The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future (19 page)

The New Arrivals

As you might imagine, the biological response to this has been brisk. By the 1990s, a greening up of northern plant cover was spotted by satellites. Down on the ground, trees grew taller and barren tundra began sprouting up shrubs.
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All of this is consistent with the temperature increases recorded by weather stations. Not surprisingly, ecosystem models project plant growth to continue rising right alongside the projected increases in air temperature and growing season length. Even under the “optimistic” emissions scenario shown earlier, Arctic net primary productivity (a measure of overall plant biomass growth) is projected to almost double by the 2080s.
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Wildlife is also on the move. From my travels and interviews the appearance of “southern” creatures in northern places was a prevailing theme. I heard repeatedly about raccoons, white-tailed deer, beavers, and even a mountain lion spotted in places they’d never been seen before. My uncle, a longtime outdoorsman in northern New York State, noticed gray squirrels and opossums moving in, along with some crazy disruptions to the spring harvest of maple syrup. The Mountain Pine Beetle, normally kept in check by winter-kill, is now devastating Canadian forests. Other biological examples published in the scientific literature include the common buzzard
Buteo buteo
wintering near Moscow, nearly a thousand kilometers north of normal; a northward shift in Japan’s Greater White-fronted Goose,
Anser albifrons;
and Sweden’s Brown Hare,
Lepus europaeus,
infiltrating the territory of (and possibly hybridizing with)
Lepus timidus,
the Mountain Hare. Red foxes are displacing Arctic foxes. Beavers are pushing north, and model projections suggest they will also become denser inside their current range.
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By midcentury
Ixodes scapularis—
the Lyme-disease-carrying tick—is projected to expand northward from its current toehold in southern Ontario to much of Canada. By century’s end the smallmouth bass, today found only near the U.S. border, is projected to live all the way to the Arctic Ocean. In the North Sea—one of the world’s most productive fisheries—nearly two-thirds of all fish species have either shifted north in latitude or sunk down to cooler water depths. Even lowly plankton is on the move: In the past forty years Atlantic warm-water species have pushed northward 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 under the Endangered Species Act. This gesture, ultimately rebuffed by both the Bush and Obama administrations, was largely symbolic (far more polar bears live offshore of Canada, Russia, and Greenland than Alaska, and these countries are certainly not beholden to the U.S. Endangered Species Act), but the concern for these magnificent animals is valid. They exist naturally only in the Arctic
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and are uniquely adapted to live out their lives roaming on top of a frozen ocean. Their home is on the floating sea ice, hunting ringed seals, napping, and occasionally cavorting or mating with one another. Some females go onto land to give birth, but they otherwise spend as much time as possible out on the ice. Unlike other bears they do not hibernate through the winter. The lean time for polar bears is in summer, when the ice disintegrates and retreats. Forced ashore, they mostly fast and wait until it returns.

There is growing evidence that the waiting and fasting periods are getting longer, leading to skinny bears, strange behavior (like wandering into towns), and even cannibalism. In 2004 biologists confirmed three occurrences of polar bears deliberately hunting and eating each other. In one case a large male bear pounded its forepaws through the den roof of a female, savagely bit into her head and neck, then dragged her off in a trail of blood to be devoured. Her cubs were buried and suffocated in the rubble. Such behavior had never been seen before during the scientists’ thirty-four years of research in the area.
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The problem is that the bears’ favorite prey, ringed seals, also require sea ice. They spend their time either resting on top of it (and watching out for polar bears), or swimming beneath it looking for Arctic cod. The Arctic cod lurks under and along the edges of the ice, watching out for ringed seals while chasing amphipods, copepods, and krill. Those little creatures in turn graze on tiny flagellates and diatoms that grow on the underside of the ice, and also bloom profusely in the water alongside its melting edge. This entire food chain—from microscopic phytoplankton to a thousand-pound polar bear—is inextricably linked to the presence of sea ice. Walruses, bearded seals, and other species also use sea ice, though none so specifically as do polar bears, ringed seals, and Arctic cod.

Despite growing evidence of stress (like bear cannibalism), none of these species is in immediate risk of extinction. But there is little question that if the summertime sea-ice fades completely, then these amazing creatures will fade right along with it. Government scientists, in a report to aid the Bush administration’s decision on the proposed Endangered Species Act listing, estimate that two-thirds of the world’s polar bears will be gone by 2050.
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From these and other indications worldwide, climate change is forcing a massive ecological reorganization of the planet, with both extinctions and expansions now under way. Depending on the emission scenario used, one model projects that anywhere from 15% to 37% of the world’s species will be committed to climate-change extinction by 2050.
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If these numbers hold true, they are devastating—roughly comparable to the impacts of deforestation and other direct forms of habitat loss. When combined with all the other species extinctions since the last ice age, they will mark the sixth great mass extinction on Earth—and the first since the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction that ended the dinosaurs some sixty-five million years ago.

The mechanisms for climate-change extinction are many. Amphibians and wetland species are especially vulnerable to droughts. As temperatures rise, polar and alpine species have literally nowhere left to go once pushed off the brink of the northernmost coast or highest mountain peak. A less direct mechanism is the decoupling of codependent species within a food web (called “match-mismatch” by ecologists) when their respective phenological cycles fall out of whack. Imagine birds migrating to their accustomed nesting area only to find that the caterpillar hatch they were planning to gorge on has already come and gone, for example. Another is that warmer temperatures tend to enable insect pests, invasive species, disease, and robust “generalized” species (like rats and raccoons) to outcompete specialized ones. Yet another is that the projected rate of climate change is so rapid that some sedentary species (like trees) may not be able to relocate quickly enough, or their escaping climatic comfort zone will shift to a place incompatible for other reasons, like terrain or soil. Some climates, especially in alpine and polar areas, will simply cease to exist. By century’s end, under a high carbon emissions scenario, 10%-48% of the world’s land surface is projected to “lose” its extant climate completely, and 12%-39% will develop new “novel” climates that don’t exist in the world today (mostly in the tropics and subtropics).
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These changes will have powerful impacts on world ecosystems and could even render some local conservation efforts obsolete. Finally, because ecosystems and food webs have so many complex interconnections, there will be rippling effects we don’t yet know about. All of this is piled on top of an ongoing raft of familiar ecological threats, including habitat destruction, invasive species, and pollution.

Compared with other places, habitat loss and pollution are less severe in Alaska, northern Canada, the Nordic countries, and eastern Russia, where vast boreal forests, tundra, and mountains hold some of the wildest and least-disturbed places left on Earth.
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However, northern ecosystems also have far simpler food chains and fewer species than, say, the Amazon rain forest. Indeed, much of it is a colonizing landscape, still in the early stages of soil formation and biological expansion after being encased and pulverized by glacier ice just eighteen thousand years ago.

When imagining 2050, I anticipate that a globally unfair assortment of some winners and many more loser species will be very apparent by then. Already the world’s plants and animals are in the midst of their biggest extinction challenge in sixty-five million years. Out of perhaps seven million eukaryote species found on Earth, nearly half of all vascular plants and one-third of vertebrates are confined to just twenty-five imperiled “hot spots,” mostly in the tropics and comprising just 1.4% of the world’s land surface.
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Even in the far North, a specialized ecosystem adapted to frigid cold will be under attack by advancing southern competitors, pests, and disease. It is possible that the vast boreal forest—girdling the northern high latitudes from Canada to Siberia—might convert to a more open, savannah-like state.
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But total primary productivity—meaning plant biomass, the bottom of the food chain—will be ramping up. Certain mobile southern invaders will enjoy growing viability in a vast new territory that is 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 greater overall ocean biomass, more complex food webs, and the invasion of southern marine species at the expense of northern ones.

The ecology of the North is imperiled and changing. But it will be anything but lifeless.

Hunters on Thin Ice

People rely on sea ice too. For millennia the Inuit and Yupik (Eskimo) peoples have lived along the shores of the Arctic Ocean and even out on the ice itself, hunting seals, polar bears, whales, walruses, and fish. It is the platform upon which they travel, whether by snowmobile, dogsled, or on foot. It is the foundation on which they build hunting camps to live in for weeks or months at a time.

These hunters have watched in astonishment as their sea-ice travel platform—dangerous even in good times—has thinned, become less predictable, and even disappeared. People’s snowmobiles and ATVs are crashing through into the freezing ocean. Farther south, they are crashing through the ice covering rivers and lakes. In Sanikiluaq, Canada, I learned that weaker ice and a two- to three-month shorter ice season is impairing people’s ability to catch seals and Arctic char. In Pangnirtung a traditional New Year’s Day bash celebrated out on the ice has become unsafe. In Barrow, two thousand miles west on the northernmost tip of Alaska, I learned hunters are now taking boats many miles offshore, hoping to find bits of ice with a walrus or bearded seal.
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This is a serious matter. In the high Arctic, eating wild animals is an essential part of human survival and culture. In Barrow I was welcomed into the home of an Inuit elder, who explained that three-quarters of his community relies on wild-caught food.
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I was struck by this because Barrow is one of the most prosperous and modernized northern towns I have seen. There is a huge supermarket with most everything found in the supermarkets of Los Angeles. But groceries are two or three times more expensive because there is no road or rail to Barrow, so everything must be flown or barged in. Most people at least supplement their diet with wild food; many crucially depend on it. Alongside Pepe’s Mexican Restaurant (which has surprisingly good food and is apparently visited by members of the Chicago Bulls basketball team) I saw plenty of bushmeat in Barrow. My host’s kitchen and backyard were festooned with racks of drying meat and fish; in his driveway was a dead caribou. Another driveway had two seals, yet another a massive walrus. In the Arctic, obtaining “country food” is not for sport—it is as important to people’s diet as thin-crust pizza is to New Yorkers.

Of all northern peoples, the marine mammal-hunters living along the Arctic Ocean coast are suffering the most from climate change. Less sea ice means more accidents and fewer ice-loving animals to eat. It means faster shoreline erosion from pounding by the waves and storms of the open ocean. The Alaskan village of Shishmaref has lost this battle and will need to be relocated farther inland. But even in coastal towns, nearly everyone I meet bristles at the notion of being cast as a hapless climate-change refugee.

Even as they express frustration at having their lives damaged by people living thousands of miles away—and think it only fair that those damages be repatriated—they also point to their long history of adaptation and resilience in one of the world’s most extreme environments. They are not sitting around idly in despair, or gazing forlornly out at the unfamiliar sea. They are buying boats, and organizing workshops, and setting about catching the fat salmon that are increasingly moving into their seas.

There is more to this story than climate change. Later, we will discuss some profound demographic, political, and economic trends now under way that promise to be just as important to northerners’ lives in the coming decades.

Greenland’s Fine Potatoes

One of the more vivid media images of 2007 was one of happy Greenlanders tending lush green potato fields against a backdrop of icebergs melting away into the ocean. The diminished sea ice was wreaking havoc on seal hunting—Greenland’s finance and foreign affairs minister observed that subsistence hunting crashed by 75%—but people were beginning to plant potatoes, radishes, and broccoli. “Farming, an occupation all but unheard of a century ago, has never looked better,” trumpeted
The Christian Science Monitor
. By 2009 some fields were doing so well that Danish scientists started studying them, to learn why Greenland’s potatoes were growing even better than southern ones.
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What could be a more iconic symbol of the world in 2050 than seal hunters turned farmers in one of the coldest places on Earth? But in terms of sheer caloric output, any climate-triggered boons to agriculture will not be realized on the narrow, rocky shores of Greenland, or indeed any other place in the Arctic. Similarly to what we saw for certain wild organisms, the pressure is a gradient from south to north, not a leap to the top of the planet. Summers there will always be brief, and its soils thin or nonexistent. A short-lived vegetable garden is one thing, but when it comes to producing major crops for global markets, any significant increases will be realized at the northern margins of present-day agriculture. There will be no amber fields of grain waving along the shores of the Arctic Ocean.

In 2007 I watched some of the world’s top agronomists and plant geneticists debate how best to save our temperate crops from the rising heat, droughts, and pathogens forecast for the coming decades.
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Their solution was part biotech—genetic modifications, for example—and part ancient practice: Move over, water-guzzling corn, here come the best drought-tolerant sorghums and millets . . . from Ethiopia! Without adaptation, the group concluded, the prospect of food insecurity in the low latitudes was a serious threat.

I was particularly impressed with presentations by Stanford University’s Dave Lobell and Marshall Burke, who used twenty different climate models to statistically map where the food insecurities were most likely to emerge. Apparently, by the year 2030 South Asia, Southeast Asia, and southern Africa are especially vulnerable.
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By 2050, agricultural projections for sub-Saharan Africa get even worse, with average crop production losses of −22, −17, −17, −18, and −8% for corn, sorghum, millet, groundnut, and cassava, respectively.
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By century’s end, things become still rougher, with one study concluding it is more than 90% likely that future growing season temperatures in the tropics and subtropics will exceed anything we’ve ever seen before, with bad implications for food crops. “With growing season temperatures in excess of the hottest years on record . . . the stress on crops and livestock will become global in character,” wrote the paper’s authors. “Ignoring climate projections at this stage will only result in the worst form of triage.”
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In contrast to these studies, a broad pattern of rising crop yields in Canada, some northern U.S. states, southern Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, and parts of Russia have been repeatedly demonstrated by climate-change model simulations for years. Already these countries are major producers of wheat, barley, rye, rapeseed, and potatoes. As early as 1990 it was apparent that regardless of what climate model was used, the northern U.S. states of Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin would likely benefit from rising average temperatures, even if corn, wheat, and soybean production in the rest of the country declined.
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Similar north-south asymmetries in crop yield (with gains in the north and declines in the south) were later demonstrated for Europe and Russia.
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The general idea is that in the marginal northern fringes of present-day agriculture, rising temperatures and longer growing seasons will boost current crops and perhaps allow introduction of new ones; in marginal southern fringes, rising temperatures and drought frequency should harm them.
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Other questions revolve around the relative importance of temperature versus moisture stress on plants, soil quality, strength of CO
₂
fertilization, and whether extreme events (heat waves, flooding) might be even more important determinants of future food supply than the long-term temperature and precipitation statistical averages produced by climate models.
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It is also an oversimplification to assert that Russian and Canadian agriculture, for example, will universally benefit from warmer air temperatures. Russia’s current agricultural heartland lies in its dry southern steppes, where crop declines may not be fully offset by gains in the north.
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The same holds true for Canada’s western prairies. But relative to the rest of the world, the NORCs—especially the northernmost U.S. states, parts of Canada and Russia, and northern Europe—count among the few places on Earth where we can reasonably expect to see rising crop production from climate change.

Please pass the potatoes.