Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

by Bill McKibben

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  Some of the cost of climate change can be measured in units we’re used to dealing with. Testimony submitted by climate scientists to a federal court in 2017, for instance, said that if we don’t take much stronger action now, future citizens would have to pay $535 trillion to cope with global warming.26 How is that possible? Take one small county in Florida, which needs to raise 150 miles of road to prevent flooding from even minimal sea level rise. That costs $7 million a mile, putting the price tag at over $1 billion, in a county that has an annual road budget of $25 million. Or consider the numbers from Alaska, where officials are preparing to move one coastal village with four hundred residents that’s threatened by rising waters at a cost of up to $400 million—$1 million a person.27 Multiply this by everyone everywhere, and you understand why the costs run so high. A team of economists predicted a 12 percent risk that global warming could reduce global economic output by 50 percent by 2100—that is to say, there’s a one-in-eight chance of something eight times as bad as the Great Recession.28

  But some things can’t be measured, and the damage there seems even greater. For instance, the median estimate, from the International Organization for Migration, is that we may see two hundred million climate refugees by 2050. (The high estimate is a billion.) Already “the likelihood of being uprooted from one’s home has increased sixty percent compared with forty years ago.”29 The U.S. military frets about that because masses of people on the march destabilize entire regions. “Security will start to crumble pretty quickly,” said Adm. Samuel Locklear, former chief of U.S. Pacific Command, explaining why climate change was his single greatest worry.30

  The biggest worry for people losing their homes is … losing their homes. So, let me tell you about a trip I took last summer, to the ice shelf of Greenland. I was with a pair of veteran ice scientists and two young poets—a woman named Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific, and another named Aka Niviana, who was born on this largest of all the earth’s islands, a massive sheet of ice that, when it melts, will raise the level of the oceans more than twenty feet.

  And it is melting. We landed at the World War II–era airstrip in Narsarsuaq and proceeded by boat through the iceberg-clogged Tunulliarfik Fjord, arriving eventually at the foot of the Qaterlait Glacier. We hauled gear up the sloping, icy ramp of the glacier and made camp on an outcrop of red granite bedrock nearly a kilometer inland. In fact, we made camp twice, because the afternoon sun swelled the stream we’d chosen for a site, and soon the tents were inundated. But after dinner, in the late Arctic sunlight, the two women donned the traditional dress of their respective homelands and hiked farther up the glacier, till they could see both the ocean and the high ice. And there they performed a poem they’d composed, a cry from angry and engaged hearts about the overwhelming fact of their lives.

  The ice of Niviana’s homeland was disappearing, and with it a way of life. While we were on the ice sheet, researchers reported that “the oldest and thickest sea ice” in the Arctic had melted, “opening waters north of Greenland that are normally frozen even in summer.”31 Just up the coast from our camp, a landslide triggered by melting ice had recently set off a hundred-foot tsunami that killed four people in a remote village: it was, said scientists, precisely the kind of event that will “become more frequent as the climate warms.”32

  The effect, however, is likely to be even more immediate on Jetnil-Kijiner’s home. The Marshalls are a meter or two above sea level, and already the “king tides” wash through living rooms and unearth graveyards. The breadfruit trees and the banana palms are wilting as saltwater intrudes on the small lens of fresh water that has supported life on the atolls for millennia. Jetnil-Kijiner was literally standing on the ice that, as it melts, will drown her home, leaving her and her countrymen with, as she put it, “only a passport to call home.”

  So, you can understand the quiet rage that flowed through the poem the two women had written, a poem they now shouted into a chill wind on this glacier that flowed up to the great ice sheet, silhouetted against the hemisphere’s starkest landscape. It was a fury that came from a long and bitter history: the Marshalls were the site of the atom bomb tests after the war, and Bikini Atoll remains uninhabitable, just as the United States left nuclear waste lying around the ice when it abandoned the thirty bases it had built in Greenland.

  The very same beasts

  That now decide

  Who should live

  And who should die …

  We demand that the world see beyond

  SUVs, ACs, their pre-packaged convenience

  Their oil-slicked dreams, beyond the belief

  That tomorrow will never happen

  But, of course, climate change is different, the first crisis that, though it affects the most vulnerable first and hardest, will eventually come for us all.

  Let me bring my home to yours

  Let’s watch as Miami, New York,

  Shanghai, Amsterdam, London

  Rio de Janeiro and Osaka

  Try to breathe underwater …

  None of us is immune.

  Science can tell us a good deal about this crisis. Jason Box, an American glaciologist who organized the trip, has spent the last twenty-five years journeying to Greenland. “We called this place where we are now the Eagle Glacier because of its shape when we first came here five years ago,” Box said. “But now the head and the wings of the bird have melted away. I don’t know what we should call it now, but the eagle is dead.” He busied himself replacing the batteries in his remote weather stations, scattered across the ice. They tell one story, but his colleague Alun Hubbard, a Welsh scientist, conceded that there were limits to what instruments could explain. “It’s just gobsmacking looking at the trauma of the landscape,” he said. “I just couldn’t register the scale of how the ice sheet had changed in my head.”

  But artists can register scale. They can transpose the fact of melting ice to inundated homes and bewildered lives, gauge it against long history and lost future. Science and economics have no real way to value the fact that people have lived for millennia in a certain rhythm, have eaten the food and sung the songs of certain places that are now disappearing. This is a cost only art can measure, and it makes sense that the units of that measurement are sadness and fury—and also, remarkably, hope. The women’s poem, shouted into the chill wind, ended like this:

  Life in all forms demands

  The same respect we all give to money …

  So each and every one of us

  Has to decide

  If we

  Will

  Rise

  And so, we must—in fact, this book will end with a description of what that rising might look like. But if, as now seems certain, the melt continues, then the villages of the Marshalls and the ports of Greenland will be overwhelmed. And we will all be a little poorer, because a way of being will have been cut off. The puzzle of being human will have lost some of its oldest, most artful pieces.

  “The loss of Venice,” Jeff Goodell writes, wouldn’t be about just the loss of present-day Venetians. “It’s the loss of the stones in the narrow streets where Titian and Giorgione walked. It’s the loss of eleventh-century mosaics in the basilica, and the unburied home of Marco Polo, and palazzos along the Grand Canal.… The loss of Venice is about the loss of a part of ourselves that reaches back in time and binds us together as civilized people.”33

  We all have losses already. Where I live, it’s the seasons: winter doesn’t reliably mean winter anymore, and so the way we’ve always viscerally told time has begun to break down. In California, it’s the sense of ease: the smell of the fire next time lingers in the eucalyptus groves. There are many ways to be poorer, and we’re going to find out all of them.

  4

  This is a book about being human, but for a moment we need to leave people a little behind and go out to the deep ocean and back into deep time—go, that is, to realms so staggering in their size tha
t we can finally understand the scale of our very human impact.

  Saltwater first. We erred, though understandably, when we named our planet. “Ocean” would have been more apt, as 70 percent of the surface is covered by the seas. We live on their margins, so our worries are dominated by their rise, their intrusion into our sphere. But unless you earn your livelihood by fishing, you rarely think very much about what goes on beneath the surface. The sea seems so endlessly vast; very few humans ever disappear over the edge of the horizon and get a sense of that blue expanse—which is why, of course, we’ve mistreated it so casually. By the middle of this century the ocean may contain more plastic than fish by weight,1 partly because we toss away so many bottles and partly because we take far more life from the ocean than it can reproduce. Since 1950 we’ve wiped out perhaps 90 percent of the big fish in the ocean: swordfish, marlin, grouper. This is not surprising when one bluefin tuna can bring $180,000 on the Japanese market, or when 270,000 sharks are killed each day, mostly for their fins, which add no taste but much status to bowls of soup. Every year, we plow an undersea area twice the size of the continental United States, with trawlers leveling everything on the sea floor. Were this on the surface, there would be real protest, but it’s invisible.2

  Still, the overfishing, and the dead zones at the mouths of all major rivers where fertilizers pour into the sea, and the gyres of plastic spinning slowly a thousand miles offshore—these are the smallest of our insults to the ocean. The overwhelming threat comes, again, from the fossil fuel we burn and the effects of the carbon dioxide that it produces, effects that are even larger in the sea than on the land. For one, the ocean is where most of that extra heat accumulates. Though we focus on the heat in the air around us, about 93 percent of the extra heat is actually collecting in the sea. The deep sea is now warming about nine times faster than it was in the 1960s, ’70s, or ’80s.3 (It goes without saying that the Trump administration has proposed big cutbacks for the agency that maintains the network of temperature-monitoring buoys.) To get a sense of how much heat the oceans absorb, consider this: without them, the temperature of the atmosphere would have gone up by 97 degrees Fahrenheit since 1955.4

  You needn’t be an expert diver to see the most dramatic effects of all that heat. A snorkel will do, or even a lungful of air. From Port Douglas, in Queensland, Australia, it’s about two hours by motorboat to the outer edge of the Great Barrier Reef. On my last trip, in the spring of 2018, the sea was choppy and no one talked much, just dozed in the early morning sun. We were headed to the Opal Reef, where, three years earlier, a crew had filmed some of the remarkable scenes of coral spawning for the BBC series Blue Planet II. Guided by the phases of the moon, and with David Attenborough providing discreet and tasteful narration, the garden of corals had simultaneously released clouds of eggs and sperm for the cameras, in the world’s most profligate display of fecundity, a spectacle if there ever was one. But no longer. We moored, tugged on snorkels and masks, and stepped off the stern, clad in full-body “stinger suits” to protect us from the jellyfish. I swam the fifty yards to the reef with James Kerry, a reef researcher at Queensland’s James Cook University, and when we got to the edge, we peered down—and it was like snorkeling over an empty parking garage. The forms of coral remained—there were exuberant fans and antlers and trays—but instead of vivid neon colors, there were just shades of murk. The living coral were so few in number that Kerry could tell me about them individually as we treaded water at the surface. “That blue one is Pocillopora damicornis. It’s pretty hardy,” he said. “And did you see that one thing down on the bottom that looked like a pillow? That’s a large single-polyp coral, a fungid.” Some fish wandered through—mostly parrotfish, which feed off the algae that covers the dead coral.

  The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on Earth, but it is roughly half as living as it was three years ago. Massive bleaching events in 2016 and 2017 (caused by the incursions of hot water that are becoming ever more common) devastated the northern and central sections. It’s hard to explain how grim it looked beneath the surface, in the same way that it’s hard to explain precisely how you know instinctively that a dead body is dead. But everyone on board the motorboat that day was trying to put it in words, working out a kind of grief. Dean Miller, a reef scientist who is the director of media and science for the Great Barrier Reef Legacy, an organization that works to get more scientists out on the water, has filmed transects across this section of the reef over the years, mapping the same route across the coral. “This place—it looked like someone had created the reef, had planted all their favorite corals in perfect shapes and sizes. It was a bustling city, like in Finding Nemo. But now it just seems quiet, like the lights have been turned off.” The shapes of the dead coral will persist until the first big storm crumbles them, but no one has seen any spawning in the area in the past two years. One reef expert, Jon Brodie, told reporters that the reef was now in a “terminal stage. We’ve given up. It’s been my life,” he said. “We’ve failed.”5 The response of local officials was, of course, emblematic: the head of the Queensland tourism association called the chief coral scientist “a dick,” and demanded that the government cut funding for future research. Tourists, he pointed out, “won’t do long-haul trips if they think the reef is dead.”6

  The extra heat is not the only thing we’re adding to the oceans. As our factories, cars, and furnaces have produced a great plume of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, some of that carbon dioxide has been absorbed by seawater—at the moment, about a million tons crosses from the air into the sea each hour.7 For many decades, scientists thought of this as a blessing—some of the carbon that we spewed out would simply disappear into the briny deep—but about fifteen years ago, researchers began to sense profound danger. In the volumes that we are producing carbon, it turns out, even the ocean is too small to soak it up without effect. As carbon dioxide flows into the ocean, some of it is turned into carbonic acid, and that in turn reduces the pH of seawater. Throughout the Holocene—throughout, that is, recorded human history—the ocean’s pH was a steady 8.2. It has now dropped to 8.1, which doesn’t sound like much, until you remember that pH is a logarithmic scale. The oceans have seen their acidity increase by about 30 percent. At current emission rates, the pH of the oceans will drop to 7.8 or 7.7 by century’s end, “well beyond what fish and other marine organisms can tolerate in the laboratory without very serious implications for health, reproduction, and mobility,” according to the veteran oceanographer Eelco Rohling.8 Human bodies, for instance, have a pH of about 7.4. If that drops by 0.2 units (about half what we expect for the ocean this century), it can “cause serious health issues, such as seizures, coma, and death.” As water acidifies, the small phytoplankton at the very base of the planet’s biological chains struggle to form carbonate for their skeletal parts. Fish blood pH is in equilibrium with the surrounding water; if the water becomes more acid, fish use huge amounts of energy to restore the balance in their cells, which stifles their growth and slows their mobility.9

  So, carbon dioxide is both heating and acidifying the oceans that cover most of our planet. Taken together, says Rohling, “it’s a double whammy” that will “dramatically reduce diversity and numbers of key species throughout the marine ecosystem. This could induce a species collapse from the top of the food web downward.”10 He’s not alone in his fears. In 2013, 540 of the world’s top ocean scientists collaborated on a report for the United Nations. Their prediction: the oceans, over the course of the century, would become “hot, sour, and breathless.”11 Scientists now routinely predict that by 2050, virtually all the world’s coral reefs will be dead.12 That’s roughly thirty years away. That is to say, the same distance in the future as the collapse of the Soviet Union is in the past. It’s half as distant in time as the invention of the Frisbee or the birth of Donny Osmond. A child born today who wants to become a marine biologist will barely have her PhD by 2050.

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  Politi
cians who don’t wish to deal with the issue of global warming often say, “The climate is always changing.” Even those people who are properly worried often default to a truism of their own: “The earth will be fine; it’s humans who are in trouble.” Both statements are technically accurate: no system is perfectly stable, and until the sun blows up some billions of years hence, there will always be a rock orbiting at a distance of about ninety million miles. But both statements are at their core quite wrong: the climate change we are currently forcing will be enormous in comparison with anything our civilization has ever known, and it will fundamentally degrade the earth’s biology. Human beings are now a geological force. In fact, we are one of the half-dozen or so largest geological forces to punctuate the billions of years of earth’s history.