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.

Wild Free and Happy Sample 58

 

[Note: This is the fifty-eighth sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews.  These samples are not freestanding pieces.  They will be easier to understand if you start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE — if you happen to have some free time.  If you prefer audiobooks, Michael Dowd is in the process of reading and recording my book HERE.

[Continued from Climate Crisis 03 Sample 57]

 

Climate Crisis “Solutions”

Peter Wadhams, the melting Arctic expert, is totally freaked out by the expected impacts of the approaching climate catastrophe.  He notes that there are a number of proposed techno-responses, but none of them provide an effective cure for the nightmare we’ve created.  An effective cure, if there is one, will be something that has not yet been invented. 

Meanwhile, he thought that we should desperately throw all caution to the wind, and do whatever we can that might slightly slow the disaster down a wee bit, until the miracles arrive.  He even suggested building more nuclear power plants.  I disagree.  Let’s take a peek at a few of the proposed “solutions.”

Nuclear Power

Some folks advocate for nuclear energy because reactors emit no greenhouse gases while they operate.  Like solar panels, wind turbines, and hydroelectric dams, reactors also have a limited lifespan.  Building new nuke plants requires large quantities of materials that require fossil energy for their production — cement and steel for example.  Like coal and oil, uranium is not a renewable resource.  Like coal and oil, the use of uranium has serious long-term negative impacts. 

If the objective is to reduce current carbon emissions, building numerous new nuke plants is not the most effective approach.  Every power switch has an OFF position.  Satellite photos of the Earth at night reveal tremendous amounts of wasted energy, and this waste is just the tip of the iceberg.  [LOOK]  My grandparents and mother were born in homes without electricity, as were 300,000 years of their ancestors. 

The expiration date for our maximum impact lifestyle is approaching, as we smack into more and more immovable limits.  Even if we immediately and permanently turned OFF industrial civilization, the ice would keep melting, the Arctic would keep warming, the permafrost would keep melting, atmospheric carbon would continue increasing, etc., etc.  Do we need electric cars?  Can we live without cars?

Paul Dorfman pointed out the embarrassing fact that climate change is leading to rising sea levels.  The Greenland ice sheet is approaching a tipping point that would make accelerated melting inevitable.  If miracles don’t rescue us, we’re going to see more coastal and inland flooding.  “With 41 percent of all nuclear plants world-wide operating on the coast, nuclear may prove an important risk.”  May?  At least 100 of these plants are just a few meters above sea level.

“The near-term effect of rising mean sea-levels at coastal nuclear installations will be felt most profoundly during extreme storm conditions when strong winds and low atmospheric pressure bring about a localised increase in sea-level known as a ‘storm surge.’”  Inland plants also face warming-related risks — wildfires, river floods, low river levels.  If river temperatures get too warm, their ability to properly cool reactors is diminished.  Worldwide, more than a half billion people live within 50 miles (80 km) of a nuke plant.

William and Rosemarie Alley wrote the book on nuclear waste storage.  In 2012, the U.S. had generated lots of high-level radioactive wastes — 70,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel, and 20,000 giant canisters of military material.  Waste was stored at 121 sites in 39 states.  William worked for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and it was his job to find a secure place to safely store this stuff forever. 

At first, folks thought it would become harmless in 600 years or so.  Eventually, they realized that some of the waste would be dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years.  It needed to be stored in a geologic repository, in strong deep bedrock that would not collapse if a future ice age put a mile thick ice sheet above it.  It had to be dry, seismically stable, accessible to transport, and inaccessible to terrorists.

After 25 years of research, costing $10 billion, Alley recommended the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada, which was as close to perfect as possible.  President Obama got elected, and promptly rejected the site, for political reasons.  President Trump tried to revive the project, but failed.  Now it’s 2021, and there is far more high-level waste sitting around.  The U.S. has 60 nuclear power plants, and there are 443 in the world.  Guess how many nations are using geologic repositories.  Zero.  One in Finland might open in 2023.  People like using electricity, but few fully trust the honesty of corporate interests, and the integrity of their government servants.

Edwin Lyman wrote a 148 page report on the new generation of “advanced” reactors that may be put into commercial use at some point in the future.  He works for the Union of Concerned Scientists, an organization dedicated to objective analysis.  It is financially and politically independent of the nuclear power industry’s interests.  The industry makes a number of impressive claims about the technological advances of the new reactors.  Lyman has reservations.  Different is not the same as better.  He labels ten claims, including improved safety and security, to be “misleading.”  The report is a free download.  Enjoy!

Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Sequestration (BECCS)

BECCSs was another big idea.  Instead of burning filthy coal, we could grow, gather, and burn lots of “replaceable” biomass fuel — grasses, trees, crop residues, etc.  These fuels would absorb CO₂ as they grew, and then we could burn this renewable resource to make happy green electricity.  The chimney smoke from the burning would be processed to remove the CO₂, which could then be safely stored underground forever in some way.  The technology for capturing the CO₂ is expensive, guzzles lots of energy, and is not yet feasible for full scale deployment.

Net Zero

James Dyke, Robert Watson, and Wolfgang Knorr are three venerable climate science elders who have been watching the clan of eco-wizards contemplate possible solutions to the climate crisis for many years.  They wrote, “It has been estimated that BECCS would demand between 0.4 and 1.2 billion hectares of land.  That’s 25% to 80% of all the land currently under cultivation.” (Land now used to produce food.)

The three lads wrote a fascinating and heartbreaking essay on the elusive goal of net zero emissions.  [HERE]  The climate crisis is a consequence of having way too much CO₂ in the atmosphere, and adding more and more every day.  So, the apparent solution involved extracting the excess CO₂ from the air, while also sharply reducing the rate of current emissions.  The Holy Grail was “net zero” — extracting as much carbon as we emit, creating a healthy balance.  In maybe 30 years of net zero, bye-bye climate crisis, hello happy days!

Until 2021, the three professors kept their opinions to themselves.  The technosphere is a sacred realm of miracles.  Expressing doubts is heresy.  Heresy can rubbish your reputation, and jeopardize future research grants.  They understood that the notion of net zero was daffy — “burn now, pay later.” 

If we plant a bunch of trees, they’ll sequester carbon as they grow, and we can continue living recklessly.  This encourages blind faith in future techno-miracles, and it discourages everyone from making big changes in the here and now.  Consequently, carbon in the atmosphere keeps increasing.  The professors finally came out of the closet, and shared their pain.  Hooray!

Bonnie Waring laments humankind’s hallucination that, with a bit of encouragement, the world’s forests can absorb enough carbon to end the climate crisis.  “But the fact is that there aren’t enough trees in the world to offset society’s carbon emissions — and there never will be.”

Solar Radiation Management (SRM)

The goal of SRM is to artificially increase albedo by frequently dispersing tons reflective substances high in the sky, year after year, forever.  McKenzie Funk wrote about Microsoft billionaire Nathan Myhrvold, who was working on a planet saving miracle.  His StratoShield project 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 a bit longer, maybe.

While this might deflect some incoming heat, ongoing CO₂ emissions would continue building up in the atmosphere and oceans.  Will vegetation be OK with reduced sunlight?  Will precipitation patterns change?  Apparently the hallucination is that by reducing incoming heat, the Artic would quit melting, and humankind could live happily ever after.  Another variant is cirrus cloud thinning — modifying high-altitude clouds to make them thinner, less of an insulating blanket.  This would allow the planet to release more heat from the atmosphere.

Direct Air Capture (DAC)

Direct air capture (DAC) is an experimental technology that removes CO₂ (but not methane) from the atmosphere.  The captured carbon can be permanently stored in the ground, at significant expense, or sold for commercial uses.  For example, it could be pumped into active oil wells to enhance oil recovery, or converted into a synthetic fuel, or used to carbonate bubbly beverages, etc.

Alister Doyle reported on a radical DAC experiment.  Climeworks, a Swiss business, is developing a DAC facility in Iceland.  Big fans suck in air, the CO₂ is removed, mixed with water to form a mild acid, and then pumped into basaltic rock that is 2,600 to 6,500 feet (800 to 2,000 meters) below ground.  Two years later, 95 percent of what was CO₂ is petrified, turned to stone, where it will safely remain for millions of years.  The basaltic formations suitable for these operations are only found under about 5 percent of the world’s dry land, but more are available underwater. 

This is an energy-intensive process, and Iceland was chosen because it produces cheap and abundant zero carbon geothermal energy.  In 2020, there were 15 DAC plants in operation around the world, capturing more than 9,000 tons of CO₂ per year, which was “the equivalent of the annual emissions of just 600 Americans, each producing about 15 tonnes of climate-changing pollution.”

Robert Hunziker wrote about a DAC plant in the southwest U.S. that will begin operation in 2024.  Powered by natural gas, it will capture one million tons of CO₂ per year.  Meanwhile, worldwide human activities are emitting 4.2 million tons every hour.  In this plant, air is sucked in, CO₂ is extracted by a chemical solution (like potassium hydroxide), more chemicals then transform it into pellets of 50 percent CO₂, the pellets are heated to 900°C, producing a gas that can be stored underground forever.

By building a global system of 100 million of these processing units (as soon as possible), enough CO₂ could be extracted from the air to keep up with global emissions (but not the carbon already in the atmosphere).  Extraction could be done at the bargain price of $330 to $800 per ton.  DAC is not used for high concentration point source emissions, like those from the worlds many cement factories, or biomass power plants.  These operations can use Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) systems.

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS)

Jorgen Randers believed that the excess carbon in the atmosphere could be successfully extracted by building 33,000 large Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) plants, and keeping them running forever.  Permanently storing huge amounts of a gaseous compound is far more challenging than storing gold or diamonds.  Also challenging is finding enormous amounts of money to build 33,000 plants.  CCS was a super-delicious fantasy.  We could keep burning coal, remove the carbon from the smoke, and avoid the dreadful need to sharply cut other forms of carbon emissions.  Not one coal plant got a CCS system.  It was too expensive, and it was not mandatory.

Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)

CDR is also intended to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere.  It uses different methods than DAC.  Plant more trees.  Encourage agriculture to sequester more carbon in the soil.  Restore wetlands.  Spread nutrients on the ocean surface to stimulate blooms of phytoplankton (tiny plants) to increase their intake of CO₂.  One study found that oceanic phytoplankton declined about 40 percent between 1950 and 2008.  The prime suspect is rising surface temperatures.

Geoengineering (Climate Engineering)

Geoengineering is a word used to describe large scale interventions 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, including expense.  Unintended consequences are guaranteed.

Green New Deal (GND)

Every day our minds are blasted with misinformation.  Humans have created a way of life that is so complicated that it’s impossible for anyone to understand more than a tiny bit of it.  Most folks are clueless about sustainability.  This is why U.S. legislators promoting the Green New Deal program are not laughed off the stage.  It sounds like a sweet dream.

The GND became a trendy idea around 2018, but legislation to pursue it was defeated a year later.  Its primary objective was to eliminate global warming by rapidly moving away from fossil energy, and replacing it with clean, green, zero-carbon renewable energy.  Believers shouted with joy and celebration.  It’s not too late.  We can save the world, and still enjoy our modern consumer lifestyle in an advanced society.  Let’s do it!

Mining.com is a news source for the mining industry.  Its editor, Frik Els, praised the efforts of frontline GND proponents Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Greta Thunberg — “mining’s unlikely heroines.”  Why?  Because the Green New Deal would be a multi-trillion dollar godsend for mining and manufacturing corporations.  The nation’s power system would require massive changes, and lots of new high-tech infrastructure.

Moving from unsustainable fossil energy to unsustainable “carbon-free” energy would require enormous amounts of minerals to make the needed steel, concrete, copper, lithium, silicon, etc.  Mining operations and industrial centers primarily run on fossil energy, not breezes and sunbeams.  Fossil fuel is the primary energy source for making solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars, and high capacity batteries. 

These “green” devices have limited lifespans, and must be replaced periodically.  This regular maintenance requires ongoing fossil energy inputs, and carbon emission outputs, until civilization moves off the stage.  Like Siamese twins, industrial civilization and the climate crisis are inseparable components of the same unsustainable monstrosity.

In 2019, Jeff Gibbs produced the documentary Planet of the Humans, which put a spotlight on the GND’s heavy dependence on magical thinking.  Powerful corporate interests are dedicated to keeping consumer society on life support for as long as humanly possible, because it is the engine of their growth and profits.  They generously fund celebrities that preach the GND gospel of a limitless beautiful future, 100% clean energy, net zero emissions, sustainable growth, and jobs, jobs, jobs!

Max Blumenthal described what happened next.  Immediately following the release of Gibbs’ film, a mob of well-known eco-celebrities exploded with bloodthirsty rage, loudly denounced the demonic film, and demanded that it be suppressed.  This explosion of hysterical fury had the unintended consequence of stimulating a tidal wave of publicity for the film.  On YouTube, it got millions of views in a month.  The intense drama also tarnished the reputations of the noisy ultra-righteous (well paid) censors.

In March 2021, Derrick Jensen and team published Bright Green Lies, and Julia Barnes released the Bright Green Lies documentary, based on that book.  Having learned their embarrassing lesson, celebrity critics largely took this as an opportunity to quietly go fishing in North Dakota.  Both the Planet of the Humans and Bright Green Lies devoted significant effort to describing the dodgy performance of mainstream environmentalism, and its big money supporters. 

In May 2021, Alice Friedemann published Life After Fossil Fuels, which filled in important missing pieces.  She didn’t spank eco-celebrities, or provide a “solutions” chapter.  She directed her full attention to simply explaining, in great detail, exactly why the bright green vision was irrational, impossible, nonsensical, and unaffordable (the inconvenient truth).  Her readers are better able to see through the fog of misinformation, and keep both feet firmly planted in reality, where they belong. 

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Randers, Jorgen and Ulrich Goluke, “An earth system model shows self-sustained melting of permafrost even if all man-made GHG emissions stop in 2020,” Scientific Reports, (2020) 10:18456  [LINK]

Ranganathan, Janet, et al., “Shifting Diets for a Sustainable Food Future,” World Resources Institute, Washington D.C., 2016.  [LINK]

Robbins, Jim, “The West’s Great River Hits Its Limits: Will the Colorado Run Dry?” Yale Environment 360, January 14, 2019.  [LINK]

Robine, Jean-Marie, et al., “Death toll exceeded 70,000 in Europe during the summer of 2003,” Comptes Rendus Biologies, February 2008.  [LINK]

Santora, Tara, “What's the hottest temperature the human body can endure?” Live Science, July 31, 2021.  [LINK]

Second State of the Carbon Cycle Report, U.S. Global Change Research Program, Washington, D.C., 2018.  [LINK]

Seibert, Megan, and William Rees, “Through the Eye of a Needle: An Eco-Heterodox Perspective on the Renewable Energy Transition,” Energies, MDPI, July 26, 2021.  [LINK]

Shivaram, Deepa, “Heat Wave Killed An Estimated 1 Billion Sea Creatures,” NPR, July 9, 2021.  [LINK]

Siberian Times, “’Big bang’ and ‘pillar of fire’ as latest of two new craters forms this week in the Arctic,” Siberian Times, July 2, 2017.  [LINK]

Smith, Tierney, “Warming oceans face CO₂ tipping point,” Climate Change News, January 24, 2012.  [LINK]

Steffen, Will, et al., “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene,” PNAS, August 14, 2018.  [LINK]

Struzik, Ed, “How Thawing Permafrost Is Beginning to Transform the Arctic,” Yale Environment 360, January 21, 2020.  [LINK]

Sukhova, Valeria, and Olga Gertcyk, “Bubbling methane craters and super seeps: is this the worrying new face of the undersea Arctic?” Siberian Times, November 19, 2020.  [LINK]

Sullivan, Cody and Rebecca Lindsey, “2017 State of the climate: Ocean uptake of human-produced carbon,” NOAA Climate.gov, August 1, 2018.  [LINK]

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Waage, Malin, et al., “Geological controls of giant crater development on the Arctic seafloor,” Scientific Reports, May 21, 2020.  [LINK]

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

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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.

 

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.