Maine Sen. Susan Collins left Jan. 3 for an eight-day trip to Antarctica to visit with a reputable group of scientists from the University of Maine and to learn about abrupt climate change.
Her visit, for which she should be commended, will no doubt earn her further flak from conservative talk radio and TV pundits, who already despise her tendency to go her own way.
Most Americans have never heard of abrupt climate change, but they soon will.
It’s Antarctica’s brief summer. Collins, during her trip, experienced more sun there than Maine did these gloomy January weeks. Indeed, for two or three decades, Antarctica, the Arctic and Greenland have been getting more and more heat. Therein lies the problem. The fossil carbon we burn for heat and transportation creates a warmer atmosphere over the ice, causing unusual summer melting. This fresh water flows into the northern and southern oceans right at the places where great warm ocean currents from the tropics terminate. Once it cools, that tropical water, relatively salty and therefore dense, normally sinks. The sinking drives a “conveyor” belt of sorts, pulling more warm water up from southern latitudes, transferring vast heat energy from south to north. Scientists call this conveyor thermohaline circulation – thermo for heat, haline for salt.
Remember the phrase, get used to it. You’ll be hearing it more and more.
As a result of the thermohaline currents, England, with latitude far higher than Maine, has a mild winter climate similar to that of Maryland. The English, Shakespeare’s “happy breed,” of which I am luckily one, have a lot to be grateful for, but the Gulf Stream is perhaps the most important. Without it, life in England would be very difficult indeed.
What climate scientists have discovered – and the Maine researchers have helped – is that sometimes these warm currents, including the Gulf Stream, shut down.
They do so when lighter fresh water from melting ice overwhelms the heavier, once-tropical water, and puts the sinking mechanism on “pause.” This last happened during the famous “Younger Dryas,” only 12,000 years ago, and the North Atlantic was cold for over a 1,000 years, more than 50 human generations. Half of Britain was under an ice cap. Scientists from Britain’s Hadley Centre have estimated that within 30 years after a shutdown of the thermohaline circulation, Maine, too, will suffer cooling, putting us in the same small boat as poor old England.
I explain the concept of warming leading to abrupt cooling to a 120 or so Unity College students each year, in classes of 20. Half of my flock are fairly typical New England rural males. They come to us to learn to be Maine wardens, foresters, wildlife biologists, fisheries managers and so on. They love big pickup trucks and snowmobiles, guns, hunting and fishing. They think Rush – the talker, not the group – is cool. They sit in my class, a basic course in sustainability that all Unity College students must take to graduate, with the other half of my flock, the students who plan to go on to be environmental activists, scientists, writers and newshounds.
I think I have a little experience in explaining abrupt climate change to conservative Mainers. It’s hard. It’s really hard.
When Sen. Collins learns what the scientists have to tell her, she’s going to be faced with a big decision. Does she tell the truth and suffer the political consequences? Or does she just quietly forget about ever having gone to Antarctica?
Because the scientists are going to tell her that the planet’s climate is a lot more capricious than we previously believed. They will tell her that unless the world can find a way to run the economy on at least 60 percent less fossil fuel very soon, they calculate the probability of a dramatic warming over the next 60 to 90 years as roughly nine out of 10. Nine out of 10 chances Maine becomes as warm as Virginia or even Georgia within 60 to 90 years is how I put it when I explain it to my students.
The scientists are also going to tell her that they don’t yet know what the exact probability is, that the warming can lead to a sudden and capricious cooling, but that they do know the odds are creeping up with each new discovery. A team of British scientists was suggesting “evens” recently: 50-50.
About this time in my semester, some students take issue with the scientific facts on climate change. Uniformly, the ones who disagree are those who do not understand. It is admittedly complicated. I review the information with them and watch their struggle. The attempt to reconcile dogma with science even leads some students to become mildly hostile. Examining serious problems that demand tough choices is never easy.
Yet to me, climate change is absolutely non-ideological.
It isn’t the fault of scientists that we are discovering the world to be different than our intuition suggests. That’s the nature of science, since Copernicus, since Galileo.
It will be interesting to see whether Americans can reconcile themselves to this new world. From my particular point of view in the world, that test begins with Susan Collins’ return from Antarctica.
Mick Womersley, Ph.D, is interim provost and associate professor of human ecology at Unity College. He has degrees in biology, conservation and environmental policy. He is co-chair of the college’s sustainability effort.
Comments are no longer available on this story