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Of all northern peoples, the marine mammal-hunters living along the Arctic Ocean coast are suffering the most from climate change. Less sea ice means more accidents and fewer ice-loving animals to eat. It means faster shoreline erosion from pounding by the waves and storms of the open ocean. The Alaskan village of Shishmaref has lost this battle and will need to be relocated farther inland. But even in coastal towns, nearly everyone I meet bristles at the notion of being cast as a hapless climate-change refugee.

Even as they express frustration at having their lives damaged by people living thousands of miles away—and think it only fair that those damages be repatriated—they also point to their long history of adaptation and resilience in one of the world’s most extreme environments. They are not sitting around idly in despair, or gazing forlornly out at the unfamiliar sea. They are buying boats, and organizing workshops, and setting about catching the fat salmon that are increasingly moving into their seas.

There is more to this story than climate change. Later, we will discuss some profound demographic, political, and economic trends now under way that promise to be just as important to northerners’ lives in the coming decades.

Greenland’s Fine Potatoes

One of the more vivid media images of 2007 was one of happy Greenlanders tending lush green potato fields against a backdrop of icebergs melting away into the ocean. The diminished sea ice was wreaking havoc on seal hunting—Greenland’s finance and foreign affairs minister observed that subsistence hunting crashed by 75%—but people were beginning to plant potatoes, radishes, and broccoli. “Farming, an occupation all but unheard of a century ago, has never looked better,” trumpeted The Christian Science Monitor. By 2009 some fields were doing so well that Danish scientists started studying them, to learn why Greenland’s potatoes were growing even better than southern ones.311

What could be a more iconic symbol of the world in 2050 than seal hunters turned farmers in one of the coldest places on Earth? But in terms of sheer caloric output, any climate-triggered boons to agriculture will not be realized on the narrow, rocky shores of Greenland, or indeed any other place in the Arctic. Similarly to what we saw for certain wild organisms, the pressure is a gradient from south to north, not a leap to the top of the planet. Summers there will always be brief, and its soils thin or nonexistent. A short-lived vegetable garden is one thing, but when it comes to producing major crops for global markets, any significant increases will be realized at the northern margins of present-day agriculture. There will be no amber fields of grain waving along the shores of the Arctic Ocean.

In 2007 I watched some of the world’s top agronomists and plant geneticists debate how best to save our temperate crops from the rising heat, droughts, and pathogens forecast for the coming decades.312 Their solution was part biotech—genetic modifications, for example—and part ancient practice: Move over, water-guzzling corn, here come the best drought-tolerant sorghums and millets . . . from Ethiopia! Without adaptation, the group concluded, the prospect of food insecurity in the low latitudes was a serious threat.

I was particularly impressed with presentations by Stanford University’s Dave Lobell and Marshall Burke, who used twenty different climate models to statistically map where the food insecurities were most likely to emerge. Apparently, by the year 2030 South Asia, Southeast Asia, and southern Africa are especially vulnerable.313 By 2050, agricultural projections for sub-Saharan Africa get even worse, with average crop production losses of −22, −17, −17, −18, and −8% for corn, sorghum, millet, groundnut, and cassava, respectively.314 By century’s end, things become still rougher, with one study concluding it is more than 90% likely that future growing season temperatures in the tropics and