What does it mean when we have no winter? John Gurda finds it worrisome.
When it comes to climate change the Earth is still flat.
I know I’m in the minority here, but I really disliked the so-called winter that just ended. What a sorry excuse for a season! Temperatures rose to June levels in February, snowfall was spotty at best, and the blackbirds and meadowlarks returned weeks too early. The whole world seemed topsy-turvy.
Sure, I enjoyed biking down to Grant Park and watching incredulous golfers tee off on Feb. 19. Three days later, the mercury hit 71 degrees — the highest winter temperature ever recorded in Milwaukee. We had Florida weather in what used to be Wisconsin’s deep freeze. It was undeniably pleasant, but I could never escape the feeling that something was broken. If this is indeed the new normal, I might have to move to Canada.
My disappointment in this year’s abortive winter was in part physical. Crosscountry skiing is my preferred form of cold-weather exercise, and the skiing was dismal this season. The Birkebeiner racers were shut out completely, and I canceled two trips to Upper Michigan — normally a skier’s paradise — because the trails there had turned to slush.
I also have an attachment to winter that is partly emotional and partly philosophical. I come from northern people — Norwegians and Poles — and the season may be encoded in my DNA. I crave winter as an absence, an anti-environment, a state of suspension, even gestation, that serves as a respite from the frenetic pace of summer. Just as some seeds require a period of cold and dark to germinate in spring, I seem to need the long time-out of January and February.
When I’m not shivering too hard, I also appreciate winter as a meteorological Lent, a time of denial and discernment. There is a bleak, blank otherness to the season that puts the human condition in bold relief. You are alone here, says winter; you and your warm-blooded kind are just wayfaring strangers in a broken world. Seek shelter. Find enough.
Those cautionary reminders aren’t available if the season never really arrives. When autumn grades into winter and winter fades into spring without clear lines of demarcation, we might as well be living in California.
Wisconsin has had warm winters before, of course. Pioneer historian James Buck, who came to Milwaukee in 1837, loved to write about the weather. Buck recalled seasons with such luxuriant snows that entire trains were buried in drifts until spring, but he also singled out the frost-free winter of 1877-78. “I picked full blown dandelions in my yard on the 22d of January,” he recalled, “and my fruit trees all budded in February. Nothing like it was ever seen before.”
Unlike Buck, we have seen it before, especially in recent years. What had been an isolated occurrence has become a
general pattern. Much of the northern hemisphere experienced its warmest February on record this year, and the average global temperature has risen roughly 1.5 degrees since 1880.
That has been enough to make ice caps melt, oceans rise, coral die, deserts expand and storms increase in intensity. We may have entered a feedback loop: the less polar ice there is to reflect sunlight, the faster Earth’s temperatures will rise, and the faster temperatures rise, the more ice will melt and the sooner coastal cities will flood.
All this, according to the overwhelming majority of the world’s scientists, is our doing. The billions of engines we use to do our work have created a dome of exhaust gases that traps heat in the atmosphere. There is a bitter irony in the fact that the fossil fuels we extract from the Earth may be hastening our own progress toward fossil-hood.
I find it stunning that climate change is still a matter of debate. The naysayers have made cold, hard facts “controversial,” which raises the question of how human beings know anything. We don’t doubt that the sun is 93 million miles away from Earth, but no one I know ever held the tape measure. We have no trouble believing that dinosaurs lived 150 million years ago, but who can even count back that far? We take it on faith that the continents drift around on tectonic plates like ice floes in a slush pond, but the ground feels pretty stable to me.
Even though none of us can independently verify any of these things, most of us accept them as facts, not assertions. We recognize them as the settled conclusions of qualified experts who have studied the evidence carefully and ruled out every competing hypothesis. That’s what science does; it extends our reach and allows us to make connections, connect dots, that we couldn’t possibly link on our own. If we accepted only the evidence of our senses, we’d still think that the Earth was flat and the sun and stars revolved around us.
When it comes to climate change, however, the Earth is still flat. Scientific facts have somehow become opinions, and carefully researched conclusions are written off as theories or even hoaxes. Climate scientists went to the same schools, earned the same degrees, and follow the same protocols as experts we wouldn’t begin to question on other matters, but millions of us find it easy to say, “I don’t think so.”
Why don’t we believe the prognosticators of climate change? Because believing would be, to use Al Gore’s favorite word, inconvenient. Because accepting climate change would imply the need to change our behaviors. Once we admit our collective guilt, we would have to assume, however reluctantly, our collective responsibility for fixing what we and our ancestors have broken.
The key word here is “collective.” Anyone who places the freedom of the individual above all else will instinctively resist subordinating personal privilege to the common good, particularly if it means living more simply. And anyone who puts “America First” will find the idea of meaningful cooperation across international borders repugnant. And so climate change becomes something we seek to manage rather than halt. The bus keeps careening toward the edge of the cliff.
There will be, in the end, only one right answer. What if the deniers are dead wrong? What will our individualism and our nationalism cost future generations? How will history judge us, we who had the means and opportunity to address the problem while something could still be done?
The dinosaurs who once ruled the Earth are gone, casualties of climate change caused by an asteroid’s impact or clouds of volcanic ash or some other event that cooled the planet below a threshold that could sustain reptilian life. We’re moving in the opposite direction on the temperature scale, but the long-term effect could be the same. If winter goes extinct, how long before we follow?