Both in my personal observations and the understanding of Western science, the climate is undergoing rapid and significant changes. When I first began writing this chapter in the spring of 2011, five months prior to the rain and flooding brought by Tropical Storm Irene, Lake Champlain had experienced unprecedented rises in water levels. In our northwest corner of Vermont, close to the lake, we had experienced unprecedented flooding.
It was a time that has made a lasting impression on me and many other Vermonters. With two months of torrential, sometimes nonstop rain, the lake rose to historic levels. The rain coupled with spring melt from a heavy winter snowfall led many of the rivers that feed into the lake to rise beyond their banks, and the lake itself was flooding. According to the Lake Champlain Basin Program, which monitors the lake and its water levels, the lake level exceeded the highest level ever recorded in 184 years of monitoring.1
The same forces of climate change that led to the flooding outside our clinic, described in chapter 1, had also been at play earlier that year. Vermont is known to experience some extreme weather, but local climate scientists described these as hundred-year floods—and we endured two of them in just a five-month period.
I remember several memorable sights from the spring of that year. One occurred in April when I was driving with my wife, Liz, in upstate New York to catch the ferry to Vermont. The road leading to the dock, where cars and people usually board the ferry, had water rushing over it from a nearby flooding stream. The stream usually ran parallel to the road for several miles, but in April, the stream had engulfed the road. This was a full breach of the riverbanks—the river was flowing rapidly along a path that just a few hours before was the road.
After finding a new route to the ferry, we arrived at the dock and saw a sight that would become a familiar one for the rest of that spring: the ticket booth was submerged halfway under water. The loading area was under about four feet of water. Once we found our way across the lake, on the Vermont side there was a similar scene: several feet of standing water covering the ferry dock.
The water from these spring floods would stay for several months, keeping the dock and ticket houses on both sides of the lake—as well as large stretches of Vermont and northern New York—submerged under several feet of water until it gradually receded by early summer. And while we may wish that this flooding was an isolated event and hope that what Liz and I saw was anecdotal, in reality it was part of a clear pattern of rapid, wide-reaching climate change. As we’ll discuss later in this chapter and throughout the remainder of the book, the dramatic storms and severe flooding we’ve experienced here in Vermont are part of a clear, global pattern. Using the insight of Chinese medicine, we can see clearly that what is happening in New England is connected to similar severe weather around the planet.
If we look back over the past twenty-five years, in hindsight it makes sense that the planet is warming due to the gases we have been emitting. The basic science of global warming, equivalent to the introductory basics of Yin and Yang, explains that the gases we emit from driving, flying, manufacturing, and agriculture stay in the atmosphere, allowing sunlight to pass through but retaining the energy reflected from the earth’s surface. This occurs because there is a change in the oscillation of the light as it transitions from sunlight to reflected light. As summarized in Fred Pierce’s With Speed and Violence, from the mid-nineteenth century lab work was performed to demonstrate that some gases, including carbon dioxide, were transparent to ultraviolet radiation from the sun but trapped infrared heat that radiates from the earth’s surface. Pearce states, “Later dubbed ‘greenhouse gases’ because they seemed to work like the glass in a greenhouse, these gases acted as a kind of atmospheric thermostat.”2
As early as 1894, the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius began to study and calculate the correlation between gases in the atmosphere and the effect on climate. Even today, with the use of several decades of supercomputer modeling, the work of this lone scientist is still a relevant prediction of how greenhouse gases affect climate.3 While the past two decades have seen an enormous amount of research on climate change, the basic scientific underpinnings and generally accurate predictions date back to the end of the nineteenth century. Arrhenius’s work has been so fundamental to our current understanding that he has been called the “father of climate change.”4
Moving forward to more recent contributions, two particularly striking elements stand out when considering Bill McKibben’s seminal 1989 work. The first is how, within the last ten to fifteen years, Western scientific consensus changed, from viewing global climate change as a distant possibility to a here-and-now reality. Second, severe climate scenarios that were considered in the late 1980s to be theoretically possible yet unlikely are now occurring.
As McKibben states in the preface of his most recent book, Eaarth, in which he addresses both elements, “The first point of the book is simple: global warming is no longer a philosophical threat, no longer a future threat, no longer a threat at all. It’s our reality. We’ve changed the planet, changed it in large and fundamental ways.”5 In the first chapter, he provides a summary of some of the recent scientific and popular literature that details how all aspects of life on the planet are being affected—plants, animals (humans included), insects, land and water, and the global climate as a whole. He cites studies that indicate that from Antarctica to Greenland, from Siberia to the Amazon, and from North America to South America, whole ecosystems are being fundamentally affected.6
Before we start to discuss the details of the science of climate change, I want to acknowledge that there are lots of numbers and studies. All of these are necessary for us to have enough information to understand what’s happening. As you’ll soon see, there’s a continuing stream of studies and research that shows that the climate is rapidly warming and destabilizing.
This mounting evidence can feel overwhelming, like a deluge of bad news when we look at it from our usual Western perspective. However, when we see the climate science through the lens of Chinese medicine, clear patterns begin to emerge. The holistic thinking of Chinese medicine allows us to recognize the connection between the data collected from the tundra, the tropics, and more temperate locales like the United States. And in Chinese medicine, if we have a clear understanding of where symptoms are coming from—whether it’s in the treatment room or with the climate—there’s the opportunity to administer the remedies to address the root causes. There’s more than just the catastrophe of climate change; there’s the opportunity as well.
Part of the important role forests and trees play is that they absorb the greenhouse gases we create. They absorb carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide and, in turn, provide the planet with oxygen. From the Chinese medical view, part of what trees and forests do is take in the heat we release—heat that is mostly the result of the way we have been living. Trees have the ability to absorb heat because, compared to us humans, trees are recognized to be Yin in nature. While humans can move around—indicating more Yang—trees remain rooted where they are—indicating more Yin.
To understand the nature of trees, think about your daily life and compare it to that of a tree. If you are like many of us in the United States, you move around a great deal throughout your day—traveling for work, to school, to get something to eat, to see family and friends. For all of those hours that many of us are moving around and getting things done, trees are standing still, rooted into the ground. For Chinese medicine, trees and forests are not only Yin in their ability to help cool the planet, they are also Yin in their stationary nature. Forests and trees are important remedies for the symptoms of climate change in that they can absorb greenhouse gases, and their stillness and rootedness can also teach us important lessons about our overly busy, unrooted lives.
With the Yin nature of trees, understanding the speed at which we have been cutting them down is particularly significant. The staggering rate of global deforestation has been well documented for many decades. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has monitored the world’s forests at five- and ten-year intervals since 1946. Using data from over 230 countries and areas, with information from over nine hundred contributors using a wide variety of variables to measure forest health, the FAO describes their most recent assessment as the most comprehensive to date.7
While the assessment states that the rate of deforestation does appear to be decreasing globally, it demonstrates that “around [32 million acres] of forest were converted to other uses or lost through natural causes each year in the last decade compared to [40 million acres] per year in the 1990s.”8 This translates to 32 million acres of forest lost each year over the last ten years, or 320 million acres total in the past decade. It also means there has been 40 million acres lost yearly over the 1990s, or about 400 million acres in that decade.
Simple math shows that about 720 million acres have been deforested in the past twenty years alone. Translating this massive number into something we can comprehend, 720 million acres equals just under 1.1 million square miles of forests lost—approximately the size of California and Texas combined, or the size of France and Sweden together.
According to the report, forest planting and natural forest growth have reduced the net global effect of deforestation,9 but planting trees is not the same as replacing the complexity and resilience of long-established forests. In terms of global climate change, part of what trees and forests provide is their ability to hold carbon that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere and contribute to warming. When deforestation occurs, eventually the greenhouse gases the trees were retaining is released. This effect is not minor by any means—the IPCC estimates that deforestation is the third-largest global contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, behind only energy production and industry. Given that the FAO estimates deforestation contributes seventeen percent of the total gases emitted, just the release of greenhouse gases from cut forests, which doesn’t include the amount of carbon they would have stored, surpasses the total effects of all transportation, residential, commercial, service industry, and waste emissions, including that from landfills.10
By looking at the global condition of forests through what is happening around us, it’s possible to see firsthand what is occurring worldwide. Back when I lived in Montana, it was clear that deforestation was not some distant possibility that might occur in some far-off place. Simple observation of the mountains in the Gallatin Valley showed a smaller, local picture that mirrored what was happening in forests around the world.
In addition to the rampant deforestation for timber throughout the United States, forests have also been fundamentally affected in other ways. Whole mountainsides—which, in a place like Big Sky Country, can span dozens of miles—are experiencing significant, and in some cases nearly complete, deaths of mountain pine trees. This is because pine beetles are now able to survive through the winter as the weather in the Rocky Mountains warms. A higher winter survival rate means more beetles, and more beetles means more pine trees are affected as the beetles bore beneath the bark looking for a place to live.
In a nearby state, “milder winters since 1994 have reduced the winter death rate of beetle larvae in Wyoming from eighty percent per year to less than ten percent. . . . Meanwhile, hotter drier summers have made trees weaker and less able to fight off the swarming beetles.”11 Providing context for how this affects the region’s forests, environmental writer Jim Robbins summarizes that, “All told, the Rocky Mountains in Canada and the United States have seen nearly 70,000 square miles of forest—an area the size of Washington State—dead” in 10 years.12
From my Montana days, I can remember one hike I took with my wife, Liz, that offered a visual example of what was occurring within the region. A few miles outside Bozeman is a Forest Service road used by many people year-round for hiking, biking, and skiing. On a warm, clear summer day we set out from the trailhead parking lot. For the first few miles, the trail cuts into the mountainside and is bordered on the left by large ponderosa pines that grow over an understory of chokecherry bushes and wild forsythia. To the right of the path are openings that offer views of the nearby peaks as the trail follows the Sourdough Creek below. After a few miles, as we rounded a bend, we reached a clearing where we could see about a mile and a half into the distance. The view was a common one in the region—the pines were dying and their once-evergreen needles had turned brown. From what I could see that day, about three-quarters of the trees on the mountainside had been affected. Later hikes we took over the years in the Gallatin Valley told similar stories of large-scale and widespread die-off.
The importance of the death of local trees and expansive deforestation is highlighted by a recent comprehensive examination of worldwide forests. The data suggests that deforestation plays a much greater role in global warming than was previously recognized. The benchmark study, published in Science, provides the most accurate measure so far of the effects of deforestation on global warming and the amount of greenhouse gases absorbed by forests globally.13 An international team of climate scientists combined data from 1990 through 2007 to create a profile of the role global forests have played as regulators of the atmosphere. The ongoing destruction of forests—mainly in the tropics for food, fuel, and development—emits 2.9 billion tons of carbon annually. This massive release of greenhouse gases accounts for more than a quarter of all emissions that stem from human activity. This updated number is over an eight percent increase from the FAO number cited above, a huge change when factored over a global scale for all greenhouse gas emissions.
The study also concluded that in addition to increased warming effects from deforestation, forests are responsible for more cooling effects than previously recognized when they are kept intact. Study coauthor Josep Canadell, a scientist at Australia’s national climate research center, summarizes that
this is the first complete and global evidence of the overwhelming role of forests in removing anthropogenic carbon dioxide. . . . If you were to stop deforestation tomorrow, the world’s established and regrowing forests would remove half of fossil fuel emissions,” and later describes these findings as “incredible” and “unexpected.14
Despite the extraordinary rate of deforestation, forests that are still intact today act as a tremendous depository for our emissions. New figures in the Science study reveal that the world’s forests absorb 1.1 billion tons of carbon each year, the equivalent of thirteen percent of all the coal, oil, and gas burned in the world annually. Summarizing its significance for climate policy, Canadell says that the new data means that “forests are even more at the forefront as a strategy to protect our climate.”15
As the amount of greenhouse emissions is rapidly increasing and forests are being cut and dying, other factors that have historically kept the climate cool and stable are also changing. The oceans, an embodiment of Chinese medicine’s understanding of Yin, may have reached their saturation point in their ability to contain greenhouse gases.
As noted in a variety of publications, including Yale University’s Yale Environment 360 and those of business news company Bloomberg, another recent study in Science indicates that the world’s oceans are acidifying faster now than they have over the last 300 million years.16 In addition to affecting their capacity for holding greenhouse gases, this could also have serious consequences for many marine species and whole ecosystems. Summarizing the study, Bloomberg reports that in a review of hundreds of studies, a team of international scientists found that a steep rise in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide has driven up oceans acidity levels ten times faster than the closest historical comparison—a period of acidification fifty-six million years ago that triggered a massive ocean die-off. The Bloomberg report continues that the oceans are vulnerable because they absorb excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, making the water more acidic.17
Acidification of the oceans, which results in a decreased ability to hold greenhouse gases, is particularly relevant as we now understand that the oceans have been holding a disproportionate amount of what we have been releasing. According to Hansen, “Earth’s energy imbalance is deposited almost entirely into the ocean, where it contributes to iceberg and ice shelf melting. . . . It turns out that the lion’s share of the excess incoming energy, about ninety percent, goes into the ocean.”18
In Chinese medicine, water is a commonly used word to describe Yin, and the image of expansive amounts of water, such as the sea, is frequently referred to when describing Yin’s cooling potential.19 Part of what water does, literally and metaphorically, is cool things down. As the oceans are vast accumulations of water, and therefore vast accumulations of Yin, in Chinese medicine they are well suited to absorbing and holding emissions and heat.
As was the case with Jenny—whose Yin had been compromised, leading to hot flashes and other symptoms of heat—the ocean’s ability to provide this cooling function has its limits. At some point, the ocean’s ability, just like our own personal ability, to keep things cool and stable will eventually be compromised. The Chinese medical conception of Yin’s limit for containing heat is no longer theoretical—we are now seeing this manifest within the oceans globally.
In addition to the ocean’s decreased ability to absorb our emissions, a recent study in Nature: Climate Change indicates that the cooling effects of certain ocean organisms are also being compromised. Ocean acidification leads marine phytoplankton, which are microbes that live in sunlit water, to emit less of the sulfur compounds that contribute to helping keep the planet cool. Atmospheric sulfur is mostly derived from the sea, and phytoplankton produce a compound called dimethyl sulfide (DMS). Some of the DMS enters the atmosphere and reacts to make sulfuric acid, which then clumps into microscopic airborne particles. The particles help to seed the formation of clouds, which in turn help cool the atmosphere by reflecting sunlight that would otherwise reach the planet’s surface and contribute to warming. The study estimates that this decrease in the creation of DMS alone could increase the global temperature by about 0.5 to 1 degrees Fahrenheit, leading to an overall increase in carbon dioxide levels.20
This might seem like an insignificant rise in temperature, but this recently discovered effect is factored over the whole planet. As with several other effects on the climate that we’ll discuss later, its impact has not been factored into the projections by the IPCC and others. The combination of these effects are of tremendous importance. There is growing concern that we may be approaching a climate tipping point, where temperatures will begin to increase dramatically and rapidly.
The IPCC and others have suggested a goal of limiting the global temperature increase to about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Seeing as how we have already increased the global temperature by slightly less than 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, ocean acidification alone has the potential to raise the temperate by another 0.5 degrees, leaving us only 1.3 degrees from the target limit.
From the perspective of Chinese medicine, a frozen state is more Yin, while something that is thawed is more Yang. When something goes from being frozen to unfrozen, its temperature increases, indicating movement from the cool of Yin to the warmth of Yang. Similarly, Yin and Yang are also intricately interrelated: as Yang increases, Yin decreases, and vice versa. In other words, as something thaws, this indicates both an increase in Yang as well as a corresponding decrease in Yin. This dynamic can originate either from an increase in warmth—where Yang rises and Yin falls as a result—or from a decrease in cold—where Yin decreases, causing the Yang to increase.
This dynamic of warmth–Yang increasing as coolant–Yin decreasing is currently occurring in the oceans as well as on land in the Arctic. Looking again to Western science, ocean acidification and decreased DMS from phytoplankton is happening as permafrost melts in the region, both on land and in the oceans. Until recently, these permanently frozen parts of the Arctic have kept methane, a greenhouse gas, from being released into the atmosphere. Created as a result of anaerobic decomposition, methane has been stored in the ground in bogs and in the ocean floors, secured by a barrier of permafrost. Due to the warming global temperatures, however, permafrost is now melting, releasing methane that is potentially one hundred times more potent as a greenhouse gas than the more commonly discussed carbon dioxide.21
While there has been evidence of methane release since about 2008, as is happening globally with climate change, the process appears to speeding up.22 Igor Semiletov, of the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska, who has overseen climate research in the region and been studying the seabed for twenty years, has said that he has never before witnessed the current scale and force of the methane being released from beneath the Arctic seabed. Until relatively recently, it had been widely believed that any methane released in the oceans would mostly or completely dissolve before reaching the surface, limiting its warming effects—Semiletov’s recent observations from relatively shallow waters reveal otherwise. In an incredible statement about the rapid changes, he told the UK’s Independent newspaper that the plumes had increased from tens of yards in diameter to more than half a mile wide. He added that in a very small area, the researchers counted more than one hundred columns releasing methane directly into the atmosphere from the seabed. As a result, the concentration of methane was a hundred times higher than normal.23 Just one year prior, Semiletov estimated that approximately eight million tons of potent methane was released from the region per year, but with the recently observed size and amount of the methane plumes, it’s likely the actual number is significantly higher.
Similar to Semiletov’s observations at shallower depths, Eric Kort and his colleagues from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have recently recorded elevated methane levels over the deep Arctic Ocean. Kort said,
When we flew over completely solid sea ice, we didn’t see anything in terms of methane. But when we flew over areas where the sea ice had melted, or where there were cracks in the ice, we saw the methane levels increase. . . . We were surprised to see these enhanced methane levels at these high latitudes. Our observations really point to the ocean surface as the source, which was not what we had expected. Other scientists had seen high concentrations of methane in the sea surface, but nobody had expected to see it being released into the atmosphere in this way.24
In looking to give it a monetary number, a recent study published in Nature investigated the possible economic costs of methane release from just one specific part of the Arctic Ocean—the East Siberian Sea off the northern coast of Russia. The study makes the extraordinary estimate that the total cost of the release “comes with an average global price tag of $60 trillion in the absence of mitigation action—a figure comparable to the size of the world economy in 2012 (about $70 trillion.)” This number includes a wide-range of global economic costs, including those from poorer health and lower agricultural production. The authors clarify that “the total cost of Arctic change will be much higher.” In other words, the potential economic cost of the release of one greenhouse gas from one section of one ocean could be nearly equal to the total amount of income created by the entire planet in one year.25 If the conclusions of the study prove correct, the cost of dealing with this region’s methane release will financially overwhelm the global economy. Equally important is that the methane release from the Arctic region as a whole would have economic costs severely higher than that of the East Siberian Sea alone.
Looking to the effects from the land, melting permafrost within bogs has similarly been found to be contributing to the warming process. There are reports and firsthand accounts from scientists that the bogs in the Arctic region are melting at unprecedented rates.26 Paralleling what is occurring in the oceans, a study in Siberia indicates that a massive release of carbon is possible due to melting permafrost. Summarizing a recent study, Michael Marshall states in New Scientist that “we are on the cusp of a tipping point in the climate. If the global climate warms another few tenths of a degree, a large expanse of the Siberian permafrost will start to melt uncontrollably. The result: a significant amount of extra greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere.”27
Another recent paper also indicates that there appears to be much more greenhouse gases than previously estimated in frozen Arctic soil, and a higher likelihood that they will be released. As published in Nature, the title and the description are revealing: “High Risk of Permafrost Thaw,” “Northern soils will release huge amounts of carbon in a warmer world.” The article begins, “Arctic temperatures are rising fast, and permafrost is thawing. Carbon released into the atmosphere from permafrost soils will accelerate climate change. . . . Our collective estimate is that carbon will be released more quickly than [other] models suggest, at a levels that are cause for serious concern.” To put the amount of carbon held in the permafrost into perspective, the article states that
the latest estimate is that [the Arctic] northern soils hold about 1,700 billion tonnes of organic carbon—the remains of plants and animals that have accumulated in the soil over thousands of years. That is about four times more than all the carbon emitted by human activity in modern times and twice as much as is present in the atmosphere now [emphasis added]. This soil carbon amount is more than three times higher than previous estimates.
In terms of how much of this may eventually end up in the atmosphere, the authors state that based on different warming possibilities, “The estimated carbon release from this degradation is thirty billion to sixty-three billion tonnes of carbon by 2040.”28
To give these enormous numbers some context, the most recent Environmental Protection Agency report states that the total emissions for the entire United States was 6.7 billion metric tons in 2011.29 Averaging the potential carbon released from the Arctic permafrost over thirty years, this equals about one to two billion tons of carbon per year. In other words, the release from the permafrost may be equivalent to fifteen to thirty percent of the entire yearly U.S. emissions.
As the permafrost melts, which is a decrease in Yin, and methane is released, which has a warming Yang effects, a similar dynamic is occurring elsewhere in the region. Similar to the role permafrost plays in climate stability, ice sheets and glaciers also have a cooling and stabilizing effect. In contrast to exposed soil, which absorbs warmth from sunlight, ice sheets and glaciers reflect sunlight back into the atmosphere, helping to cool the planet. As ice sheets—slabs of ice that are partially in water and partially on land—and glaciers—ice that is wholly on land—continue to melt and break away, sunlight is now being absorbed by the newly exposed land and water, contributing to the warming process.
In The Independent, Steve Connor cites a study in The Journal of Glaciology to describe clear global trends in Canada, the Himalayas, Greenland, and Europe. Other recently published articles tell similar stories about Europe, the Andes, Antarctica, and the United States:
• In Canada, glaciers in the western part of the country, which store an estimated 1,625 square miles of ice, are melting quickly and may completely disappear by the end of the century.
• In the Himalayas, hundreds of meltwater lakes have appeared in recent years on the surface of glaciers, indicating sustained glacial melt. Over a period of forty-eight hours, one such lake discharged approximately 27.7 million gallons of water, equivalent to forty-two Olympic-size swimming pools.
• In Greenland, computer models revealed that the melting in 2011 was the third most extensive melt on record since 1979, when recording first began, lagging behind only 2010 and 2007. In 2011, more ice melted than was formed by fresh snowfall.
• In Europe, glaciers in the French Alps have lost a full twenty-five percent of their area in the past forty years. For example, the ice fields around Mont Blanc and the surrounding mountains covered approximately 235 square miles in the 1960s, but by the late 2000s the area had decreased to about 172 square miles, about a twenty-five-percent reduction.30
• Another recent study published by the European Geosciences Union indicates that the glaciers in the tropical Andes have been melting at an unprecedented rate, one that hasn’t been seen in the past three hundred years. Glaciers in the mountain range have shrunk by an average of thirty to fifty percent since the 1970s, according to Antoine Rabatel, researcher at the Glaciology and Environmental Geophysics Laboratory in Grenoble, France.31
• In Antarctica, new research indicates that the already significant rates of melting may have been significantly underestimated. A recent article in The Independent indicates that this underestimation in Antarctica was due to faulty data collection.
Temperatures in the western part of Antarctica are rising almost twice as fast as previously believed, adding to fears that continued thaws are causing sea levels to rise. . . . In a discovery that raises new concerns about the effects of climate change on the South Pole, the average annual temperature in the region has risen by [4.3 degrees Fahrenheit] since the 1950s, three times faster than the average around the world.32
This is almost twice as fast as was previously believed for the rate of warming for the region. These accelerated rates of rising temperatures will also accelerate the rate of glacier and ice sheet melting.
• In the United States, there are numerous similar reports. A recent piece in the New York Times on dramatic melts in Alaska describes the effect on the town of Juneau. In the summer of 2011, sudden floods bursting from glaciers began occurring. “In that first, and so far biggest, measured flood burst, an estimated ten billion gallons gushed out in three days, threatening homes and property. . . . There have been at least two smaller bursts” since then.33 The U.S. Geological Survey of the Department of the Interior cites research that describes occurrences in other parts of the United States:
In Glacier National Park (GNP) in Montana some effects of global climate change are strikingly clear. Glacier recession is underway, and many glaciers have already disappeared. . . . It has been estimated that there were approximately 150 glaciers present in 1850, and most glaciers were still present in 1910 when the park was established. In 2010, we consider there to be only twenty-five glaciers larger than twenty-five acres remaining in GNP. A computer-based climate model predicts that some of the park’s largest glaciers will vanish by 2030.34
A recent National Geographic article tells a similar story and includes a comparison of older and current pictures of GNP to demonstrate the rapid loss of the park’s namesakes.35
While living in Montana, I also witnessed these changes that may someday lead Glacier National Park to have to change its name. In 2006, carrying backpacks filled with the food and bedding we would need for a four-day trip, my family and I hiked along the Highline Trail, venturing into some of the most stunning landscape I have ever seen. With a view of hundreds of miles of peaks and valleys that dramatically rise and fall, it’s clear why this area is called Big Sky Country. Out in this wilderness, the sky feels enormous, with its clear, dry air and unobstructed views. In addition to the breathtaking beauty, not far from where we set out on the trail, we experienced another reminder of the area’s wildness: we had an up-close and personal encounter with a family of mountain goats on the trail.
The mountain goats seemed to be using the four-foot-wide trail because the sharp drop-off below left no other route for them to safely travel across the mountainside. After a long moment of tension and stillness, when we were only a few feet apart and cautiously looking at each other, the family of goats darted off the downhill side of the trail. They crashed through the small, dense bushes and a moment later reappeared a few feet down the trail, and ran off.
Once we arrived at the chalet, it wasn’t difficult to see already what the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Geographic authors would write about several years later: large areas of the surrounding peaks and valleys had changed. The increasing temperature in the park, which had risen about 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit since 1900, almost twice as fast as the global average,36 meant there were less white glaciers and more gray rocks and green shrubs. Not only did the melting of the glaciers mean the loss of the iconic nature of the park, it also means more sunlight is absorbed by the soil rather than reflected back into the atmosphere, contributing to warming.
Hansen describes the issues we saw in the park—warming temperatures melting glaciers, resulting in more warming temperatures—as “amplifying feedbacks that were expected to occur only slowly [but] have begun to come into play in the past few years.” Significantly, he also notes that “these feedbacks were not incorporated in most climate simulations, such as those of the IPCC. Yet these ‘slow’ feedbacks are already beginning to emerge in the real world.”37
When taken only at face value, the science of climate change can seem overwhelming. It can feel as if there is too much data about too many issues to make sense of it all. We might feel that too many things are happening at once, and too many feedback loops are occurring simultaneously for us to be able to understand the process that we’ve started. But just as in the treatment room, where it’s not only possible to treat multiple physical symptoms simultaneously but address mental and emotional issues as well, Chinese medicine can help us clarify what we are seeing and allow a clear pattern to emerge. As discussed earlier, the long history of Chinese medicine is based on inductive thinking, which allows us see patterns and tendencies in the world around us.
From the view of Western science, forests absorb greenhouse gases and help to cool the planet. When there is large-scale deforestation from trees being cut or dying, this cooling effect is decreased, which is a decrease of Yin. The greenhouse gases the trees once absorbed are also released during deforestation, which contributes to a warming effect, which is an increase of Yang.
As the oceans acidify, they lose their capacity to store our emissions. This is another loss of coolant, another decrease in Yin. Ocean acidification also leads phytoplankton to emit less of the sulfur compounds that help seed cloud formation, which is another loss of a cooling effect, another decrease in Yin. Fewer clouds allow more sunlight to reach the surface, which contributes to more warming, which is an additional increase in Yang.
The melting of frozen soil in bogs and the ocean floor can be understood as the movement from a colder, Yin state to a warmer, Yang state. In other words, this is another decrease of Yin and an increase of Yang. As the permafrost melts, the potent greenhouse gas methane is released, again contributing to warming and increasing Yang. As glaciers and ice sheets melt, they also move from a more Yin, frozen state to a more Yang, liquid state. The resulting exposed soil and water absorb sunlight that would have been reflected, contributing to warming and an increase in Yang.
Looking at climate research through the lens of Chinese medicine, a clear pattern emerges. Together, the loss of forests, the acidification of oceans, and the melting of permafrost, glaciers, and ice sheets tell us a story of decreasing coolant and increasing heat. Rather than being separate issues, the situation of trees, ice, and oceans together depict a clear picture of a planet that is warming as its cooling capacities are decreasing. From the view of Chinese medicine, the cumulative effect of these symptoms tells us that the planet has a clear diagnosis: Yin-deficient heat. This increasing warmth with decreasing coolant is the cycle in which heat increases, cooking off the coolant. This decrease of Yin creates an additional increase in heat, which then cooks off more Yin.
To arrive at a clear diagnosis of what is happening to the climate is crucial. As in the treatment room, where acupuncturists and herbalists are looking to treat the specific root causes of various conditions, having a clear understanding of the global climate allows us to choose the most appropriate remedies for the imbalances we’ve created. When treating headaches, for example, there is no one-size-fits-all approach in which the same herbs and the same acupuncture points are used to treat the discomfort. Similarly, it’s much more likely that we will be able to effectively address climate change if we understand the underlying issues rather than just the more superficial symptoms.
In addition to providing a clear diagnosis of the root causes, Chinese medicine can also help us understand the relationship between what occurs in the global climate and what occurs within us as individuals. The long-established connection in Chinese medicine between the big picture and the little allows us to see the clear connection between the microcosm and macrocosm. In doing so, this inductive understanding can help us discern the appropriate set of remedies to treat the sickness of climate change. Chinese medicine can help us see how basic assumptions about our lives contribute to our individual and collective imbalances that are being mirrored in the condition of the climate. Understanding Yin and Yang provides us the opportunity to self-administer the medicine needed to treat the causes of increasing heat and decreasing coolant, which is creating a rapidly destabilizing planet.