When the glaciers are gone, they are gone. What does a place like Lima do? Or, in northwest China, there are 300 million people relying on snowmelt for water supply. There’s no way to replace it until the next ice age.
—Tim Barnett, climate scientist
Genesee residents during the winter of 1912-13
Autumn came late this year, and climate change was very much on my
mind as the skies remained warm and dry throughout much of
October. With our house windows left open long after dark to cool the
place down, I lingered over the pictures and stories of deep snows in
the book I’ve just finished editing and publishing for my fellow
Eastern Washington resident Gerald Hickman. Good Times in Old
Genesee: A Tale of Two Families (Tellectual Press, 2015) is
about a tiny dot of a pioneer town a couple hours’ drive south of here
where Gerald and his parents were born and raised.
When he was growing up, it snowed there. A lot, if the “walked through
miles of snow to school, uphill both ways” memories of an elder
citizen can be relied upon:
My brother and sister and I would walk down the steep hill on our
ranch road about a half mile through the snow drifts to catch a ride
to school on the bus. We had to buck the drifts about ten months of
each year. Finally, when summer came, we were mostly snow-free, and
free of classes as well.
He recalls snowball fights and sled riding down a hill on the drive
to his childhood home. “The best part: We were really close to home
for hot chocolate from Mom’s warm and loving kitchen.”
Detail: Snowball
In the early 1900s, he says (here drawing on historical research
rather than memory), “there was often so much snow that they had to
tunnel under the snow to cross Main Street.”
His great-uncle John Platt, who arrived in Genesee as a child with his
family in the late 1800s, “said that the snow did not seem so deep
around Genesee in the later years of his life,” and Gerald
agrees. “With the exceptional year or two, winters seem to have become
less severe in my later years as well.”
Just in the 15 years or so we’ve been in the Inland Northwest, we’ve
seen a decrease in snowfall. I love the feeling of huddling inside our
house with the woodstove burning wood I grew, logged, hauled, bucked,
split, and stacked myself, from my own property, as the snow fills the
skies and piles up outside. I love stomping through it and seeing the
cold clean whiteness of it all, the graceful curves of it piled on
trees and roofs, softening every sharp angle. One memorable winter, I
spent 26 days skiing down it on a mountain that is less than 40
minutes from my driveway.
Now, thanks in part to automobile trips as long as the ones I made
back and forth to that ski hill, undertaken every day by millions of
commuters across the country and beyond, those snowfalls are
faltering. Climate change, driven by greenhouse gas emissions from my
tailpipe and everyone else’s, has thinned the clouds in our Pacific
Northwest skies. When they do offer us the winter moisture that has
carpeted this region with evergreens, it often comes down as rain
rather than snow.
———
According to a Nepalese study cited in Bill McKibben’s book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, there has been an
annual temperature rise of 0.1°F in the Himalayas. That, McKibben
observes, works out to “a degree every decade in a world where the
mercury barely budged for ten millennia.”
Detail: Eye contact with the past
In 2008, a 57-year old Nepalese man looking at a glacier that’s
retreated more than a mile since he played on it as a child said, “I
feel that the sun is getting stronger, and in the past there used to
be a lot more snow in winter. We used to get up to two metres in the
winter, and it would stay for weeks. Last winter we only had two
centimetres.”
The drastic warmth in Nepal “is spurring melt with almost unimaginable
consequences,” says McKibben.
Indian researchers recently predicted that glaciers could disappear
from the central and eastern Himalayas as early as 2035, including
the giant Gangotri Glacier that supplies 70 percent of the dry-season
water to the Ganges River. That would leave 407 million people
looking for a new source of drinking and irrigation water.
On the other side of India lies Pakistan, “a country that is
essentially a desert with a big river flowing through it.” That
river is the Indus, which is fed by glaciers in “the Himalayas, the
Hindu Kush and the Karakoram, forming the largest reservoir of ice
outside the poles.” This is a country that is already getting hit by
climate change, with “catastrophic floods which displaced millions,
and a deadly heatwave this summer that killed 1,200 people.”
But the suffering is only going to get worse, because those glaciers
are retreating fast. By 2050, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change “predicts a decrease in the freshwater supply of South Asia,
particularly in large river basins such as the Indus.” Karachi, which
draws almost all of its water from the Indus “will somehow have to
manage its growing population with even less water–a population with
a significant poverty rate that will also struggle should food prices rise.”
This is not just a problem for some distant people we never see except
occasionally on the news, because India and Pakistan both have nuclear
weapons, about a hundred between them as of 2010. They glare at each
other across a hostile border, possibly “the most worrisome
adversaries capable of a regional nuclear conflict today.” What
happens when one of them–thoroughly infected with religious
fanaticism and filled with millions of desperate, starving
citizens–finally decides to lash out at its hated rival?
Consider, as Gwynne Dyer does in his scary look forward to a planet at
war over climate pressures, that five
of the six rivers that eventually feed into the Indus system rise in
Indian-controlled territory. In undivided, British-ruled India, the
water flowed unhindered into the intricately linked irrigation canals
that covered much of the provinces of Punjab and Sind, but Partition
in 1947 left most of the headwaters in Indian hands, while well over
four-fifths of the farmers who depended on the water lived in the new
state of Pakistan.
Nations do not “go gentle into that good night” when dwindling
resources make bare survival look impossible. Backed against the wall,
with military options at hand–frightfully so in Pakistan and India to
say nothing of China, another thirsty nation with dicey water
prospects–they follow Dylan Thomas’s poetic admonition to “rage,
rage, against the dying of the light.” The consequences are horrific
for their neighbors, sometimes the entire world.
This is what Lebensraum was all about, as historian Tim Snyder
soberly explained on a recent episode of Tom Ashbrook’s On
Point NPR program. Climate change could well return us to a
tribalistic world convulsed by resource wars. We are already seeing
the beginning of sorrows in the mass exodus from Syria.
“Organized societies can endure a lot of hardship and still carry on,
but when populations go hungry all bets are off for cultural cohesion
and political stability,” observes James Howard Kunstler in his
masterpiece Too Much Magic.
If world events follow their usual perverse course, food shortages
and other resource scarcities will express themselves indirectly in
quarrels that may seem to have little to do with the pertinent
issues: conflicts over abstractions such as interest rates and
currencies, trade wars, revolutions, fights over boundaries and
islands, nationalist chest-beating displays, and religious warfare of
the jihad and crusade variety. There may be little public
acknowledgment or even consciousness of the reasons behind one
outburst of trouble or another.
And we certainly can’t expect that an abused planet already under
stress would respond well to even a “local” outbreak of mushroom
clouds in the Subcontinent:
A nuclear war could trigger declines in yield nearly everywhere at
once, and a worldwide panic could bring the global agricultural
trading system to a halt, with severe shortages in many
places. Around one billion people worldwide who now live on marginal
food supplies would be directly threatened with starvation by a
nuclear war between India and Pakistan or between other regional
nuclear powers.
Snowy street in early Genesee, Idaho
It’s a grim picture, and there has been no shortage of what doomsday
ecologist Guy McPherson memorably calls “hopium” to assuage a public
that’s becoming increasingly concerned, despite campaigns of denial
financed by fossil fuel interests. The pharmacopoeia of hopium
includes grandiose techno-fixes such as implausible carbon capture
schemes and seeding the stratosphere with sulfates to reflect solar
radiation. Bill McKibben is critical of such fantasies, though with
some sympathy for “the daydreams of the developing world” like the
suggestion made at a meeting of Asian journalists that “Bangladesh
could be relocated to Siberia and Iceland.” Melting snows would, it
was claimed, “turn them into ‘bread-baskets.’” How, he asks, does one
tell these front-line casualties of our war against nature “that the
tundra is turning into a methane-leaking swamp?”
Besides, there is the small issue of what the Russians and Icelanders
might think about an invasion of 150 million Bangladeshis. Even an
enlightened new generation of Germans ever mindful of their
grandparents’ Holocaust is getting twitchy about all the Syrian
refugees mobbing their borders.
January 2009: Our last really good snow in Eastern WA [Flickr page] “Have you entered the storehouses of the snow, or have you seen the
storehouses of the hail,” the Book of Job has God sniff at us mere
mortals, storm-stuff that he has “reserved for the time of distress,
for the day of war and battle?” Those storehouses are not hidden
somewhere above clouds in God’s heaven, but on snow-capped mountains
right here on earth. Their stock is running low, not just in the
Himalayas, but around the world in this time of distress we have made
for ourselves.
The last of Bolivia’s 18,000 year-old Chacaltaya Glacier melted away
in 2009. Andean glaciers like that one are “the main source of water
across South America, from Colombia to Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and
Chile,” and their disappearance is going to cause major problems. One
climate change advisor for Latin America at a humanitarian
organization says that conflicts over water “will become explosive
over the coming decades because the glaciers will dry out.”
Agriculture “is practically at an end in California’s Central Valley,”
says Dyer, “due to the failure of the rivers that used to be fed in
the summer by the melting snowpack on the Sierra Nevada and Rocky
Mountains.” This is not a trivial situation: The Central Valley
“accounts for one-quarter of the food grown for human consumption in
the United States.” But its rivers will likely become seasonal in
world that is 2°C warmer, flowing only in the winter with
precipitation that falls on the mountains mostly as rain instead of snow.
The Sierra Nevada mountain range is, or was, “a giant water faucet in
the sky, a 400-mile-long, 60-mile-wide reservoir held in cold storage
that supplies California with more than 60 percent of its water.” Now
the snow is coming later and melting earlier.
Rainwater, alas, runs off immediately instead of adding to a
storehouse of moisture that melts and feeds rivers late into the
spring and summer. Farmers and ranchers in the American West need that
slowly melting snow to keep water flowing throughout the dry
summer. Otherwise, a lot of the water is gone by the time their crops need it.
And there are a lot of us eating food produced from those crops. Don’t
kid yourself about agricultural abundance from the Midwest,
either. About 30% of the groundwater used for irrigation in the
U.S. comes from the Ogallala Aquifer, the saturated volume of which
has gone down by about 9% since 1950, according to
Wikipedia. “Depletion is accelerating, with 2% lost between 2001 and
2009 alone. Once depleted, the aquifer will take over 6,000 years to
replenish naturally through rainfall.” In the crucial Kansas section
of the Ogallala, 30% has already been pumped out and farming there
will likely peak by around 2040 due to water depletion.
Meanwhile, back in Latah County where Gerald Hickman’s little town of
Genesee still sits among the monoculture, petroleum-fertilized grain
fields of Big Ag, a local club in the Idaho State Snowmobile
Association (“Snodrifters of Latah County”) canceled its February
15, 2015 “Raffle Run” due to lack of snow. “Look for us to be back
next year,” they plead on their website.
For reasons that go far beyond a little winter recreation, we can only
hope they will be.
———
The pictures with Flickr links are my own, and you can click on them to enlarge and download for your own non-commercial use, as usual.
The Genesee snow pics are digital restorations I’ve done of photos from the Latah County Historical society. If you’re interested in some plain-spoken personal and local history interspersed with old photos, check out Jerry’s
book page at
tellectual.com.
Notes
