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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Wild Free and Happy Sample 55

[Note: This is the fifty-fifth 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.

CLIMATE CRISIS

The focus of this book is human eco-history.  Climate change has influenced our journey since day one, when our tree-dwelling ancestors had to move onto the savannah.  Today’s crisis is climate change on steroids.  It’s doing things that humans have never experienced before — countless huge, accelerating, scary, uncontrollable changes that we don’t fully comprehend.  Our beloved techno magic is incompetent to cleverly swish the bad stuff away.  Say hello to a thrilling future of big surprises.

For many folks, the climate crisis is not chasing them down the alley every day, snarling and viciously snapping at their asses.  Now and then we hear stories and see some pictures.  News sources tend to quietly step around the embarrassing subject.  Too much yucky news can make their audience uncomfortable and unfaithful.  We get some peeks at reality now and then, but most of the story remains behind closed curtains.

For many, the crisis can seem like a wee dark cloud on the distant horizon.  Day to day life in the cubicle farm, or the family room, is rarely affected.  But, if you make an effort to listen, the jungle drums are regularly talking about highly improbable flash floods, hundred year storms, persistent droughts, unprecedented heat spells, landslides, etc.  These weird stories from outer space can often seem impossible, unbelievable, and deniable.

The climate crisis is not a sudden asteroid-strike event, like the destruction of the World Trade Center towers in 2001.  It’s a vastly bigger and stronger disturbance that will eventually be affecting everyone, everything, everywhere, to a breathtaking degree, and causing much irreversible damage.  It’s the unintentional result of way too many people, living way too hard, for way too long.

Hopium addicts jabber about “solving” the climate crisis, and looking forward to a sustainable green future.  There is nothing that the magicians of technology cannot fix.  Hope fiends have blind faith that “it’s not too late.”  Buy an electric car, put solar panels on your roof, shop like there’s no tomorrow, and enjoy a long and fabulous life. 

The dreamy perceptions of these hope fiends reflects a deficit of understanding, in combination with the Tinker Bell Effect.  In the Peter Pan story, Tinker Bell is the fluttering fairy of magical thinking, “Just think a happy thought and you can fly!”  Albert Bartlett was amused by the popular fantasy that if you called something “sustainable” enough times, then <shazaam!> it was!

Megan Seibert and William Rees did an excellent job of explaining why sustainable alternative energy visions are neither sustainable nor possible.  Their report describes why “the pat notion of ‘affordable clean energy’ views the world through a narrow keyhole that is blind to innumerable economic, ecological, and social costs.”  Alice Friedemann examined the alternative energy options, and described why none of them were an effective or realistic solution.

In addition to the hopium addicts are the shameless bullshit hucksters.  They are supported by wealthy interests that want to keep the planet-thrashing status quo on life support ventilators for as long as humanly possible.  Their cash cows produce generous profits, but exist at the expense of the family of life.  Bullshit artists have been highly successful at sowing the seeds of doubt.  Climate change is a hoax promoted by devil worshippers!  We’re regularly splattered with a firehose of deliberate misinformation.

The unfortunate reality is that 7.8 billion people cannot simply think a happy thought and become ecologically harmless.  Climate change is the stinky steaming 100 ton turd in the swimming pool.  It horrifies us, because it rubbishes our fantasies of human supremacy, endless progress, and the best is yet to come.  It makes our beloved “high standard of living” look like an insanely stupid hallucination (which it is) — a reckless high speed joyride that leaves the planet in ruins.

The climate crisis is an enormous fast-moving subject that is generating a staggering amount of articles, reports, books, and videos.  The future has yet to be written, but a number of current trends have a clear trajectory — warming climate, melting ice, thawing permafrost, rising seas, extreme weather events, etc.  I’m not going to play the prophet game, but I do feel obligated to point out some critical climate-oriented trends that obviously appear to be on a treacherous path. 

The information on the following pages is a very rough sketch, like a cop’s bodycam video of a chaotic crime scene.  It’s written at one moment in time, from one perspective, and is far from complete.  My plan here is to present a sampler of core ideas, and toss in links to interesting sources.  Readers who want to further explore the issue can follow the links, and feed their hungry brains. 

Albedo

When incoming sunbeams hit white regions of ice and snow, 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, absorb more incoming heat, and then radiate it.  Open water has an albedo of 0.1. 

When albedo reflectivity is diminished, more heat can enter the atmosphere and accumulate.  Ice gets thinner, breaks up, and retreats.  Then, more solar heat can hit more open water or bare ground.  More of the thick ice that used to exist year-round now melts away during the warmer months.  The duration of ice-free summer periods is lengthening.  This pattern is called a positive feedback loop — more warmth, more melting, more warmth, etc….  It’s the engine of runaway warming, the arctic death spiral.

Arctic 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 around both the north and south poles.  Today, when it’s summer in the Northern Hemisphere, the view from outer space shows a white Antarctic, and a blue Arctic.  As it melts, the ancient northern ice sheet is gradually becoming an open ocean.  With a stampede of well-intended, highly-destructive booboos, human cleverness and runaway warming are changing the planet, and the future.

Peter Wadhams has been studying Arctic ice for 50 years.  He has a way-above-average understanding of the danger we’re in.  He’s been working hard to alert us, but not many are getting the message.  Arctic ice is extremely precious, because it’s essential for maintaining vital climate balances.  Its cool temperature, and highly reflective whiteness, have enabled the existence of life as we know it. 

Over the last 70,000 years, climate trends have typically been a zigzag pattern of frequent erratic swings, hot-cold-hot-cold….  Today, we are living in the rear end of an 11,700 year era of unusually stabile warm temperatures — a weird deviation that enabled the emergence of fairly reliable agriculture, and allowed 7.8 billion people to survive at the same time (temporarily).  The long-term trends imply that we’re long overdue for a new ice age.  Fat chance!  Instead, we’re speeding out of control down the hot lane.

The planet is sliding down the path to a largely ice-free Arctic.  A few decades ago, the North Pole as covered with ice 10 to 12 feet thick.  No more.  “With the steady disappearance of polar ice cover, we are losing a vast air conditioning system that stabilized the climate for thousands of years.”  We have been living in “the Goldilocks climate” — not too hot, not too cold, just right!  That pattern has been disrupted by rapidly overloading the atmosphere with ancient carbon.

Wadhams lamented, “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.”  In 2016, he wrote a short and easy to understand summary of his findings, with excellent illustrations.  I strongly recommend checking it out [HERE].  YouTube also has many Wadhams videos.

Morgan McFall-Johnsen described the rapid melting of Greenland’s ice in 2019.  That year, in just five days, 55 billion tons of melt water rushed out of Greenland’s ice sheet, “enough to cover the state of Florida in almost 5 inches of water.”  In their most pessimistic scenario, scientists had predicted that this level of melting would not be reached until 2070.  We did it 50 years ahead of schedule!  “The Arctic is warming almost twice as quickly as the global average.”    The times are changing.  Trouble ahead. 

Greenhouse Gases

Under normal natural conditions, CO₂ is precious.  If there was no CO₂, there would be no plants or animals.  During photosynthesis, plants take in CO₂ and emit oxygen.  At the same time, animals breathe in oxygen and exhale CO₂.  It’s a harmonious circle dance, normally.  But the balance gets blasted when we extract millions of years of ancient carbon from deep underground, burn it, and totally overload the atmosphere.

The atmosphere is also precious.  It allows incoming solar heat to pass through, and warm the planet below, which enables the survival of the family of life.  It also allows some heat to escape back into outer space, but not as much as it lets in.  So, the atmosphere acts like a comfortable greenhouse.  Wadhams noted that 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).

There are several compounds that help the greenhouse maintain a happy climate.  In normal times, the greenhouse is wonderful magic act.  In crazy times, greenhouse gas overloads can disrupt the global party.  The four main greenhouse gases are carbon dioxide (CO₂) methane (CH₄), nitrous oxide (N₂O), and water vapor (H₂O).  CO₂ is responsible for maybe 55 percent of the current imbalance.  In preindustrial times, CO₂ levels in the atmosphere were 280 ppm (parts per million).  In 2021 they reached 420 ppm — estimated to be the highest concentration in more than 3 million years (or 4 million, or 15 million).

Methane levels are also soaring, from preindustrial 700 ppb (parts per billion) to around 2,000 ppb in 2019.  Methane remains in the atmosphere for 7 to 10 years, during which its impact can be 100 to 200 times worse than CO₂.  Then, it breaks down into CO₂, which can remain in the atmosphere much longer.  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. 

Nitrous oxide is a minor offender, found at about 300 ppb in the atmosphere, where it can remain for 120 years.  Its source is primarily synthetic nitrogen fertilizers. 

Water vapor can act like an insulating blanket.  As the Arctic warms, its air can hold more moisture, and a layer of water vapor (clouds) helps to retain warm air.

The bottom line here is that manmade carbon emissions have been working hard to turn the delightful greenhouse into an overheated hothouse.  Too much heat is being retained in the atmosphere, frigid regions are melting, and a slippery hideous crisis has popped out of the womb screaming.

The good news here is that we are beginning to learn a very important lesson.  Mistakes can be fabulous teachers.  The bad news is that we are learning this at a time when a growing number of experts believe that the crisis is already past the point of no return, off the leash, sprinting away, disregarding our frantic commands.  Far too late, the wizards have discovered that the unusually warm and stable climate that we used to enjoy was possible because of a priceless treasure of snow and ice, which is now riding off into the sunset. 

Clouds

Fred Pearce described how clouds also play a role in the greenhouse magic act.  When the sun is shining, bright clouds can reflect away 30 to 60 percent of incoming solar heat.  Over the seas, stratus and stratocumulus clouds shade the ocean, so less heat is absorbed by the water.  During the day, low clouds provide cooling shade, but after sunset they become a heat retaining blanket. 

Whether clouds make shade or trap heat “depends on how reflective they are, how high they are, and whether it is day or night.”  Until recently, experts believed that the conflicting effects of clouds were about equal, so they balanced out.  That belief is going extinct.

Satellite data from NASA indicates that since 2013, cloud cover over the oceans has declined, at the same time that global average temperatures have risen sharply.  Other studies indicate that in warmer years, there are fewer low-level clouds in the tropics.  This indicates that in a warming climate, clouds are expected to get thinner, completely burn off, or not form at all.  This would lead to even higher temperatures, and faster global warming — a positive feedback loop of more heat, less clouds, more heat….

Pearce wrote, “Recent climate models project that a doubling of atmospheric CO₂ above pre-industrial levels could cause temperatures to soar far above previous estimates.”  In pre-industrial times, CO₂ levels in the atmosphere were 280 ppm.  Double that would be 560 ppm.  In 2021 they reached 420 ppm.  The higher they go, the hotter it gets, the fewer the clouds….

Carbon Emissions Skyrocket

As described in earlier chapters, our ancestors began acting like odd animals long, long ago.  Our quirky path picked up momentum with fire making, the domestication of plants and animals, and the emergence of civilization.  The turbo thrusters ignited with the arrival of the Industrial Revolution, when we plunged headlong into the brave new world of fossil energy.  With this shift, more and more carbon was emitted by human activity, and absorbed by the oceans, atmosphere, and greenery.

The twentieth century was radically different from all previous time.  Foolishly raiding a massive 500 million year treasure chest of highly potent energy enabled the rapid development of countless planet-thrashing technologies.  Unencumbered by foresight, dangerously clever humans looted the ancient hydrocarbon cemeteries, hauled much of the buried treasure into the daylight world, and burned it — to enjoy a brief, fantastically ridiculous, explosion of childish decadence.

In 2000, environmental historian J. R. McNeill wrote an eco-obituary for the twentieth century, Something New Under the Sun.  This book revealed the nightmares that exploded during that century from hell.  Later, as the years clicked past, McNeill realized that his book did not say enough.  The years following World War II were so spectacularly insane that they made the first 45 years of the century look somewhat wholesome.

So, in 2014, McNeill and Peter Engelke published The Great Acceleration, which focused on the era after 1945, when the poop slammed hard into the fan.  This era was the freak show in which I have spent my life’s journey, the freak show when the human population more than tripled, the freak show that the living generation perceives to be the normal way of life.

They wrote that in 1750, when the Industrial Revolution was still in diapers, 3 million tons of carbon were released into the atmosphere each year.  By 1850, emissions soared to 50 million tons.  It was 1,200 million tons in 1950, 4,000 million in 1970, and 9,500 million by 2015.  How smart was that? 

Steven Koonin noted that of the CO₂ we emit today, between 30 and 55 percent will still be in the atmosphere 100 years from now, and between 15 and 30 percent will remain for 1,000 years.  It does not promptly dissipate, so ongoing emissions ratchet up the concentration in the atmosphere.  Reducing emissions only slows the increase.  The gearshift has no reverse.

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.  A portion of these emissions remain in the atmosphere for centuries, so their concentration continuously grows.  The current trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions is on a path to double by 2075.  

Billions continue living like its 1999.  Ignorance is bliss.  John Gowdy concluded, “The effects of fossil fuel burning are irreversible on a time scale relevant to humans.”  We’ve started something we cannot stop. 

Terrestrial Permafrost

Peter Wadhams noted that permafrost is buried under dry land across the Arctic, spread across an area 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 (it does not “melt”).  Soils in this permafrost contain lots of organic carbon, plant material that lived in ages past, but froze before fully decomposing.  Unlike offshore (sea bottom) permafrost, terrestrial permafrost does not contain frozen methane.  But when it thaws and decays, microbial life can then create and emit CO₂, methane, and nitrous oxide. 

Susan Natali, an Arctic ecologist, studies permafrost, climate change, and greenhouse gases.  In the Northern Hemisphere, about 25 percent of the land area sits above permafrost, a layer of frozen soil, rocks, water, and organic material.  Some of it has been frozen for up to 40,000 years.  Permafrost contains about 1,500 billion tons of carbon — twice as much as the carbon already in the atmosphere, and three times as much as the carbon stored in the world’s forest biomass.

Temperatures in the Arctic are rising twice as fast as they are in the rest of the world, a trend likely to continue indefinitely.  This warming is thawing the upper layers of permafrost.  “Not all of the carbon that’s in permafrost will be released.  Our current expectations is about 10 to 15 percent of that carbon will be released into the atmosphere.  That said, if all of the carbon of permafrost was released, at that point, this is not going to be a habitable planet for humans.”

Craig Welch also commented on the daunting speed at which Arctic permafrost is thawing.  Until recently, scientists expected the rate of thawing to be gradual.  Reality disagrees.  When forest soils thaw and soften, trees get wobbly as root systems destabilize.  These “drunken trees” will eventually fall down.  When frozen slopes thaw, landslides happen, exposing the bones of mammoths and other ancient critters. 

Abrupt thaw increases the number of massive ground slumps.  These depressions collect melt water and rain, creating new ponds and lakes.  Bubbles of methane and CO₂ rise up out of the mud beneath the water.  As the climate warms, and Arctic lakes grow in size and number, greenhouse gas emissions from permafrost could triple.

Ed Struzik notes that permafrost consists of up to 80 percent frozen water.  When permafrost thaws, the land can turn to mud.  Craters up to the size of football stadiums are forming in the tundra, as the land sinks.  The Batagaika Crater in the Yana River Basin of Siberia is 0.6 miles (1 km) long, and 109 yards (100 m) deep.  These thaw slumps or landslides are increasing.  Stream flows are changing, and seashores are collapsing.  In the Northwest Territories, when a rapidly thawing cliff bordering the shores of a tundra lake collapsed, the 800,000 gallon lake drained in two hours.  In the Mackenzie River Delta, up to 15,000 of the 45,000 lakes are expected to dry up. 

With warming, willows and shrubs are now displacing tundra vegetation, which includes cranberries, blueberries, cloudberries, shrubs, sedges, and lichen.  This is affecting wildlife.  In 2006, there were 3,000 caribou on the Tuktoyaktuk Peninsula, now there are half as many.  They have less lichen to eat.  Musk oxen in Canada and reindeer in Siberia seem to be dying from ancient pathogens that are coming back to life. 

The U.S. Geological Survey wrote an excellent 68 page report on thermokarst.  This is a fairly new landform in the Northern Hemisphere that has come into existence since the 1980s.  Thermokarst is created as permafrost thaws, and the land surface changes in 23 different ways.  Common characteristics include lakes, sinkholes, pits, landslides, collapsed pingos, etc.  (See Wikipedia’s thermokarst page for breathtaking photos of massive permafrost melting.)

Louise Farquharson and team studied thermokarst development in the Canadian High Arctic.  They studied land that had been frozen for thousands of years.  Until recently, the buried permafrost had been in equilibrium with the climate.  They were surprised to find that, thanks to rising temperatures, permafrost thawing was reaching depths that were not predicted for another 70 years.  “Our data show that very cold permafrost (<10°C) at high latitudes is highly vulnerable to rapid near‐surface permafrost degradation due to climate change.”

Dahr Jamail is a nomadic journalist who writes powerful stories from the front lines of the climate blitzkrieg.  He visited the Inupiat village of Utqiagvik, Alaska.  The original village is collapsing into the sea, because the solid permafrost it was built on thawed and turned to pudding.  The new village is also destined to tumble into the sea.  Polar bears are gone.

A gravedigger said that in the past, solid permafrost was close to the surface.  It used to take three days of chopping to dig a grave.  Now it takes five hours.  “Roads, railroads, oil and gas infrastructure, airports, seaports, all these things were built across the Arctic on the assumption that the permafrost would stay frozen.”  Ooops!

Offshore Permafrost

In addition to terrestrial permafrost, there is also offshore permafrost, which lies beneath seabed sediments.  It originally formed under dry land thousands of years ago, when sea levels were much lower.  Offshore is what gives Peter Wadhams screaming nightmares.  It contains substantial amounts of methane hydrates (also called methane clathrates), and it is especially vulnerable to thawing as sea ice retreats, and water temperatures rise. 

Methane hydrates are frozen crystals of methane that will melt and burn when close to a flame.  They look like ice.  An estimated 10,400 gigatons of methane are stored in hydrate deposits.  When hydrate crystals melt, the methane is released.  In the entire Arctic Ocean, the hydrate deposits are estimated to contain 13 times the amount of carbon currently present in the atmosphere. 

Wadhams is especially focused on the East Siberian Arctic Shelf.  In the East Siberian Sea, this shelf consists of 810,000 square miles (2.1 million km²) of shallow water, of which 75 percent is less than 130 feet (40 m) deep.  In the good old days, the entire sea used to be covered year round with surface ice, which kept the water frigid or frozen.  This changed in 2005, when summer sea ice began disappearing, exposing seawater to the atmosphere.  Sunlight could now penetrate directly into the water and warm it.  Shallow waters warm faster than deeper areas.

For the first time in tens of thousands of years, warmer water could reach shallow regions of the seabed, causing permafrost to thaw.  As permafrost thawed, the frozen methane hydrates began melting, releasing plumes of methane bubbles.  In waters deeper than 330 feet (100 m), the methane oxidizes while rising, and the plume disappears before reaching the surface.  In the shallows, bubble plumes make it to the surface, and methane is released into the atmosphere. 

In a 2016 article, Wadhams described the possibility of a sudden catastrophic methane release from the East Siberian Sea.  Researchers “fear that a pulse of up to 50 gigatons of methane — some 8 percent of the estimated stock in the Arctic sediments — could be released within a very few years, starting soon.”  This would generate a surge of warming.  Russian scientists on site calculate that the probability of this is at least 50 percent.

[To be continued.  This chapter will contain 3 or 4 more segments.]