To explore these changes in order—from melt to drought to deluge—as I broadly did, with some exceptions, in my travels around the globe, is to go from opportunism to wagon circling to open desperation. The expansionist exuberance of the Arctic petroleum rush, which has men running around like Elizabethan invaders, claiming virgin territory, fades into the grim free marketeering of a Malthusian world without enough water, then into the bunker mentality of sea-level rise and hurricanes, which could be what finally makes climate change personal for many Americans—and against which long-shot technology is viewed as our only escape hatch. There is no single response to the effects of global warming, even if we do seem to fall back on a finite set, but as I traveled, I found a consistent theme: I met hundreds of people who thought climate change would make them rich. In the six years I spent reporting this book, visiting twenty-four countries and more than a dozen U.S. states (and flying so often that I caused far, far more than my share of carbon emissions), I met profiteers, engineers, warlords, mercenaries, vigilantes, politicians, spies, entrepreneurs, and thieves—people seeking to come out ahead in a new, warmed world. They were universally kind and hospitable to me, and nearly all, driven by ideology, fear, or hard-nosed realism—or all three—thought they were doing the necessary thing. In six years, I never met a bad person.
When you’re on the high ground—wealthy enough, northerly enough, far enough above the sea—global warming is not yet the existential threat that it is for an Egyptian or a Marshall or Staten Islander. It’s a shorter ski season, a more expensive loaf of bread, a new business opportunity. We can afford the desalination plants; we can afford the seawalls. Many of the world’s existing imbalances seem only magnified by climate change, and they may be magnified all the more by how we respond to it. The technical term for trying to prepare for an altered planet is “adaptation.” (To try to cut emissions is known as mitigation.) One of the few tangible results of the 2009 and 2010 climate conferences in Copenhagen and Cancún was a pledge by emitter countries to help poorer countries adapt. But new climate funding is already falling short of the pledge: so far, $2 billion to save the rest of the world, which is at least $8 billion less than it could cost to build a proposed storm-surge barrier to protect New York City from the next Sandy.
It would be a mistake to suggest that every plan and project described in this book was born solely, or even principally, in response to climate change. Arctic oil is attractive for many reasons, not least because there’s less and less oil everywhere else, and what remains is often in hostile countries (Iran, Venezuela, Sudan) or recent conflict zones (Iraq, Nigeria, Libya). Water markets have boomed in Australia and California thanks in large part to the historic oddities of their water laws and the decision, whether foolish or brave, to turn emptiness into farmland, deserts into paradise. African refugees crowding southern Europe’s detention camps have often fled more immediate threats than the expanding Sahara. Genetic engineers racing to build supernaturally perfect corn see climate change as just one more excuse for their efforts. Weather modifiers have tried to make rain and tame hurricanes for a generation. The twenty-one-hundred-mile fence that India is building around Bangladesh is not all about sea-level rise, not hardly: India also doesn’t much like Bangladesh, and its emigrants have long been a source of irritation. It is as difficult to attribute human action to a single climatic cause as it is to attribute today’s weather report—or one bad wheat harvest—to long-term climatic shifts. But global warming is the thread that ties these stories together, and it’s a window into our collective state of mind. I’ve tried to keep rooted in the present, so if there’s a glimpse of the future in these pages, it’s only because we’re the ones making it. To the increasingly urgent question “What are we doing about climate change?” this book is meant to be an answer.
PART ONE
THE MELT
It is natural to expect that opinions were very varied when the news spread that the Arctic region was going to be sold at auction for the benefit of the highest and final bidder. . . .
To use the Arctic region? Why, such an idea could “only be found in the brain of a fool,” was the general verdict.
Nothing, however, was more serious than this project.
—Jules Verne, The Purchase of the North Pole, 1889
ONE
COLD RUSH
CANADA DEFENDS THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE
On the first full day of the sovereignty operation, the captain slowed the frigate and we took out the machine guns and sprayed the Northwest Passage with bullets. It felt pretty good. It was foggy out, and the unpolluted water boiled as we polluted it with lead. There was no life we could see and few waves. The wind was cold, the Arctic Ocean a drab green. There wasn’t any ice. But if there had been ice, we would have shot it, too.
The guns were C7s—American M16s but rechristened, like many Canadian weapons, with a patriotic C—and most of the shooters were camo-clad teenagers from Quebec’s celebrated 22e Regiment, who are known as the Vandoos, from vingt-deux (twenty-two). The Vandoos lined up three in a row on the back deck, each of them held in place by a sturdy navy man, and fired away. They went from semiautomatic to fully automatic and shot more. They switched to pistols and then shotguns and shot until the deck was littered with shells. When they finished, they kicked the shells into the sea. There were journalists on board, and the Arctic was melting, and the Canadians—who now had a new, northern coastline to develop and defend—were trying their hardest to be fierce. The world had to understand that they were ready to fight for whatever riches the retreating ice revealed.
The frigate was named the Montreal. It was the length of two city blocks and painted warship gray, packed with two dozen torpedoes and nearly 250 people. There were sailors, Vandoos, and Mounties. There were Canadian wire-service reporters and photographers from at least two in-flight magazines. There were Inuit dignitaries and observers from Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated, the pseudo-governmental Inuit corporation that had negotiated the 1999 creation of its people’s own 800,000-square-mile territory, Nunavut. Our cruise speed was 15.5 knots. Our fuel stores were at 125 percent. With diesel taking the place of water in the auxiliary tanks, our showers were capped at two minutes. We were steaming north, farther north than the Royal Canadian Navy had gone in decades.
The Arctic held two main prizes: petroleum and new shipping lanes. An estimated 22 percent of the world’s untapped deposits—ninety billion barrels of oil and 1,670 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, according to the U.S. Geological Survey—is thought to be hiding in the high north, some of it in territory that does not yet belong to any nation. The less ice there is, the more petroleum there is within reach, and the more pressure there is to stake a claim. Likewise, the less ice there is, the more the storied Northwest Passage—a long-sought, long-frozen-over shortcut between the Atlantic and the Pacific—becomes a viable alternative to the Panama Canal, saving potentially shippers leaving Newark or Baltimore for Shanghai or Busan some four thousand miles and hundreds of thousands of dollars in transit fees and fuel costs.
Canada owns the land on both sides of the Northwest Passage, but much of the world, particularly its customary ally the United States, does not agree that it owns the waterway itself. Canadians were tired of being pushed around by their more populous neighbor—of being “condemned to always play ‘Robin’ to the U.S. ‘Batman,’” as American diplomats would put it in a 2008 cable released by WikiLeaks. At stake up here was national pride, not just money or national security. To kick off this show of force, called Operation Lancaster, conservative prime minister Stephen Harper himself had made the long journey to Iqaluit, the former U.S. military base that is now the capital of Nunavut. He had arrived bearing promises of new heavy icebreakers, a new Arctic warfare and training center, a new deepwater port, and a new network of undersea sensors and aerial drones. Now, as his Vandoos and Mounties moved north, he was putting boots on the ice.
There had been sovereignty operations before, including Nunalivut (Inuktitut for “the land is ours”) in 2006 and the previous year’s Exercise Frozen Beaver, when Canadian troops helicoptered to Hans Island—a bean-shaped, half-square-mile rock near Greenland claimed by both Denmark and Canada—and planted a supposedly windproof steel flag and flagpole that the wind toppled almost immediately. But Lancaster was the largest such operation to date, the first to take advantage of retreating sea ice, and it was occurring on the hundredth anniversary of the Northwest Passage’s first crossing (which was by a Norwegian, though no one dwelled on that). Its stated goal was to “project a credible size military force over a broad area of the Eastern Arctic.” It would last twelve days in all. The Montreal would lead a flotilla of two navy warships and two coast guard icebreakers into Lancaster Sound, the eastern entrance of the passage, and patrol back and forth as the skies buzzed with Aurora surveillance planes and Griffon helicopters. Meanwhile, the Vandoos—accompanied by Inuit reservists, there to ensure that no one was eaten by polar bears—would take the smaller ships to shore and set up observation posts on both sides of the sound. To the north, on rocky Devon Island, would be Observation Post 1. To the south, on glaciated Bylot Island and the adjacent Borden Peninsula, would be Observation Posts 2 and 3. The troops would hold the high ground for most of a week, scanning the Northwest Passage for invaders.
This would all be preceded by a display of Canadian resolve: a mock interdiction. After watching the machine guns fire and the Maple Leaf flag flutter, I strolled up to the bridge and stood next to the Montreal’s commanding officer. He and his crew had donned green helmets and green flak jackets. The radio crackled, and a Canadian approximation of the voice of a California surfer filled the bridge. It was the supposed captain of the Killer Bee, which in actuality was the Goose Bay, a 150-foot Canadian coastal-defense vessel that the war gamers had decided would be a rogue “American” merchant ship starting an unauthorized transit of the Northwest Passage.
The Killer Bee was four miles away in the fog, sailing a course that would intersect with ours in an estimated fourteen minutes and forty-two seconds. It would not say where it was going. It would not say what was in its hold. “Merchant vessel Killer Bee, what is your cargo?” our radioman asked. “This is Warship 336. Again, what is your cargo?” The Killer Bee’s answers were brief, rude, believably American in their tone save for the occasional slipup: “We’re aboot forty miles off the coast, which constitutes international waters. Are you sure you have the authority to be questioning me out here? Can you just tell me again why I’m being asked these questions? You guys are the almighty Canadian government, so I’m sure you can access this sort of information somewhere else.”
The Montreal passed a message to the colonel running Operation Lancaster, asking for clearance to send over a boarding party and, if necessary, to initiate “disabling fire.” The sailors on the bridge peered into the mist off our port side. We informed the Killer Bee that we would be boarding it, and its captain replied that he wouldn’t be “too down with that.” The engine churned. We began to close the gap: seven hundred yards, six hundred yards, five hundred yards. The ship appeared, and we aimed our .50-caliber machine gun at it. “Bullying your way around the ocean is not a way to foster cooperation between our two countries,” the voice told us. We commanded the Killer Bee to remove all personnel from its top decks, and our gunners directed a barrage of tracer fire a thousand yards off its bow. The smell of gunpowder wafted through the bridge. The next barrage was five hundred yards off the bow. Finally, our 57-millimeter cannon swiveled toward the Killer Bee. There were five loud booms in quick succession, five puffs of smoke, and then, seconds later, a sixth round. The ocean in front of the Killer Bee erupted. Its captain relented. “I thought Canada was a nation of peacekeepers,” whined the faux American.
For the next five hundred miles, we saw only water and fog and an occasional glimpse of the chutes and pinnacles of Baffin Island’s peaks. It wasn’t until 10:00 a.m. on the operation’s fourth day that a much-awaited announcement came over the loudspeaker: icebergs ahead. We rushed to the port-side deck where the officers normally gathered to smoke. We were at seventy-two degrees north, and there were three of them: two- and three-hundred-foot giants that towered over the frigate. The icebergs’ walls were riven by small waterfalls, and chunks of ice were falling off into the sea. The bergs were drifting south toward the Atlantic, bound for warmer waters, where they would soon melt into nothing. The Vandoos leaned over the railing and snapped photographs.
• • •
IT WAS THE SUMMER OF 2006, and drought-crazed camels would soon rampage through a village in Australia, a manatee would swim past Chelsea Piers in New York City’s Hudson River, and the Netherlands would announce that its famous Elfstedentocht ice-skating race might have to be postponed forever. Armadillos were reaching northeast Arkansas. Wolves ate dogs in Alaska. Fire consumed fifty million acres of Siberia. Greenland lost a hundred gigatons of ice. The Inuit got air-conditioning units. The polar bear lurched toward the endangered-species list. India’s Ghoramara Island was mostly lost to the Bay of Bengal, Papua New Guinea’s Malasiga village was mostly lost to the Solomon Sea, and Alaska’s Shishmaref village decided to evacuate before being lost to the Chukchi Sea. Canadian scientists reported that the forty-square-mile Ayles Ice Shelf had broken off Ellesmere Island and formed a rapidly melting island of its own. A European satellite showed a temporary crack in the ice pack leading from northern Russia all the way to the North Pole. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would declare that winter the warmest since it began keeping records, which was in 1880. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change would announce that eleven of the previous twelve years were the warmest in human history.
In retrospect, this was the moment that we began to believe in global warming—not in the abstract science of it, which most could already passively accept, but in the fact that there were money and power to be won and lost. Skeptics would continue loudly doubting the overwhelming scientific consensus, but they were a smoke screen. For those who considered climate change’s strategic rather than ideological impacts—militaries, corporations, the rare politician—it had become time to grapple with the consequences. There would be winners. There would be losers. The process of determining who was who was getting under way.
Great Britain had recently asked its chief economist, Sir Nicholas Stern, to conduct a review of global warming’s likely effects on world markets. His findings were dire: The cost of unchecked greenhouse-gas emissions would be the equivalent of losing 5 percent or more of global GDP a year, every year, forever. In tropical Africa and South America, crop yields would drop dramatically. In South and East Asia, hundreds of millions of people and trillions of dollars of assets would be threatened by rising seas. “What makes wars start?” Britain’s foreign minister, Margaret Beckett, asked the UN Security Council in 2007. “Fights over water. Changing patterns of rainfall. Fights over food production, land use.” According to Lord Stern, the world was on the brink of an upheaval on the scale of the two world wars and the Great Depression.
But the future did not seem universally dark. At the margins of the crisis, some were already seeing opportunity, especially in the wealthy nations that were causing climate change in the first place. At least in the near term in most of Europe, Russia, Canada, and America, rain will still fall, growing seasons will extend, and some agriculture could expand, bolstered by our emissions. Carbon dioxide is a key building block for plant growth. All else being equal—though in few cases will all else be equal—the higher the atmospheric concentration, the higher the yields.
Farther north, in the Arctic, the ice albedo feedback effect—the fact that sea ice, which reflects 85 to 90 percent of solar radiation, melts to become seawater, which absorbs all but 10 percent of radiation—would help keep temperatures climbing at twice the global rate. Northern economies seemed poised to grow at least as rap
idly. Canada’s farmers already had two extra growing days a year, and studies said its Athabasca tar sands might someday be accessible from the north, via the Mackenzie River. Under Stephen Harper, a country many Americans considered well-meaning to the point of naïveté was becoming one of the villains of international climate conferences. Canada was a party to the Kyoto Protocol, a weak 1997 treaty that mostly excluded big emitters like China and the United States but nonetheless remains the world’s first and only binding international agreement on greenhouse gases. Yet Canada would be overshooting its Kyoto targets by 30 percent by the time it abandoned the treaty in 2012—just before another northern economy, Russia, also made its exit. One could blame Canada’s climate about-face on its reliance on carbon-intensive tar sands. But it is also unclear that climate change is all that bad for Canada.
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