There was a remarkable sight on Preston Pond a few
days ago. It was an odd day to start with for late February; 50 degrees and
raining lightly. Nainette and Shiloh needed to be aired out before breakfast, so
as is our wont, we wandered over to the pond. It is a generally peaceful start
to the day and we occasionally see wildlife or stirring effects of light and
water. What we found was befittingly odd
for the weirdly warm morning: the ice had sunk.
Ice shouldn’t sink. That is a basic tenet of physics
upon which all life depends; even the dogs took interested note of it. Lacking higher
educations, they soon resumed sniffing and peeing on things, but I stood in the
pleasant (though slightly disturbing) warmth and gentle rain, looking out over
the beaver dam musing about the ice.
At Mt. Mansfield Union High School in 1973, Mr. Smith ("Uncle Bob") assigned a creative writing project to us in Advanced Science. We were to write a paper premised on a key physical trait of one of several
molecules not being true. I chose to write about water not being a bipolar molecule.
I titled it “UnWater” and argued that if water were not bipolar, life, and the
entire Earth as we know it, could not exist (it’s an easy argument). The
bipolarity of water (slight negative charge to the oxygen atom and slight
positive to the hydrogen atoms) is why water is a universal solvent and critical
for almost every aspect of all known life. It is also why ice floats. As water
cools, like most matter, its molecules slow and crowd together so that the
liquid becomes more dense – until the temperature reaches 32 F (0 C). Then the
attraction that the slight positive and negative charges on different molecules
have for each other overcomes the declining energy of motion in the cooling
liquid and forces the molecules to expand into a crystal matrix – ice – like a mob
of students crowded around a scuffle having to take their seats when the vice
principal shows up. This makes ice an odd solid in that it is less dense than its
liquid form and voila; it floats. So the pond ice should have been floating
too. Something was up.
And that something was the water. The rain had been
heavy at times over night. I could see silt covering much of the submerged ice,
especially on the east shore where a couple of streams come in. Another interesting
symptom of what was going on was that the ice in the middle of the pond was obeying
the rules and floating. As the dogs finished up and started bugging for
breakfast, the puzzle came into focus. The shore ice must have frozen to the bank
and been unable to move as the water rose. As for the middle, the ice is very
thin this year and so had enough flex to float up as the streams swelled in and
flooded the edges. Well, that explained the sunken ice, but underscored two
other disquieting phenomena: thin ice on the pond and rain in February.
These two February oddities have been accompanied by
little or no snow, and they follow on a surreally warm, record shattering Twilight
Zone of a Christmas Eve (more on that in a bit). Having just been recalling UnWater, I found myself
thinking of it as our UnWinter (though March has yet to weigh in). Such a warm
winter inevitably brings to mind the hot-button topic of human generated global
climate change and, at least at first flush, would seem to support it. However,
are all of these oddities really harbingers of humans firing up the biosphere? The
severity of winter and weather in general has varied famously in Vermont ever
since records have been kept, and Vermont is one small part of the globe. So
that it is raining in February and the ice on Preston Pond is thin does not
necessarily mean anything relative to climate, let alone global climate. On the
other hand, this “UnWinter” would be consistent with a warming Earth. The logical thin
ice here is confusing weather for climate. A particularly well publicized
example was Senator James Inhofe’s melodramatic presentation of a snowball in
the U.S. Senate last February, putatively disproving the idea of global climate
change, which it no more did than someone bingeing on Ben & Jerry’s disproves
world hunger. More generally a University of New Hampshire study of political
independents showed that, as a group, their views on global climate literally
change with the local weather. http://www.unh.edu/news/releases/2013/jan/lw24climate.cfm
As for the liberal and conservative ends of the
political spectrum, while Democrats and Republicans each may use examples of
weather to make dubious assertions about climate, it is often in service of
positions they have already formed, seemingly at least in part due to their
respective political philosophies more than objective science. UNH studied this
phenomenon too (http://scholars.unh.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1133&context=carsey),
as did a wider ranging paper summarizing many such studies in the February 22,
2016 online version of “Nature Climate Change.”
To a degree, you can hardly blame some for being skeptical; finding patterns and making predictions of complex
systems can be absurdly difficult, and people in general hate change. However, there are smaller scale analogues that are instructive. As a freelance advertising artist in
Manhattan in the late ‘70’s to early ‘90’s, many of my colleagues and I were in
a constant search for reassuring patterns in our wildly fluctuating incomes
every time the phone didn’t ring for a day. But by stepping back from the day
to day and weekly gyrations, we found meaningful (and reassuring) patterns in
months and years. This is the basic difference between weather and climate too:
time. However, the constant “noise” of short term change still makes it difficult to
tell when long term changes are in the works.
Back in my midtown studio, I kept rationalizing
reassuring patterns even after what were, especially in hindsight, loud alarms. My yearly income dropped for the first time in ’88, but it was still good and even
though it stayed down in ’89, I rationalized that maybe it was just part of an
even longer term variation. Then, at the end of ‘89 the handwriting on the wall
appeared (ironically disguised as the highlight of my career): a client called
with the 1990 SuperBowl logo. Normally this meant I would work with the agency
to design it. However, my dreams of football glory deflated when the job
arrived. Instead of some rough initial sketches from the art director, I was
presented with a completed layout done on one of the new fangled computer
programs. The only
thing they needed from me was to render the final camera-ready art because
computer images at the time were too pixilated. At that moment I became a
trained monkey, and was about to become a dinosaur. And I kind of knew it. Change
is very hard though, so I kept rationalizing patterns and hoping against the
evidence for another couple of years - I became a "denier" – until my income was barely more than my
mortgage. The refusal to act on what I knew was coming cost my family enormous
trauma (we’re all good now) and arguably, my marriage. Climate, driven by
processes ranging from the atomic to cosmic and composed of myriad interwoven
negative and positive feedback loops, is astronomically more complex than the
economic vagaries of advertising art; and the fate of the biosphere is at stake
rather than that of a few artists and their families. Of course, like my
family, the biosphere will come through OK – eventually. The question is
whether our comfortable civilization will – if that is, there really is a
climate change problem which we are causing and can do anything about.
So, are there significant patterns to our winters? Three
inches of ice in the dead of winter is not normal here and it is not just this season.
For many years now, it has often been a dicey proposition to go out on Preston
Pond in certain areas. At the risk of proving myself a curmudgeon, when I was a kid, the
ice on Preston Pond would get 18 inches thick or more. We had a game we called “golf,” where we would
shovel a clear patch on the pond, chop one foot deep pits into the ice at various
points and take turns shooting pucks into the pits. We scored it like golf. Lake Champlain ice would
be two feet as I knew all too well from hand augering the holes when we went
ice fishing. As of this moment (March 1), the main lake is open – it is
unfrozen. That has happened in 65% of the winters since 2000: 27% of the
winters in the 1900’s and 3.5% of the winters in the1800’s according to
National Weather Service data at Burlington. In the 1880’s, the lumber yards in
Burlington would put down hay, lay track and run a locomotive over the ice to
Plattsburgh. On an April 15th in the 1980’s, VT Fish and Wildlife
drove a truck out on Preston Pond to stock lake trout fingerlings. The ice was
thick and no one worried about going through; not in January, February, or
March; and not in much of December or April. A long lasting decline from 18+
inches to 3 inches (>83%) on Preston Pond (and two feet to nothing on
Champlain at Burlington) is a pattern, and local as it is, it is almost certainly no
longer weather, but climate.
Whether (sorry) it is climate change or not does not seem to
be much of a question to most of the scientific community, though the battle
rages on in the public/political sphere. That battle is understandable given
the economic and political stakes and our species’ general aversion to change;
and even if a broad consensus is reached that human-fired climate change is
real, there almost certainly will remain legitimate questions about what its
effects will be, how long they will take to occur, and what policies are best
to deal with them. However, if the bulk of climate researchers are correct, and we are
heating the biosphere, my worry is that many people, politicians and policy
makers among them, are likely going to wait like I did in New York. The trauma my family and I went through, repeated on a world-wide scale, could trigger social and economic upheaval that could break civilization.
Gazing out on Preston Pond in the warm February
rain, something clicked into place. I recognized that I’d had, for lack of a
better term, a “SuperBowl Logo Moment” back on Christmas Eve. It was disguised within
a lovely treat of a day, but ominous when thrown into the midst of years of on
again off again winters, unreliable ice, and the warmest fall on record. 67 F (and
partly sunny) was indeed a bizarre and record shattering temperature for Christmas
Eve in Vermont, but that was not what created the Twilight Zone sensation referred to earlier. It
wasn’t even the salamanders in the pond or the frogs singing – though I did
feel the opening scenes were rolling. It was my wife Bonnie’s voice, like Rod
Serling’s intoning our arrival at the eerie station stop: “Oh, Rob - Look!” I turned back – and then glanced down. My only excuse for not seeing it is a rather weak “who
would expect to?” I had just stepped over a gorgeous young garter snake sunning
in the leaves - on Christmas Eve.
 |
| Garter snake near Preston Pond Christmas Eve 2015. Photo: Rob Mullen |
