“It’s raining and not
snowing,” said musher Luan
Marques during a recent training ride, maneuvering the dogs to avoid
puddles on the trail. “That’s not good.”
A number of qualifying races have been canceled because of
warm conditions and lack of snow. In Minnesota, the 400-mile John Beargrease
sled-dog race has been postponed by two months. Three major Alaskan races have
been canceled. And a fourth had to cut its trail by 25 miles for lack of
snow. Much of the Iditarod is run on
frozen rivers, so warming is a serious matter to mushers and their dogs.
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| Iditarod sled dogs |
But, of all the alarming effects of a warming climate, why
on earth would we worry about a dog race in Alaska? There are lots of places
where you can’t sled. So what if Alaska becomes more like the rest of them?
In fact, the Arctic is warming rapidly. Over the last 100
years, the Earth has warmed by 1.4oF, but the Arctic has warmed
by 4-5oF just since the 1950s. The effects are visible
everywhere. Coastal villages
are eroding into the ocean as sea ice yields to waves, and frozen shores thaw.
Summer Arctic sea-ice cover breaks record lows year by year, and last
year it fell precipitously. In 2012, the Greenland ice sheet melted faster than any prior year
on record, and its glaciers are accelerating toward the seas. Northern boreal
forests are increasingly filled with “drunken trees” tilting at
crazy angles, as once-firm permafrost soils thaw and subside.
All these are interesting curiosities, perhaps. But where’s
the danger to me, to my children, and to the world? The danger, it turns out,
is lurking beneath the ground, clawing at its icy dungeon, waiting for some
primeval spring to release its fury on the world. Like some sci-fi alien, it’s
been locked away for eons, but is now edging its way toward the surface.
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| "Drunken trees" in the thawing north |
We’re talking about massive quantities of carbon, buried for
millennia under the permafrost, but increasingly free to escape into the
atmosphere. Here are the facts:
About 25% of the entire land surface in the Northern
Hemisphere is permafrost. And it contains massive amounts of carbon – dead
mosses, lichens, leaves and such – built up over eons but never decomposing due
to the frozen soil. It contains about twice
as much carbon as does Earth’s entire atmosphere. But it’s melting rapidly.
As permafrost thaws, microbes begin to break down this
ancient plant matter. In the process, much of the carbon gets released into the
atmosphere as CO2. With atmospheric CO2 concentrations at the highest levels in
the last 800,000
years, that’s alarming. But it’s not nearly the worst part. As some
permafrost melts, it creates swamp-like flooded zones, where microbes break
down carbon with little or no oxygen. That creates little CO2, but lots of
methane. And methane
is a powerful greenhouse gas, 25 times more powerful than CO2. Tiny amounts of methane
do enormous damage to global climate systems. In northern lakes and swamps
today, you can see gases bubbling to the surface from carbon-rich lake bottoms
– carbon in the form of methane escaping from eons of frozen captivity beneath
the tundra.
One of the scariest parts of our global permafrost drama is
that there are so many uncertainties. No one is certain how much of the
permafrost will thaw; or how much of its carbon will be released; or how quickly
the release will happen; or how much of it will be released in the form of
earth-cooking methane. We laymen may be tempted to take this uncertainty as a
comfort, but the opposite is true: What we don’t know can hurt us.
In the absence of hard data, the Permafrost
Carbon Research Network – an association of 41 international scientists who
publish research on various aspects of the permafrost – have pooled their best
assessments of the prospects for earth-warming gases from the melting permafrost.
These are estimates, but they come from some
of the most authoritative researchers in the field. The results are alarming:
If the earth warms at the low end of scientific projections,
these researchers tell us that enough carbon will escape the permafrost by the
end of the century to equal the emissions from another 25 years’ worth of
fossil fuel burning at current levels. And if the earth warms at the high end
of the projected range? Then add the equivalent of another 41 years’ worth of
human carbon emissions. In effect, if humanity weaned itself completely off of
oil, coal and gas by the end of the century, there would be additional CO2 in
the atmosphere from the melted permafrost equal to another 41 years of our
current carbon binge.
These are estimates. But let’s not imagine that uncertainty
here is a reason for comfort. Melting permafrost is a classic example of a
positive feedback loop that can cause runaway changes: More warming leads to
more permafrost melting, leading to faster plant decomposition, which leads to
more methane or CO2 emissions and still further warming, and so on…. Runaway changes have the potential to usher in
major global extinction events, and to potentially threaten virtually every
species on earth.
I don’t know of a single Christian thinker who believes that
God’s plan for creation involves the extinction of mankind. Most of us agree
that the Creator is the sovereign ruler of the world, and that he uses all
things to accomplish his purposes. But we also affirm that the creation bears
the curse of human sin and failed stewardship. And undoubtedly, these failures have
resulted in the loss of many of God’s species, and misery for millions of people.
This year, our climate impact has been harmful to mushers,
sled dogs and their hardy northern followers. But unless we act quickly to curb
the burning of fossil fuels, I doubt that anyone can be confident about the
future for thousands of species and billions of people.
Please join me in praying for – and working for – prompt climate
action in our country and God’s entire world.
Thanks for reading, and may God bless you.
J. Elwood
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