Icebergs ripping into the future
Bye Bye, Miss American Pie
11 minute read
Part 2 of a series. Part 1 is here.
By 2009 I had been working full time as a professional climate advocate for over 10 years. I had been aware of the climate disruption threat and calling it out in my writing since the 1980s. I had written many articles and papers on climate science and solutions, even a book. But the Jersey shore trip with its visceral sense of inevitable loss opened a new dimension. I started writing global warming poetry and songs for sunken cities. The shore inspired a Springsteen-ish lyric I called “Dead Cities Walking.”
Seen the rotting casino towers
fall before the rising tide
Their salt corroded skeletal remains
relics of a reckless age
crumble into the sea
Seen the rising tides devour
the Trump and Harrah towers
One day the ocean got an urge
sent the shore a big storm surge
Where the lights were once so pretty
now a real Atlantic City
Where the city now the sea
Wrecked remains now underneath
We take tours out there by submarine
to see what’s left of the gambler’s dream
Cruise old shore towns Asbury to Cape May
Drowned boardwalks where they used to play
Where they used to tour old homes of ghosts
now we tour the ghosted coast
They’re building New Atlantic City
up north there on Kitantitty
They’ve moved the roulette wheels
and one-armed bandits
beyond the reach of the sea
Philly’s moved to the burbs
It’s the new shore town now
They’re building New New York
where Yonkers used to be
now that the City’s submerged
They’ve saved the Lady
Deconstructed her
Put her back together up there
in New Times Square
We see the old skyline
dying in the sunset
Driving down ghost highways
Garden State Parkways
Memories of former days
Old Led Zepp playing
Signs are saying
Ocean City Cape May
Driving on my way
to dead cities walking
On that drive to the shore, flipping the radio dial we caught Don McLean’s “America Pie.” His obtuse one-hit wonder about ‘60s rock is the subject of intense hermeneutical debate over which lyrics refer to which stars. As I listened it recalled an epiphany that came to me flying over the west coast of Greenland one August 2000 afternoon on the top of the world route from Amsterdam to Seattle.
I had been in Europe at the Ardennes Forest summer retreat of Ecolo, the Green Party of French-speaking Belgium, to speak about global Green Party statements to the Kyoto and Buenos Aires U.N. climate summits. As a co-chair of the U.S. Association of State Green Parties, predecessor to today’s Green Party of the United States, I had been asked in 1997 by Ralph Monoe, chair of the European Federation of Green Parties, to co-author the Kyoto document. With signatories from six continents it was the first global statement ever by the world’s Green parties. I was asked back to do the same for the follow-up conference in Buenos Aires in 1998.
Returning home, some six or seven miles above the west coast of Greenland, jagged fjords stretched hundreds of miles north out the window to the horizon beneath a deep blue sky. Rocky brown earth along the coast pushed back miles to the white line of the ice pack. On this late summer day fleets of icebergs were sailing in lines out of the fjords west of Godhavn into Disko Bay and the Davis Strait, the passage between Baffin Bay and the Labrador Sea. Dozens of white glacial fragments freshly calved from the ice pack were sharply outlined against in the dark blue waters. Though they seemed small from six miles up, their fractal, crystalline shapes were clearly visible, indicating just how massive these immense ships of ice were.
Aboard the plane the last moments of the movie were playing. It was “American Pie” with Madonna. Her version of the signature Don McLean song formed the soundtrack to the show outside.
“Bye-bye, Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee
But the levee was dry
And them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
Singin’ this’ll be the day that I die
This’ll be the day that I die.”
By coincidence, or synchronicity, I’d been reading Brian Fagan’s Floods, Famines and Emperors. Waiting at Schipol Airport I had just read his narrative about cold snaps that ensue when too much fresh water suddenly invades the Labrador and Greenland Seas. It makes the ocean less salty, so water becomes lighter and stops sinking to lower depths. It is that sinking in this particular part of the ocean that vacuums water north and drives and the Gulf Stream circulation that brings that warm water to the Jersey shore. The fear is that this could entirely stop the circulation of warm water to the north, creating weather chaos around the world.
A Gulf Stream shutdown likely caused ice age conditions around 12,000 years ago. Scientists now tend toward the conclusion the planet is overall too warm for that to happen again. But that does not mean a shutdown of North Atlantic circulation would not have serious impacts, mucking with weather systems in ways that bring drought across the planet and make Superstorm Sandy-scale storms common events. Some of the planet’s hottest waters and most rapidly rising seas are piling up off the east coast, the opposite number of that North Atlantic cool spot. A Rutgers University study found sea levels on the Jersey coast are up 18 inches since 1900, compared to 8 inches globally. The combination of hotter and higher water is just what it takes to drive increasingly devastating storms.
Since I took that flight in 2000, scientists have found the Gulf Stream is slowing to rates not seen in at least 1,000 years, and they are pointing the finger at Greenland melt. Stefan Ramsdorf, one of the world’s leading scientists studying the North Atlantic circulation, wrote in Real Climate:
“The North Atlantic between Newfoundland and Ireland is practically the only region of the world that has defied global warming and even cooled. Last winter there even was the coldest on record – while globally it was the hottest on record. Our recent study attributes this to a weakening of the Gulf Stream System, which is apparently unique in the last thousand years . . .
“It happens to be just that area for which climate models predict a cooling when the Gulf Stream System weakens . . . Meanwhile evidence is mounting that the long-feared circulation decline is already well underway . . .Another new aspect is the importance of the increasing mass loss of the Greenland ice sheet, which causes extra freshwater to enter the North Atlantic that dilutes the sea water . . . The ice loss amounts to a freshwater volume which should have made an important contribution to the observed decrease in salinity in the northern Atlantic.”
Flying over Greenland in August 2000 I was indeed seeing the early onset of ice melt that has only accelerated since. I was flying just north of one of its ground zeros, the Jacobshavn Isbrae glacier, one of Greenland’s three biggest. Jacobhavn, the largest, is a 400-mile long ice river that drains seven percent of the subcontinent and has been “for some decades . . . the world’s most prolific producer of icebergs,” Fred Pearce notes in his With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change, cover appropriately decorated with a picture of ice falling from a polar glacier front and splashing into the sea. My beach reading at Ocean City. See, I told you I was a curmudgeon.
“Jacobshavn was the likely source of the most famous iceberg of all – the one that sunk the Titanic in 1912,” Pearce reports. “But is has been in overdrive since 1997, after suddenly doubling the speed of its flow to the sea. It is now also the world’s fastest moving glacier, at better than seven miles a year.” The white stream could now be dumping the equivalent of a Nile River into the sea every year. It is sending a message that polar ice does not behave in a gradual manner, but abruptly changes.
Thought responsible for four percent of 20th century sea level rise, Jacobshavn’s flow shot up two times between 1997 and 2003, dissolving its floating ice shelf into icebergs such as the fleet I saw out the plane window. Scientists including Pennsylvania State University glaciologist Richard Alley are discovering that glaciers are being speeded up and sent on their way by rivers of meltwater flowing beneath their base. While standard sea level rise projections range around two to three feet feet this century, Alley says 20 feet is not unimaginable. If anything is clear about the cryosphere, the planet’s ice cover, it is that our understanding falls far short, and melt consistently proceeds faster than projected.
“Greenland is a different animal from what we thought it was just a few years ago,” Alley says. “We are still thinking it might take centuries to go, but if things go wrong, it could just be decades. Everything points in one direction, and it’s not a good direction.”
The watchword is feedback. As the Arctic becomes warmer it promotes processes that add to the effect. White ice and snow repel sunlight, send it back toward space. Blue water absorbs it. Ice melt water plunges water deep into the heart of the ice, melting it yet more.
There was a time 14,000 years ago, Mark Lynas notes in Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter World, when “the giant ice sheets of the last glacial age crumbled and gave way to the Holocene.” Every 20 years sea levels escalated by over three feet. That went on for 400 years. This was the result of climate feedbacks generated by small changes in sunlight due to orbital fluctuations. Humanity today is also changing the degree to which the planet absorbs sunlight at a rate several times greater. “Just as they were in the past, ice-sheet changes in the future could be, to use (climate scientist James) Hansen’s phrase, ‘explosively rapid.’”
As I looked out the plane window, was I seeing the modality for the end of the world as we know it? The sight of the Greenland coast was slowly receding to the rear, framed by the wing and engines determinedly plowing forward across the curvature of the Earth. Madonna was singing the final verses.
“And in the streets the children screamed
The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed
But not a word was spoken
The church bells all were broken
And the three men I admire most
The Father, Son and the Holy Ghost
They caught the last train for the coast
The day the music died.”
“And they were singing bye-bye Miss American Pie . . . “
”This’ll be the day that I die ....”.
As the thrum of the jet engines departed the Greenland coast making their own full complement of greenhouse gases - I was not unaware of the irony of my flight - I thought about rock’n’roll, automobiles, the fossil fuel age, the exuberant expressions of our technological adolescence mostly made in USA, and all the excrescences of that time now up here inexorably warming the atmosphere and melting those glaciers. How much we are at the end of that age, I thought. Bye Bye, Miss American Pie indeed.
That day in August 2000, conveyed by the sight of those iceberg fleets sailing out the fjords, I had a sense that if I conceived of my mission as preventing severe climate change it was too late already, too locked into the system, rolling like an unstoppable juggernaut or an accelerating glacier. While we had the technical means to prevent it, the inertia of political and economic systems would drive us into radical climate disruption, a sense all too well confirmed as it has emerged in succeeding years.
At the same time, I felt an encouragement to continue everything I was doing, knowing I could not give up, and that everything we could do to slow and reduce the momentum of climate disruption was vital to leave our children a world in which they would not be absolutely swamped by the impacts. To give my daughter and her generation a fighting chance. Put whatever tools we could put in place to help them build a new world in which humanity creates a more fitting relationship with the planet.
In those bergs that day over Godhavn and Disko Bay, I did sense the end of the world as we knew it. Now, another August nine years later, as we drove along the Garden State Parkway to Jersey shore towns where that melted ice water would come, I felt that day approaching closer. It somehow felt fitting to be reminded by a song about the end of youthful innocence, the day the music died. The day the Jersey shore of my younger days would go under the waves. For weeks after that flight I experienced life as a temporariness. Driving through standard, autofied urban/suburban development, the sense this all was passing came with an immediacy, as if this will not be here tomorrow.
The feeling of immediacy passed, but the sense remains. Life is impermanent. There is wisdom in accepting this. Nothing lasts long but Earth and Sky, goes the Native American saying. We must accept the passing of things. But I cannot take the realities of climate into my soul without a certain sense of grief. All things must pass, and we must too. But what shall we leave, above all, to our children? From that question I cannot be detached. Erika’s generation will know a changed world of drowned cities and possibilities past. And I hope as well a chance to build a better world out of what we have left them.
At least in those days at the Jersey shore I had a chance to share with her a little of the joy I felt in my youth’s warm summer waves and boardwalk playfulness. Not much, but the least I could do.
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