When the Al Gore documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” received an Academy Award last week, it seemed a pretty sure sign that Hollywood believes that global climate change is taking place. But what about the rest of the world? Prompted by a New York winter that went from disturbing warmth to bone-chilling cold practically overnight, the Op-Ed page asked four writers from different corners of the globe to report on the erratic weather they’ve been experiencing. Here are their dispatches.
1) Kotzebue, Alaska
In Alaska, Everyone’s Afraid of the Water
By Seth Kantner, a photographer and the author of the novel “Ordinary Wolves”
The sun was finally back in late January, and I thought, when it shines again it might even be yellow. (When the sun returns to the Arctic, you stare at it like a lost love.) But the sky was still gray, the temperature was 5 below (what we call “warm”), and the west wind was drifting snow off the sea ice. The ice was not as thick or plentiful as it should be at that time of year.
Late January marks the beginning of good winter travel, and I was impatient to be out. At 10 a.m. I lashed snowshoes, camera bag and tools to my snowmobile. The snow-scoured town droned with the beat of the power plant, auto engines and four-wheelers and the tortured roar of high-performance snowmobiles driven by lawless teenagers (some in their 40s).
My husky came sleepily out of his doghouse, stepped over giant, gnawed moose bones and stretched to the end of his chain, wagging his tail, wanting to go with me. Though it was still twilight, I felt pressed not to waste light. To take photographs in winter you must be close to caribou or wolves or whatever you’re shooting when the light arrives. In past winters, the caribou herds have been nearer to town, but this year has been different.
While the snowmobile engine warmed up, I hurried inside for the rest of my gear: parka and fur hat, face mask and goggles, binoculars and beaver mittens.
The sky here has lost its hard-earned trust; the weather has always been unpredictable, but who knows anymore, the temperature could plummet or, worse, it could rain. Here in winter we fear water most of all.
It is good that our uncertain “freezeup” — our word for the season that divides summer and water from winter and ice — is behind us, with the ice forming and then rethawing, with that strange rain in October that felt like Oregon weather but with extra darkness, with thin ice in November and temperatures in the teens into December. It was nice too that an early January storm and minus-35 weather had passed. We’ve been spoiled by warm weather, and yet we are worried watching the Arctic melt.
One cold spell and people were already talking about “global cooling.” It turned cold again the first week of February, and has been relentlessly 15 to 30 below since. But not everyone remembers the deep freezes of decades past when inland winters regularly dipped to minus 60, and here on the coast minus 100 wind chill was common. What we are left with now is a suspicion about what the sky will bring, and what new bugs and birds may fly in under it.
Cold matters here; we travel long distances on snow and ice. Think of driving from Washington to New York and wondering the whole way if the road will melt. These days, everyone here knows or is related to someone who has drowned by falling through thin ice.
Out on Kotzebue Sound snowdrifts slowed my travel. After 15 miles I left the ice, climbed up onto the tundra and crossed the fresh tracks of two other snowmobiles. Kotzebue is a town of hunters, the tradition going back 10,000 years, before rifles and aircraft, and though times have changed and brought NBC and “CSI,” Gore-Tex and FedEx and every other thing to the Arctic, caribou remain the meat of choice.
The land stretched into rising, rolling tundra dotted with clumps of brush (brush that is very happy, thank you, with the last 10 years of late falls and melting permafrost). Occasional stands of spruce marked tributaries and south-facing slopes. The spruce, too, are moving north, trailing new thickets of cute green babies along the way.
The snow was trackless. In the ringing of the engine my thoughts wandered ahead and behind. In autumn, sometimes 50,000 caribou come through this area. Caribou here are like wild ducks; they migrate at predictable times — south in September, north in May. They provide food and in the process define the seasons. But this past season was a strange and lean one; caribou delayed migrating until after freezeup. Many folks believe this happened because of our warmer falls; most also heap blame on the recent invasion of another species — swarms of sport hunters from the lower 48 states whose camps block the trails, and who do not know or follow the local custom of not shooting the leaders of the caribou migration.
But it was January, and finally cold. Down in a buried creek, I found the first footprints of wild creatures — a fox, and then ptarmigan. Four ptarmigan burst out of the willows, their feathers white on white, as if chunks of the snow itself had sprung to life. On a rise I shut off my machine and with cold fingers put my camera together. The land was growing lighter, hushed, empty. A thousand distant brush clumps looked like caribou but were not. To the south were bands of orange. To the north, mountains rose into low, gray falling snow.
2) Dhaka, Bangladesh
Losing Bangladesh, by Degrees
By Tahmima Anam, the author of the forthcoming novel “A Golden Age”
Imagine, if you will, a country marooned between a snowy mountain range and a churning sea. The country is small, a thumbprint on a vast continent. It holds the youngest and largest delta in the world. This means the landscape is fickle, the rivers often shifting and swallowing giant swaths of land.
It is cleaved by two of the world’s mightiest rivers, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra. They perform vanishing acts and conjuring tricks. One day your house is dry and the chilis are airing in the courtyard. The next it has disappeared altogether. You do not want to rebuild so close to the river, but you do: there is no space; the country is full.
For whatever else it strains to hold, it is the crush of humanity that makes Bangladesh what it is: a calamitous country, a country so full of people that every slight shift in circumstance has dire consequences. The weather does not have to be extreme. It has only to be intemperate, and the country does the rest.
How does such a small place hold so much? You worry that it will burst. But your worry is misplaced. You should worry that it will sink. For as the sea level rises, its waters will flow upward like fingers into a glove, turning the sweet river water into salt. The salt will destroy the crops and kill the fish and raze the forests. At the same time, the Himalayan peaks will melt, and they, too, will flow into the country. The rising sea and the melting mountains will meet on this tiny patch of the world, and the people who strain at its seams will drown with it, or be blown away to distant shores, casualties and refugees by the millions.
Here in the capital, winter is a festive season. The cool weather allows women to wear their heaviest saris and wrap thick twists of gold around their necks. There is little rain, the ground is solid — good for high heels. Buildings across the city are draped with strings of lights. You can buy hot, crunchy jilapis by the roadside; the markets are full of winter vegetables.
One day this winter, I landed at Dhaka airport just before dawn. The fog that had delayed my flight clung to the ground and looked like snow; as it lifted, a milky haze took its place. On the way home I saw groups of men huddled over coal fires by the side of the road. They wore puffy jackets and acrylic sweaters, castoffs from the sweatshops that dot the highways between the airport and the city. When they blew on their hands, I saw clouds whistling out of their mouths. Their heads were wrapped in shawls and towels and mosquito nets. The sun did not make an appearance until noon that day, and even then it was only a heatless, watery orb.
In the evening I went to the other side of town, where my uncles live by the long, pencil-shaped Dhanmondi Lake. I watched from the window as the lake appeared to go still, as though deciding whether it was cold enough to freeze over, and there were tiny dots of fish moving toward the shore, not swimming but belly up, drowned.
According to the United Nations, the temperatures this winter in some parts of Bangladesh were the coldest in 38 years. The last time it was this cold, Bangladesh was called East Pakistan. Looked at another way, however, the mean temperature was only two degrees below the average for January.
Yet in a country so precariously balanced, two degrees meant the difference between life and death. In the districts of Rajshahi, Nilphamari, Srimangal and Gaibandha, people died of the cold because they had no protection against the weather, no walls between them and the elements — not a long sleeve or a sock. Only two degrees, but instead of enjoying their jilapis and weddings and cauliflower, 134 people died. A mere two-degree rise in the global climate will cause large tracts of the delta to disappear, and two degrees after that, the rivers will be wider than the plains, and two degrees after that, the water will have swallowed Bangladesh.
Two degrees either way for this country is not two degrees: it is catastrophe itself, borne on the waves of our warming world.
3) Reykjavik, Iceland
By Kristin Steinsdottir
Would it be possible to go skiing over the weekend? This was her first thought when she pulled the curtains in the morning. Last weekend had been unusual. It shimmered like a beam of light in her memory and sent warmth into every nerve of her body. White ski slopes, sunshine, laughter and joyful shouting. Wasn't it a bit like being a child again?
Such a weekend wouldn't have been unusual at all 30 years ago, but in the vicinity of Reykjavik, the skiing areas had been shut down one by one during the previous winters, and the little snow that actually fell was always blown away. Now she looked at the snow in the trees, vaguely remembering crawling through an upper-story window a long time ago to watch her father dig his way down to the front door. Or was it perhaps only a lapse of memory? After all, she had been a little girl at that time and in memory everything becomes larger than life.
After a mild and rainy fall in 2006 no one in the city expected snow. The rain had poured from the sky and run down the streets, gathering into large puddles, reminding her of lakes. This past October she felt that the rain was more frequent and heavier than the years before. Some people missed the old windy rain, spoke of "foreign rain," said the rain wasn't behaving as it used to, and that they needed to get an umbrella. Using an umbrella in Iceland is actually just a joke since the wind usually blows from all directions, flips over the umbrella and destroys it. No one uses an umbrella in Iceland except foreigners.
The fall went by and it started getting colder, but it was on and off, as it often is in Iceland. There is an old saying that people never know what to put on when they leave the house. The sun may be shining when you go out, but you return in the rain or even a storm — and vice versa. It is said that this is due to the shifting weather conditions. But weren't the weather conditions shifting even more now? Wasn't there more of everything this winter?
She furrowed her brow, looked over the garden and tried to answer herself: blocked roads, snowstorms and sudden snowfall in the city after many winters with hardly any snow at all ... rainfall above average in the same city ... an unusual surging of rivers all over the country just before Christmas. These days she also felt more often as if the roof of her house might get blown off in passing storms. Rescue teams were constantly being sent out; air travel was interrupted more and more.
People wondered. Were these interruptions the result of stepped-up safety measures? Was the roof just getting older? But what about the temperatures? Although January was cold, the last 10 years in Reykjavik were the warmest on record, at least since records have been kept.
She looked at the glacier through the window. It appeared in full view across the bay in the morning sun and reminded her of an old pyramid. The glacier Snaefellsjokull is supposed to be one of the seven sources of spiritual energy in the world. Many tap into its energy. Once the glacier had an even snow cap on all sides. Now the cap was uneven and here and there rocks were visible through the ice.
The glacier is melting like others of its kind in Iceland. When looking at it she was reminded of another glacier, Vatnajokull, one of the largest in Europe. It would be gone within the next 200 years, it was said.
When she drew the curtains in the evening it had started to rain.
4) Camberra, Australia
While Australia Burns
By Iain McCalman, a fellow at the Australian National University, is the author of the forthcoming “Darwin’s Armada: How Four Voyagers to Australasia Won the War Over the Theory of Evolution”
This summer, Australia feels like a war zone. Cities and towns across the country are enveloped in a perpetual smoke haze, and the braying of fire sirens is as commonplace as birdsong. Every evening television commentators deliver grim-faced reports from the front lines. Tired farmers look dazedly into the camera. Firemen with soot-smeared clothes and chili-red eyes shake their heads and mumble that they have never known anything like it. As with every modern war report, helicopters make a ubiquitous backdrop. They dip down in front of shrinking reservoirs, then stagger toward the fire front, their water pouches swaying marsupial-like underneath their bellies.
‘‘Why? Why, Kamarrang?” asks a tall, slightly stooped Aboriginal man from western Arnhem Land in the far north of Australia. He is Bardayal Nadjamerrek, an elder of the Mok clan, and he is talking to a grizzled “white fellah” named Peter Cook, an ecological scientist. They are discussing the disappearance of whole groups of animals from the plateau of Mr. Nadjamerrek’s youth. He repeats the question, this time looking upward to address the “Old People” — his ever-present ancestors — with whom he habitually discusses such issues.
This scene opens a nearly completed film, “Fire in the Land of Honey,” of which I’m a producer. The work of the filmmaker Kim McKenzie, it is one of a trilogy of documentaries about Mr. Nadjamerrek and his native land, which his people call Ankung Djang. Collectively, the films will tell how some 50 years ago the Aboriginal people left this vast plateau, the size of Belgium, drawn by the lure of money, tobacco and other novelties offered by distant buffalo camps, mines, stock stations and missions. Today it is a lost world, emptied of people but filled with rock paintings so intricate, ancient and beautiful they take your breath away. He is among the last people to grow up on the plateau, to know its lore and habitat, and to speak its languages.
He has returned to Ankung Djang with his wife, Kalkiwarra, because he has a task. It is to show his own grandchildren, as well as Peter Cook and other scientists, how his people used to look after the country long ago. He is also telling Mr. McKenzie, the filmmaker, all that he remembers of the history and culture of this ancient place. They are recording his knowledge because otherwise Ankung Djang will cease to have a history. Mr. Nadjamerrek is over 80 and his memory is getting shaky; names and places are starting to fade like the old trails he traveled as a young man to gather spear-making materials.
But his most urgent quest is to find out why his country is out of kilter. Since his people left half a century ago, fire — a staple tool of Aboriginal life — has turned into an uncontrollable monster, careering across the landscape, devouring the plateau’s trees, plants, birds, animals and insects (including Mr. Nadjamerrek’s beloved native bees).
In truth, none of us can really answer his question: “Why?” We do know the controlled-fire regimens that Aboriginal people practiced for millenniums to nurture the land must be reinstated. But, like Mr. Nadjamerrek, we also suspect something larger is going on — we fear that Australia’s soaring heat, vanishing water and rampant fires are connected to larger global patterns of climate change. Thankfully, we Australians at least have Bardayal Nadjamerrek and the Old People to advise us; the rest of the globe is not so lucky.