keep up. Yes, ice sheets are melting faster than the models projected, but resistance is beginning to boil. In these existing and nascent movements we now have a clear

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Sylvia Wachira at Copenhagen climate conference, Climate Justice Now!, December 10, 2009, http://www.climate-justice-now.org; GREENLAND: J. E. Box et al., “Greenland Ice Sheet,” Arctic Report Card 2012, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, January 14, 2013; ACIDIFICATION: Bärbel Hönisch et al., “The Geological Record of Ocean Acidification,” Science

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During the Summer of 2003,” Comptes Rendus Biologies 331 (2008): 171-78; CROP LOSSES: “Climate Stabilization Targets,” National Academy of Sciences, pp. 160–63. 19. ICE-FREE ARCTIC: Ibid., pp. 132–36. VEGETATION: Andrew D. Friend et al., “Carbon Residence Time Dominates Uncertainty in Terrestrial Vegetation Responses to Future Climate and Atmospheric CO2

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of SRM: Gabriele C. Hegerl and Susan Solomon, “Risks of Climate Engineering,” Science 325 (2009): 955–956. ARCTIC SEA ICE LOSS AND GLOBAL SEA LEVEL RISE: Julienne Stroeve et al., “Arctic Sea Ice Decline: Faster than Forecast,” Geophysical Research Letters 34 (2007): L09501; Julienne C. Stroeve et al., “Trends in Arctic Sea

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Ice Extent from CMIP5, CMIP3 and Observations,” Geophysical Research Letters 39 (2012): L16502; Stefan Rahmstorf et al., “Recent Climate Observations Compared to Projections,” Science 316 (2007):

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(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 293; Rudolf Brázdil et al., “European Floods During the Winter 1783/1784: Scenarios of an Extreme Event During the ‘Little Ice Age,’ ” Theoretical and Applied Climatology 100 (2010): 179–185; Anja Schmidt et al., “Climatic Impact of the Long-lasting 1783 Laki Eruption: Inapplicability of Mass

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of, see emission reduction from shipping, 76, 79 standards for, 25 WTO regulations and, 71 see also carbon emissions Greenland: extraction industry in, 385 melting ice sheet in, 12, 148, 385 green NGOs, geoengineering and, 264, 280 Green Party (New Brunswick), 374 Greenpeace, 84, 156, 197, 199, 201, 205, 233n, 264

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, 108, 404, 407 hybrid cars, 35 hydraulic fracturing, see fracking hydrocarbons, 237 metabolizing of, 433 reserves of, 150 hydroelectric power, 97, 100, 182 Iceland, 243 ice shelves, 176 Ickes, Harold, 293 Idaho, 318, 370 Idaho Rivers United, 319 Idle No More movement, 381–82, 397 Ierissos, Greece, 295, 298 Ijaw Nation

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, intentional modification of: as weapon, 261, 278 see also Pinatubo Option; Solar Radiation Management Weintrobe, Sally, 12 Werner, Brad, 449–50, 451, 460 West Antarctic ice sheet, 13, 14, 15 West Burton, England, 300 Western Australia, 376 West, Thomas, 365 West Virginia, 332, 357n, 367 wetlands, extractive industry damage to, 425

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

by Alan Weisman  · 23 Sep 2013  · 579pp  · 164,339 words

that 90-odd percent of everyone with a maternal grandparent born in this country can trace their ancestry back ten thousand years. Right to the Ice Age. I put it to the test: I used genetic mapping on both my maternal and paternal DNA. And sure enough, I’m what was

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’re going to import millions of Vietnamese, who will undercut your wages and work for next to nothing’?” He swirls his empty glass, clinking the ice cubes. “They wouldn’t put up with it, would they? There would be riots in Poland.” But the European Union–sanctioned labor mobility that allows

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both to elevation changes and to being one of the oldest forests on Earth, dating back at least twenty-five thousand years, before the last Ice Age. It wasn’t until the latter part of the twentieth century that biologists knew that the apes raiding surrounding settlers’ fields were, in fact

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philanthropy. Every NGO in every developing country competes for the same pool of charity—which, as economies contract and populations grow, is shrinking like Arctic ice. All week, Gladys and Lynne have worked on a CTPH evaluation to present to funding agencies, Lynne translating it into the acronym-studded bureaucratese she

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.” Shading his eyes, he sees it’s Jemalyn Rayos, her pink cooler hanging from a shoulder strap. From it he selects a melon-flavored fruit ice; she, her seven children, and her eight siblings make and sell them around the island. Jemalyn, in her late thirties, is also San Agapito’s

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coastal communities in eight Philippine provinces, and its successor program now focuses on the most impoverished, such as this one. Romeo points with his fruit ice to the fish sanctuary, where no one is allowed to dive. Sixteen more similar sanctuaries ring the island. Each village has coastal resource managers, who

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thick with cypress, cedar, and Persian juniper. This is the largest remnant of Iran’s great Hirkani Forest, a relic that escaped freezing during the Ice Ages. Below the conifers are stands of oak, maple, wild cherry, and barberry, and valleys filled with wild saffron. Beyond them are the steppes where

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than we once thought we had—in the form of gas we free by shattering bedrock, oil we wring from sand and shale, and newly ice-free Arctic deposits—seems impressive from a short-term perspective, such as an election cycle. But the math reveals that they’ll buy us relatively little extra

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to help themselves and to help meet a global emergency. Over the years, their lending had expanded to small businesses ranging from embroidered silks to ice cream to raising off-season organic limes and cantaloupes that earned several times their normal price. Now, partnering with sponsoring Thai companies, they could finance

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acidic that it’s turned into salty Perrier, higher levels of dissolved CO2 corrode developing shells of young mollusks and crustaceans. Warm waters expand, melting ice adds more volume, and the specter of rising seas becomes a certainty as it grows likely that Earth’s average surface temperature is headed beyond

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the soy meal, goes to feed livestock,2 not people (as do 80 percent of the antibiotics sold). Nearly one-third of the planet’s ice-free landmass is used for either grazing or for growing animal feed. It takes about six pounds of grain (and roughly 2,400 gallons of

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whoever profits from business as usual. But thus far, the main failing in climate change models has been timidity: the worst possible case for an ice-free Arctic summer, predicted for 2050 back in 2008, has now been moved to as early as 2016. At what point, and with what proof or words

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?” Trudeau Lecture at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, January 28, 2009. Tripati, A. K., C. D. Roberts, and R. A. Eagle. “Coupling of CO2 and Ice Sheet Stability Over Major Climate Transitions of the Last 20 Million Years.” Science, vol. 326, no. 5958 (December 2009): 1394–97. doi: 10.1126/science

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’s Population to Shrink About 30% to 86.7 Mil. by 2060.” Japan Economic Newswire, January 30, 2012. “Japan to Test-Drill for Seabed ‘Burning Ice.’ ” Agence France-Presse, July 26, 2011. “Japan Vows to Continue Nuclear Plant Exports.” Agence France-Presse, August 5, 2011. Johnson, Eric. “Kansai Chiefs Accept ‘Limited

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Beef?” Sydney Morning Herald, September 25, 2011. Bamber, J. L., and W. P. Aspinall. “An Expert Judgment Assessment of Future Sea Level Rise from the Ice Sheets.” Nature Climate Change, January 6, 2013. Barnett, T. P., and D. W. Pierce. “When Will Lake Mead Go Dry?” Water Resources Research, vol. 44

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/11/house-energy-and-commerce-climate-science-hearing-Is-u-s-corn-doomed. Lewis, Tanya. “Sea Level Rise Overflowing Estimates: Feedback Mechanisms Are Speeding Up Ice Melt.” Science News, November 8, 2012. Lobell, D. B., W. Schlenker, and J. Costa-Roberts. “Climate Trends and Global Crop Production Since 1980.” Science, vol

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, March 7, 2011. Brill, Richard. “Earth’s Carrying Capacity Is an Inescapable Fact.” Honolulu Star-Advertiser, November 5, 2010. Bump, Philip. “The Arctic Could Be Ice-Free by 2016.” Grist, September 18, 2012. Cabal, Luisa. “Regressive Contraception Policies ‘Failing Women’ in EU.” Public Service Europe, March 23, 2012. http://www.publicserviceeurope

A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World

by William J. Bernstein  · 5 May 2009  · 565pp  · 164,405 words

land bridge from their North American habitat to a similar one in Eurasia. Thus, whereas animal species might migrate across the Bering Strait during the ice ages, crop species could not. That all changed in 1493 with Christopher Columbus's second voyage, which would turn the agriculture and the economies of

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met a sudden, dark, and frigid end when an enormous asteroid hit the Gulf of Mexico about sixty-five million years ago and triggered an ice age. Our warm-blooded mammalian ancestors, better adapted to the cold, enjoyed a resurgence. Around forty million years ago, one of these, the rabbit-size

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. The Pleistocene, which ended just ten thousand years ago, was marked by periods of intermittent but vast glaciation. During these frozen interludes the accumulation of ice in the earth's expanding polar caps caused the sea level to drop by as much as several hundred feet, more than enough to expose

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heat, into a state of excitement. The Tuscany carried a new and priceless cargo: more than a hundred tons of crystal-clear New England ice. By that year, ice had been shipped over great distances for nearly three decades. This trade was the brainchild of an eccentric Bostonian, Frederic Tudor. On a

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cold drinks. He was right. Beginning in the Caribbean, he expanded his operations throughout Europe and the United States, particularly in New Orleans, where Tudor ice made the mint julep famous. Getting a frozen cargo from Massachusetts to India on a sailing ship is not as difficult as it sounds-the

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larger the mass of ice, the more slowly it melts. A layer of sawdust insulation and a bit of ventilation were enough to keep two-thirds of 150 tons of

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ice frozen for the four-month journey. The hard part of shipping ice to the tropics was harvesting the clear, cold cargo in sufficient quantity, quality, and shape. This problem was solved

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by Nathaniel Wyeth, a hotel keeper who sold ice to Tudor as a sideline. Wyeth's invention, patented in 1829, gave birth to one of New England's largest nineteenth-century industries. His horse

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fruit into his refrigerated holds-typically, Baldwin apples southbound to Havana, and oranges northbound. Farther north, the very first barges on the Erie Canal carried ice-chilled Great Lakes fish to New York. Strangely, Tudor did little to exploit this advance. Until the day he died in 1864, he dealt almost

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exclusively in ice, and it fell to others to develop what would become a much larger business, the shipment of perishables.35 Well into the twentieth century, most

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Thoreau, demonstrating an imperfect grasp of Indian Ocean trade routes, sea temperature, and the physics of heat transfer, mused about a wayward block of Tudor ice tumbling into the harbor at Calcutta: The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. With favoring winds it is wafted

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from cut flowers to sides of beef, and these bounteous luxuries fed consumers' demand for more. By the mid-nineteenth century, a higher tonnage of ice, bound for India, Europe, and around the Horn to the West Coast, was shipped out of Boston harbor than any other product. Occasionally, shipments traveled

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in New England, Gustavus Swift, decided to move his business to Chicago's rail hub. Finding the railroad companies both unwilling and unable to provide ice-chilled cars, he began to experiment with various railcar designs. He settled on one invented by Andrew Chase that featured easily loaded twin overhead

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ice tanks at either end, a configuration later improved on by another meat packer, Philip Armour, who added an effective cooling mixture of crushed ice and salt.38 By 1880, the railroads and private shippers owned more than

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1,300 ice-cooled refrigerated cars; by 1900, that number swelled to 87,000. The number finally peaked in 1930

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beef distributor Timothy Eastman shipped the first chilled meat from New York to England. He packed about onefourth of the volume of the hold with ice and cooled the adjacent cargo with ventilation fans. Queen Victoria deemed the beef "very good," continuing the centuries-old tradition of royal endorsement of novel

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consumer goods and bringing chilled American meat to English tables. Not many populated areas of the world are blessed with a reliable ice-harvesting season. Even in the Boston area where Tudor operated, a mild winter often resulted in a "crop failure," inducing panic in the more refined

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parts of the South and moving the cutting crews to Maine. In the nineteenth century, the public also became concerned about the purity of ice harvested by horse-drawn Wyeth cutters from increasingly polluted ponds and rivers. Both Americans and Europeans began to investigate artificial chilling. Before the mid-twentieth

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, most American families owned such "refrigerators"-insulated cedar or oak boxes designed to keep a small amount of meat or a dairy product cold with ice replenished every several days. Mechanical refrigeration had no Alexander Graham Bell or Thomas Edison. The basic principles of artificial cooling had been known since prehistoric

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people had their slaves moisten the outside of earthen jars, which chilled on exposure to night breezes; the Indians recorded the first production of artificial ice by a similar treatment of covered waterfilled pits. In 1755, William Cullen, a Scottish physician, made a simple but far-reaching breakthrough when he generated

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produces dramatic cooling-the same phenomenon that occurs when you emerge from a swim into a stiff breeze. Soon enough, Cullen was able to make ice at room temperature. Variations on Cullen's basic technique multiplied; the most alarming of them involved using concentrated sulfuric acid, which aggressively absorbs water, to

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side, it cools a jacket of brine (which has a low freezing temperature) that is circulated out to the task at hand-ice-making machinery in the case of an ice plant, or the refrigerated compartment of a ship. On the highpressure side, the ammonia condenses, producing "waste" heat that is vented

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off. These first heavy, inefficient steam-driven mechanical refrigerators, produced by dozens of inventors under numerous patents, were used in fixed ice-making plants far from

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natural ice sources-in the Caribbean, south of the Mason-Dixon Line, in West Coast cities, and particularly in Argentinean and Australian meatpacking plants. Tudor

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a century following his initial delivery in 1833, came to an abrupt end a few years after the opening of the city's first artificial ice plant in 1878.40 Figure 12-3. Schematic of Early Mechanical Refrigeration Unit Artificial and natural production complemented each other nicely

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; ice made in plants in New Orleans or California filled the cooling tanks of northbound and eastbound refrigerator cars; blocks harvested from midwestern rivers and New

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England ponds cooled south- and westbound freights. Timothy Eastman's partner, Henry Bell, suspected that the new artificial refrigeration machines might prove more economical than ice for marine shipping. In 1877 he approached the famous physicist Sir William Thompson (later Lord Kelvin) about the feasibility of transporting artificially chilled and frozen

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Weightman, The Frozen Water Trade (New York: Hyperion, 2003), 7, 71, 105-109, 127-143. For a detailed description of Wyeth's invention and ancillary ice-harvesting tools, see Oscar Edward Anderson Jr., Refrigeration in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press for the University of Cincinnati, 1953), 13-35. 36. Henry D

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J. Tangredi, ed., Globalization and Maritime Power (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 2002), 143-169. 7. Jessie C. Carman, "Economic and Strategic Implications of Ice-Free Arctic Seas," in Globalization and Maritime Power 171-188. 8. Patrick J. Buchanan, The Great Betrayal (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998), 224. 9. Bairoch, Economics and World

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, Ian, Review of Roman Coins from India (Paula J. Turner), Classical Review 41 (January 1991): 264-265. Carman, Jessie C., "Economic and Strategic Implications of Ice-Free Arctic Seas," in Globalization and Maritime Power (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 2002). Carney, Timothy P., The Big Ripoff (New York: Wiley, 2006). Chau Ju

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