The Only News That Really Matters

I read The New York Times every morning pretty carefully, but this morning there was no news I could find about what keeps me up late sometimes: global warming.

The news is often chaotic, and right now that seems to be the way of the world. War in Ukraine, war in Myanmar, high inflation rates at home, voter suppression, truly crazy conspiracy plots from the far right, a pandemic now in its third year, the long aftermath of a coup attempt on the Capitol — and there’s more.

There’s always more.

But nothing about global warming. Usually there’s something, but not today.

And that is the biggest news story there is right now.

I saw something on PBS recently; it was pictures of holes in the landscape, round holes, scattered across the landscape. These were the holes created by methane escaping from the permafrost underneath as it melts. Methane is captured in huge quantities in the permafrost, which has been around in the Arctic for many centuries, and has never melted. Until now.

Now, the Arctic is heating up at a prodigious rate, and the permafrost is melting. This is news worldwide.

Methane is far worse as a heat-trapping gas than carbon dioxide, which is bad enough. The Arctic itself is now on fire on a large scale. The Arctic ice cap is disappearing.

When I wrote my last book, about the search for the Northwest Passage, the ice cap in the Arctic had been, historically, 10 feet thick in August, and the ice would pile up sometimes with floes, one on top of the other, to a depth of 40 feet. No ice breaker can handle ice that thick. The Northwest Passage was not navigated until 1906, and it took three years in a small ship powered by a gasoline engine, threading its way through gaps in the ice cover.

Now, the ice cap in the summer has shrunk to something less than 3 feet, and it has shrunk drastically in size.

This is, as I say, the worst possible news.

But it is long-term news, and who thinks long term? Especially in a little village like Sag Harbor, where I have lived for more than 40 years?

They recently put in a modern drainage system along the edge of Bay Street, which has frequently flooded in the past. Basements in Main Street, i.e. downtown Sag Harbor, used to flood according to the tides.

I remember being in the basement of the Municipal Building years ago, which had a sand floor, and seeing the marks on the walls left by high tides. The basement of the American Hotel next door had wooden planks on the floors to make walkways where you could walk without getting your feet wet.

Downtown Sag Harbor is filled land. It was once meadowland. A whole nearby hillside was leveled in the late 18th or early 19th century to fill in that land. Houses behind Main Street, to the west, regularly see their basements flood, and the water has to be pumped into the street.

We live in Nineveh, on a small hill, maybe 40 feet above sea level, which renders us safe from flooding for now, and probably for years to come.

But Greenland is melting. Greenland has an ice sheet that is 1,500 miles long and 700 miles wide. It is also two miles thick. But it is melting at a rate no one has ever seen before. Fissures have developed all over the ice sheet, fissures that are, in effect, bottomless, and huge quantities of melt water run through them as the climate in the far north warms up.

There has been some talk about the possibility that the eastern half of that ice sheet will slide off into the North Sea, where it will disappear, and when the whole ice sheet is melted, sea level worldwide will rise by more than 20 feet.

What happens to Sag Harbor then?

I do think long term. At my age, which is 85, you tend to think long thoughts. History teaches you that, and I am a historian.

Fire in the Arctic. Never seen before in my lifetime.

In 1819, a British sea captain stood on the shore of an island in the High Arctic and looked across the entrance to what became the Northwest Passage many years later and saw huge quantities of ice everywhere he looked. His ship was locked into that ice, and he wondered whether he would ever get out.

He did, in October, but he had to chop the ship out of the ice and find his way out of it through open leads, and he was lucky. There were open leads here and there.

The Greenland ice cap melting? Oh, that’s years away. Yes, probably, but the Arctic is warming three or four times faster than the rest of the planet. Nobody knows why. Maybe it’s the methane. Nobody has ever seen the Arctic burning, but it is now.

And the weather. Suddenly, it seems like all of California is on fire, and elsewhere in the West it’s the same story. Tornadoes are now common in winter as well as what used to be the tornado season. Tornadoes are moving east.

And hurricanes. I have seen beachfronts after a hurricane. A few houses survive, but many are just splinters.

Recently, in Sag Harbor, a bayfront home, which in Nineveh is generally on a little rise, placing it about 10 feet above sea level, sold for $5 million. Many bayfront homes in Sag Harbor are much lower, some just 1 or 2 feet above sea level. What do we do? A seawall around the entire village?

Seafront cities all over the world are grappling with this future. In New York, they’re talking about a seawall. In the Netherlands they already have a series of dikes, and they’re talking about letting water in, with means to let it out. In Tokyo, it’s floating residential islands.

People do recognize the problem. But you can’t build a seawall around Long Island. There’s no Robert Moses to make things happen that way. When Greenland goes, so will Long Island. So will large portions of southern New Jersey, so will Florida and the Florida Keys, so will all of Bangladesh, hundreds of sea islands and many millions of lives. The world will drastically change.

I won’t be here to see it. But my hopes are not high.