the 2007 roller-coaster winter is the latest chapter in the season’s long and storied history in New England

This winter’s exceptionally warm weather—following the warmest year on record in the U.S., according to the National Climatic Data Center—has been a respite from the blizzards and nor’easters most natives grew up with. But with dire predictions for global climate change, most of us are casting a wary eye on the thermometer. Something just doesn’t feel right.

“Normal” is relative, though. Comparatively speaking, our species has developed during some surprisingly beneficial weather. The more we learn about the earth and the more we discover about the cycles it goes through and the wealth of extremely varied life that has come before us, the more we realize how infinitesimally temporal are the conditions we all take for granted.

In 1815, Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia erupted, killing 100,000 people. Tambora was the biggest volcanic explosion in 10,000 years. It was 150 times the size of the Mount St. Helens eruption, the equivalent of 60,000 Hiroshima-sized atom bombs. Though the average temperature worldwide dropped only 1 degree Celsius, the year 1816 became known as a year without summer, and in New England, it became popularly known as “Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death.” It was the worst year for farmers in modern history.

Thousands of years of a steady climate has led us into a comfort zone. We can usually just throw on another blanket, turn up the thermostat or drink a cup of tea that we bought at the store if we’re cold. But there’s only so much snowplows and utility workers can keep up with. Despite our modern illusion that we can cope with it, it doesn’t take much to remind us that weather has us at its mercy.

On Saturday, March 10, 1888, the Army Signal Service in Washington, D.C., compiled data from weather collection sites around the country by telegraph and issued an “indication” before closing at 10 p.m. The indication noted that “fresh to brisk winds with rain will prevail followed on Monday by colder, brisk westerly winds and fair weather throughout the Atlantic States.” It had been one of the warmest winters on record.

By the time the office reopened 19 hours later on Sunday evening, hundreds of people were dead in a blizzard of epic proportions that had completely shut down the Eastern Seaboard from the Carolinas to Canada, according to Jim Murphy, author of “Blizzard! The Storm That Changed America.” Trains were stranded in snowdrifts 15 to 20 feet high.

Power and communication lines were ripped down in major cities, harbors along the coast were torn asunder and 200 ships were sunk as the storm passed over New Jersey, went out to sea, and then turned around to make another pass at New York, Philadelphia and Boston.

In the inner cities, where the majority of the population were living in tiny apartments without heat or running water, acquiring food and supplies became impossible. In the tenements, families would hang a cup on their door for the milkman to fill daily. There were no refrigerators, and food was generally purchased fresh at markets on a daily basis.

According to Murphy, the 1888 blizzard led directly to the creation of the national Weather Bureau, when the Signal Corps was transferred from Army control to the Department of Agriculture in 1891. It also led to the implementation of underground wires in major northern cities, the building of underground subways in New York City in 1904, and a sea change in the way we think about snow.

In 1888, cities and municipalities didn’t see snow removal as their job, and all the work that was done was by temporary workers hired for the day when a storm showed up on the scene. By the 20th century, we had better systems in place to predict bad weather and to deal with it when it appeared. We also had refrigeration and the ability to stockpile fresh foods for more than a day or two at a time.

We fared better in the Blizzard of 1978, when three air masses converged over New England and a Canadian high pressure system held the storm in place for three days. Massachusetts received up to 51 inches of snow, and the storm surge along the coast pushed high tides several feet above flood stage in Boston on multiple days. Weather reporting had improved vastly, but not everyone heeded the advice. The storm came on quickly, stranding thousands on the highways around the city in drifts up to 15 feet high as they struggled to get home as the storm intensified.

ice, ice baby
Yet even the greatest of the winter storms of the past century or two can’t compare to what New England experienced in the more distant past. Over the last 400,000 years, Earth has experienced four long periods of glaciers—80,000-90,000 years of ice sheets covering vast expanses of North America under more than a mile of ice—interspersed with relatively short interglacial periods of 10,000-15,000 years when the glaciers retreated.

“It is mildly disconcerting to reflect that the whole of meaningful human history—the development of farming, the creation of towns, the rise of mathematics and writing and science and all the rest—has taken place within an atypical patch of fair weather,” observes Bill Bryson in “A Short History of Nearly Everything.”

In fact, when measured on the scale of a football field, the 10,000–14,000 years since the earliest evidence of human agriculture is less than 1/64 of an inch compared to the 3.5 billion years since our planet coalesced from a gaseous sphere.

According to Dick Boisvert, New Hampshire’s state archaeologist since 2002, the earliest traces of human activity in this area indicate that modern humans followed a retreating ice sheet into the southwestern part of the state 12,000 years ago. They were basically game hunters, following herds of caribou. There are about a dozen well documented archaeological sites dating to this era scattered around the northern part of the state. “When the ice was gone, the caribou were gone, and the people stayed in the area and became forest hunter/gatherers and learned to fish,” Boisvert says.

The great Wisconsonian Glacier was very heavy. The mass of ice, at its peak some 20,000 years ago, stretched from Cape Cod northwest for 2,000 continuous miles. Its weight depressed the continent by 750 feet. At the same time, so much of the planet’s oceans were trapped in glacial ice that the sea level had dropped more than 300 feet. The modern-day Seacoast was 90 miles from the coastline, which was located beyond Georges Bank and the Nantucket Shoals. When the glacier retreated, the land left bare in its wake initially became windswept grasslands, very much like the steppe of modern Mongolia.

Beginning about 9,000 years ago, the climate began a warming trend that lasted for 5,000 years. “New Hampshire was very similar to Richmond, Va., today,” says Michael Caduto, author of “A Time Before New Hampshire: A Story of a Land and Native Peoples.” “A lot of plants and animals from much further south lived here.”

Caduto’s book, published in 2003 by the University of New Hampshire Press, looks at the ancient natural world in this area and the people who lived here from earliest times to the 17th century.

“For millions of years before the dawn of agriculture throughout the world, people relied completely and intimately on their natural surroundings for every aspect of life. If enough stone and bone, bark and wood, skin, flesh, and water was available to support a family or group of families, they would remain in that place…,” writes Caduto. “Whenever a group of families began to grow so large that they might outstrip the land’s ability to sustain them, they would split into two smaller groups and move apart. This fluid way of life meant that each group was small enough to live within the limitations of the surrounding land.”

Long before coal stoves, gas heat, refrigeration and electric ranges, people existed in intimate harmony with this land. The climate in New Hampshire began to cool about 4,000 years ago and held steady to conditions very similar to what we know today, and the Abenaki, the native peoples living here when the English first arrived, thrived for thousands of years.

Beth Heckman runs the children’s educational program at the Great Bay Discovery Center on the southern shore of Great Bay in Greenland, where there is an Abenaki encampment exhibit. A wigwam covered with birch bark would have served as shelter here, mainly during the spring, summer and fall. The Abenaki grew corn, beans and squash and used fire to burn parts of the land so they would produce more crops such as berries.

“I want to stress the importance of harvesting in the fall,” says Heckman. “They smoked meat to draw the moisture out so that they could easily travel that way.” In the winter, they would rely mostly on hunting. Most probably did not remain along the coast, but cycled through the area during various times of the year. There is an archaeological site at Wadley Falls on the Lamprey River in Lee that was intermittently used for 8,600 years. There are more than 60 known sites, scattered around the Seacoast. Some, like Wadley Falls, are at strategic spots where salmon and other anadromous fish pass on their way back to their birthplaces to spawn. Typically, archaeologists find spear and knife points, the remnants of primitive nets made of sinew, spear-throwing atlatls, stone gauges, adzes and dugout canoes.

“I don’t know that winters were much different 400 years ago than they are now. They spent most of the winter inland hunting, but some bands would come through and ice fish (on Great Bay),” Heckman says.

the future
For the record, our current interglacial period has nearly run out of time, and given the typical cycle, we’re due for some more ice. But, as many mutual fund and stock trading advertisements will tell you, “Past performance is not an indication of future results.”

Cameron Wake, associate professor at the University of New Hampshire’s Climate Change Research Center,  studies our changing climate by focusing on the last 1,000 years and predicting the next 100 years. He analyzes ice cores taken from Greenland, Antarctica, the Tibetan plateau and the Canadian Arctic, where snow accumulates in tens of meters per year and melts down into ice in the summer before getting covered up by the next winter’s snow. By digging straight down through the ice, he can study annual conditions with high accuracy, dating back more than 500 years.

The past 1,000 years in the Northern Hemisphere have been warming. From 1300 to 1850, the Little Ice Age reversed this trend. In Europe, glaciers crept down the valleys in the Alps and Dutch canals became ice skating racecourses. But starting in the mid-19th century, the climate started a warming trend again. It is impossible to tell how much of this has been natural and how much has been influenced by human input. “During the Industrial Revolution we started creating climate change,” says Wake. “Within the last 35 years humans have become implicated in a big way.”

The consequences of our actions are outlined in “An Inconvenient Truth.” Whatever your political affiliation is, the film warrants honest attention. Over 30 years of political life, former Vice President Al Gore quietly worked and reworked a slide show on climate change. Although we didn’t hear very much about it during his time in the spotlight during the 2000 presidential campaign, he rediscovered his crusade against environmental catastrophe in the years that followed and began traveling around the world, giving lectures with his slide show. The film, which follows Gore’s presentations, has been nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary in 2006.

“An Inconvenient Truth,” in book form is a slick, glossy primer—perfect as an introduction to global climate change for our sound-bite society. It touches on innumerable examples of current climate change, and though it is a touch sensationalistic from time to time, there’s no need to exaggerate. Gore backs it all up with massive amounts of specific scientific data, and the overall picture it paints is that it’s do-or-die time when it comes to decreasing carbon emissions to reverse global warming.

Gore’s organization, www.theclimateproject.org, is working to spread the word even further. Steve Miller, who works as the training program coordinator at Great Bay Discovery Center in Stratham, is one of 1,000 advocates trained by Al Gore over the past few months. He spent three intensive days in January with 200 other trainees in Nashville, Tenn., to learn how to give the Gore slideshow. The training was free to all participants, with the expectation that each trainee would in turn conduct 10 free presentations to local groups within a year.

In his job, Miller provides long-term sustainability information to local municipalities. He struggled with the issue of climate change for a few years, always knowing it was real and that we were going to have to deal with it.

“The best thing for me on the training was the sense that we can solve this,” he says. “It is not as overwhelming as I had previously thought. We already have the technology. We really can affect this and turn it around, and our economies aren’t going to collapse in the process.”

In his group of trainees, Miller says there were lots of interesting people. There were about a dozen ministers, as well as high school teachers, media people and representatives from the energy field. Already, the initial batch of 30-50 presenters trained by The Climate Project in the past year have done more presentations of the slide show than Gore managed to do in 30 years. Three weeks after returning from Nashville, Miller has a presentation scheduled at Saint Anselm College in Manchester. This summer he will hold a session at Great Bay Discovery Center and will talk to several garden clubs.

“It’s important to state that climate changes. It always has changed and it always will. Human activity has become an artificial force that is altering the way our climate acts. It’s not an either-or. We will have to alter the way things are in a positive way to keep from the worst case scenario,” says Cameron Wake.

the fate of the Granite State
The oldest known rock in New Hampshire was formed in its present state 650 million years ago, right here in the Seacoast and in the foothills of the southeastern part of the state, carried along by convection currents in the Earth’s mantle, the semi-molten sea of rock that lies just below the crust. On one scale of time, mountain ranges rise up and erode like ocean waves on a shore. By viewing this place through that filter, on a geological scale, you begin to see the overwhelmingly temporal nature of our oceans, our mountains and, especially, our forests and man-made structures.

It has finally been universally accepted that human beings have indeed already foisted significant climatic change on the planet. We have gorged on petrochemicals, burned whole mountain ranges of coal, deforested continents, lubricated gas-guzzling engines with neurochemicals for 62 years (Americans alive today have 625 times the amount of lead permanently in their blood than in 1900, according to Bryson). We have developed, and subsequently had a life-long love affair with, chloroflourocarbons (though we have largely halted their production, CFCs will not be banned in developing countries until 2010, and even then, CFCs will spend the next century roaming around the stratosphere annihilating ozone en masse).

We have built cities and towns in inopportune places. Despite a mismanagement of incredible proportions that led to much of the devastation from Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast will likely be underwater within the next 100 years anyway.

The climate has begun to change beyond natural conditions. We are in the precarious position of creating prime conditions for rapid climate change. Large tracts of the ice caps at both poles have melted in the past decade, and weather patterns seem to be starting to change. “I’ve read research reports (by UNH climate scientists),” says Caduto.

“If you run the numbers, sometime within the next half-century could become like it was 5,000 years ago. It could be as warm as Virginia, as warm as Atlanta.”

Paul Lacourse, who teaches a course called “The Study of New Hampshire Birds” at Winnacunnet High School in Hampton, was more than a little surprised when he looked outside onto the athletic fields last week and saw three rare blue snow geese. “I have only seen one in the last 25 years and now there are three here at WHS. They nested in the high Arctic this past summer and should have migrated south along the Mississippi River and ended up somewhere along the Gulf of Mexico,” he says.

According to The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds, the snow goose winters “along the Atlantic Coast from New Jersey to Texas,” as well as Baja California and the Gulf Coast. And for the blue snow goose, “each fall virtually the entire population gathers at the southern end of Hudson Bay and makes a single nonstop flight to the Gulf Coast.”

This may not be conclusive evidence of climate change, but there have been a number of odd avian visitors in the Seacoast lately, Lacourse says, such as “the 11 turkey vultures that have spent the winter up to this point in Newmarket. They just haven’t wintered this far north before and their occurence this year is probably due to late arriving winter.

“Another example would be the 3,000 to 4,000 American robins that are roosting in Newfields. Many have been wintering in New Hampshire for the past 8-10 years and their numbers are increasing each winter. The northward expansion of the red-bellied woodpecker and Carolina wren into southern New Hampshire in the last few years may also be due to the warmer and shorter winters we have been having,” says Lacourse.

It’s difficult to predict what the world might look like in the future if human input continues on its current trajectory.
“The climate that our children and grandchildren experience will be the result of the changes we create in the weather system over the next five to 10 years,” says Wake.

Yet to put this into perspective, there are many things that we can’t even begin to predict.

“Even today, with the threat of global warming, nearly a quarter of the Earth’s land is either under ice or in a state of permafrost,” writes Bryson in “A Short History of Nearly Everything.” If Greenland were to melt, as it has in previous interglacials and could conceivably do in the next several generations, the amount of water flowing into the Atlantic Ocean would raise the sea level around the world by about 23 feet, submerging cities from Los Angeles to London, much of Florida and low-lying countries like Bangladesh, the Netherlands and many of the islands in Southeast Asia. The land where Seacoast residents live has been, within the past 15,000 years, anywhere from 90 miles from the coast to deep beneath the waves.

As Gore suggests in “An Inconvenient Truth,” perhaps we should be preparing for other threats besides terrorists.

TO READ
“A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson, Broadway Books, 2003

Bryson is known for his witty, humorous takes on travel and adventure, so it seemed a bit odd when he took three years to write a book about science. His goal was to review what science has taught us about the Earth, sun, solar system and universe, and the history of earth and life living on it. “The idea was to see if it isn’t possible to understand and appreciate—marvel at, enjoy even—the wonder and accomplishments of science at a level that isn’t too technical or demanding, but isn’t entirely superficial either.” He managed to tackle this subject with such substance and style that it became a bestseller, and nearly any literate person will walk away with a better comprehension of the world and her place in it.

“A Time Before New Hampshire" by Michael J. Caduto, University of New Hampshire Press, through University Press of New England, 2003

This book is a marvel. It is almost incomprehensible that something this carefully detailed, well-researched and mapped out can exist specifically for the state of New Hampshire. It is split into two parts. The first is a geological and biological history, which Caduto likens to a 24-hour clock that starts 650 million years ago (at the time of the formation of the oldest known rock in the state and when green algae was becoming the first living organism to survive on land) and ends today. The rest of the book is a stream of concocted narratives of native peoples living throughout the Holocene Period around the state. These stories are based largely upon site reports of a handful of archaeological sites, and drawn from the oral history of modern day Abenakis.

“Blizzard! The Storm That Changed America” by John Murphy, Scholastic Press, 2000“Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” by Jared Diamond, Penguin Group, 2004

Diamond examines contemporary environmental issues through the lens of past calamitous meltdowns, such as the Viking settlement of Greenland prior to the Medieval Little Ice Age in Europe—a trend that sent that settlement spiraling downward. He compares such historical situations, in which civilizations were unraveled by dramatic climate change, to modern day trouble spots, from Australia to China to Montana.

TO WATCH
“An Inconvenient Truth”
starring Al Gore, directed by Davis Guggenheim
www.theclimateproject.org

TO VISIT
Great Bay Discovery Center
89 Depot Road, Greenland
www.greatbay.org, 603-778-0015
GBDC has a permanent Abenaki encampment exhibit. A birch bark-covered wigwam would have served as shelter here mainly during the spring, summer and fall

Phillips Anthropology Museum
Phillips Exeter Academy, Academy Building
Front Street, Exeter
www.exeter.edu, 603-772-4311
New Hampshire’s original peoples exhibit, with research library open to the general public.

The Woodman Institute
182-192 Central Ave., Dover
603-742-1038
Native American exhibit among others set in historic houses