Under a White Sky

 

Elizabeth Kolbert, author of the Pulitzer Award winning The Sixth Extinction, has written a potent new book, Under a White Sky.  She sums it up as “a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems.”  So much of what we do echoes the plot of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice folktale — vivid imaginations, half-baked cleverness, dangerous overconfidence, and zero foresight result in frightening unintended consequences.  Kolbert puts on a journalist uniform, and visits the wizards on the cutting edge of ingenious technology.  She presented eight scenarios of human hubris. 

Two are about climate change.  The title, “Under a White Sky,” is a reference to her discussion of SRM.  Solar Radiation Management is what is usually meant by “geoengineering.”  The goal of SRM visionaries is to reduce the rate of atmospheric warming by bouncing away a significant portion of the incoming solar radiation.  To do this, they envision dumping a million tons of highly reflective particles into the stratosphere each year — 40,000 planeloads of sulfur dioxide, calcium carbonate, or something.  Some fear that SRM would turn the blue skies white.  What could possibly go wrong?  I need to put this in context.

Petroleum geologist Walter Younquist noted that in less than 500 years, we’re going to burn up the oil, gas, and coal that took more than 500 million years to create.  It took 109 years to consume the first 200 billion barrels of oil, ten years for the second 200 billion, and six and a half years for the third.  Of all the oil ever consumed, 90 percent has been used since 1958.  We’re taking a high speed one-way joyride into the deep unknown, with no brakes, and no understanding.

Alice Friedemann explained why life as we know it would be impossible without fossil energy.  Many core processes cannot be run on electric power — trucking, shipping, air travel, manufacturing, agriculture, mining, and so on.  Wind turbines, solar panels, and high capacity storage batteries have limited working lifespans, and making them requires high impact processes and materials.  They are “re-buildable,” not “renewable.”  The current electric grids of the world were not designed to reliably function on intermittent inflows of energy.  So, the global transition to happy “green” energy would be a monumental undertaking.

The atmosphere is already overloaded with greenhouse gases, and we constantly add more.  This leads to a perpetual downward spiral.  As the gases accumulate, the atmosphere retains more heat, shiny white ice sheets keep melting, so less incoming solar heat is reflected away, so the atmosphere gets warmer, so more ice melts…, etc.  Vast regions of permafrost are beginning to thaw, allowing ancient organic material to decompose, and emit methane.  Vast undersea deposits of frozen methane hydrates are beginning to melt, sending even more methane into the atmosphere.  Consequently, this is why the planet’s formerly tolerable climate is shape-shifting into a furious city-smashing movie monster. 

It’s important to understand that the carbon released into the atmosphere does not quickly dissipate, it accumulates.  Environmental historian J. R. McNeill wrote, “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.”  If all of humankind camped on Mars for 50 years, the warming cycle on Earth would not promptly stop.

Not everyone is an enthusiastic fan of SRM.  As the planet continues warming, more flights will be needed to release more tonnage of reflective particles.  What goes up, must come down.  Could falling dust harm our lungs?  If sulfur dioxide particles were used, this could damage the ozone layer, and add sulfuric acid to the rain.  The bottom line is that SRM does not eliminate the primary cause of climate change — massive ongoing emissions of carbon compounds.

Kolbert also discussed a theoretical solution to the climate crisis.  She visited the brave new world of Direct Air Capture (DAC).  It involves extracting the carbon from the atmosphere, and injecting it deep underground at locations with ideal geology, where it would mineralize into calcium carbonate, and harmlessly stay there forever.  One plan involved building 100 million trailer sized DAC units around the world.  It sounds like a miracle, the answer to our prayers.  We can save the world and keep living like lunatics too!

In another scenario, she discussed Chicago’s heroic war on Asian carp.  The city is a ghastly disaster area that generates enormous amounts of sewage, garbage, pollution, and toxic waste.  Years ago, the Chicago River was used to conveniently move lots of crud into Lake Michigan, where it would be out of sight, out of mind, and out of nose.  Eventually, a few oddballs began to wonder if this was intelligent. 

Luckily, experts solved the problem by changing the course of the flow.  They began sending the filthy dreck down the new Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which would eventually dump it into the Mississippi River, which is far less sacred to many Americans.  Unfortunately, the river is home to four species of Asian carp, some of which can weigh up to 100 pounds (45 kg).  In the Mississippi, when motorboats pass by, numerous carp leap high into the air, sometimes injuring fishermen, and knocking boaters overboard.  Waterskiing has become an especially dangerous activity.

Unfortunately, Chicago’s alterations to the flow of filth was not a flawless design.  It was theoretically possible for carp to migrate into the Great Lakes.  The carp are so good at extracting plankton that it was possible they might deplete food resources that enabled the survival of indigenous lake fish.  If they spread throughout the Great Lakes, it would be a death sentence for sport fish like walleye and perch.  This upset some folks.  Rachel Carson opposed poisoning the new canal, so they installed electrified underwater fences to electrocute the carp.  What were Asian carp doing in the Mississippi?  In 1964, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service imported the fish to control exotic aquatic weeds.  How smart was that?

Kolbert also spent time with folks engaged in genetic engineering.  The cool new CRISPR technology enables them to make green chickens.  Other gene splicers want to resurrect the extinct passenger pigeon.  My father was in diapers when the last bird died in 1914.  Some estimate that there were once 3 to 5 billion passenger pigeons.  In 1800, they may have been the most numerous birds on Earth.  The pigeons were forest animals, and their primary food was mast — nuts and berries that grew on trees and woody brush. 

A. W. Schorger (1884-1972) wrote an outstanding book on pigeon history.  He mentioned a 1663 report from Quebec, noting that one scattershot blast into a dense flock could kill up to 132 birds.  Some migrating flocks, a mile wide (1.6 km), and miles long, darkened the sky for up to three days.  Folks could hear the roar of countless wings before the flocks came into view.  They could fly up to 62 miles per hour (100 km/h). 

Farmers hated the huge flocks that generously assisted at harvest time.  Market hunters adored them as an easy way to make money.  In 1913, William Hornaday wrote, “In 1869, from the town of Hartford, Michigan, three car loads of dead pigeons were shipped to market each day for forty days, making a total of 11,880,000 birds.  It is recorded that another Michigan town marketed 15,840,000 in two years.”

Should we bring the pigeons back from extinction?  Forests were where they nested, where they roosted for the night, and home to their primary food resource, nuts.  While the hunters were taking a devastating toll on the birds, others were obliterating their habitat.  Loggers eagerly turned forests into gold.  Farmers nuked forests to expand cropland and pasture.  Explosive population growth converted forest ecosystems into hideous hotbeds of industrial civilization.  Greetings GMO pigeons!  Welcome to our nightmare!  Enjoy your resurrection!

Kolbert’s book is easy to read, not too long, provides us with a provocative look in the mirror, and encourages us to reexamine our blind faith in unquestioned beliefs.  She gave us a pair of dueling quotes.  Hippy visionary Stewart Brand once asserted, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”  This annoyed biologist E. O. Wilson, who responded, “We are not as gods.  We’re not yet sentient or intelligent enough to be much of anything.” 

A one hour interview with Kolbert discussing this book is [HERE].  The message is, if you’re not pessimistic about the future, you’re not paying attention. 

Kolbert, Elizabeth, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, Crown, New York, 2021.

Windfall

McKenzie Funk’s book, Windfall, explores the question, “What are we doing about climate change?”  Readers are introduced to ambitious speculators who are eager to make enormous profits on new opportunities resulting from a warming planet.  They are not investing in research for sharply reducing carbon emissions.  They are obsessed with keeping the economic growth monster on life support.  Climate change investment funds will soon become gold mines, creating a flood of new billionaires.  The future is rosy as hell.

Mining corporations are slobbering with anticipation as Greenland’s ice melts, providing access to billions of dollars worth of zinc, gold, diamonds, and uranium.  A defunct zinc mine, which operated from 1973 to 1990, provides a sneak preview of the nightmares to come.  The Black Angel mine dumped its tailings into a nearby fjord.  The zinc and lead in the runoff was absorbed by the blue mussels, which were eaten by fish, which were eaten by seals.  Investors won, the ecosystem lost.

Other entrepreneurs are anxious to turn the torrents of melt water into hydropower, providing cheap energy for new server farms and aluminum smelters.  Meanwhile, the tourism industry is raking in big money serving the growing swarms of disaster tourists.

As the Arctic ice melts, sea levels could rise as much as 20 feet (6 m).  A number of low-lying islands are already on death row — the Maldives, Tuvalu, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Seychelles, Bahamas, and the Carteret Islands.  Islanders are pissed that faraway rich folks are destroying their home.  Bath time is also predicted for large portions of Manila, Alexandria, Lagos, Karachi, Kolkata, Jakarta, Dakar, Rio, Miami, Ho Chi Minh City, and a fifth of Bangladesh.  There may be a billion climate refugees by 2050.

Five nations have shorelines on the icy Arctic Ocean: Canada, Russia, Norway, Denmark (Greenland), and the United States (Alaska).  Beneath the rapidly melting ice are billions of dollars worth of oil, gas, and coal.  We would be wise to leave this energy in the ground but, of course, we won’t.  There will be abundant testosterone-powered discussion over borderlines in the region, and this might include blizzards of bombs and bullets.  Both Canada and Denmark claim ownership of Hans Island.  Russia has planted a flag on the North Pole.

A melted Arctic will also provide a new shipping lane, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific, providing a much shorter and much cheaper alternative to the Panama Canal.  Both sides of the Northwest Passage are owned by Canada, but other nations, like the U.S. and China, disagree that Canada owns the waterway.  They prefer it to be an international route of innocent passage, like Gibraltar.  Funk took a cruise on the Montreal, a frigate of the Royal Canadian Navy.  They were engaged in Arctic war games, which included an exercise that seized a naughty American ship.

The core driver of climate change is simple: “add carbon, get heat.”  As carbon emissions skyrocket, so does the temperature of the atmosphere.  We can’t undo what has already been done, damage that will persist for centuries, but it would be rather intelligent to quit throwing gasoline on the fire.  Unfortunately, the titans of capitalism have a different plan.  Renewable energy cannot power our nightmare, and environmental activism has failed.  Governments are careful to ignore the prickly issue, because voters delight in living as wastefully as possible.  Technology is our only hope.

Cutting emissions would blindside our way of life (and so will not cutting emissions).  But cleverly adapting to climate change will greatly enrich the titans, temporarily.  There’s growing interest in seawalls, storm surge barriers, and floating cities.  Israelis are making big money selling snowmaking and desalinization equipment.  Biotech firms are working like crazy to produce expensive drought resistant seeds.  India is building a 2,100 mile (3,380 km) fence along its border with Bangladesh, to block the flood of refugees that are expected when rising seas submerge low-lying regions.

Others dream of making big money creating monopolies on the supply of freshwater, which is diminishing as the torrents of melting ice rush into the salty oceans.  There are two things that people will spend their remaining cash on, water and food.  Crop yields are sure to drop in a warming climate.  This will lead to rising prices, and create exciting opportunities for profiteering.  A number of wealthy nations are ruthlessly acquiring cropland in third world regions.

Funk visited Nathan Myhrvold, a Microsoft billionaire, who now runs Intellectual Ventures.  His plan is to keep economic growth on life support by creating a virtual volcano called StratoShield.  Volcanoes spew ash into the atmosphere, which reduces incoming solar heat, and cools off the climate.  StratoShield would spray 2 to 5 million metric tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere every year.  This would make the sunlight one percent dimmer, and enable life as we know it to continue, with reduced guilt, for a bit longer (maybe) — hooray!

Funk also visited Alan Robock, who opposes the plan.  Volcanic ash is not harmless.  The goal of StratoShield is to block heat.  The catastrophic side effect is that it’s like to severely alter rain patterns in the southern hemisphere, spurring horrendous droughts, deluges, and storm systems.  On the bright side, life in Microsoft country, the Pacific Northwest, would remain fairly normal, and the sulfur dioxide sunsets would be wonderfully colorful.

Funk didn’t mention that the geoengineering, if it actually worked, would have to be done permanently.  Beneath the shield, ongoing emissions would continue to increase the atmosphere’s carbon load.  If the shield was discontinued, and full sunlight resumed, the consequences would not be pleasant.

Myhrvold’s former boss, Bill Gates, is running a foundation that’s spending billions of dollars to eradicate disease.  The mosquitoes of the world are nervous, fearing near term extinction.  The foundation is dedicated to promoting the wellbeing of humankind.  Oddly, it has spent nothing on research to cut carbon emissions.  Folks will be spared from disease so they can enjoy drought and deluge.  There is no brilliant win/win solution.  The path to balance will be long and painful.

Funk finished his book in 2012, a very hot year for climate juju all around the world.  He had spent six years hanging out with tycoons, “the smartest guys in the room.”  All were obsessed with conjuring highly complex ways of making even more money by keeping our insane civilization on life support, for as long as possible, by any means necessary.

Climate change is a manmade disaster, and those most responsible are the wealthy consumers of the north.  Funk imagines that the poor folks of the south will be hammered, while the primary perpetrators remain fairly comfortable.  It’s a wicked problem because “we are not our own victims.”  We feel no obligation to reduce our emissions or consumption.  We care little about misery in far away places. 

I am not convinced that the north will get off easy.  Anyone who spends time studying the Earth Crisis will eventually conclude that humans are remarkably clever, but pathologically irrational.  We’ve created a reality far too complex for our tropical primate brains.  We’ve created a culture that burns every bridge it crosses.  Funk reminds us that, “We should remember that there is also genius in simplicity.”  I agree.

Funk, McKenzie, Windfall — The Booming Business of Global Warming, Penguin Press, New York, 2014.