High Tide: How Climate Crisis is Engulfing Our Planet. Mark Lynas
Fairbanks has always been a boom-and-bust town. In 1920, following the end of the gold rush, the town’s population had dwindled to a thousand – after a high of nearly twenty thousand a decade before. Another boom came during World War II, when several large military bases were established to counter the Japanese threat. The army and airforce stayed on during the Cold War, and Fairbanks began to prosper as a military town.
But the biggest boom of all has proved to be oil. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline runs right past Fairbanks, and the town was the centre of the pipeline-construction effort in the mid-1970s. Much of the entire state’s economy, not to mention its politics, revolves around the oil industry.
However, Alaska’s current prosperity has come at a high price. Although few in the state care to recognise it, Alaskan oil – of which more than a million barrels a day are exported to the mainland US – has rebounded heavily on the state through global climate change. And whatever their views on global warming, almost every resident will admit one thing: Alaska’s weather has gone crazy.
I arrived in Fairbanks late one evening after a twelve-hour train journey north from Anchorage. Most of it had been through the Alaska Range mountains, which were brilliant white against the blue sky, their tree-clad lower slopes speckled and green as the snows gave way to forest.
Travelling with me were Franny Armstrong, a filmmaker, and photographer Karen Robinson. Franny filmed out of the doorway as the train rattled over deep gorges and through metre-high snowdrifts, whilst Karen snapped shots of snow-bound shacks buried in remote backwoods territory. Everyone gathered at the window as we passed Mount McKinley, but we were disappointed: the great mountain was hidden from view by grey cloud.
Once in Fairbanks we bundled our gear into a taxi and found a cheap backstreet hostel in a part of town where the front gardens were full of junk, and savage-looking dogs barked from behind chain-link fences. The hostel, which had several semi-permanent unemployed residents, was once a brothel, its proprietor confided soon after we arrived. This gave the otherwise unremarkable two-storey wooden building an air of seedy glamour, especially since the taxi driver had known exactly where it was, even calling it by its former name – ‘Ruthie’s’.
The proprietor, a young hunting enthusiast called Dale Curtis, watched us unpack.
‘You guys tourists or something?’ He adjusted his baseball cap uneasily, leaning against the doorframe. (The doors were concertina cardboard, another brothel legacy.)
‘No, we’re journalists. We’re investigating climate change.’
He looked blank.
‘Global warming,’ I continued. ‘Asking people how the weather has changed and that sort of thing.’
He looked intrigued. ‘Well, the weather sure has got strange. It don’t get cold enough fast like it used to, and then it warms up real quick.’
This sounded interesting. I sat up and listened, encouraging him to continue.
‘What really struck me was watching ducks swimming on the river all winter. It was Christmas time, January even, and they were still swimming around. They’re not supposed to be here at that time, they’re supposed to be south already.’
He shook his head in amazement, warming to the theme. ‘And the bears come out too early. They don’t know whether to go into hibernation or to wake up. Folks round here are real worried about it. A couple of years ago at Christmas it rained and melted all the snow away. That just ain’t right, you know?’
As Dale Curtis was suggesting, Fairbanks is supposed to get cold in winter – really cold. Just a hundred and fifty kilometres shy of the Arctic Circle, in mid-December the town receives only three hours of sunlight. As any resident will tell you, the sun doesn’t really come up at all – it just skirts along the horizon, as if entangled in the icy peaks of the Alaska Range, before plunging back down south and leaving Fairbanks in frigid night. Temperatures regularly plummet to –40°C. It’s so cold that the air behaves differently: distant sounds become eerily close, and the smoke from home fires lies horizontally across the rooftops.
Or at least it used to be that cold. In recent winters temperatures in Fairbanks have reached –30°C for only a couple of days, Dale Curtis told me, whilst in previous decades they had remained at –40°C for months at a time. And it’s not just Fairbanks: similar stories come from all over the state. In Barrow, hundreds of kilometres above the Arctic Circle on Alaska’s frozen north coast, there were thunderstorms for the first time in memory a couple of years back. Local people had never seen anything like it: some Native American elders thought that the loud bangs of thunder were bombs going off.
The reason is simple: Alaska is baking. Temperatures in the state – as in much of the Arctic – are rising ten times faster than in the rest of the world. And the effects are so dramatic that entire ecosystems are beginning to unravel, as are the lifestyles of the people – many of them Native Americans – who depend on them. In many ways Alaska is the canary in the coal mine, showing the rest of the world what lies ahead as global warming accelerates.
The man who has done more than perhaps any other to highlight this is a quietly spoken scientist based at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, Professor Gunter Weller.
I met him on a warm May morning, and the season’s first mosquitoes were descending from the trees as we walked through patches of thawing snow behind Weller’s Center for Global Change and Arctic Systems Research. The Center looked thoroughly modern, with shiny plate-glass windows and a big car park full of big sports utility vehicles. A hundred metres away in the forest, a giant dish was turning gradually around, focusing its data stream on some unseen satellite far above.
‘In Alaska we’re seeing great changes in climate,’ Professor Weller was saying in his soft German accent. ‘There’s no doubt about it. This year we had extreme high temperatures, and in fact it’s been the second warmest year on record.’
When he first arrived in the state, Weller continued, the weather had been quite different – sometimes reaching minus fifty centigrade. ‘In fact, I remember my first New Year’s Eve here in 1968. I was invited next door to a party and I put a shot of very good scotch in an ice-cube tray outside, and it was frozen within half an hour. You wouldn’t see that now, no way.’
Alaskan wintertime temperatures have shot up by an average of six degrees centigrade, Weller told me. ‘This is an absolutely enormous signal,’ he emphasised, ‘bigger than anything the computer models have predicted.’ Summer temperatures were rising too: Fairbanks now regularly sees summertime highs of twenty-five degrees.
One of the best temperature records of all comes not from scientists but from gamblers. Each year the people of Nenana, a small town southwest of Fairbanks, place bets on the exact minute when the ice on the river will begin to break up for the spring thaw. The contest began when Alaska Railroad engineers put down an $800 wager in 1917; by 2000 the jackpot had grown to $335,000, and thousands of people across the state compete. The high financial stakes ensure constant vigilance by the locals, so the record is considered as reliable as the best scientific data – and it shows that the first day of spring has advanced by over a week since the 1920s.2
So was this global warming? I asked Professor Weller. Or perhaps something else?
His answer was unequivocal. ‘I think it’s clearly understood and clearly accepted by the scientific community that this is in part due to the human-induced global greenhouse effect.’ This greenhouse effect, he explained, was amplified at high latitudes by a positive feedback: once snow and ice begin to melt, the reflectivity of the Earth’s surface decreases, allowing more of the sun’s heat to be absorbed. This in turn melts more ice and snow, further reducing the planet’s albedo, allowing still more warming, and so on.
In Fairbanks the rising temperatures were having a dramatic impact. Much of the area is underlain by permafrost – permanently frozen ground – which now, for the first time in thousands of years, is beginning to thaw. As a result,