The Sugar Season (29 page)

“The letter on top,” he said, “was from a high school teacher here in Concord named Phil Browne. He thought I was still in California. He wrote that his students were devastated by the loss of Christa and that they had a negative image of NASA and of science. He wanted to know if there was anything I might do to get students interested again.” Rock thought it might be promising to study white pines, which are sensitive to pollution. He and Phil Browne founded a program called Forest Watch, in which New Hampshire students studied the health of pine trees.

He began his talk by describing his work using satellite imagery to study New England forests. He said some things that I was hearing for the first time. He began with, “I don’t want to be an undertaker. I want to be a physician.” Which seemed to mean bad news. He explained that New England is downwind to the rest of the country, that six major air currents flow over the region on their way to the Atlantic Ocean. The currents move not only weather but also airborne pollutants, including gases and metals. He said, “We may think in New England we live in a very pristine area, but that is not true. We get air from everywhere else. New England is the tailpipe of the nation.”

Tailpipe?

Not only that, Barry Rock said, but those pollutants flow into New England in a turbulent zone of the atmosphere between
3000 and 5000 feet. The compound of ozone can be found in concentrations there, Rock said—not the good kind of ozone that protects us earthlings from ultraviolet radiation but the bad kind that is found in smog. Ozone damages the cells in the needles of white pines and inhibits their ability to produce chlorophyll. It reduces their ability to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen—from the human perspective carbon sequestration is one of the most important things that trees do, storing atmospheric carbon in the tree’s wood. He explained that other chemicals in those air currents can damage maple trees, reducing their ability to photosynthesize, which then reduces the maple’s ability to create carbohydrates, and this, in turn, reduces their essential ability to produce sugar. Which in turn reduces their ability to produce healthy leaves.

Referring to this layer between 3000 and 5000 feet where pollutants congregate, Rock said, “Not only are we in the tailpipe, we are in a sort of atmospheric sewer. These are terms that have become widely used by atmospheric scientists. Tailpipe. Sewer.”

It is hard to describe how I felt then. Annoyed, sad, disappointed, angry—even at Barry Rock for telling me this while aware that he was the messenger, the physician, the man advocating health. But he was talking about the activity I like most and the reason I wanted to live in New Hampshire, to hike in the mountains and to breathe that highly oxygenated fresh air, air that helped my thinking, I was sure, and to solve problems, including writing problems—that now, it seemed, if Rock was correct, was a hazardous activity. The world was turned upside down. I might as well hike on Fifth Avenue or Boylston Street.

When I later read the
New England Regional Assessment
I came upon a case study titled “Hiker Health” about a research study at Harvard Medical School that examined the effects of ozone and fine particulates on the lung function of people hiking on Mount Washington. They found a diminished breathing capacity even with exposure to low levels of ozone. “Acute ozone exposure in humans is associated with decreased pulmonary function and can result in shortness of breath, coughing, and pain while inhaling.” It was saddening, reading that. And infuriating. I could see the signs of the future up on the trails, near the huts:
“Caution. Mountain Air Has Been Found to Be Hazardous to Your Health. It Is Advised That You Wear Protective Respiratory Gear.”

Also in the
New England Regional Assessment
were those reports and predictions mentioned in the
Boston Globe
news story, that temperatures in New England would rise by 6 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2090. The difference depended on levels of emissions. A minor increase of 1.8 degrees had already occurred in the New England region since 1899 and likely brought milder winters, earlier maple sap flows, earlier ice-out dates, and reduced snowfall. The report stated—or actually understated, I thought, in typical academic language—that the increases of 6 to 10 degrees projected for New England and the Northeast “must be viewed as serious.”

The authors of the
New England Regional Assessment
were required to use at least two climate models in making their predictions. Rock and his team chose one called the “Canadian General Circulation Model” that projected a rise in average temperatures by nine to ten degrees by the year 2090 and a ten percent increase in rainfall. The other originated
in Britain and was called the “Hadley Climate Model,” which projected an increase of six degrees in average temperatures and a thirty percent increase in rainfall by 2090.

In the report Rock wrote that although there was a wide difference between 6 degrees and 10 degrees, the results of either would be extreme. Using Boston as an example, with its thirty-year annual average temperature of 51.3°, he projected two possible outcomes. With a rise of 6 degrees Boston’s yearly annual average temperature would be equivalent to that of Richmond, Virginia, with its yearly average of 57.7° Fahrenheit. A rise of 10 degrees would give Boston the climate of Atlanta, Georgia, with its annual average temperature of 61.3°. Average the difference and you land in Charlotte, North Carolina. A very nice place, Charlotte, but you wouldn’t want New Hampshire to live there.

Rock also coauthored the case study on maple syrup that was part of the
New England Regional Assessment
. The researchers looked at historical trends and stresses from changes in climate. They concluded that the industry is moving northward, that in the past some regions of Canada were unproductive because of deep snow cover and prolonged freezes. The development of tubing and warmer nighttime temperatures had resulted in a shift in syrup production as far north as the Gaspe Peninsula in Quebec.

In conclusion, Rock wrote, with some feeling, “Most disturbing are the results of ecological modeling efforts that show the changes in climate could potentially extirpate the sugar maple within New England. The maple industry is an important part of New England character, way-of-life, and economy that, because it is highly dependent upon prevailing
climactic conditions, may be irreparably altered under a changing climate.”

In 2009 the
Second Climate Change Assessment
was issued by the US Global Change Research Program, with some changes in projections for the Northeast region of the United States. According to this more recent report, the average annual temperature had increased by two degrees Fahrenheit since 1970. As for projections for the end of the century, radically different climate futures were possible, depending on the amount of increase of greenhouse gases. Under a scenario for higher emissions, winters in the northeastern United States would be much shorter, with fewer cold days and more rain; the length of the winter snow season would be cut in half across northern New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, and reduced to a week or two in southern parts of the region; hot summer conditions would arrive three weeks earlier and last three weeks longer in the fall; and sea levels would rise more than the global average.

One prescient paragraph anticipated the effects of Hurricane Sandy in 2012: “Rising sea level is projected to increase the frequency and severity of damaging storm surges and flooding. Under a higher emissions scenario, what is now considered a once-in-a-century coastal flood in New York City is projected to occur at least twice as often by mid-century, and 10 times as often (or once per decade on average), by late this century. With a lower emissions scenario, today’s 100-year flood is projected to occur once every 22 years on average by late this century.”

As for agriculture and forestry, the
Second Climate Change Assessment
reported, “Large portions of the Northeast are
likely to become unsuitable for growing popular varieties of apples, blueberries, and cranberries under a higher emissions scenario. Climate conditions suitable for maple/beech/birch forests are projected to shift dramatically northward, eventually leaving only a small portion of the Northeast with a maple sugar business.”

Barry Rock ended his report that night with a success story about his work in the Czech Republic that could be an allegory for what could happen in the United States with the right effort. He showed us work he had done with remote sensing in that country, where during the Communist regime pollution levels from burning soft coal were so high that the average life span of Czech citizens living in mountainous regions was only thirty-one years. Now, under democracy, that had changed. They converted to nuclear power and cleaned up the air, and the average life span had increased to normal ranges.

During a question-and-answer period someone asked whether there was a direct correlation between high temperatures and the chemical problems in the mountain air—in that place called the atmospheric sewer and that region called the tailpipe.

Rock said there had been a two-degree rise in average temperature over the last hundred years, which should be creating more ozone, but there was also a counterbalance in the Clean Air Act. “It has done a wonderful job removing a lot of the precursors that would end up generating a lot of ozone. In terms of ozone and white pine, there has been a dramatic improvement.”

And, of course, it had to be the case—if the trees were healthier, then we earthlings had to be too, right?

We left the planetarium and walked out into the warm midsummer night. To our surprise, spread out over the parking lot, were amateur astronomers with their telescopes pointed up at the sky. Eyeballs to the universe. Saturn was visible that night out in the clear sky, just as it had been inside the planetarium. We wandered from telescope to telescope, taking in Saturn’s rings, hundreds of millions of miles away.

I
N THE CLARK SUGARHOUSE
on March 17, 2012, over sugar on snow, Alvin told me he had received a letter from Richard Polonsky. Richard was having some medical problems, which he confided to Alvin. Alvin read part of the letter aloud to me:

Thank you for being such a spokesman on climate change. I know you worried, because people in the maple syrup business are skeptical and you certainly do not want to convey that maple syrup could dry up in the future. It is really time for people in every business that depends upon the land to recognize that there is something affecting weather patterns that is bigger than Mother Nature. We need to slow down or just stop polluting the atmosphere with all the chemicals we spew from burning fuel oil. It is amazing to me that the more advanced countries of Europe are able to produce goods and services with one-half the energy of the US, and that Japan only uses two-thirds per capita of what we do. With only two percent of the world’s population we consume 20 percent of its oil.

Alvin and I visited the “Seasons of Change” exhibit again when it stopped at the Montshire Museum in Norwich, Vermont. On the drive home Alvin said, “The scientists at UNH are supporting me on this climate change thing. It will be forty or fifty years until we know if they’re right. I’ll be gone by then.”

I asked if he would give me his explanation for the maple sap flow.

“Sure,” he said. “There has to be enough water, and the leaves have to look good in the fall. Good color and not falling off the trees early from drought as they did in some places this year when it got warm. When it starts to get above freezing, up into the forties in the daytime and below freezing at night, water starts moving up the cambium layer. The sugar is stored up in the branches, having been made by the leaves in the previous summer. The tree pulls the water up from the roots through the action of barometric pressure. When the trees are starting to flow they are absorbing heat, and you can see a ring around the trunk of the tree. The water is coming up from underground, because of the thaw, but also because the ground doesn’t freeze more than three feet down.

“The sugar maple is a sensitive tree. They are just like humans, in that sap is like blood. They are very sensitive, and that’s why they are in danger from climate change.”