With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change by Fred Pearce Read Free Book Online Page B

domesticate animals, tame rivers, create cities, develop science, and ultimately industrialize the planet.
    But in the Anthropocene, the rules of the game have changed. Alley and Steffen agree that humanity is today pushing planetary life-support systems toward their limits. The stakes are higher, because what is happening is global. "Before, if we screwed up, we could move on," says Steffen. "But now we don't have an exit option. We don't have another planet."

     

5
    THE WATCHTOWER
    Keeping climate vigil on an Arctic island
    A chill wind was blowing off the glacier. Small blue chunks of ice occasionally split from its face and floated down the fjord toward the ocean. A strange green ribbon of light flashed across the sky above from an anonymous building on the foreshore. And on the snow behind, a polar bear wandered warily around a strange human settlement that had grown up on this remote fjord at the seventy-ninth parallel.
    I had come to Ny-Alesund, an international community of scientists that, in the darkening days of autumn, numbered fewer than thirty people. The hardy band was there to man this Arctic watchtower on the northwest shores of Spitzbergen, the largest island of a cluster of Arctic islands called Svalbard, because it is reckoned to be one of the most likely places to witness firsthand any future climatic conflagration. Hollywood directors may have chosen New York as the place that would descend into climatic chaos first. But while the scientists here heartily enjoy watching their DVD of The Day After Tomorrow, they are convinced that NyAlesund is the place to be. The place where our comfy, climatically benign world might begin to end. Where nature may start to take its revenge.
    Ny-Alesund is a tiny town of yellow, red, and blue houses two hours' flight from the northernmost spot on mainland Europe. It is nearer Greenland and the North Pole than Norway, which administers Svalbard under an international treaty signed in 1920. It has history. This was where great Norwegian Arctic explorers such as Roald Amundsen and Graf Zeppelin set out for the North Pole, by ship, seaplane, and even giant airship assembled here. More recently, the High Arctic was famous for its military listening posts, where the staff sat in the cold silence, waiting for the first sign of a Russian or American nuclear missile streaking over the ice to obliterate New York or Moscow or London. But today the biggest business is climate science-waiting for the world to turn. Says Jack Kohler, of the Norwegian Polar Institute, down south in Tromso: "If you want to see the world's climate system flip, you'd probably best come here to see it first."

    Spitzbergen is already one of the epicenters of climate change. For a few days in July 2005, the scientists put aside their instruments, donned T-shirts and shorts, and sipped lager by the glaciers in temperatures that hit a record 68"F-just 6oo miles from the North Pole. Even in late September, as the sun hovered close to the horizon and the long Arctic night beckoned, the sea was still ice-free, and tomatoes were growing in the greenhouse behind the research station kitchens. Old-timers like the British station head Nick Cox, who has visited Ny-Alesund most years since 1978, marvel at the pace of change. "It stuns me how far the glaciers have retreated and how the climate has changed," Cox says. "It used to be still and clear and cold. Now it is a lot warmer, and damper, too, because the warmer air can hold more moisture."
    Photographs in the town's tiny museum show families who used to work in coal mines here in the i93os, huddled in warm clothes down by the shore. Looming behind them are glaciers that are barely visible today, having retreated about 3 miles back up the fjord. The glaciers and ice sheets that still cover two thirds of Svalbard are some of the best-studied in the world. And visiting glaciologists leave each time with worsening news. In the summer of 2005, British glaciologists