Unsettled

Steven Koonin’s Unsettled is an unsettling book.  I learned about it via a Facebook post, clicked my way over to Goodreads, and listened to the reader comment jungle drums.  Folks seemed to like it.  A few climate deniers wrote that the book had convinced them that the climate was actually warming.  Wow!  What could a book say that might communicate with them?  I promptly downloaded a copy of the Kindle version.

Koonin is a physicist who has worked for BP, Obama’s Department of Energy, and in academia.  He enjoys an unblemished reputation as a contrarian.  For him, climate change is “a possible future problem.”  The mainstream mindset constantly tells us that the science on climate change is settled (huge threat!).  Koonin insists that “The Science” is unsettled — reputable climate science has been highjacked by doom mongerers (but he does acknowledge that the climate is indeed warming).  The Trump administration once wanted to use him in a proposed media campaign to challenge mainstream perceptions about climate change. 

Koonin is an expert at computer modelling, and he’s very interested in climate science.  Models are given a set of rules, and then selected data is fed into them for processing.  If significant trends appear, they can provide a basis for projections of the future.  Armed with compelling graphs, and a blizzard of statistics, he shines a spotlight on little known truths.  For example, “The net economic impact of human-induced climate change will be minimal through at least the end of this century.”

Actual reality is more complex than a collection of data points.  In the Arctic, bright white surfaces, like snow and ice, are very reflective (high albedo).  Earth is bathed with incoming solar heat every day, but albedo bounces about 30 percent of the heat back into outer space, so we don’t bake.  Darker surfaces, like forests or open water, reflect much less heat (low albedo).  The 70 percent of solar heat that reaches the planet surface helps to keep the climate at temperatures that enable life as we know it.  This is an amazing balancing act.

Because the climate is warming, especially in the Arctic, the glaciers, ice pack, and sea ice are busy melting and retreating — exposing darker surfaces, like dry ground and seawater.  So, less heat is bounced away, and more is absorbed, leading to rising temps.  The warmer it gets, the faster the melting, which raises the warming, which speeds the melting — a vicious circle.

The atmosphere also plays a starring role in the balancing act.  Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide (CO₂) methane (CH₄), nitrous oxide (N₂O), and water vapor (H₂O).  In the atmosphere, they provide a comfortable insulating blanket that retains much of the heat radiating upward from the Earth’s surface.  This process beneficially contributed to the balancing act until the industrial era, when greenhouse gas emissions intensified, and heat retention began increasing.

Warming affected permafrost.  Consider the area of the 48 U.S. states that lie between Canada and Mexico.  In the Northern Hemisphere, permafrost underlies an area almost 2.5 times as large as the 48 states.  In the Arctic, vast deposits of it, which can be many thousands of years old, exist beneath both dry ground and offshore waters.  Permafrost is a mix of frozen soil and organic material (plant and animal).  When it warms, it thaws (not melts). 

With thawing, land that was once strong and solid becomes more pudding-like.  Towns decompose, villages slide into the sea, pipelines fall apart, and hills release landslides (exposing mammoth bones).  Microbes feast on the defrosted organic matter, and then emit methane.  Methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas.  In the atmosphere, it survives for 7 to 10 years before breaking down into CO₂, which is less potent, but can remain airborne for many centuries.

On the bottom of northern seas, permafrost lies beneath layers of sediment.  Sediments contain frozen crystals of methane hydrates (or clathrates), which look like ice, but can burn.  Seabed hydrate deposits in the Arctic are estimated to contain 13 times the amount of carbon that’s currently present in the atmosphere.  As rising temps melt the bright surface of sea ice, darker seawater becomes exposed to daylight, and absorbs heat.  When seabed waters warm, the crystals melt, and methane gas is released.  In deeper waters, the plumes of methane bubbles dissolve while rising.  In shallow waters, methane bubbles make it to the surface, and enter the atmosphere. 

As the Arctic climate continues warming, it’s possible that a catastrophic release of methane could be triggered.  Folks who pay attention to this stuff are nervous.  They are monitoring the East Siberian Arctic Shelf — 810,000 square miles (2.1 million km²) of shallow waters in methane country.  The shelf covers an area more than five times larger than California.

So, why don’t we just slow down greenhouse gas emissions?  Here, we collide head-on with a monumental bummer.  Koonin wrote (2020) that in the atmosphere, CO₂ levels are 415 parts per million (ppm).  Each year, about 37 billion tons of CO₂ are emitted.  At this rate, the concentration in the atmosphere would increase by about 2 ppm in a year.  Year after year, more is added.  These emissions remain in the atmosphere for centuries (!) — so their concentration continuously grows.  He calculated the trajectory of current greenhouse gas emissions, and concluded that they would double by 2075.

In his book, The Great Acceleration, environmental historian J. R. McNeill said it differently, “Some proportion, perhaps as much as a quarter, of the roughly 300 billion tons of carbon released to the atmosphere between 1945 and 2015 will remain aloft for a few hundred thousand years.”  By 2008, concentrations had grown by 25 percent in just 50 years.  Of the emissions caused by humans, about 85 percent was related to fossil fuels.

Koonin contemplated where the path of continuous accumulation would lead.  He reflected on humankind’s massive addiction to fossil fuels.  Would we ever willingly back away from our high impact way of life, as long as it’s still possible?  No!  We’ll bet heavily on hope, and patiently wait for technological miracles, until the lights go out.  Suddenly, a divine revelation arrived.  The notion that we could stabilize current CO₂ emissions in the coming decades was simply not plausible — and forget actually reducing them.

“Modest reductions in emissions will only delay, but not prevent, the rise in concentration.”  If greenhouse gases continue their out of control accumulation, less heat will escape, the climate keeps warming, the Arctic keeps melting, albedo keeps decreasing, and the climate keeps getting warmer and warmer.  We’ve started something we can’t stop.  Yikes!  Never fear!  Koonin pulls three “solutions” out of his magic hat. 

Solar Radiation Management (SRM) would artificially increase albedo by frequently dispersing tons reflective substances high in the sky, year after year, forever.  The Artic would quit melting, and humankind could live happily ever after.

Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) uses technology to extract the surplus CO₂ from the atmosphere, and put it somewhere secure, where it will cause no mischief for a million years.  A few small pilot projects are underway, and they have serious limitations so far. 

Geoengineering is a word used to describe processes like SRM and CDR.  If one or both turn out to be miraculously successful, humans could, in their wildest dreams, continue burning fossil energy, and living like there’s no tomorrow.  In reality, neither is a proven success, nor cheap, easy, or sustainable.  Both ideas make lots of people nervous, for a wide variety of intelligent reasons.  Unintended consequences are guaranteed.

Luckily, there is one tried and true, all-purpose solution that humans have relied on for countless thousands of years — adaptation.  Courage!  Migrate to a region where you won’t starve, turn to ice, roast alive, or drown in rising seas.  Learn how to walk.  Become a great forager.  And so on. 

Doom mongerers warn that human influences will eventually push the climate beyond a tipping point, at which time catastrophe will ring our doorbell.  Koonin writes that it’s unlikely that human influences will push the climate over a tipping point.  “The most likely societal response will be to adapt to a changing climate, and that adaptation will very likely be effective.”  If adaptation isn’t enough, we can always throw all caution to the wind, and fool around with geoengineering. 

So, Koonin introduced readers to the notion of albedo, rising temperatures, melting Arctic, less albedo.  Great!  He came extremely close to the powerful punch line, but then suddenly swerved off into a head spinning whiteout blizzard of statistics and graphs.  His viewpoint is based on data collections — statistics on temperatures, precipitation, storms, etc. — stuff that computers can process (36 red dots, 55 blue dots…). 

A great benefit of Kindle books is that they are searchable.  I searched the book for a number of essential climate science keywords, and discovered zero hits for: Peter Wadhams (Arctic researcher), permafrost, methane hydrate, methane clathrate, methane craters, ocean acidification, ocean deoxygenation, East Siberian Arctic Shelf, pine beetles, tree death, threshold temperatures (too hot for agriculture), etc.  A whole bunch of essential information is absent in the book, and it may be an invisible elephant in the room.  Could doom mongerers actually be reality mongerers?

Reading this book was an interesting experience for me.  It made me question my views (all survived).  I learned a few new things.  Koonin is a purebred scientist, absolutely dedicated to the holy quest for truth.  The long and winding upward path to sacred certainty passes through numerous challenges and arguments that eventually weed out the dodgy ideas.  The Steven Koonin article in Wikipedia [HERE] provides ringside seats to the debate — links to commentaries by some of his critics who also have respectable credentials.

Koonin, Steven E., Unsettled, BenBella Books, Inc., Dallas, Texas, 2021.

 

A Farewell to Ice

 

In 1968, the Apollo-8 mission orbited the moon, and took the first photo of the Earth rising above the moon’s horizon.  In that photo, Earth was white on both the top and bottom.  Today, when it’s summer in the northern hemisphere, the distant view shows a white bottom and a blue top.  An ancient ice sheet is becoming an ocean.  With a sloppy stampede of well-intended, self-defeating, highly-destructive booboos, human cleverness has changed the planet.

In 1970, Peter Wadhams began studying cool stuff in polar regions — sea ice, glaciers, ice sheets, snow, and permafrost.  When he began his 47 years of research, polar ice was not a headline making subject that begged for the full attention of the world.  He is now among the world’s top experts in the field.  His book, A Farewell to Ice, sums up what he has learned over the years.  It provides an understandable, uncomfortable, and important introduction to the Climate Crisis. 

Arctic ice is precious, because it nurtures the existence of a climate that enables complex biodiversity.  But things are changing now.  When incoming sunbeams hit white regions, some of the heat is reflected away from the planet, back into outer space.  This ability to reflect is called albedo.  Fresh snow, which is very white, reflects 80 to 90 percent of incoming heat.  So, it has an albedo of 0.8 to 0.9.  Ice that has been bare for a while accumulates soot and dust, which makes it darker, less reflective.  It has an albedo of 0.4 to 0.7.  Sea water and dry land are darker, and absorb more incoming heat.  Open water has an albedo of 0.1. 

When albedo reflectivity weakens, more heat can enter the atmosphere, and accumulate.  Ice gets thinner, breaks up, and retreats.  So, more sunlight hits more open water, which absorbs more heat.  More ice that used to exist year-round now melts away during the warmer months.  The duration of ice-free summer periods is lengthening.  This vicious circle is called the “Arctic Death Spiral.” 

Glaciers, ice sheets, and sea ice have existed for thousands of years, leftovers from previous ice ages.  Once they are gone, they will not return for a very long time, if ever.  They were still in pretty good shape at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.  If human population and lifestyles had remained at pre-industrial levels, the Arctic might still be an awesomely cool and stable region.

The atmosphere is precious.  It helps to retain adequate heat, but not too much, like a greenhouse.  While it allows some heat to escape into outer space, it allows even more solar heat to enter.  If Earth had no atmosphere, it would be a lifeless frozen planet.  The moon is a frigid place because it has no atmosphere, and its average temperature is -4°F (-18°C).  Earth’s lovely atmosphere enables an average temperature of 59°F (15°C). 

This atmospheric greenhouse enables our survival, because life is possible when it’s warm enough for water to exist in liquid form.  Every living cell contains water.  The greenhouse also prevents most seawater from freezing.  Unfrozen oceans absorb incoming solar heat and retain it, which is good and normal, up to a point.  Right now, ocean absorption is what’s (temporarily) saving our asses.  Eventually, the oceans will get too warm, which will impact marine ecosystems, and everything else.  Eventually, the climate will get more unstable.  Agricultural systems will get dizzy and wobbly.  Life will become more exciting.

There are several greenhouse gases that help the atmosphere trap heat, including ozone, water vapor, nitrous oxide, carbon dioxide, and methane.  Wadhams is especially concerned about carbon dioxide (CO₂) and methane (CH₄), because of their primary role in encouraging warmer temperatures.  CO₂ is responsible for about 55 percent of the greenhouse warming issues.

Some CO₂ emissions can remain in the atmosphere for thousands of years.  A lot of it is absorbed by plant life and oceans.  Prior to the Industrial Revolution, CO₂ levels in the air were 280 ppm (parts per million).  Today, they are 421 ppm.  Current trends suggest that in 75 to 100 years, levels will double (800+ ppm).  In oceans, CO₂ dissolves and forms carbonic acid, which damages the shells of sea critters, and hammers coral reefs.  Wizards have calculated that oceans now absorb over one million tons of manmade CO₂ every hour!  [LINK]  What could possibly go wrong?

CO₂ is precious.  If there was no CO₂, there would be no plants or animals.  During photosynthesis, all plants take in CO₂ and emit oxygen, which all animals need.  We’re now learning that it’s possible to have too much of a good thing.  Wadhams shouts (in bold text), “adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere inevitably causes a temperature rise.  And, the more you add, the greater the temperature rise.”

It won’t be long before the North Pole will be ice-free for the first time in tens of thousands of years.  In the ’70s, summertime Arctic sea ice covered over 3 million square miles (7.8 million km²), an area larger than the continent of Australia.  In 2012, it covered just 1.3 million square miles (much more open water).  Climate change is happening most rapidly in the Arctic.  Their summers are now having some horror show heat waves.  The Southern Hemisphere has been less vulnerable to ice age periods, because it has less dry land, and much more heat-retaining ocean area.

So, as Arctic snow and ice retreats, albedo declines, more sunbeams arrive, temperatures rise, melting increases, and on and on…  This is called a feedback loop.  Our emissions have created growing imbalances that now enable self-perpetuating feedback loops.  “We are fast approaching the stage when climate change will be playing the tune for us while we stand by and watch helplessly, with our reductions in CO₂ emissions having no effect.”  This is what is known as runaway warming.

Concentrations of methane are also rising in the atmosphere.  They have risen from 700 ppb (parts per billion) in preindustrial times, up to 1,940 ppb recently.  Methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas, but it only stays in the atmosphere for 7 to 10 years, during which time it is 100+ times more harmful than CO₂.  Then, it breaks down into CO₂.  When methane’s brief existence is calculated within a hundred year timeframe, its impact is 23 times worse than the hundred year impact of CO₂. 

In addition to airborne methane, massive amounts of it are stored in seabed permafrost, in the form of methane hydrates — flammable frozen crystals of methane and water.  When the permafrost thaws, the hydrate crystals dissolve, and the methane is released.  Permafrost is soil that has been frozen for years, often thousands of years.  Deposits can be hundreds of yards (or meters) deep.  With regard to warming and methane, Wadhams highlights two daunting issues.  One is offshore permafrost (underwater), and the other is terrestrial permafrost (under dry land).

Offshore permafrost is a dire concern for Wadhams, because it has the potential to be the source of a monstrous release of methane within a few decades.  This permafrost formed on dry land thousands of years ago, when sea levels were much lower.  Today, it is buried beneath seabed sediments.  It contains substantial amounts of methane hydrates, and it is especially vulnerable to thawing as sea ice retreats, and water temperatures rise. 

The East Siberian Sea includes 810,000 square miles (2.1 million km²) of shallow water, most of which is less than 130 feet (40 m) deep.  In the good old days, the sea used to be covered year round with surface ice, which kept the water frigid.  This changed in 2005, when summer sea ice began disappearing, which exposed seawater to the atmosphere for the first time.  Sunlight could now penetrate directly into the water and warm it.  Shallow waters warmed faster than deeper areas.

For the first time in tens of thousands of years, warm water could reach the seabed, causing frozen sediments to thaw.  Then, as the underlying permafrost thaws, large plumes of methane bubbles are released.  In deeper waters, the rising methane oxidizes, and the plume disappears before reaching the surface.  In the shallows, methane makes it to the surface, and is released into the atmosphere.

In the entire Arctic Ocean, the methane hydrate deposits are estimated to contain 13 times the amount of carbon currently present in the atmosphere.  Wadhams believes that “the risk of an Arctic seabed methane pulse is one of the greatest immediate risks facing the human race.”  Russian scientists on site calculate that the probability of this is at least 50 percent.  Scientists skeptical about the possible methane pulse have one thing in common — none have participated in research on the East Siberian Sea.  In a 2020 article, Wadhams revealed that the East Siberian Arctic Shelf was home to high concentrations of methane hydrates in permafrost layers that are up to 1.25 miles (2 km) thick. [LINK] 

Terrestrial permafrost is buried under dry land across the Arctic.  It is found within a region of 7.3 million square miles (19 million km²) — something like the combined land area of Russia and Argentina.  As Arctic temperatures soar, the permafrost is rapidly thawing.  Soils in this permafrost contain lots of organic carbon, plant material that lived long ago, but froze before fully decomposing.  Unlike offshore permafrost, terrestrial permafrost does not contain methane while frozen.  But when it thaws and decays, chemical processes then create CO₂, methane, and nitrous oxide.  

Wadhams strongly suspects that a massive seabed methane pulse may occur in the next decade or so.  One way or another, fast or slow, the permafrost will inevitably thaw.  Nobody questions that the climate is warming.  The amount of carbon stored in the offshore permafrost is estimated to be 50 gigatons, but the terrestrial permafrost is estimated to hold 1,400 to 1,700 gigatons (30 times more than offshore).  Wadhams believes that most of the massive greenhouse emissions are likely to take place by the end of the century, at the latest.

So, that’s a bit about what this book is about.  When you sit down with a copy from your friendly local library, you’ll learn much more.  Wadhams is profoundly concerned about the path we’re on, and is distinctly gloomy about where we’re headed.  He admits that the technological miracles that will successfully end the Arctic Death Spiral have yet to be invented, and may never be. 

Humankind remains largely clueless, whilst insanely committed to preserving our maximum waste lifestyle, as long as possible, by any means necessary.  Only dangerous heretics talk about sensibly turning stuff OFF.  We are wading neck deep in happy talk, misinformation, gibberish, and magical thinking.  The jungle drums keep talking about “solving the Climate Crisis.”  The spotlights are aimed at solar panels, electric cars, and LED light bulbs, not melting permafrost.  What could possibly go wrong?

Wadhams, Peter, A Farewell to Ice, Oxford University Press, New York, 2017.