Warming temperatures. Summer sea ice melting. Longer storm seasons eroding coastal villages. Permafrost melting. Greenhouse gases reaching levels unseen in 650,000 years. The ocean turning more acidic. Forests browning. Tundra brushing up.
And the near-certainty that the Earth’s climate “sweet spot” — the conditions that enabled human civilization to flower — has been thrown out of whack for at least another 1,000 years.
The impact of human-caused warming on the globe has been spelled out in detail, with an international panel calling it “unequivocal” and even Republican conservatives like Sen. John McCain declaring the climate change debate is over.
And that means the time to fret has passed and the time to act has arrived, from the household level to the international stage, urged a litany of speakers at the Alaska Forum for the Environment, a conference held this past week in Anchorage, largest city in the state hit hardest by the symptoms of global warming.
Some glimpses:
In a standing-room only session in the basement of the Anchorage Egan Convention Center, with school kids sitting on the floor, Native elder Elaine Abraham reminded people to think of the next generation, the unborn children to come, what Tlingit called the “spirits in the shadows.”
“What kind of world will the ones who are being born 10 years from now (find)?” she said. “Today those who are being born are born into a contaminated world, a polluted world, and a state of confusion.”
Abraham talked about a prophesy made by her 102-year-old father on his deathbed:
“On the day he was going to travel … he caught me to him and said, ‘Bring me your mama because I have decided to leave. The sun is just right. The moon is just right. The stars are just right, and it’s time for me to leave.’
“And one of the things he said to me is, ‘When my great-great grandchildren are entering adulthood, I’m going to be praying for you and for the world because there’s going to be a confusion. The sun will not know when to shine. The moon will not know how to regulate the tide, and the stars will not know when to shine. It will be a hard time for my great-great grandchildren.”
His first great-great grandchild will be born this spring, Abraham told the hushed room. Will the “time of confusion” come in two decades, when temperatures rise another degree on average?
Bob Corell, program director of the The H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, and the chair of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, reviewed the evidence that’s become so familiar — steady rise in overall average temperatures, shrinking sea ice, greenhouse gas concentrations rising to levels unseen in 650,000 years.
IPCC ‘hockey stick’ graphic
He showed a version of the now-famous “hockey stick” graph — where temperatures run level for more than 1,000 years and then spike up during the 20th century. Extended 10 times further into the past, the graph tracks a climate that shifted up and down only about one degree Fahrenheit over the entire period that humans developed technology, agriculture and communities.
“For 10,000 years, the planet’s temperature and circumstances were very, very stable, and I would argue that this is the ‘human sweet spot,’ the anthropogenic sweet spot,” Corell said. “We’ve been allowed to evolve as we are today because we’ve not been faced with really dramatic changes. But even that little band of less than a degree Centigrade, like .7 (degrees), a little over a degree Fahrenheit, on either side produced the Little Ice Age (that drove the Vikings out of Greenland and triggered all the world’s glaciers to advance.)
The Earth is now climbing out of the sweet spot — with three degrees of warming predicted by the end of the century. That’s a climate human civilization has never experienced.
“We’re already outside the sweet spot in Alaska,” he said. “We are outside of the band of stability that has enabled us to evolve so beautifully as humankind throughout all the continents of the world.”
The melt rate in Greenland was three times faster last summer than it was three years earlier. The Arctic warming has risen at a rate that exceeds anywhere else on Earth. A new ecosystem is being created, and quickly.
“We have no idea what that new ecosystem is going to look like,” Corell said. “Can it survive? We have this sweet spot where all this stuff got worked out, with the interdependence from insects to polar bears, and now we’re going to tear it apart.”