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.] 

Unsettled

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

A Farewell to Ice

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The End of Ice

 

The Climate Crisis is alive and thriving, a persistent embarrassing bummer that refuses to be wished away.  It is, by far, the biggest threat we’ve faced in the entire human saga.  We are, by far, the most unusual animals in the world, and we’ve bumbled and stumbled into a “deer in the headlights” situation of complete vulnerability.  The Climate Crisis shrugs with indifference, and faithfully serves us what we’ve ordered… rough justice.

In human society, there is a modest level of agreement that the crisis is real and intensifying.  There is vigorous disagreement over how severe the crisis may become, how quickly it may proceed, and whether there is anything non-idiotic we can do to soften impacts on the ecosystem.

Projections of long-term climate trends are based on computer models designed to predict how massively-complex natural processes are likely to interact over time, and how the consequences will affect life as we know it.  “Every single worst-case prediction made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) about the rise in temperatures, extreme weather, sea levels, and the increasing CO₂ content in the atmosphere have fallen short of reality,” wrote climate journalist Dahr Jamail.

Following this rapidly moving field of knowledge is not easy, because it’s a whirlwind of arguing experts, misinformation, hard truths, and shameless marketing gibberish.  The hard truths rarely appear in the daily headlines because they do not boost ratings, delight advertisers, or nurture consumer confidence.  Consumers are constantly fed steaming balderdash about progress and miracles.  Students might hear mild truths, if any (don’t scare the children!).  Many of the hard truth discussions are written for an audience of scientists, not general readers.  

Dahr Jamail is a journalist who is good at translating perplexing techno-jabber into ordinary English.  He is a Texas-born, fourth generation Lebanese-American.  In 1996, he moved to Alaska, where he got into mountain climbing.  As the years passed, he could see that the glaciers were melting and retreating.  The world was changing, and not in a good way.  In 2003, the fates called him to become a war correspondent in Iraq and Afghanistan.  In 2010, the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico seized his full attention, and he began covering the world war on our home, Earth.

Since then, he’s travelled extensively, visited highly impacted regions, chatted with locals, and received a full immersion baptism in bullshit-free reality.  He’s written more than a hundred climate stories.  In 2019, he published The End of Ice, a combo of fascinating travel journal, terrifying horror story, and voyage of personal growth.  The book allows readers to see and feel the painful changes that are taking place, from the perspective of direct, feet on the ground, experience.  Jamail is passionately interested in helping people understand the Climate Crisis.  Ignorance is curable.

In Brazil, he was amazed by the Amazon rainforest.  About one percent of the incoming sunlight makes it through the dense green canopy.  It’s always warm, and close to 100 percent humidity.  There isn’t much difference between day and night, or winter and summer.  The birdsong symphony is amazing.  Scientists have barely begun discovering the fantastic biodiversity of this rainforest.  A 25 day expedition discovered 80 new species.  Because of the rapid rate of destruction, countless species will go extinct before we learn of their existence.

This forest used to sequester carbon.  Now, because of drought, fires, clear-cuts, and development, it’s releasing more carbon than all of the traffic in the U.S.  Biologists who are overwhelmed by the stunning magnificence of the Amazon are deeply pained by the massive mindless destruction, and by the cold indifference of the world.  People have no connection to the planet, no connection with anything.

A week after leaving the Amazon, Jamail arrived in the Inupiat village of Utqiagvik, Alaska (formerly Barrow), on the Arctic Ocean.  The modern town is located east of the original village, which is decomposing, and collapsing into the sea.  The waves will eventually wash away modern Utqiagvik too.  Residents say that winters have been getting much shorter and warmer.  The sea ice is thinning, breaking up, and retreating.  Polar bears are gone. 

A gravedigger said that in the past, solid permafrost was just 10 to 12 inches (25 to 30 cm) below the surface.  Digging a grave took three days of strenuous chopping.  Now, it only takes five hours or less.  There are enormous deposits of permafrost scattered across the northern hemisphere.  As permafrost thaws, it softens and the land sinks.  In the thawing process, methane is released.  In 2017, enormous methane craters began blowing open on Siberia’s Yamal Peninsula, and in Canada’s Northwest Territories.  Big trouble is just getting warmed up.

NOTE: With warming, glaciers and ice “melt,” and permafrost deposits “thaw.”  To avoid looking like a dolt, never forget this!

Jamail visited Glacier National Park, home to a formerly thriving boreal forest.  A warming climate has delighted millions of hungry beetles, some of whom can now have two life cycles per year.  In the last 20 years, beetles have killed 40 million acres (16 million ha) of trees.  They kill fewer trees now, because fewer trees remain alive.  The latest serial killer is white pine blister rust, which has infected almost 85 percent of the trees in the park.

Another stop was Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, which is busy dying.  Because of warming and ocean acidification, most of the world’s coral will be gone by 2050.  Oceans are absorbing more than 30 percent of the CO₂ that humans emit.  Carbon in the water promotes the formation of carbonic acid, which is harmful to coral, mollusks, and some types of plankton.  Phytoplankton are tiny water plants that generate half of the planet’s oxygen supply.  All of my best friends are chronic oxygen addicts.

Florida is a state that should learn how to swim.  In the southern region, there are four national parks that “will be underwater in my lifetime.”  Sea level is rising because ice is rapidly melting, and because warming seawater expands in volume.  Salt water will eventually infiltrate the Florida freshwater aquifer.  Miami’s drainage system was designed to operate by gravity.  Rising sea levels and tides now prohibit the system from fully draining.  Many homes in South Miami are on septic systems.  These only work when they are above the water table.  When this is not the case, bathtubs fill with raw sewage — a delightful surprise!

Anyway, zooming out to the bigger picture, current trends do not suggest that we are hippity-hopping down the golden path to a brighter future.  “The last time there was this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was three million years ago, when temperatures were as high as they are expected to be in 2050, and sea levels were 70 feet (21 m) higher than they are today.”  Back in those days there were trees growing on the South Pole.

“Even if we immediately stopped all greenhouse emissions, it would take another 25,000 years for the CO₂ now in the atmosphere to be absorbed into the oceans.”  So, the ice will continue melting, the seas will continue absorbing heat, the climate will continue warming, and the planet’s ecosystems will continue taking a merciless catastrophic beating.  Ignorance pandemics don’t <bleep> around.

As readers move into the book’s homestretch, Jamail stops storytelling and looks them directly in the eye.  It’s time for some heart-to-heart communication.  Writing this book has been very painful.  The folks he wrote about were not extremists, lunatics, or liars.  In addition to his travels and interviews, he’s spent lots of time gathering additional information online.  Paying close attention to eco-reality, year after year, is a miserable path.

Writers are often inspired by the hope that the work they do can inspire beneficial change.  They hope that readers will see the light if blasted with a firehose of truth.  Well, the world often enjoys taking long hard pisses on hope-filled dreams.  It laughs at their grandiose hope in promoting real transformation.  And so, the spurned dreamer hopes even harder.  Eventually, Jamail wondered if there was any point in writing.

Hope is a turd in the swimming pool.  Hope can’t undo the damage, or send the carbon back home, or resurrect the extinct, or make people care.  The worst is yet to come.  It’s time for grieving not hoping.  Jamail took a nose dive into a deep depression, and eventually emerged hope-free, a great healing.  He is now able to be present in reality, in the fullness of the darkness.  He learned that it is possible for acceptance and inner peace to reside in the same heart with grief and suffering.  “I have never felt more alive.”

 Jamail, Dahr, The End of Ice, The New Press, New York, 2019.  

The Collapse of Western Civilization

Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway are science historians, and they are hopping mad at folks who deny that humans are the primary cause of climate change.  Their outrage inspired them to write The Collapse of Western Civilization, which has been selling furiously in its first month on the market.  It’s a 112-page science fiction rant.

The story is a discourse on the Penumbral Age (1988-2093), written in 2393 by a Chinese historian.  The Penumbral Age was a time of paralyzing anti-intellectualism, when humankind failed to take action on an emerging climate catastrophe, which ended up sinking western civilization.  In presenting this story, the authors are rubbing the denialists’ noses in the steaming mess they created, similar to the process of housebreaking a crappy puppy.

By 1988, scientists could clearly see the approach of a huge storm, and they dutifully reported their findings.  They believed that once the public was informed, they would rationally do what needed to be done.  But the public shrugged, and the scientists were too dignified to run out into the streets, jump up and down, and scream warnings.  Also, the scientists were too conservative — temperatures ended up rising far more than they had predicted. 

Early in the twenty-first century, many more people could see the storm, but still nothing was done.  A dark villain moved to center stage — the carbon-combustion complex, a disgusting mob of slimy creeps who made a lot of money in activities dependent on burning fossil fuel.  They created think tanks that hurled excrement and insults at the annoying climate scientists.  Screw-brained economists hissed that government should take a long nap and let the invisible hand of the market magically make the bad stuff go away.  (My favorite line is, “The invisible hand never picks up the check.”)

And so, in a heavy fog of mixed messages, everyone resumed staring at their cell phones, and the world went to heck.  There were terrible storms and droughts.  The ice caps melted, and this opened the floodgates to the Great Collapse (2073 to 2093), when sea levels were eight meters higher (26 ft.).  Twenty percent of humankind was forced to move to higher ground during the Great Migration, about 1.5 billion people.  Thus, 100 percent of humankind would have been 7.5 billion — in 2073 — an amazingly high number!

I just let the cat out of the bag.  This book is a gusher of intoxicating hope and optimism.  While the Great Collapse blindsided the hopelessly rotten governments of the west, China did OK.  The wise leaders of the Second People’s Republic of China maintained a strong central government, free of corruption.  When sea levels rose, they quickly built new cities inland, in safe locations.  When leaders have integrity, miracles happen.

And it gets better.  In 2090, a female scientist in Japan created a GMO fungus that gobbled up the greenhouse gas doo-doo, the storm passed, and the survivors lived happily ever after.  Unfortunately, by that time, there was a total dieoff in Africa and Australia.  Luckily, the northern folks, who contributed heavily to the disaster, survived (minus the polar bears).

The authors note that it’s now too late to halt climate change; it’s time for damage control.  The whole thing could have been prevented if only we had rapidly shifted to non-carbon-based energy sources.  Really?  No expert with both oars in the water believes that renewable energy could ever replace more than a small portion of the energy we currently produce from non-renewable fuels.  If we phased out the extraction of fossil energy, our way of life would go belly up.  The status quo is a dead end, and rational change provides few benefits when it’s a hundred years too late.

Solar panels and wind turbines are not made of pixie dust, rainbows, and good vibes.  They are produced by high-impact industrial processes.  They require the consumption of non-renewable resources.  They produce energy that is used to temporarily keep an extremely unsustainable society on life support.  Hydropower dams are ecological train wrecks.  The authors lament that carbon-free nuclear energy became unhip because of a few wee boo-boos.

The book gives high praise to the precautionary principle, which is old-fashioned common sense with a spiffy title.  If you see an emerging problem, nip it in the bud.  If a new technology is not perceived to be 100 percent safe by a consensus of scientists, forget about it until its safety can be proven beyond all doubt.  Duh!  Common sense says that humankind made a huge mistake by ignoring the warnings of scientists in 1988.

The precautionary principle would also have blocked the development of nuclear technology.  It was spectacularly stupid to build 440 nuclear reactors before the wizards had a plan for storing the wastes, which remain highly toxic for more than 100,000 years.  By 2073, all of these reactors will be far beyond their designed life expectancy.  Decommissioning can take decades, and it can cost more than the original construction.  If the 440 reactors are not decommissioned before the grid shuts down, each will do a lively impersonation of Fukushima, and spew deadly radiation forever.  Or maybe they will be disastrously decommissioned by war, earthquakes, terrorists, or economic meltdown.

Imagine a graph that spans 4,000 years, from A.D. 1 to 4000.  The trend line is fairly flat, except for a brief 200-year period in the middle, which looks like a tall spike, as narrow and sharp as an icicle.  As I write in 2014, we’re very close to the tip of this icicle.  This spike is the petroleum bubble, and its trend line is nearly the same as the bubbles of food production, human population, and resource extraction.  What’s important to grasp here is that the way of life we consider normal is an extreme deviation in the 200,000-year human journey.  It’s a temporary abnormality, and it can never again be repeated.

Oil production is quite close to peak.  The huge deposits are past peak.  Today we are extracting oil from lean, challenging deposits, and the output is expensive.  Costs will rise, production will decline, and economies will stumble until Game Over, which seems likely well before 2050.  Industrial agriculture has an expiration date.  (See The Coming Famine by Julian Cribb.)

Unfortunately, after the peak, our carbon problems are not going to fade away in a hundred years.  The book imagines that the global temperature in 2060, fanned by positive feedback loops, will be 11° C warmer than in 1988.  It’s hard to imagine agriculture surviving such a huge transition, consequently a population of 7.5 billion in 2073 seems impossible.  While the authors wring their hands about rising sea level, Brian Fagan (in The Great Warming) warns that the far greater threat of warming is megadroughts, like one in California that began in A.D. 1250 and lasted 100 years.

The bottom line here is that, even if our enormous carbon emissions were perfectly harmless, we have created such a cornucopia of perplexing predicaments that the coming years are certain to be exciting and memorable.  By definition, an unsustainable way of life can only be temporary.  It’s fun to dream, but I have a hunch that reality may not fully cooperate with the story’s imaginary hope and optimism.  Reality bats last.

Oreskes, Naomi and Conway, Erik M., The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future, Columbia University Press, New York, 2014.