High Tide: How Climate Crisis is Engulfing Our Planet

She was now in full flow. ‘You go to Barrow and there’s open water in January. That’s very unusual. This is the second year in a row that there is open water. And when it goes out, it doesn’t leave chunks like it used to – it just disappears.’

I asked her how she felt about it.

‘It matters to me. I don’t understand it. Is it because we’re not putting enough oxygen or too much pavement down, or not planting enough trees? I’ve seen how it floods now and gets hot in all of the US.’

Could it be global warming?

‘What else could it be? I don’t know.’ She asked me to explain more about global warming. I told her about greenhouse gases, about the rapidly-rising temperatures, about the disproportionate effect on the Arctic north and how much worse it was likely to get. I told her what I’d heard in Fairbanks from Professor Gunter Weller, and what I’d heard from the Native residents of Shishmaref and Huslia. Her shoulders drooped as she listened.

‘Well, all I can say is God bless us all,’ she said quietly. ‘All I know is we’re in the billions now, and we all try to survive.’ She sighed. ‘I agree with you. If I knew more about it, I would do something. I really would.’

My time in Alaska was drawing to a close. I had expected Kaktovik to be hostile and bleak because of the oil connection, but it was just as warm and welcoming as the other Native villages. People stopped to give me a lift if I was spotted walking the few hundred yards from the hostel towards the centre of the village, and I was constantly invited into their houses as if I were an old friend.

Another thing that impressed me was the concern the Inupiat Eskimos had for their local wildlife. For a start, everyone in Kaktovik is obsessed with polar bears. People don’t seem to shoot them like in Shishmaref – instead they drive to the end of the airstrip, where the whalebone dump is, and sit in their pickup trucks to watch entranced whilst the huge bears lumber around sniffing for any bits of remaining meat.

There are only 20,000 polar bears left in the world, and on my last evening in Kaktovik I was keen to see one in the wild. Travelling up to the end of the airstrip with a local hunting guide called Robert Thompson, we circled the whalebone dump, but it was empty.

Robert turned round on the snowmachine. I was standing on the sled at the back.

‘Let’s go a bit further afield,’ he called out.

We travelled east, to a spit of land where the sea ice had piled up high against the beach, making a ridge about twenty feet high – the only vantage point for miles around. Robert stopped the snowmachine and dismounted, moving gingerly forward, revolver cocked.

‘Sometimes they can come straight at you from behind these ice mounds,’ he told me. ‘I don’t want to take any chances.’

It was well after midnight, and the sky was cloudy, with a strange reddish light making distances difficult to judge. As I peered over the Arctic Ocean, each successive snowdrift seemed to metamorphose into a polar bear and then back again. The wind was bitter, blowing spindrift between the mounds of ice.

‘There’s no one between here and the North Pole,’ muttered Robert, as he scanned the horizon with binoculars.

Then I saw it – a distinct yellow dot moving in the distance. ‘There!’

Robert whipped round. ‘Oh yeah, I got him. Quick – let’s go closer.’

We leapt back onto the snowmachine and headed north. Suddenly the bear popped up right in front of us, and then – startled by the noise of the engine – quickly loped off. It stopped again two hundred yards away, the black dots of its eyes and nose amongst the yellow fur clearly visible to the naked eye. It yawned and lay down for a while, before lumbering off again at a surprisingly fast rate towards Kaktovik.

We followed it, and as we neared the village, I could see that several cars were already moving down the airstrip to marvel at the scene.

I felt immensely privileged to have seen a polar bear – the more so because of how threatened these beautiful animals are going to become as climate change destroys their habitat over the next few decades. Already there is evidence from Canada’s Hudson Bay that polar bears are less well nourished and bring up fewer cubs in the years when sea ice breaks up earlier.

(#litres_trial_promo) And this is, unfortunately, only the beginning.

With temperatures rising ever faster and sea ice coverage shrinking fast, polar bears – together with other ice-dependent animals like seals, walruses and belugas – are going to be squeezed onto a smaller and smaller remnant of floating polar ice during twenty-first-century summers.

Once that perennial ice disappears for ever – as it is likely to do within the next hundred years, according to the latest predictions

(#litres_trial_promo) – the entire Arctic marine ecosystem, as we currently know it, will be destroyed. The frozen North Pole will cease to exist, leaving open water at the top of the Earth. The polar bears will have nowhere left to go, and their extinction is near certain.

This spells disaster, of course, not just for the animals but for human populations too – not just the residents of Shishmaref and Kaktovik, but all the Native people living in Canada, Siberia and Greenland – who currently depend on them. As a US government study drily points out, ‘few adaptation options are likely to be available’ once the animals begin to disappear for ever.

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Time is running out too for the land areas of the Arctic. With twenty-first-century warming predicted as high as a staggering 10°C,

(#litres_trial_promo) much of the remaining permafrost is likely to thaw – further damaging forests, houses, roads and other infrastructure, and raising the spectre of massive releases of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane from bogland hitherto inert and frozen.

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In addition, the area of tundra is likely to decrease by two-thirds, a looming catastrophe for all the animals and plants which are adapted to this fragile Arctic ecosystem. This is ironic too, considering the current debate over oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and its potential effect on the caribou. Because tundra mosses, forbs and lichens are a vital winter food source for the caribou, climate change could decimate the herds whatever the outcome of the oil drilling debate.

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This is just one of several bitter ironies facing Alaskans as their entire environment morphs with the rapidly-rising temperatures. The biggest and bitterest of all, of course, is that an overwhelming majority of state residents still seem deadset on pumping out their fossil fuel reserves for as long as the oil keeps flowing – whatever the eventual cost to their climate.

This dissonance sheds some light, perhaps, on the complexity of human psychology, and how difficult it is to tackle societal denial based on wilful ignorance and self-interest. But it also illustrates the wider struggle that modern civilisation in general is going to face if it is to change its ways in time to head off the worst of the looming catastrophe that lies ahead.

In this sense, the dilemma facing the residents of America’s largest and most northerly state is one which faces all of us, each time we boil a kettle, switch on a light, drive a car, or vote. It’s not unique to Kaktovik, Fairbanks or Anchorage. In this modern, interconnected, energy-hungry world, we are all Alaskans.

3 Pacific Paradise Lost (#ulink_5d9bc47a-ac5d-5b70-a7ca-98cec3b509ee)

Nothing much happens in Tuvalu. For a while I found this charming, then it drove me crazy, and then, just as I was about to leave, I began to find it charming again. Some afternoons a tropical shower will break the heat with five minutes of torrential rain, thundering through the coconut palms and turning the dappled-blue lagoon surface into a grey mist with millions of exploding water droplets. But most of the time the temperature is so oppressive that afternoons are better spent lounging in the shade of a pandanus tree on the breezy ocean side of the island, where groups of sun-browned children play chicken with the Pacific rollers surging up onto the rocky reef.

On the surface it seems like life has tripped by at this gentle pace for centuries, and will continue to do so for centuries more. Surrounded by thousands of miles of open ocean, Tuvalu’s Funafuti atoll feels the centre of its own little universe, isolated from the clamour of a rapidly-changing outside world.

But change has come to Tuvalu, change of an uninvited and menacing nature. Bit by bit, as glaciers melt and the oceans warm, global sea levels are creeping up. Over the last half-century the rate of rise has averaged just a couple of millimetres a year, but already it’s beginning to accelerate,

(#litres_trial_promo) in tandem with rapidly-rising world temperatures. The minuscule increments of the past have stacked up, leading to a steady cumulative effect which is already taking its toll on island life.

For years Tuvaluan political leaders have toured the big UN conferences, pleading and cajoling industrialised country governments to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. The Tuvaluans – together with their colleagues from Kiribati, the Maldives, Samoa and other low-lying island nations – became the symbolic first casualties of global warming, fêted on the media circuit.

But nothing much was done, and the Tuvaluan politicians, betrayed by false promises, eventually returned home empty-handed to feed their pigs and sit watching with impassive faces each year’s high tide rise a little higher than the last.

And no amount of impassioned talk can change the laws of physics. Thoughout all the meetings, the press conferences and the speeches, the glaciers and ice caps kept melting and the seas – filled with this new water and the ‘thermal expansion’ caused by the ever-increasing warmth – kept rising.

Tuvalu’s ocean clock is still ticking today, but it’s nearly out of time. The people of the islands are now faced with the choice they’ve always dreaded – to move, and live cultureless and uprooted in a foreign country, or stay on the land of their forefathers and die. From the distant vantage point of my home in Oxford, I heard that the choice had finally been made.

FUNAFUTI ATOLL

The first person I met in Tuvalu was Paani Laupepa, the tall, solidly-built Environment Ministry official long one of the most articulate voices of his country’s plight. I’d seen him quoted in countless media reports, and was looking forward to questioning him more.

‘No, no, no,’ he insisted. ‘You must go and rest. We can talk any time – you go and lie down.’ Then he beetled off on his motorbike – everyone on Funafuti has motorbikes – and left me little option but to obey.

It was ridiculously hot, and I lay under a mosquito net whilst a small fan whirred impotently a few feet away. Already Suva, the Fijian capital where I’d boarded my flight a thousand kilometres away over the cloud-flecked open Pacific, seemed like a different world. As I lay on the bed, sweat quietly dripping, I could hear nothing, just the occasional buzz of a passing motorbike, the swish of wind in the palms above, and the far-off rumble of the ocean.

Once the harsh sunlight began to soften a little, I wandered outside to explore. A hundred metres on my left was the lagoon, fringed by a narrow beach, the water mottled with purples and light blues where the sea floor alternated between sand and rock. A few women stood chatting in the water, only their heads showing above the rippled surface – looking as natural as old ladies passing the time of day at a London bus stop. Every now and then someone would heave themselves out of the sea fully-clothed, and set off, dripping, back to their house. I marvelled at their almost amphibious lifestyle – being wet or dry made little difference in this equatorial heat.