Lesson 3 Ships in the DesertAL Gore1. I was standing in the sun on the hot steel deck of a fishing ship capable of processing a fifty-ton catch on a good day. But it wasnt a good day. We were anchored in what used to be the most productive fishing site in all of central Asia, but as I looked out over the bow, the prospects of a good catch looked bleak. Where there should have been gentle blue-green waves lapping against the side of the ship, there was nothing but hot dry sandas far as I could see in all directions. The other ships of the fleet were also at rest in the sand, scattered in the dunes that stretched all the way to the horizon. Ten years ago the Aral was the fourth-largest inland sea in the world, comparable to the largest of North Americas Great Lakes. Now it is disappearing because the water that used to feed it has been diverted in an ill-considered irrigation scheme to grow cotton in the desert. The new shoreline was almost forty kilometers across the sand from where the fishing fleet was now permanently docked. Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Muynak the people were still canning fishbrought not from the Aral Sea but shipped by rail through Siberia from the Pacific Ocean, more than a thousand miles away.2. My search for the underlying causes of the environmental crisis has led me to travel around the world to examine and study many of these images of destruction. At the very bottom of the earth, high in the Trans-Antarctic Mountains, with the sun glaring at midnight through a hole in the sky, I stood in the unbelievable coldness and talked with a scientist in the late tall of 1988 about the tunnel he was digging through time. Slipping his parka back to reveal a badly burned face that was cracked and peeling, he pointed to the annual layers of ice in a core sample dug from the glacier on which we were standing. He moved his finger back in time to the ice of two decades ago. “Heres where the U.S Congress passed the Clean Air Act,” he said. At the bottom of the world, two continents away from Washington, D.C., even a small reduction in one countrys emissions had changed the amount of pollution found in the remotest end least accessible place on earth.3. But the most significant change thus far in the earths atmosphere is the one that began with the industrial revolution early in the last century and has picked up speed ever since. Industry meant coal, and later oil, and we began to burn lots of itbringing rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) , with its ability to trap more heat in the atmosphere and slowly warm the earth. Fewer than a hundred yards from the South Pole, upwind from the ice runway where the ski plane lands and keeps its engines running to prevent the metal parts from freeze-locking together, scientists monitor the air several times every day to chart the course of that inexorable change. During my visit, I watched one scientist draw the results of that days measurements, pushing the end of a steep line still higher on the graph. He told me how easy it isthere at the end of the earthto see that this enormous change in the global atmosphere is still picking up speed.4. Two and a half years later I slept under the midnight sun at the other end of our planet, in a small tent pitched on a twelve-toot-thick slab of ice floating in the frigid Arctic Ocean. After a hearty breakfast, my companions and I traveled by snowmobiles a few miles farther north to a rendezvous point where the ice was thinneronly three and a half feet thickand a nuclear submarine hovered in the water below. After it crashed through the ice, took on its new passengers, and resub merged, I talked with scientists who were trying to measure more accurately the thickness of the polar ice cap, which many believe is thinning as a result of global warming. I had just negotiated an agreement between ice scientists and the U.S. Navy to secure the release of previously top secret data from submarine sonar tracks, data that could help them learn what is happening to the north polar cap. Now, I wanted to see the pole it-self, and some eight hours after we met the submarine, we were crashing through that ice, surfacing, and then I was standing in an eerily beautiful snowscape, windswept and sparkling white, with the horizon defined by little hummocks, or “pressure ridges” of ice that are pushed up like tiny mountain ranges when separate sheets collide. But here too, CO2, levels are rising just as rapidly, and ultimately temperature will rise with themindeed, global warming is expected to push temperatures up much more rapidly in the polar regions than in the rest of the world. As the polar air warms, the ice here will thin; and since the polar cap plays such a crucial role in the worlds weather system, the consequences of a thinning cap could be disastrous.5. Considering such scenarios is not a purely speculative exercise. Six months after I returned from the North Pole, a team of scientists r