The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Illustration by Christopher Henderson



I’m going to miss Minnesota—not because I’m going away, but because Minnesota is. The north woods? There’s a fairly good chance I will outlive them. A walk through the spruce, the cry of a loon—a lot of experiences we think of as quintessential Minnesota may disappear. Or emigrate to Canada.

In February of 2000, the American Birkebeiner, the largest cross-county ski race in North America, was canceled for lack of snow for the first time in its 30-year history. Although the region of northwest Wisconsin that’s home to the Birkie received 16 inches of snow in the week leading up to the race, that winter wonderland was liquefied by four subsequent days of rain and warm winds. Pastor Lynn Larson of Cable, Wisconsin, remembers the week well. “We had a snowman holding a pair of skis outside our church at the beginning of the week,” he says. “By the middle of the week, we replaced the skis with an umbrella.”

A direct son of Norway via eight immigrant great-grandparents, Larson has skied the marathon 17 times. That year, he watched thousands of crestfallen skiers—nearly half of whom had come up from the Twin Cities—trudge around Hayward with a sour look on their faces. “That really got the wheels turning for me,” he says. “I’m convinced that this is all related to climate change—the greenhouse effect.”

Worried that the Birkie was in jeopardy, Larson started a group called Cross Country Skiers for Global Cooling. To join, members must take “the patriot’s energy pledge,” vowing to conserve energy and do whatever they can to minimize their own greenhouse emissions. Forty people have joined this very loose club, which, as it turns out, is mostly about the nifty T-shirts.

Many winter-lovers in the upper Midwest believe that the halcyon days of consistent cold and snow in the region are behind us. The state of Wisconsin seems to agree; Tourism Secretary Kevin Shibilski recently announced plans for a program that will offer loan guarantees to businesses that depend on snowmobiling or cross-country skiing in low-snow years.

Ahvo Taipale has run a cross-country ski shop in the Twin Cities since 1973 and is widely seen as the dean of Minnesota cross-country skiing. He says that Minnesota and western Wisconsin used to get fairly consistent snow. Until the mid-1980s, when warming spells began forcing event organizers to cancel ski races. “In particular, the last five years have been very weird,” he says. Another telling phenomenon: He says he can be fully stocked with new equipment an entire month and a half later than he could 10 or 20 years ago.

A look back at the record with longtime Birkie staffer Shellie Milford seems to underscore Taipale’s anecdotal and personal take on the trends: Half of the races in the last ten years have been characterized by challenging snow conditions. In the previous decade, four races lacked snow or cold compared to only one race in the Birkie’s first decade.

It’s not just the carbo-loading set that’s starting to worry. On the motoring side of things, it’s also been tough sledding for the past five years. Pete Bohlig sells recreational vehicles for the Hitching Post in South St. Paul. With the less reliable snow he’s seen lately, he sells a lot more four-wheeled ATVs than snowmobiles. “If I had a nickel for every time someone tried to trade in a sled for an ATV, I’d be a rich man,” he says.

John Prusak, editor of several national snowmobiling magazines, says one should take such doom-and-gloom talk with a grain of salt, noting that the industry has gone through six distinct boom-bust cycles in the last 30 years. Snowmobile sales follow snowfall more closely than they do the economy, and the industry did very well in the upper Midwest as recently as 1998, he says.Climatologists like the University of Minnesota’s Mark Seeley encourage an even more skeptical view of reading snowflakes like tea-leaves. Although he acknowledges that the state has seen trends in regional weather over the past century, he dislikes the term “climate change,” pointing out that the climate is always changing, with both long and short periods of warming and cooling not only in modern records, but in records reconstructed through the study of ice cores and sediments.

The British writer George Monbiot has pointed out that there is a cruel irony to global warming: The people whose lives will be affected most drastically are those who use the least amount of fossil fuels, whether they are East Africans or Indians suffering through increasing years of drought, or Bangladeshis facing devastation with rising sea levels.

Coastal areas are thought to be particularly vulnerable. In his novel A Friend of the Earth, writer T.C. Boyle follows a hapless protagonist into the year 2026. In this future of extremes, the formerly pleasant climate of Santa Barbara cycles between ferocious, roof-lifting gales and searing dry heat. The last of endangered animal species die off one by one in a rock star’s hobby zoo, and the only thing on the menu in the waterlogged restaurants is catfish and sake. It’s not a rosy picture of the future (although it’s something we Minnesotans might wish upon the Golden State when we’re scraping the ice off our windshields in February).

What might happen in Minnesota as a result of global warming is the subject of a growing body of research, but the scenarios are many, and mapping the possible interactions of heat, air, and water with the natural environment is a hell of a lot more difficult than forecasting the weekend weather. But, unlike 20 years ago, when the specter of global warming was hotly debated and carefully provisoed even by those who were already convinced, the scientific consensus today has shifted much more to the reality of man-made climate change. A 2001 report by the respected Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that the earth had warmed by about 1 degree F over the past century, that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have risen by 30 percent since 1750, that “confidence in the ability of models to project future climate has increased,” and that “there is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.”

Perhaps most telling is the increasingly shrill voice of industry in the discussion. One prominent businessman noted in March that “there are huge uncertain ties about the risks and the impact. Further research is essential. But we can’t wait to answer all questions beyond reasonable doubt… We stand with those who are prepared to take action to solve that problem... now... before it is too late.” Although those sound more like the words of a Green Party spokesman, they were actually uttered by Sir Philip Watts, the chairman of Shell Oil. British Petroleum recently trumpeted that the company has already met its 2010 goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and that the improvements were achieved at no net cost to the company.

In Minnesota, even at the more subtle end of predicted climate change, scientists are predicting major changes in the landscape. One of the most dramatic predicted changes is that the tall pine and aspen forests that define the Boundary Waters Canoe Area and wide swaths of the north-central and northeast parts of the state will die off within 50 to 100 years.

Losing the northern woods is just one of the fundamental challenges to Minnesotans’ self-identity posed by global warming. Whether we like to tear through them on snowmobiles, chop them down for paper pulp, fish in their lakes, or hike quietly through them in order to hear the birds, the north woods loom large in our imagination. Even in a state where the majority of the population lives in the Twin Cities metro area, the great outdoors still most often means going “up north.” If landscape determines culture, as writer Terry Tempest Williams has suggested, then what does the loss of a touchstone landscape mean for Minnesota?

In the northern hemisphere, spring is now arriving a week earlier and the onset of autumn is delayed by five days, as measured by plant behavior, compared to two decades ago. Another study has found that lakes and rivers in the northern hemisphere freeze over a week later and thaw out 10 days sooner than they did 150 years ago. Like other regions between 20 and 50 degrees latitude, we in Minnesota have seen an increase in precipitation over the past century—about 20 percent since 1900. Today, more of that precipitation is attributable to thunderstorms than it was 100 years ago.

In Minnesota, the increase in temperature is slightly less than the global mean over the past century, although one local study showed an increase of 3 degrees between 1860 and 1987. According to Mark Seeley, this warming is largely a function of milder winters rather than changes in other seasonal temperatures, and it is the daily minimum temperatures that seem to be rising more than the maximums.The magnitude and frequency of high dewpoint episodes are increasing, indicating that the air is more saturated with water. An increase in water vapor may be linked to the trend of what appears to be more violent weather in Minnesota. The state set a record for number of tornadoes in 1998 with 57, only to have it broken again with a record 73 tornadoes in 2001. Floods expected once in 500 years hit the Red River in 1997; and flooding levels expected once in 100 years overran the banks of the Mississippi in 1993 and 2001. Hail, heavy rains, and tornadoes were the major cause of the record $1.5 billion in insurance damage Minnesota incurred in 1998, a payout that topped the previous 49 years combined.

Meteorologist Paul Douglas, who has affixed his well-recognized mug to a dire climate-change report put out by Minnesotans for an Energy-Efficient Economy, says all of these occurrences are either “the mother of all coincidences,” or that “some very distinct trends are emerging, with troubling consequences for daily weather and longer-term climate.”

If you remember your Earth science coursework, you know that Minnesota is at an impressive naturally occurring crossroads. We are a nexus of air streams, biomes, and water, which helps explain how excitable our local newscasters seem to get about the weather. (Paul Douglas has claimed that despite his national prospects, he thinks this is the most challenging place to be for a skilled meteorologist.) Three air masses converge on the state—dry air from the Pacific, wetter air from the Gulf of Mexico and polar air from the north. Three major biomes, basically large biological communities of a type, follow roughly the same contours as the air masses: prairie to the west and south, and northern coniferous forest to the north and east, transected from the northwest to the southeast by a swath of hardwood forest.

The Department of Natural Resources, in its eternal quest for accuracy, calls these three biomes prairie parkland (now mostly cropland), Laurentian mixed forest (mixed hardwood and coniferous trees, including the boreal forest of balsam fir, white cedar, and white spruce), and eastern broadleaf forest (sugar maple, basswood, oak and ash). According to John Tester, professor emeritus of ecology at the University of Minnesota and author of a natural history of Minnesota, the state has one of the greatest climate changes in North America, outside alpine zones. That’s true across time, with the dramatic change of seasons—the painfully obvious 60-degree divergence in mean temperatures between July and January. It’s also true across distance, with sharp changes in climate within less than 50 miles. That variability, due to our location at the edge of three distinct environments, also makes the state more susceptible to climate change.

Near Itasca State Park, for example, along the gradual rise of a glacial moraine, the land changes from prairie to hardwood forest to mixed pine forest within a distance of 40 miles. Tester found that the average temperature from the prairie to the pines consistently differed by 4 degrees in the summer months, and annual precipitation varied by 5 inches, leaving the forest cooler and wetter. If such relatively minor weather differences correlated so strongly to different landscapes, Tester wonders, what happens to the landscape if the entire region warms up and dries out?

Duluth biology professor John Pastor looks at the interaction of trees and soils, and he agrees that Minnesota is at “the bullseye of big changes,” when it comes to global warming. Over the past two decades, he has spent many hours in church basements and libraries across the northern part of the state, giving talks about climate change.

“I used to describe the changes we will likely see in the next fifty years here in northern Minnesota, and people would be interested. But they would look at the time frame and say, ‘So what, I have to go pick my kid up at hockey.’” Pastor says. “Now I speak in terms of generations, as in ‘I am the last generation of my family who will be able to live out my life in the north woods.’ That gets their attention. And I go further, and ask them what it will mean if the family cabin—the one they want to pass down from generation to generation—what will it be as a legacy if the pines and firs are gone, the loons pass it by, the water’s too warm for walleye or trout, and the wolves have moved farther north? Then we’re not Minnesotans anymore, it seems to me.”The latest models for global climate change predict a doubling of carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas, in the atmosphere by 2100, to be accompanied by an increase of 2 to 10 degrees in average temperatures globally. According to Peter Ciborowski of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, Minnesota’s temperature increase could be significantly more than the change in the global average. One big question is how much temperatures will rise here (and what time of year will they increase). The second question is very much related to the first: Will we be a warm and wet climate closer to that of Ohio, or a warm and dry climate like Nebraska?

In the Great Lakes, a 1997 study predicted, a warmer climate caused by a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could lead to a drop in lake levels of 6.5 to 8 feet. That same study predicted differential drying effects on smaller lakes and streams, but predicted significant warming at all lake depths, from two degrees at the surface to 14 degrees at greater depths. John Tester says a sample of things to come might lie in the droughts Minnesota suffered in the 1930s, where many shrinking lakes in the state were surrounded by vast mud flats.

The modeling of global warming relies on many complicated factors that will keep graduate students busy for years to come in fields like climatology, ecology, hydrology, and botany. Soil types, for example, will likely have a profound effect on landscape. John Pastor and his colleagues studied the sandy forest soils around the Boundary Waters, north of Duluth and around Brainerd. From his research, he predicts that with a two-degree temperature increase and boosted carbon dioxide levels, the pines, birch, and aspen would be replaced by brushland and oak savannah—a landscape characterized by open fields, smaller oaks, and stunted pines. In the heavier, clay-based soils that also dot the northern landscape, Pastor guesses that the maple and basswood forests of northern Wisconsin and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula will creep into northern Minnesota. Forest researcher Lee Frelich believes that if the climate dries out significantly, “Minnesota could end up being a state without much of any forests at all.”

Other scientists have studied whether or not trees will be able to “migrate” fast enough under rapid warming conditions. Instead of setting up new colonies in cooler, more northerly areas, they may not adapt to changing conditions fast enough and will possibly just die in place.

Julie Etterson has looked at similar issues affecting prairie plants. The Duluth biologist took partridge pea plants from Minnesota and planted them in areas of Kansas and Oklahoma, where the plant is also native. She found that the Minnesota species suffered an 84 percent reduction in seed output—a major indicator of plant fitness—in Kansas and a 94 percent decrease in Oklahoma. She also determined that if our prairie climate changed to that of either of the other states within 25 to 35 years, the plant would not be able to adapt quickly enough to the new climate through evolution. Because the prairie landscape is fragmented and dominated by farm fields, roads and towns, she believes that prairie preserve managers should begin moving plants gradually to more northern environments.

Of course, animals are profoundly affected by vegetation. Their range and habitat would be affected by climate change, too. The American Bird Conservation Society estimates that 36 bird species might exclude Minnesota in their summer range under global warming scenarios. The boreal chickadee, the evening grosbeak, 14 species of warblers, and several other north-woods species might spend their summers in the pines of Canada. Other birds may see their range increase to include bigger parts of the state, depending on what vegetation and food is available.

Waterfowl may face dire consequences under any extended drought that could accompany warming. The number of wetland potholes in the western part of the state, which are part of a vast network of duck breeding wetlands (“the continent’s duck factory”) that stretch into central Canada, may decrease. One South Dakota researcher predicts that if temperatures increase between 3.6 and 7 degrees, precipitation would have to increase 10 to 25 percent in order for wetlands to retain the water they currently hold. Another study projects that half of the potholes could dry up by 2060, and the duck population would experience a corresponding decimation.

The effect on animals is harder to predict, although some would head north like so many suburban cabin owners on a Friday afternoon. White tail deer, for example, range throughout the lower 48 states, although they tend to be smaller in hotter climates. Bears, too, are highly adaptable as long as forest areas are available. But boreal-forest animals such as the pine marten, fisher, and moose are sensitive to heat. They would likely migrate to cooler areas in Canada.In the lakes and streams, lower water levels could degrade water quality for fish. Cold-water fish such as trout and cisco would die off if lakes and streams warm significantly, and fish adapted to warm waters could move north to take their place. According to DNR biologist Don Pereira, populations of walleye in Lake Pepin have been severely distressed for the past 20 years, most likely by higher summer water temperatures there. And cisco, a key food fish for larger walleye, have recently seen their populations crash in Mille Lacs. “We’re going to see a change in fishes’ range,” he says. “In general, I’m afraid our waters will come to resemble those of Missouri.”

According to Mark Ebbers, the DNR’s trout and salmon program consultant, trout that live in the streams dotting the southeast and northeast part of the state are particularly vulnerable to higher stream temperatures. Warmer air temperatures relate closely to warmer water temperatures, but the problem could be compounded if the cooling tree cover that spruce trees provide to streams in the northern part of the state is replaced by deciduous trees, which allow more sunlight through to the water. Smallmouth bass, white suckers, and a variety of minnow species could muscle in on stream habitats, depending on how the DNR chooses to stock these waters.

Will anything really be lost if, in 25 or 50 years, the next generations of Minnesota anglers eat a shore lunch of catfish instead of walleye? Interestingly, it is fishing that provides a model for how future Minnesotans may react to a changed landscape more generally. Fisheries biologist Daniel Pauly, a professor at the University of British Columbia, was interested in why people aren’t more disturbed about the relatively rapid degradation of fishing grounds around the world—the declining size of fish caught and the tendency to “fish down the food web” when the largest fish are depleted. He theorized that the knowledge does not get passed on from generation to generation among local populations of humans—the baseline of knowledge has shifted, and the past is often dismissed as exaggerated or inaccurately depicted. The only way to stop the cycle is to reconstruct the past and set a firm reference point to which conservation policies can be anchored. For ocean fisheries, this may mean going back half a century to look at the number, type, and size of fish caught. This approach may be too little too late for warming scenarios, but at least it would establish a literal frame of reference that average Minnesotans will understand right away. You’re catching fewer and smaller walleyes, and more and bigger trash fish. Doesn’t that mean anything?

Staking out environmental benchmarks does not seem to be on the mind of the Bush administration. Soon after being elected, the president backed away from a campaign promise to regulate carbon dioxide and declared the Kyoto Protocol, the only major international agreement on greenhouse gases, “fatally flawed.” Last year, with the support of ExxonMobil, the administration used its influence to oust the chair of the leading scientific panel on global warming, and it released a plan that sought to reduce greenhouse gas intensities—the amount emitted per unit of economic growth—rather than an absolute decrease in emissions.

At the president’s request, a panel of 17 environmental experts was assembled by the National Academy of Sciences to evaluate the White House’s policies related to global warming. The panel’s February report could not have pleased the administration when it found that the Bush policy “lacks most of the basic elements of a strategic plan: a guiding vision, executable goals, clear timetables and criteria for measuring progress.” One panel member complained, “There’s no question that if you claim that not much is known, even if it is, then you delay the time at which you can say, OK, the research is unequivocal and we need to do something about the problem.”

The Bush line closely echoes the recommendations of a GOP strategy memo by pollster Frank Lutz, which was leaked to the media last year. In it, Lutz said, “The scientific debate is closing but not yet closed.” He added, “Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate…[italics his].”

There is reason for hope, and strange as it may seem, it has to do with the war in Iraq. In February, British Prime Minister Tony Blair made a remarkable statement that got little notice on this side of the Atlantic. The president’s most important ally in the war against Iraq—and the only real political star in an otherwise deplorable performance—said that global warming and other environmental degradation were as great a threat to world security as weapons of mass destruction or terrorism. Along with new funding for alternative energy research, he announced a plan to cut Europe’s greenhouse-gas emissions by 60 percent by 2050, a significant step beyond the Kyoto goal that EU countries are committed to. Taking a swipe at his Gulf War ally, he called global leadership on climate change issues, “a little short of inspirational, especially in some of the world’s most powerful nations.”

Perhaps the savvy prime minister has some kind of payback in mind for his loyalty. Could it be that Blair will ask for a U.S. commitment to stop ignoring the global and scientific consensus on climate change? Past failures of diplomacy aside, it may be one of the few silver linings to come out of this war.