The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future

In contrast to these studies, a broad pattern of rising crop yields in Canada, some northern U.S. states, southern Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, and parts of Russia have been repeatedly demonstrated by climate- change model simulations for years. Already these countries are major producers of wheat, barley, rye, rapeseed, and potatoes. As early as 1990 it was apparent that regardless of what climate model was used, the northern U.S. states of Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin would likely benefit from rising average temperatures, even if corn, wheat, and soybean production in the rest of the country declined.³¹⁶ Similar north-south asymmetries in crop yield (with gains in the north and declines in the south) were later demonstrated for Europe and Russia.³¹⁷ The general idea is that in the marginal northern fringes of present-day agriculture, rising temperatures and longer growing seasons will boost current crops and perhaps allow introduction of new ones; in marginal southern fringes, rising temperatures and drought frequency should harm them.³¹⁸

Other questions revolve around the relative importance of temperature versus moisture stress on plants, soil quality, strength of CO₂ fertilization, and whether extreme events (heat waves, flooding) might be even more important determinants of future food supply than the long-term temperature and precipitation statistical averages produced by climate models.³¹⁹ It is also an oversimplification to assert that Russian and Canadian agriculture, for example, will universally benefit from warmer air temperatures. Russia’s current agricultural heartland lies in its dry southern steppes, where crop declines may not be fully offset by gains in the north.³²⁰ The same holds true for Canada’s western prairies. But relative to the rest of the world, the NORCs—especially the northernmost U.S. states, parts of Canada and Russia, and northern Europe— count among the few places on Earth where we can reasonably expect to see rising crop production from climate change.

Please pass the potatoes.

CHAPTER 6 One if by Land, Two if by Sea

In August 2007 the Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker Rossiya broke a path to the North Pole, the research vessel Akademik Fyodorov trailing closely behind. An opening was cut through the sea ice and two tiny submarines lowered by crane into the freezing water. Their crews then dove 4,300 meters—more than two and a half miles beneath the ice—to the floor of the Arctic Ocean. A robotic arm collected samples and planted a titanium tricolor Russian flag directly into the yellow mud of the northernmost spot on the planet. “The Arctic is ours,” declared Artur Chilingarov, the polar explorer, oceanographer, and Duma politician who led the expedition and also went down in one of the subs.³²¹ Vaguely remembered for rescuing a stuck polar ship in the 1980s, he became an instant celebrity; President Putin later awarded him a gold Hero of Russia medal.

For the next several months, the world proceeded to go crazy about Russians staking out the North Pole. Western politicians spluttered in outrage. “This isn’t the fifteenth century,” Canada’s foreign minister Peter MacKay told a crowd of television reporters. “You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say: ‘We’re claiming this territory.’ ”³²² Media reports framed the story as a thinly veiled grab for natural resources, citing a recent comment by U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) scientist Don Gautier, who had ballparked that the Arctic could hold up to one-fourth of the last undiscovered hydrocarbons remaining on Earth. The presumption was that Russia had fired the opening salvo in a new sovereignty race for vast riches of untapped oil and gas—resources desperately needed to support the world economy in the coming century—thought to lie beneath the frigid seafloor of the Arctic Ocean.

Despite being closer to the Rossiya than just about anyone else on Earth, I had no idea what was going on. I was cut off from the outside world, steaming north through an empty ocean a thousand miles north of Toronto. At the moment the titanium Russian flag was inserted, I was probably either sleeping or hosing off stinky plankton nets. It was several days before I even heard about it.

I was living aboard the CCGS Amundsen, a smaller icebreaker of the Canadian Coast Guard, which was headed for Hudson Bay and ultimately the Northwest Passage. My daily routine revolved in a painted metallic world less than a hundred meters long and twenty wide, with erratic rotating shifts of sleep, work, and cafeteria. We had launched with great fanfare from Quebec City just six days before the Russian flag- planting incident.

I hadn’t fully grasped what a big deal these scientific icebreaker cruises are. A crowd milled alongside the ship and news crews swarmed the ship’s officers and chief scientists. I spotted Louis Fortier, the director of ArcticNet ³²³ who had invited me along, surrounded by television cameras. He pumped my hand and told me to enjoy myself before being spun around for another interview. A crane lifted the gangplank and the expedition’s first rotation—forty scientists, thirty-five crew members of the Canadian Coast Guard, and a handful of journalists—waved at the mass of people standing onshore. Horns blared, a gleaming red helicopter circled overhead, and the two crowds yelled good-byes over the widening slice of water. As we pulled away down the St. Lawrence Seaway, I was surprised to see a few camera crews (and Louis) still milling around on deck. Were they joining the expedition, too, I wondered? Twenty minutes later my question was answered. The ship’s helicopter, which had been buzzing around the ship, landed on the aft helipad and ferried them back to Quebec City.

That first night at sea, there was quite a party. Off-duty crew ditched their crisp military blues to mingle with the scientists in shorts, T-shirts, and halter tops. The room steamed, a stereo thumped, and everyone got at least mildly inebriated. American icebreaker cruises are dry, but the Canadians open a beer bar two nights a week. This early in the expedition, the selection was astonishing. I bought two bottles of Kilkenny and set out to learn more about the rare caste of scientist called oceanographers. I found one and we shouted back and forth about marine stratification, ocean sampling, the sexual habits of right whales (quite promiscuous), and the sexual habits of cruise scientists (apparently, also so). It was a great time. But by the third beer, when she had touched my arm twice, I figured it was time to leave.

Three weeks later, after a grueling round-the-clock schedule of moving, anchoring, crane operating, water sampling, and laboratory work, we disembarked in Churchill, Manitoba. A new rotation of scientists and crew were waiting excitedly to board the ship. It felt strange to give up my tiny cabin, familiar narrow hallways, and new friends to a bunch of strangers. But our rotation was just the first of many. The Amundsen was in her first leg of a historic 448-day journey, the longest scientific cruise ever undertaken in the Arctic. Over the next fifteen months she would cycle through some two hundred people and shock the world by gliding easily through the Northwest Passage. At a cost of $40 million, the expedition was Canada’s biggest contribution to the 2007-2009 International Polar Year.³²⁴ While less splashy than the titanium Russian flag, Canada, too, was asserting its presence in the new Arctic Ocean.

Who Owns the North Pole?

Unlike the Amundsen expedition, Chilingarov’s dive to the North Pole was privately funded and really just a daring stunt. But that didn’t stop the flag-planting from triggering an international commotion. Russia’s response was that the flag was merely symbolic: The United States once planted a flag on the moon—did anyone seriously consider that a declaration of legal sovereignty? Her real claim to the North Pole was not from a flag, but from the geological samples collected by this and many other Russian expeditions in the Arctic. These data would prove that the Lomonosov Ridge—an underwater mountain chain, rising some three thousand meters above the seafloor, that bisects the Arctic Ocean—was geologically attached to Russia’s continental shelf. This would win her sovereignty of a huge chunk of ocean floor—possibly including the North Pole—in accordance with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

UNCLOS and geology are critically important to this story, as we shall see shortly. But in late 2007 the