"Cloudy, With a Chance of Climate Change"

Four accounts of changing weather...

In Alaska, Everyone’s Afraid of the Water
By SETH KANTNER
...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...


Losing Bangladesh, by Degrees
By TAHMIMA ANAM
....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....

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.


Memories of a Colder 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....

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....

When she drew the curtains in the evening it had started to rain.

While Australia Burns
By IAIN McCALMAN
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...

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... 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).