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A mural at the corner of Boyd Street and Fox Street in Portland depicts a classic winter landscape. It is accompanied by the message STAY POSITIVE in large letters made from chunks of ice. It was a useful, if serendipitous, admonition as I came to the end of Porter Fox’s book about climate change, “The Last Winter.” In the face of the terrifying statistics that he cites page after page, positivity, if not optimism, is the only way.
Fox hears from a leading glaciologist that the climate is changing in terms seasons. The summer is rapidly overtaking winter. Spring is coming earlier and sooner, shrinking the cryosphere, which is the world of mountain ice sheets and glaciers. This is what attracted the attention of the author, who was a skier for his entire life, to the dire threat posed by global warming.
Fox, a travel writer and a native of Mount Desert Island, traced the U.S.-Canadian border in a previous book. Northland; his main credential for tackling this dire subject is his passion for winter sports, bolstered by his ability to find an intriguing cast of characters “studying what the earth will look like when winter is gone.” He tracks them down with gusto as he chases the story “from wildfires to vanishing snow to a warming planet.” Simultaneously, he traces the critical influence of ice and its fluctuations on world history since the beginning.
He begins in the North Cascades after the Carlton Complex Fire, a massive wildfire that decimated a large portion of the region. A rancher gives him a blow-by-blow account of the loss of his home, then complains about the media trying to link the increasing number of fires in the West to “goddamn climate change.” The Pacific Northwest won’t have any glaciers left in a hundred years, says a researcher working on one already in retreat. The snow is like a reservoir in mountains. Without it, forests dry out, fires spread, and 40% of the West is heading for desertification. Pondering all this on his flight home, Fox writes, rather endearingly, “Then I reached for the screen and searched for a movie, a football game, a comedy, any possible distraction.”
About halfway through the book, Fox describes the author’s “black hole,” where “the meat of the narrative…is such a mishmash” of ideas and research that he despairs of ever pulling it all together. The World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS), in Zurich, Switzerland, offers rescue in the form a difficult interview. Perhaps not coincidentally, it is at about this point that “The Last Winter” really takes off.
On a large flat-screen monitor, WGMS Director Michael Zemp keeps tabs on the planet’s ice inventory, “splotches of magenta and white” against a largely green and blue map of the world. The cryosphere is currently facing a triple threat from climate change: warming is faster at higher elevations and at higher latitudes than at winter. In many places, the change from winter snow to rain, from white peaks to brown ones, will be far away from major population centers, and there will be no “protests from the masses.”
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Switzerland is a different country. It is defined by the Alps and is the most densely populated mountain region. All over Europe, the effects of melting Alpine snow are being felt in many fascinating ways. One of the more curious – and potentially lethal to the villages located beneath them – comes from the fact that many peaks in the Alps are cemented together by permafrost and are likely to fall apart as the temperature rises.
At a conference in Bern, Fox watches “the slow churn of science trying to catch up with the rapid pace of climate change.” And, “with the end of winter in sight,” he takes in “The Lost and Found Memories Office,” an exhibit intended to memorialize the short but romantic history of winter sports in the Alps.
Skiing a 25-mile circle with an Italian mountaineer in the Italian Dolomites gives you plenty of history opportunities, from the Little Ice Age to World War I’s crack Italian Alpini regiment.
His last expedition to Greenland was with a Royal Marine Commando, three Inuit hunters, and a Royal Marine Commando. Fox’s descriptions of the landscapes and light are excellent. “Night (in the Arctic) is an afterworld of ghostly shapes and distant sounds, like opening your eyes underwater.”
His quest ends abruptly with a text message: GET DOWN NOW. While he has been enjoying the white wastes of Greenland, COVID-19 has started to strangle the world, and the President had just closed the country’s borders. It is a fitting end, trading one global catastrophe for another, although “not as hard as the end of winter will be.” Unless the nations of the world take climate change seriously and act fast, our civilization will disappear with it.
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Thomas Urquhart is the author of “Up for Grabs, Timber Pirates, Lumber Barons and the Battles Over Maine’s Public Lands.”
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