Notes on the Coming Biogeochemical Crisis: Preface

Preface

I walk into my office and say to my officemate: “you have to see this figure.” My officemate presumably just has returned from brunch after Mass and I’m fresh from a meeting after Eucharist. But soon we’re staring at several maps of the Northern Hemisphere in polar projection: output from NCAR’s CCM3 sea ice model.

Some people, including former professors of mine, tend to become quite romantic about “climate models,” about the perfection of the physics on which their based and on the splendor of their verification against past data of one sort or another. But every month or so, I notice some almost “fundamental” flaw in the climate model on which I work or hear how a climate model represents the world correctly by doing two things wrong in the right way. These are the times I catch my breath and remember that the telos or more truly the idea of the climate model is founded on the very Word and Wisdom of God, in God doing what the Psalmist asks in 104, “Send forth your Spirit, O Lord, and renew the face of the Earth.” These partially coordinated sets of clever approximations are not being itself. They are an ikon of the Living God at work in His Creation, even if we imagine that work is very standard and unexceptional.

Yet with all their flaws, the climate models have become an uncertain harmony on an increasingly certain melody, like the music of the Ainur as Arda first came into misty form. If some stranger were to come and notice that there were many different depictions of Christ in your churches but wondered why so many of them depicted him in association with two crossed bars, you would be sure to tell him of the wondrous Cross. Well, climate modelers feel much the same way. They see a variety of visions of the future and wonder which disaster will come. And unlike SimCity, Godzilla isn’t one of the options.

The disaster that confronts me and my officemate on that Sunday afternoon is disappearing sea ice. The shores of Antarctica and the North Pole of the world are covered with a thin layer of ice, built up over countless millennia as powerful storms, drew cold winds from the land over the warmer waters, transferring heat to the air and freezing the water to compensate. I am sure that anyone with the experience of a snowy winter remembers there often being an especial chill in the wake of the cold front after a snowstorm in comparison with that after a rainstorm. That impression is not just a matter of how cold the air behind the front is. In addition, the snow reflects additional sunlight from the surface, resulting in less radiation from the ground that can be absorbed by greenhouse gases. This cool blanket of snow, however, does happen to be a poor conductor of heat and thus insulates plants and animals below its cover. Sea ice plays a similar but far less inconstant role, especially reducing the potential of absorption of sunlight during the long polar summer.

Sitting in those colors and geographic outlines and a lone black curve of the climate model output was a frightening result: most sea ice would be gone by 2050. And worst of all, most of that loss would happen in the space of five years, 2025-2030. The Northwest Passage. The Northeast Passage. Both would be a reality by 2030. And during that long polar summer, almost all solar radiation at the North Pole would be absorbed by the ocean. If this occurred, I now recalled, the change locally would be radical. North of Scandinavia lies the Norwegian territory of Svalbard. Last winter , most sea ice was present unusually far north of Svalbard, inconveniencing hunters and outdoors enthusiasts used to spending time on the sea ice. January temperatures were twenty four degrees above normal Fahrenheit. For reference, observations at Svalbard have been taking place as long as many sites in the United States, i.e. since about 1900. Salt Lake City in 2003 had its all time warmest January, recording a mean temperature 9 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. By July, Svalbard had broken its all time record temperature by 1.5 degrees, reaching 19.6 degrees Celsius. See RealClimate for more details . Svalbard’s ice-free year might be a portent of Svalbard’s ice-free future. Would future Polish legislators be praying for rain (as they were this summer)? Nothing is certain in the geosciences, but the impact on the Arctic alone of sea ice loss in the span of a decade would be disastrous. The IPCC speaks very much about what will happen in 2100, and this kind of thinking had lulled even me into a false sense of security.

The next day my officemate and I talked about the implications of this fresh forecast of doom and its immediacy. 2025 is not long from now in the scheme of human affairs. I am not likely to have a child through college by then. Indeed, 2025 likely figured in my thoughts as the stage in my life when I finally might ease myself into respectability in the various endeavors of my life, find myself trying to keep a marriage warm, and begin to think whether I could have a legacy among “famous men, our ancestors in their generations.” Very few of us hold onto the world of their youth, but I at least kept hope that the atmospheric circulation of my youth might not beat me to my grave.

As we reviewed the potential consequences, bringing ourselves to one that might cause the extinction of the species, my officemate commented, “You seem unusually calm about our impending extinction.” I replied that I was calm, not because I was numb or because I did not intend to do something to stop it but because I had hope that there was something beyond the extinction of the species, that the Christian faith encourages both an affection for and a detachment from the sensible objects, thinking mainly of how the Articles describe the Sacraments, the most worthy of the sensible objects, “not ordained…to be gazed upon or carried about, but that we should duly use them”, i.e. use them according to their righteous purpose, the quickening of Grace.

So it occurred to me a few Sundays after that while reading Rev. Sam and listening to John Houghton that if the temporal things are passing away, I might say something about them and the future to which we are rushing as those “who neither know, nor understand but walk about in darkness.” For I think we are coming very close to a major biogeochemical crisis, if we are not already in the midst of one. And while I intend what I write here to be very much a theological view of science, there will be some passing relation of this work to one put out by the Discovery Institute about intelligent design, in which the challenges which life has faced in the past have been overcome through the algorithms of a beneficent God. Indeed, a global biogeochemical crisis is not without precedent and in the pages to follow, I will speak in some detail of the little we know about two or three of them.

And because I confess there to be one God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, who became incarnate as Homo sapiens sapiens in Bethlehem Ephrata, I also will warn you that I will take no such optimistic view. I know not when the Kingdom shall come. But I do suspect that it might be of some theological significance that this coming global biogeochemical crisis can be traced to the door of the human race, creatures capable of living in the image of God and charged with the stewardship of this world; creatures are capable of living into the fullness of the natural law through their gift of reason but often heedless of that prescript of Christ to live God and their neighbor, heedless of that parallel dictate of the natural law to paraphrase the Summa : to get along (and love) those with whom we have to live. Creation is groaning in anything but patient expectation. It’s time to hear what the Book of Nature might have to say.