The Sugar Season

by Douglas Whynott

  Tailpipe?

  Not only that, Barry Rock said, but those pollutants flow into New England in a turbulent zone of the atmosphere between 3000 and 5000 feet. The compound of ozone can be found in concentrations there, Rock said—not the good kind of ozone that protects us earthlings from ultraviolet radiation but the bad kind that is found in smog. Ozone damages the cells in the needles of white pines and inhibits their ability to produce chlorophyll. It reduces their ability to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen—from the human perspective carbon sequestration is one of the most important things that trees do, storing atmospheric carbon in the tree’s wood. He explained that other chemicals in those air currents can damage maple trees, reducing their ability to photosynthesize, which then reduces the maple’s ability to create carbohydrates, and this, in turn, reduces their essential ability to produce sugar. Which in turn reduces their ability to produce healthy leaves.

  Referring to this layer between 3000 and 5000 feet where pollutants congregate, Rock said, “Not only are we in the tailpipe, we are in a sort of atmospheric sewer. These are terms that have become widely used by atmospheric scientists. Tailpipe. Sewer.”

  It is hard to describe how I felt then. Annoyed, sad, disappointed, angry—even at Barry Rock for telling me this while aware that he was the messenger, the physician, the man advocating health. But he was talking about the activity I like most and the reason I wanted to live in New Hampshire, to hike in the mountains and to breathe that highly oxygenated fresh air, air that helped my thinking, I was sure, and to solve problems, including writing problems—that now, it seemed, if Rock was correct, was a hazardous activity. The world was turned upside down. I might as well hike on Fifth Avenue or Boylston Street.

  When I later read the New England Regional Assessment I came upon a case study titled “Hiker Health” about a research study at Harvard Medical School that examined the effects of ozone and fine particulates on the lung function of people hiking on Mount Washington. They found a diminished breathing capacity even with exposure to low levels of ozone. “Acute ozone exposure in humans is associated with decreased pulmonary function and can result in shortness of breath, coughing, and pain while inhaling.” It was saddening, reading that. And infuriating. I could see the signs of the future up on the trails, near the huts: “Caution. Mountain Air Has Been Found to Be Hazardous to Your Health. It Is Advised That You Wear Protective Respiratory Gear.”

  Also in the New England Regional Assessment were those reports and predictions mentioned in the Boston Globe news story, that temperatures in New England would rise by 6 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2090. The difference depended on levels of emissions. A minor increase of 1.8 degrees had already occurred in the New England region since 1899 and likely brought milder winters, earlier maple sap flows, earlier ice-out dates, and reduced snowfall. The report stated—or actually understated, I thought, in typical academic language—that the increases of 6 to 10 degrees projected for New England and the Northeast “must be viewed as serious.”

  The authors of the New England Regional Assessment were required to use at least two climate models in making their predictions. Rock and his team chose one called the “Canadian General Circulation Model” that projected a rise in average temperatures by nine to ten degrees by the year 2090 and a ten percent increase in rainfall. The other originated in Britain and was called the “Hadley Climate Model,” which projected an increase of six degrees in average temperatures and a thirty percent increase in rainfall by 2090.

  In the report Rock wrote that although there was a wide difference between 6 degrees and 10 degrees, the results of either would be extreme. Using Boston as an example, with its thirty-year annual average temperature of 51.3°, he projected two possible outcomes. With a rise of 6 degrees Boston’s yearly annual average temperature would be equivalent to that of Richmond, Virginia, with its yearly average of 57.7° Fahrenheit. A rise of 10 degrees would give Boston the climate of Atlanta, Georgia, with its annual average temperature of 61.3°. Average the difference and you land in Charlotte, North Carolina. A very nice place, Charlotte, but you wouldn’t want New Hampshire to live there.

  Rock also coauthored the case study on maple syrup that was part of the New England Regional Assessment. The researchers looked at historical trends and stresses from changes in climate. They concluded that the industry is moving northward, that in the past some regions of Canada were unproductive because of deep snow cover and prolonged freezes. The development of tubing and warmer nighttime temperatures had resulted in a shift in syrup production as far north as the Gaspe Peninsula in Quebec.

  In conclusion, Rock wrote, with some feeling, “Most disturbing are the results of ecological modeling efforts that show the changes in climate could potentially extirpate the sugar maple within New England. The maple industry is an important part of New England character, way-of-life, and economy that, because it is highly dependent upon prevailing climactic conditions, may be irreparably altered under a changing climate.”

  In 2009 the Second Climate Change Assessment was issued by the US Global Change Research Program, with some changes in projections for the Northeast region of the United States. According to this more recent report, the average annual temperature had increased by two degrees Fahrenheit since 1970. As for projections for the end of the century, radically different climate futures were possible, depending on the amount of increase of greenhouse gases. Under a scenario for higher emissions, winters in the northeastern United States would be much shorter, with fewer cold days and more rain; the length of the winter snow season would be cut in half across northern New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, and reduced to a week or two in southern parts of the region; hot summer conditions would arrive three weeks earlier and last three weeks longer in the fall; and sea levels would rise more than the global average.

  One prescient paragraph anticipated the effects of Hurricane Sandy in 2012: “Rising sea level is projected to increase the frequency and severity of damaging storm surges and flooding. Under a higher emissions scenario, what is now considered a once-in-a-century coastal flood in New York City is projected to occur at least twice as often by mid-century, and 10 times as often (or once per decade on average), by late this century. With a lower emissions scenario, today’s 100-year flood is projected to occur once every 22 years on average by late this century.”

  As for agriculture and forestry, the Second Climate Change Assessment reported, “Large portions of the Northeast are likely to become unsuitable for growing popular varieties of apples, blueberries, and cranberries under a higher emissions scenario. Climate conditions suitable for maple/beech/birch forests are projected to shift dramatically northward, eventually leaving only a small portion of the Northeast with a maple sugar business.”

  Barry Rock ended his report that night with a success story about his work in the Czech Republic that could be an allegory for what could happen in the United States with the right effort. He showed us work he had done with remote sensing in that country, where during the Communist regime pollution levels from burning soft coal were so high that the average life span of Czech citizens living in mountainous regions was only thirty-one years. Now, under democracy, that had changed. They converted to nuclear power and cleaned up the air, and the average life span had increased to normal ranges.

  During a question-and-answer period someone asked whether there was a direct correlation between high temperatures and the chemical problems in the mountain air—in that place called the atmospheric sewer and that region called the tailpipe.

  Rock said there had been a two-degree rise in average temperature over the last hundred years, which should be creating more ozone, but there was also a counterbalance in the Clean Air Act. “It has done a wonderful job removing a lot of the precursors that would end up generating a lot of ozone. In terms of ozone and white pine, there has been a dramatic improvement.”

  And, of course, it had to be the case—if the trees were healthie
r, then we earthlings had to be too, right?

  We left the planetarium and walked out into the warm midsummer night. To our surprise, spread out over the parking lot, were amateur astronomers with their telescopes pointed up at the sky. Eyeballs to the universe. Saturn was visible that night out in the clear sky, just as it had been inside the planetarium. We wandered from telescope to telescope, taking in Saturn’s rings, hundreds of millions of miles away.

  IN THE CLARK SUGARHOUSE on March 17, 2012, over sugar on snow, Alvin told me he had received a letter from Richard Polonsky. Richard was having some medical problems, which he confided to Alvin. Alvin read part of the letter aloud to me:

  Thank you for being such a spokesman on climate change. I know you worried, because people in the maple syrup business are skeptical and you certainly do not want to convey that maple syrup could dry up in the future. It is really time for people in every business that depends upon the land to recognize that there is something affecting weather patterns that is bigger than Mother Nature. We need to slow down or just stop polluting the atmosphere with all the chemicals we spew from burning fuel oil. It is amazing to me that the more advanced countries of Europe are able to produce goods and services with one-half the energy of the US, and that Japan only uses two-thirds per capita of what we do. With only two percent of the world’s population we consume 20 percent of its oil.

  Alvin and I visited the “Seasons of Change” exhibit again when it stopped at the Montshire Museum in Norwich, Vermont. On the drive home Alvin said, “The scientists at UNH are supporting me on this climate change thing. It will be forty or fifty years until we know if they’re right. I’ll be gone by then.”

  I asked if he would give me his explanation for the maple sap flow.

  “Sure,” he said. “There has to be enough water, and the leaves have to look good in the fall. Good color and not falling off the trees early from drought as they did in some places this year when it got warm. When it starts to get above freezing, up into the forties in the daytime and below freezing at night, water starts moving up the cambium layer. The sugar is stored up in the branches, having been made by the leaves in the previous summer. The tree pulls the water up from the roots through the action of barometric pressure. When the trees are starting to flow they are absorbing heat, and you can see a ring around the trunk of the tree. The water is coming up from underground, because of the thaw, but also because the ground doesn’t freeze more than three feet down.

  “The sugar maple is a sensitive tree. They are just like humans, in that sap is like blood. They are very sensitive, and that’s why they are in danger from climate change.”

  18

  SUMMER IN MARCH

  ON SUNDAY, MARCH 18, the temperature in Langdon rose above 80°. That evening before sunset my wife and I walked a pair of dogs for a friend. While the dogs played I stood in a field and felt the pleasant spring air. Nearby, flying bugs drifted in a warm pocket. Off in the field I saw a small cherry tree that had begun to bloom. Overhead a bat flew by, searching for insects, I assumed. Later, when we arrived home, we heard from the small pond in the woods the sound of the peepers, the chorus frogs, riotous and joyful.

  When Bruce said that the weather of 2012 was “once in a hundred years,” he wasn’t quite right. A study of satellite data from 1979 to 2010, comparing standard and extreme deviations, determined that some of the temperatures in the United States in March 2012 occurred with a likely frequency of once in every 4779 years. Because the data in the study was only for a 31-year period, and during a time when the planet was warming, the researchers stated that if they had used a century of data, the extent of deviation from the norm would have been much greater. So Bruce could have said that the weather in March 2012 was once in every 5000 years. You could also say that it was the kind of weather predicted to occur at the end of this century.

  These “Summer in March” conditions were a meteorological event, caused in part by an unusual position of the jet stream, which looped to the south in the western United States and curled far over the Great Lakes and Canada to the north. This caused a high-pressure area to stand in place over the midwestern and eastern United States, blocking cold air masses and holding in place warm air from the South. In the western states the southerly loop trapped a low-pressure area and drew cold temperatures from the north, bringing record snowfall to Oregon.

  Though the Summer-in-March conditions were primarily a weather event, they were also likely an event driven by global warming. As the meteorologist Andrew Freedman wrote, “Although studies have not yet been conducted on the main factors that triggered this heat wave and whether global warming may have tilted the odds in favor of the event, scientific studies of previous heat events clearly show that global warming increases the odds of heat extremes, in much the same way as using steroids boosts the chances that a baseball player will hit more home runs in a given year.” The lack of snow, which, when present, tends to reflect heat and cool the soil and air, had also contributed to the heat wave.

  March 2012 was the warmest in the United States since record keeping began in 1895. The average temperature in March in 2012 was 51.1°, 8.6 degrees above the national average for March. There were more than 14,000 temperature records broken nationwide. Perhaps the most unusual occurrences were the 21 temperature records in March occurring at night and the low temperature for the day that broke previous daytime high-temperature records. The January to March period in 2012 was also the warmest in history dating back to 1880. And as it would turn out, 2012 was the warmest year in history. Every state in the United States experienced a record warm temperature in March.

  Chicago broke daytime records nine days in a row, beginning on March 14. All the record temperatures were in the eighties: 82° on March 16, 82° on March 17, 85° on March 21. The average high temperature in Chicago in August is 82°. Thus the name, “Summer in March,” given by meteorologist Jeff Masters of the Weather Underground.

  Record high temperatures were set in cities throughout eastern Canada on March 21. The high temperature in St. John’s, New Brunswick, on March 21 of 25.4° Centigrade, or 78° Fahrenheit, set a record high for March and was also higher than any previous recorded temperature in April.

  On March 20 Burlington, Vermont, reached 80°, the earliest 80° day in that city’s history and thirty-nine degrees above the average temperature. On March 20 Concord, New Hampshire, set a record at 81°, as did Caribou, Maine, at 73°, breaking its record by twenty-three degrees. On March 21 the low nighttime temperature at Mount Washington, New Hampshire, was 44°, which broke the previous daytime record of 43°.

  The heat wave of March 2012, the Summer in March, Jeff Masters said, “was simply off-scale, and ranks as one of North America’s most extraordinary weather events in recorded history.”

  ON MARCH 16, in the midst of the heat wave, the American Forests blog published a short article titled “A Biological Clock” by Katrina Marland that began with an explanation of how our own biological clocks work, describing how tired we can become after pulling an all-nighter, then stated that scientists at the University of Edinburgh had identified the genes in plants that regulate their circadian rhythms. “They have found a set of 12 genes and one particular protein that work together to help the plant go dormant at night, saving its energy for growth, processing food and other actions that it can only perform during the day when the sun and other conditions are right.” The genes help the plant to make adjustments and to change with the seasons. “The knowledge has possible applications in a number of fields, but perhaps most important is helping scientists understand—and possibly even predict—how plants respond to interruptions in their natural cycles. If you have experienced, as many of us have, particularly strange weather patterns lately—here in Washington, D.C. we’ve had 80-degree days in March and our blooms have been out for weeks—it’s easy to see how significant knowledge like that could be.”

  Maple trees also seemed to be going through a disruption to th
eir biological clocks. The buds began to swell during the March heat wave, and that spelled the end for some sugar-makers. Many of those who kept producing made buddy, off-flavored syrup.

  Peter and Deb Rhoades boiled from March 8 to March 15, shutting down when the temperatures began to soar. Usually the Rhoades sent 80,000 gallons of sap to Bascom’s, but in 2012 that amount was down to 21,000 gallons.

  At Smith’s Maple Crest Farm in Shrewsbury, Vermont, near Rutland in the central part of the state, Jeff Smith boiled from March 12 to March 20. On March 12 the temperature at Smith’s farm was 80° outdoors and 100° inside the sugarhouse. After nine days of 80-degree temperatures Smith shut down and pulled his spouts.

  A sugarmaker located in Londonderry, New Hampshire, on a south-facing mountainside, said he experienced temperatures in the nineties during March. The trees produced sap that was like jelly.

  One sugarmaker in upstate New York near Lake Champlain went fourteen days without a freeze but kept producing sap with tubing and vacuum based on the pressure differential. He noticed that, during the warm spell when there were no freezes, the run slowed down at night and then picked up again at nine o’clock in the morning. On the warmest days, “the four-day hot season” as he called it, between March 17 and March 20, the thickened sap plugged up the reverse-osmosis machines. At one point the sap looked like cottage cheese, and they dumped it on the ground but kept their vacuum pumps running so that the tapholes wouldn’t seal. Because it was so dry, he said, “we were drawing air through the tree fibers.” After a rain the vacuum pressure went up again. They resumed boiling after the hot days passed, but the syrup was buddy from then on.