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

by Laurence C. Smith

  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.312 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.313 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.314 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.”315

  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.316 Similar north-south asymmetries in crop yield (with gains in the north and declines in the south) were later demonstrated for Europe and Russia.317 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.318

  Other questions revolve around the relative importance of temperature versus moisture stress on plants, soil quality, strength of CO2 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.319 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.320 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.

  CHAPTER 6

  One if by Land, Two if by Sea

  In August 2007 the Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker Rossiya broke a path to the North Pole, the research vessel Akademik Fyodorov trailing closely behind. An opening was cut through the sea ice and two tiny submarines lowered by crane into the freezing water. Their crews then dove 4,300 meters—more than two and a half miles beneath the ice—to the floor of the Arctic Ocean. A robotic arm collected samples and planted a titanium tricolor Russian flag directly into the yellow mud of the northernmost spot on the planet. “The Arctic is ours,” declared Artur Chilingarov, the polar explorer, oceanographer, and Duma politician who led the expedition and also went down in one of the subs.321 Vaguely remembered for rescuing a stuck polar ship in the 1980s, he became an instant celebrity; President Putin later awarded him a gold Hero of Russia medal.

  For the next several months, the world proceeded to go crazy about Russians staking out the North Pole. Western politicians spluttered in outrage. “This isn’t the fifteenth century,” Canada’s foreign minister Peter MacKay told a crowd of television reporters. “You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say: ‘We’re claiming this territory.’ ”322 Media reports framed the story as a thinly veiled grab for natural resources, citing a recent comment by U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) scientist Don Gautier, who had ballparked that the Arctic could hold up to one-fourth of the last undiscovered hydrocarbons remaining on Earth. The presumption was that Russia had fired the opening salvo in a new sovereignty race for vast riches of untapped oil and gas—resources desperately needed to support the world economy in the coming century—thought to lie beneath the frigid seafloor of the Arctic Ocean.

  Despite being closer to the Rossiya than just about anyone else on Earth, I had no idea what was going on. I was cut off from the outside world, steaming north through an empty ocean a thousand miles north of Toronto. At the moment the titanium Russian flag was inserted, I was probably either sleeping or hosing off stinky plankton nets. It was several days before I even heard about it.

  I was living aboard the CCGS Amundsen, a smaller icebreaker of the Canadian Coast Guard, which was headed for Hudson Bay and ultimately the Northwest Passage. My daily routine revolved in a painted metallic world less than a hundred meters long and twenty wide, with erratic rotating shifts of sleep, work, and cafeteria. We had launched with great fanfare from Quebec City just six days before the Russian flag-planting incident.

  I hadn’t fully grasped what a big deal these scientific icebreaker cruises are. A crowd milled alongside the ship and news crews swarmed the ship’s officers and chief scientists. I spotted Louis Fortier, the director of ArcticNet 323 who had invited me along, surrounded by television cameras. He pumped my hand and told me to enjoy myself before being spun around for another interview. A crane lifted the gangplank and the expedition’s first rotation—forty scientists, thirty-five crew members of the Canadian Coast Guard, and a handful of journalists—waved at the mass of people standing onshore. Horns blared, a gleaming red helicopter circled overhead, and the two crowds yelled good-byes over the widening slice of water. As we pulled away down the St. Lawrence Seaway, I was surprised to see a few camera crews (and Louis) still milling around on deck. Were they joining the expedition, too, I wondered? Twenty minutes later my question was answered. The ship’s helicopter, which had been buzzing around the ship, landed on the aft helipad and ferried them back to Quebec City.

  That first night at sea, there was quite a party. Off-duty crew ditched their crisp military blues to mingle with the scientists in shorts, T-shirts, and halter tops. The room steamed, a stereo thumped, and everyone got at least mildly inebriated. American icebreaker cruises are dry, but the Canadians open a beer bar two nights a week. This early in the expedition, the selection was astonishing. I bought two bottles of Kilkenny and set out to learn more about the rare caste of scientist called oceanographers. I found one and we shouted back and forth about marine stratification, ocean sampling, the sexual habits of right whales (quite promiscuous), and the sexual habits of cruise scientists (apparently, also so). It was a great time. But by the third beer, when she had touched my arm twice, I figured it was time to leave.

  Three weeks later, after a grueling round-the-clock schedule of moving, anchoring, crane operating, water sampling, and laboratory work, we disembarked in Churchill, Manitoba. A new rotation of scientists and crew were waiting excitedly to board the ship. It felt strange to give up my tiny cabin, familiar narrow hallways, and new friends to a bunch of strangers. But our rotation was just the first of many. The Amundsen was in her first leg of a historic 448-day jo
urney, the longest scientific cruise ever undertaken in the Arctic. Over the next fifteen months she would cycle through some two hundred people and shock the world by gliding easily through the Northwest Passage. At a cost of $40 million, the expedition was Canada’s biggest contribution to the 2007-2009 International Polar Year.324 While less splashy than the titanium Russian flag, Canada, too, was asserting its presence in the new Arctic Ocean.

  Who Owns the North Pole?

  Unlike the Amundsen expedition, Chilingarov’s dive to the North Pole was privately funded and really just a daring stunt. But that didn’t stop the flag-planting from triggering an international commotion. Russia’s response was that the flag was merely symbolic: The United States once planted a flag on the moon—did anyone seriously consider that a declaration of legal sovereignty? Her real claim to the North Pole was not from a flag, but from the geological samples collected by this and many other Russian expeditions in the Arctic. These data would prove that the Lomonosov Ridge—an underwater mountain chain, rising some three thousand meters above the seafloor, that bisects the Arctic Ocean—was geologically attached to Russia’s continental shelf. This would win her sovereignty of a huge chunk of ocean floor—possibly including the North Pole—in accordance with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

  UNCLOS and geology are critically important to this story, as we shall see shortly. But in late 2007 the world’s eyes were transfixed by that flag, not sediment samples. The great global economic contraction was still a year away. Energy demand was soaring and resurgent Russia, fueled by hundred-dollars-a-barrel oil and Putin’s steely gaze, was growing increasingly assertive on the world stage.

  Two months later, when the news hit about the record-shattering low in the amount of summertime Arctic sea ice,325 the image of uncorked shipping lanes, vast new energy reserves, and Russians planting flags in a brand-new ocean proved too much to resist. Arctic fever went viral. Headlines and pundits declared that a new colonial race for the frontier—a “mad scramble” for control of the Arctic Ocean and its vast presumed resources—had begun.326

  The perception that vast quantities of valuable natural resources lie awaiting in the North is not without merit. Most of its land surface has yet to be prospected for minerals; the Arctic Ocean seafloor is among the least mapped on Earth. Some of the world’s biggest mines are dug into Alaska and Siberia; one of the purest iron ores ever found was recently discovered on Canada’s Baffin Island.327 The discovery of diamonds in the Northwest Territories in 1991 sparked the biggest North American staking rush since the Klondike and propelled Canada from having no diamonds at all to becoming the world’s third-largest producer almost overnight. No one really knows what the new Arctic Ocean biology will be, but a longer open-water season can only mean more photosynthesis, more complex food webs, and the prospect of valuable new fisheries there. There are staggering volumes of gas hydrate—a sort of solid methane dry-ice that accumulates in the pore spaces of ocean sediments and permafrost—which no one has yet figured out how to recover but is plausibly a coveted fossil fuel of the future.

  The plainest prize of all is natural gas and oil. The Arctic’s broad continental shelves are draped in thick sequences of shale-rich sedimentary rock, an ideal geological setting for finding oil and gas. Prospects for natural gas are particularly high. In 2008 and 2009, the U.S. Geological Survey released new assessments concluding that about 30% of the world’s undiscovered natural gas and 13% of its undiscovered oil lies in the Arctic, mostly offshore in less than five hundred meters of water.328 These numbers are huge considering the region as a whole covers just 4% of the globe. The USGS assessments conclude it is more than 95% probable that the Arctic holds at least 770 trillion cubic feet of gas, with a fifty-fifty chance it contains more than double that. To put these numbers into perspective, the total proved gas reserves of the United States, Canada, and Mexico combined is about 313 trillion cubic feet of gas. The global economy consumes some 110 trillion cubic feet per year.

  Between the 2007 and 2008 sea-ice retreats, the Russian flag-planting, and the new USGS hydrocarbon assessments, it didn’t take long to hear rumbles about an arms race—or even outright war—over the Arctic Ocean. “There is simply no comparable historical example of a saltwater space with such ambiguous ownership, such a dramatically mutating seascape, and such extraordinary economic promise. Without U.S. leadership . . . the region could erupt in an armed mad dash for its resources,” offered Council on Foreign Relations (a prominent American think tank) analyst Scott Borgerson, writing in Foreign Affairs. “The rapid melt is also rekindling numerous interstate rivalries and attracting energy-hungry newcomers, such as China, to the region. The Arctic powers are fast approaching diplomatic gridlock, and that could eventually lead to the sort of armed brinkmanship that plagues other territories.”329 Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Russian Security Council, asserted, “The Arctic must become Russia’s main strategic resource base,” and “it cannot be ruled out that the battle for raw materials will be waged with military means.”330 The prestigious Jane’s Intelligence Review concluded, “Military competition is likely to increase, with Russia and Canada increasing their deployments and exercises, while there appears little opportunity for diplomatic resolution of the disputes.”331

  Could competition for hydrocarbons really spark a military buildup in the Arctic? Militarization has happened there before, after all. During the Cold War, it was a place where American and Russian forces played cat-and-mouse war games with spy planes and nuclear-armed subs, and built remote outposts to detect long-range bombers. It was a theater of military intrigue and brinkmanship, the stuff of spy novels and movie thrillers like Ice Station Zebra with Rock Hudson and K-19: The Widowmaker with Harrison Ford.

  The end of the Cold War marked the end of the thriller plots, and Arctic countries quickly downsized their militaries and lost interest in the region. Canada canceled its plan to buy as many as a dozen nuclear-powered submarines. The United States canceled a new class of Seawolf attack subs designed to fight beneath the sea ice. Most dramatically, the former Soviet Union simply parked its northern fleet in Murmansk and walked away.332 But by 2009, nearly two decades later, a military revival was stirring. All eight NORC countries—Russia, the United States, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden—were either rebuilding their militaries and coast guards or at least pondering new security arrangements in the region.

  Prime Minister 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 integrated weapons systems, and nearly fifty American-made F-35 fighter jets. Russia had refurbished its northern fleet and announced plans to expand it with new attack submarines, nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines, and enough ships to man five or six aircraft carrier battle groups by the 2020s. Russia had also resumed long-range bomber patrols along the airspaces of Canada, Alaska, and the Nordic countries for the first time since the Cold War. On the eve of U.S. president Barack Obama’s first visit to Canada, two Canadian Air Force jets were scrambled—perhaps overzealously—to meet an approaching Russian bomber.334 Even Iceland, nearly bankrupted by the global financial crisis, was pondering how to bolster its security. Finland, Denmark, and Sweden were considering new alliances with each other, or even possible membership in NATO.335

  The United States—dubbed the “reluctant Arctic power” by political scientist Rob Huebert at the University of Calgary336—was not growing its northern military power as noticeably. Its Polar Star icebreaker was out of service; a replacement was scrapped from the Obama administration’s omnibus stimulus bill.337 However, America had never downsized its northern forces as much as the other Arctic countries after the Cold War. It still maintained some twenty-five thousand army, air force, and coa
st guard personnel in Alaska and had even begun conducting naval exercises offshore.338 One of the United States’ two controversial missile defense complexes (intended to shoot down incoming ICBM missiles) was installed at Fort Greely in Alaska. Perhaps most telling of all was a presidential directive quietly issued in January 2009, during the final days of the Bush administration. This little-noticed document sharply redefined U.S. policy in the Arctic for the first time since the end of the Cold War.

  This “National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 66, Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD 25,” or, more compactly, “Arctic Region Policy,”339 was crafted exclusively for the Arctic, a significant change because all previous directives had lumped it and Antarctica together. Equally significant was its elevation of “National security and homeland security needs” to priority position #1 (out of six)—a return to Cold War prioritization. To political scientists, these changes are significant and signal a growing American strategic interest in the region.

  War in the Arctic?

  We’ve seen that current trends in rhetoric, defense spending, and written policy all point to a renewed militarization of the North. That is the trend. But what about war? Huebert believes that the world is beginning to perceive the Arctic as the “next Middle East” in terms of fossil hydrocarbon energy.340 Is it also the next Middle East in terms of fault lines for conflict? After all, jostling militaries imply heightened risk of incident; and conflicts needn’t even be about the Arctic to erupt there—the region could also become an expanded theater for global tensions and antagonism, as happened during the Cold War.

  This last scenario is certainly not the case today. Whether it develops in the future depends on the choices of future political leaders and thus lies outside the bounds of our thought 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?