Environment / Global Warming

By now, few scientists of any political persuasion question the reality of human-induced global warming. With Earth’s temperature climbing in concert with rising emissions of carbon dioxide (and eight of the hottest years on record occurring in the last decade), we appear to have begun a vast, unplanned experiment with our planetary home.

Still, uncertainties persist: Just how bad could global warming get? How much of it is actually caused by humans adding CO2 to the atmosphere? And what, if anything, can be done to ameliorate it? Three summers ago, as part of a book I was researching on global climate change, I invited three leading experts in global warming to tackle those questions while rafting through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northeastern Alaska. They were Jorge Sarmiento, an oceanographer at Princeton University who constructs ocean-circulation models that calculate how much atmospheric carbon dioxide eventually goes into the world’s oceans; Eileen Claussen, executive director of the Pew Center for Global Climate Change in Washington, D.C.; and David Keith, a physicist with the University of Calgary in Alberta who designs technological solutions to the global warming problem. (An ornithologist friend, two wilderness guides, and an audio assistant also came along.)

The Arctic, of course, is where global warming is being felt most acutely. It is also the site of our largest oil field, at Prudhoe Bay. Now, with the debate over whether to open the refuge to more drilling, the nation is focused on its greatest wilderness and whether to keep it that way, so the arguments seem even more relevant than they were at the time of the trip.

This was the plan: We would float downriver, from the high mountain wilderness of the Upper Ivishak River on the north slope of the Brooks Range, until we intersected the mighty Sagavanirktok River and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. From there, we would follow the pipeline and the oil company thoroughfare called Dalton Highway, or Haul Road, north to Prudhoe Bay, thereby witnessing firsthand, over five days, some of the changes humans have brought to nearly every stretch of land, sea, and sky.

We departed Fairbanks by small plane early one morning for the refuge. Up past the northern limit of trees we flew, over the highest peaks of the Brooks Range, mountain goats and musk oxen running in herds below. Then we ran into a fog bank. Our pilot, announcing that he could not safely land us at the headwaters of the Ivishak, put us down instead in a small mountain valley at the Marsh Fork River, some 40 miles shy of our intended departure point. The trip was not yet a day old, and already we were behind schedule. We set up our tents and a large cooking shelter made from a blue plastic tarp with an eight-foot pole in the middle. Around the pole, we sat on overturned buckets, our backs and heads just grazing the tarp. I chose that moment to start the discussion.