The Whale and the Supercomputer: On the Northern Front of Climate Change

by Charles Wohlforth

Let others parry and thrust with the skeptics’ abstractions.

If we’re honest, we’ll be forced to readjust our fundamental beliefs about how we relate to nature as a species in an ecological niche.

Some handy words don’t exist in English, such as mauragaq, to cross open water by jumping from one piece of ice to the next; or tuagilaaq, to kill a whale with a single blow to the sensitive spot behind the skull; or uit—literally “to open one’s eyes”—a term used to indicate the breaking away of pack ice from shore ice to form an open lead of water.

Even the addresses were indecipherable to an outsider because, instead of using street names, each building was designated solely by a unique number. To find your way around, you simply had to know the numbers: when a person said “4337,” for example, that meant the mayor’s house.

The Iñupiat switched to metal harpoons in the 1880s, so these whales had to be more than 110 years old. Using that knowledge, Craig and his colleagues calibrated the aspartic acid aging technique and established that the bowhead’s normal life span was around 130 to 150 years, making it the world’s longest-living mammal. Results suggested one whale was 211 years old.

villages of Utqiagvik (Barrow), Nuvuk (Point Barrow), and Pingusugruk (Point Franklin)

Agnaiyaaq, or Little Girl.

the Iñupiat avoided conflict—and the binding force of community was mutual respect. You could have a disability, you could be an alcoholic, you could even go to jail, and the community still made a place for you.

We liked to say respect was something you had to earn. For the Iñupiat, respect belonged to everyone.

when viewing our own circumstances, we almost always found outside causes. This familiar bias was called the attribution error. Scientists found it in every society they studied, but it was much weaker in communal societies. To put it another way, those societies’ mutual respect, measured and quantified, was greater than ours.

commercial whaling disappeared in 1907. A Paris fashion show in that year rendered valueless the last bowhead product in commercial use—baleen for high-fashion corsets—by introducing a new, more natural look, in the process saving the whales from extermination.

the Heritage Center posted core cultural values on posters and the backs of business cards: respect for elders, others, and nature; family kinship and roles; sharing; knowledge of language; cooperation; love and respect for one another; humor; hunting traditions; compassion; humility; avoidance of conflict; and spirituality.

In these windy conditions, snow tends to blow over the top of a snow gauge, skewing readings by a factor of two or three. The weather station in Barrow records “trace” snowfall around 190 days a year—meaning some snow fell, but not enough to measure accurately. The official record adds up all the trace readings to equal zero, but even a little bit of snow multiplied by 190 could be a significant amount. And no one was able to say exactly where the snow came from—did the same storms bring snowfall north and south of the Brooks Range?—or how much of it melted as opposed to sublimating away into vapor.

If a warmer climate shortened the period when snow covered the ground, as appeared to be happening, the earth’s albedo would drop and the planet would absorb more of the sun’s warmth. That could cause further warming of the climate, which could, in turn, further shorten the winter season and reduce the albedo yet more, in a spiraling pattern known as a positive feedback loop.

“You get so homesick you want to die,” Kannik recalled. “I was so scared, so afraid of people.”

Current levels of human energy use bumped up the respiration side of the equation by 8 percent. Fossil fuels multiplied the energy one person could use by many thousands. A human’s daily diet of 2,000 calories equaled 8,000 BTUs of energy, enough to continuously operate a 100-watt lightbulb. A gallon of gasoline contains 125,000 BTUs of energy, more than the human body uses in two weeks. Burning one six-pound gallon of gasoline puts twenty pounds of carbon dioxide into the air, of which five pounds is carbon and the rest is oxygen (we’ll just talk about the carbon, for simplicity). Wood is half carbon, so to recycle the carbon in one gallon of gasoline a tree has to grow by ten pounds. To recycle the carbon released to fly coast to coast round-trip on a passenger jet takes about 1,750 pounds of wood growth for each passenger. The total energy use of the average American loads five tons of carbon into the atmosphere annually. A growing forest (not a mature forest) can use about a ton of carbon per acre per year, so to balance the energy use of each American would require about five acres of young, healthy forest. That’s far more forest than we have. More fundamentally, however, forests don’t only grow, they also burn, age, and decay, releasing carbon back to the atmosphere; only if all the forests were cut down regularly and buried deep underground would they really negate carbon taken from underground and put into the atmosphere.

We can’t experience climate directly. Every moment of life happens in a particular time and place. The climate we perceive is a metaphor for the sum of weather conditions over a chosen span of time and space. Knowing an area’s climate is like knowing a person: the sense of a personality develops through extended observation until it seems solid and tangible, but that sense is never more than an estimation and often has to be adjusted to account for new events. Ecosystems describe climate zones by where they grow. Weather statistics define climate using mathematical averages at particular spots.

In English, there wasn’t a convenient way to warn of a situation in which large colliding masses of ice would ride up over each other or cause the sudden creation of pressure ridges; in Iñupiaq you could just say “ivu.”

You don’t need to know anything about science to know that you cannot sit down and force yourself to have a good idea.

“Language does control how you think, and if you don’t have a word for it, you won’t think of it.”

The British fisheries minister said his country would oppose commercial whaling no matter the numbers because whaling was “unnecessary and cruel.” The suggestion that hunting was cruel especially offended the Iñupiat; as I heard one say, “At least we don’t keep animals in little cages.”

the “Patagonia crowd” on Arctic trips. (I quickly checked to see if the Patagonia label on my fleece jacket was showing.) These urban people had to be watched carefully because, in the Arctic climate, their urge for noble suffering could kill them.

They live so much on pavement, in automobiles somewhere, that they have got to do some spartan purgatory so that they can feel better. But even still, the thing that they buy—that little tiny stove and that little tiny tent and all that—it’s top of the line,

winter. In Anchorage, to the north, winters were getting more like Homer winters used to be—spotty and inconsistent. Farther

The handy mental tool of Ockham’s razor, still influential in science, holds that one should not call upon hypothetical entities to explain empirical evidence unless there is no alternative; in other words, choose the most direct explanation that works.

You young people, the weather’s not going to be at the right place at the right time.”