The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future (32 page)

Genie in the Ice

Two smelly straight guys sharing a tent sized for one is bad enough. But waking up covered in yellow dust, with no hot water for days, is the pits. It was impossible to keep the stuff out, even barricaded inside the lone wind-rated tent we had thought to bring with us.

The Greenland Ice Sheet was in charge, not me and not Ohio State geography professor Jason Box. We were camped next to its southwestern edge, where one of its many outlet glaciers finally succumbs to a grinding wet death, killed by the sun among the tundra grasses, caribou, and musk oxen. Every night, we squeezed head-to-toe in the little tent and buttoned up tight. Every night a fierce katabatic wind would pour off the ice sheet, lift tons of grit from its gravelly outwash plain, and fling it against our shuddering tent. The silt pushed through closed zippers and tiny mesh slits. It entered our nostrils and encrusted our hands as they gripped the tent’s violently shaking poles.

But by morning the winds would die down and we went to work. Jason installed time-lapse cameras to track the speed of the glacier’s sliding snout; I submerged electronic sensors in its outgoing torrent of meltwater to monitor how much was flowing off to the sea. We were studying these things to help answer a burning scientific question that should worry us all. Chapter 4 showed that we are facing decimeters of sea-level rise by century’s end. Many scientists wonder if even these estimates might be too low. Could climate warming cause the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets to accelerate their dumpage of ice and water into the sea, thus cranking up its rise even faster than is happening already? Could the world’s oceans go even higher, say a couple of meters by the end of this century?

The short answer is maybe. The geological record tells us sea levels are certainly capable of responding quickly to shrinking glaciers. And over the long haul—meaning several thousands of years—it looks like the Greenland Ice Sheet is in trouble and could well disappear completely.
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Glaciers and ice sheets are nourished on their tops by snow. They are removed at their margins by melting and—if they float out into an ocean or lake—by calving off icebergs into the water. When nourishment exceeds removal, glaciers grow, storing water up on land, so sea level falls. When removal exceeds nourishment, glaciers retreat and their stored water returns to the ocean. In this way sea levels have danced in a tight waltz with glaciers, falling and rising anywhere from about 130 meters lower to 4-6 meters higher than today over the past few ice ages. Other things—especially thermal expansion of ocean water as it warms—also drive sea level, but the waxing and waning of land ice is a huge driver.

As the last ice age unraveled, sea levels commonly rose 1 meter per century, and sometimes as fast as 4 meters per century during intervals of very rapid glacier melting.
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Looking forward, if average air temperatures over Greenland rise by another +3°C or so, its huge ice sheet, too, must eventually disappear. Depending on how hot we allow the greenhouse effect to become, this will take anywhere from one thousand to several thousand years, raising global average sea level by another 7 meters or so.

Based on the emissions scenarios currently being bandied about by policy makers, the temperature threshold to begin this process will indeed be crossed in this century, and the long, slow decline of Greenland’s ice sheet will begin.
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It is already something of a stubborn relic of the last ice age; if it magically disappeared off the island tomorrow, it’s doubtful this ice sheet could grow back.
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One thousand years from now, eighteen of the twenty-seven megacities of 2025 listed in Chapter 2 will lie partially or wholly beneath ocean water that might once have been blue ice in Greenland.
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But over the shorter term, meaning between now and the next century or two, the scary genie of Greenland and Antarctica isn’t from their ice sheets melting per se (indeed, it will never become warm enough at the South Pole for widespread melting to occur there) but from their giant frozen rumbling ribbons of ice that slide over hundreds of miles of land to dump icebergs into the sea. Already, there are many such ice streams in Antarctica and Greenland moving tens of meters to more than ten thousand meters per year. They empty out the deep frozen hearts of these ice sheets, where temperatures are so cold the surface never melts at all.

Of grave concern is collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. This vast area is like a miniature continent of ice towering out of the ocean, much of it frozen to bedrock lying
below
sea level. If it became unstuck, a great many Antarctic glaciers would start lumbering toward the water, eventually raising average global sea level by around five meters. There is geological evidence that this has happened before,
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and if it happens again it would hit the United States especially hard. For various reasons a rise in global average sea level does not translate to the same increase everywhere—water will rise by more than the average amount in some places and less than the average in others.
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Such a collapse would produce above-average inundation of the Gulf Coast and eastern seaboard, putting Miami, Washington, D.C., New Orleans, and much of the Gulf Coast underwater. When it comes to climate genies, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is an ugly-looking lamp.

Frankly, we don’t understand the physics of sliding glaciers and ice sheet collapses well enough yet to model the futures of Greenland and Antarctica with confidence. Many things affect the speed and dynamics of that long slide that are hard to measure or see. They include the interplay between the sliding ice and its bed, the heat and lubrication added by meltwater percolating to the bed from the surface, the importance of buttressing ice shelves (which help dam ice up on the land), the ocean water temperature at the ice edge, and others.
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Computer models and field studies—like the one Jason and I were conducting in Greenland—are in their infancy. Scientists are still discovering new things and debating what may or may not be important. This is why the likelihood of accelerated sea-level rise was kept out of the last IPCC assessment, and may be kept out of the next one as well. Might the ice sheets start slipping faster, with higher sea levels right behind? Perhaps—but without well-constrained models, we don’t yet know how likely that is.

Genie in the Ground

Digging into a permafrost landscape usually goes something like this: After cutting through a thick living mat of vegetation, the spade turns over a dark, organic-rich soil, almost like the mulch that one buys to spread in a garden. Usually there are bits and pieces of old dead plants poking out of it. Then, anywhere from several to tens of inches down, the blade goes
chunk
and will bite no farther. But it’s not a stone. At the bottom of the hole, there is just more of the same organic-rich goop but it is frozen hard as cement, often with a little black ice peeking through. Going any deeper is a major job, requiring a big drill and lots of manpower.

Why on Earth would anybody go all the way to the Arctic to drill holes into frozen black muck? The reason is organic carbon, and we now know that frozen northern soils hold more of it than any other landscape on Earth. In fact, the more we study these soils the more carbon we find. As of 2010 the latest estimate is 1,672 billion tons (gigatons) of pure organic carbon frozen in the ground.
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That’s roughly half of the world’s total soil carbon crammed into just 12% of its land area.

The reason there’s so much carbon there is because this is a place too cold and damp for living things to fully rot away when they die. Live plants draw down fresh carbon from the atmosphere and store it in their tissues. When they die, decomposing microbes chow down, pumping the carbon back to the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide (CO
₂
) or methane (CH
₄
) greenhouse gases. But while plants and trees can still grow in cold places, even on top of permafrost, the microbes are hard pressed to finish off their remains because their metabolisms are strongly temperature-dependent (just as stored food decomposes more slowly in a refrigerator than at room temperature). Very often a mulch-like layer of peat will accumulate, building up the ground elevation over time as successive generations of plants root into the semirotted remains of their ancestors. Some decomposition continues underground, but once permafrost sets in, even that halts, and the stuff becomes cryogenically preserved. Since the end of the last ice age, this excess of plant production over plant decomposition has slowly accumulated one of the biggest stockpiles of organic carbon on Earth.

To put that earlier 1,672 gigatons (Gt) of carbon estimate into greater perspective, all of the world’s living plants hold about 650 Gt. The atmosphere now holds about 730 Gt of carbon, up from 360 Gt during the last ice age and 560 Gt before industrialization. The world’s remaining proven reserves of conventional oil hold about 145 Gt of carbon and coal about 632 Gt. Each year we release around 6.5 Gt of carbon from burning fossil fuels and making cement. The total target reduction for “Annex 1” (developed world) signatory countries to the Kyoto Protocol was 0.2 Gt per year.

Put bluntly, there is an absolutely gigantic pile of carbon-rich organic material just sitting up there in a freezer locker, lying at or very near the surface of the ground. The big question is, what will happen to that carbon as it thaws out? Will it stay put, perhaps even offsetting the greenhouse effect thanks to faster-growing plants, thus storing more carbon even faster than before? Or will the microbes wake up and chow down, feasting on thousands of years of accumulated compost and farting voluminous quantities of methane and carbon dioxide back into the air? I’m not suggesting that sixteen hundred gigatons of deeply frozen soil carbon could all be returned to the atmosphere at once, but even 5% or 10% of it would be enormous.

This possibility is another one of those climate genies that we are only just beginning to assess. Compared with the previous two, relatively little work has been done on it. Most permafrost research has traditionally focused on engineering, i.e., how to build structures without thawing the ground, thus slumping it and destroying what was built. Hardly anyone cared much about permafrost carbon until recently.

We don’t know how quickly or deeply permafrost will thaw or how quickly and deeply the microbes will get to work. The microbes themselves generate heat, and we’re not sure how much this will further enhance the permafrost thawing process. The net outcome—net carbon storage versus net carbon release—hinges on a small difference between two far larger and opposed numbers (i.e., the rates of plant primary production versus microbial decomposition). Both numbers are difficult to measure and have large uncertainties associated with them.

Much also depends on hydrology. The millions of lakes sprinkled across permafrost landscapes are themselves heavy greenhouse gas emitters and even bubble forth with pure methane, so their fate, too, is intimately tied to our climate future. Also, if thawed permafrost soils become dry and aerated (as might be expected if deep permafrost goes away), then microbes will release stored carbon in the form of carbon dioxide. If soils stay wet (as might be expected from climate model predictions of increased northern precipitation), then microbes will release it as methane, which is twenty-five times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Given all these uncertainties, our current generation of computer models contain significant knowledge gaps. I’d wager we have twenty years’ work ahead of us before a solid scientific consensus can be reached on what will happen to this big mess of carbon as it defrosts.
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We do know this very same landscape switched on to become a major source of greenhouse gas once before—at the end of the last ice age, when northern peatlands first began to form. About 11,700 years ago, as temperatures rose at the end of the Younger Dryas cold shudder, a threshold was crossed, plants began growing, and peatlands sprang up all around the Arctic, pumping out enormous volumes of methane.
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We also know, from a single study in Sweden, that rising air temperatures penetrate permafrost soils more quickly and deeply than we thought. From two other studies in West Siberia, we know that although thawed soils ooze up to six times more dissolved carbon into rivers and lakes than frozen soils, they also store carbon faster—or at least they did for the past 2,000 years. This is at odds with a different study in Alaska, which suggests that faster-growing plants will not be able to outpace the faster-decomposing microbes once the permafrost disappears. Finally, we know some simple math: If even 2% of this frozen carbon stock somehow returns to the atmosphere between now and 2050, it will cancel out the Kyoto Protocol Annex 1 target reductions more than four times over. Like the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, this is one genie with global repercussions that we should all hope stays asleep.

Globalization Reversal

Might any of the four global forces of demography, natural resource pressure, globalization, and climate change screech to a halt between now and 2050, thus ruining all of our best projections?

Three of these have tremendous inertia. Demographic trends are a slow-moving ship, taking a generation—fifteen to twenty years—before even major course corrections will be felt. Population momentum ensures that our fastest-growing countries will keep growing for decades, even if their fertility rates fall to 2.1 tomorrow (replacement level), because their age structures are so youthful.
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And with a projected population increase to around 9.2 billion by 2050—especially a modernized, urban, consumptive one—it’s hard to envision how our demand for water, energy, and minerals will decrease from what it is today, even with great strides in conservation and recycling. Greenhouse physics dictates that we are locked in to at least some climate change and higher global sea level no matter what; the big uncertainties are how far we will allow greenhouse loading to go, what the impacts on global rainfall patterns and hurricanes will be, and lurking climate genies.

That leaves globalization. In today’s world of Walmart and iPhones, it’s easy to take our continued economic integration for granted. But as discussed in Chapter 1, the current globalization megatrend did not simply happen by itself. It was set into motion by the United States and Britain very deliberately, with a long string of new policies dating to the Bretton Woods summit in 1944. While the Internet and other information technology have enhanced globalization, they did not create it. Global social and information networks surely seem here to stay, but unlike population momentum or greenhouse gas physics, there is no natural law commanding that current policies favoring our global economic integration must continue.

History tells us of past balloons of economic integration and technological advance followed by puncture. In 221 B.C. the Qin armies first unified northeastern China out of a bedlam of warring fiefdoms. Successive Han, Sui, T’ang, Yuan, and Ming dynasties then expanded the world’s biggest trade empire into central and southeast Asia, India, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean. By the fifteenth century, China had trade outposts in Africa and led the world in medicine, printing, explosives, banking, and centralized government. But then, its rulers lost interest in a global empire. They began a series of fateful political decisions that shut down China’s overseas trade while discouraging scientific advances at home. Its nascent industrialization cut short, China stood frozen in time, and the much smaller European states commenced to take over the world.

Europe wasted little time ramping up the next round of globalization. By the 1600s colonialist governments were working hand in hand with private corporations like the Dutch and British East India companies—the equivalent of today’s multinational corporations—setting up remote trading posts and shipping routes. Merchant capitalism flourished, fueled by furs, timber, gold, spices, and coal imported from overseas. Guided by multinational banks, by the 1870s goods and capital were flowing across national borders as freely as they do today. Steamships, the telegraph, and railroads were opening up the world just as standardized shipping containers, jet aircraft, and the Internet would do again a century later. Many countries decided to peg their paper currencies to a gold standard, creating fluid international currency markets and huge flows of cross-border capital. The British pound became the dominant circulating world currency much as the U.S. dollar is now. Remarkably, by 1913 the industrialized national economies were enjoying even greater levels of foreign investment than today.
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It was a golden age of economic globalization.

It unraveled surprisingly fast. The June 28, 1914, assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo initiated a chain of events setting off a world war, the suspension of gold-backed currencies, and a near-total collapse in global investment and trade. Even after hostilities ended, former trading partners remained bitterly divided, a collection of protectionist states heaping tariffs upon one another. Only after a second world war, followed by the United States and Britain’s deliberate reboot of the global economic order at Bretton Woods, did things start to recover. It took sixty years for merchandise exports to regain the levels of 1914.
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The rapidity of this collapse proves that unlike the three other global forces, it is possible for globalization to come to a fast halt. It is also a sobering reminder that national leaders can, on rare occasions, take their countries to war with trade partners even if it means gutting their own economies in the process.

Besides another world war, at least two things could plausibly weaken or halt the global economic integration of today. The first is obvious: Central governments could decide to abandon proglobalization policies in favor of a return to economic protectionism. A variant of this would be a shift from “globalization” to “regionalization,” with separate economic blocs emerging in North America, Europe, and East Asia.
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Some economists have argued that the 2008-09 global financial crisis will mark the end of an era for twentieth-century globalization and neoliberal policies. It is even conceivable that well-meaning carbon-reduction policies, by penalizing emissions by different amounts in different countries, could trigger tariff wars if countries respond by imposing border taxes to recoup their losses.
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A second possibility is the rising cost of oil. Global trade is fueled by cheap energy, and container ships and long-haul cargo trucks cannot readily be electrified like passenger cars as described in Chapter 3. And as environmental damages, too, are increasingly priced into production costs in manufacturing countries like China, the apparent profit margin of a global versus local trade network will narrow.

A deglobalized world with extremely high energy prices might be an oddly familiar one, with local farmers feeding compact walking cities, a return to domestic manufacturing, and airplane travel afforded only by rich elites. One could even imagine a reversal of the urbanization trend as farming returns to being a labor-intensive industry, no longer propped by cheap hydrocarbon for fuel, fertilizers, and pesticides. Overseas tourism would fade, perhaps to be replaced by virtual experiences or even uninterest and disengagement from foreign affairs.

Political genies are even harder to anticipate than permafrost genies. In my mind’s eye I imagine an even more integrated world in 2050 than 2010. But no one really knows if our globalization megatrend will accelerate, slow, or reverse over the next forty years. Of the four global forces, this one is the hardest to foresee.