Foreseeing a new Earth

 kw: book reviews, speculative fiction, climate change, geoengineering, sociology

Finally! Something on which former President Barack Obama and I agree!! He likes the book, and I like the book: The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. I suspect if we were to sit down over a cuppa and talk about it, the President and I would find that our reasons for liking it differ substantially. Oh, well.

The climate is changing, that we can nearly all agree on, because that is what the climate does; it is how climate is defined. What is driving the change, hardly anybody agrees on (the so-called "scientific consensus" covers enormous in-fighting in the "climate science" crowd). At present, rising carbon dioxide is the favored culprit. In my view, carbon dioxide is significant, but not decisive.

It must be noted that the temperature swing of around 5°C between the Medieval Climate Warming of around 1,000 years ago (~950AD to ~1250AD in Europe and North America), and the Little Ice Age that began about 200 years later (~1450AD to ~1850AD) occurred during a time of utterly stable carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere. Furthermore, the Maunder Minimum, a period of exceedingly low sunspot activity, occurred from about 1645AD to 1715AD, right in the middle of that cool-down. The 22-year sunspot cycle, plus poorly known longer-term cycles in the Sun, together with the three longer-term orbital-mechanics Milankovitch cycles, are the primary external climate drivers.

The premise of MftF (an abbreviation used in the book) is that rising carbon dioxide concentration is the only relevant driving force of post-Industrial Revolution climate warming. Let's grant the author that for the nonce and see where it leads, because the book is full of fascinating ideas, some of which may prove useful.

The book opens with a hot weather disaster in India in which 20 million die. The government of India responds by unilaterally carrying out a bit of geoengineering: at great cost, they have thousands of airplanes release sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere in what is later called a "double Pinatubo". It works for a while, cooling India and the northern hemisphere for several years. Several chapters describe the futile politicking that goes on around this event. In the midst of it all, a new agency of the UN is formed, the Ministry for the Future. Its leader, Mary Murphy, and her staff, are central figures in the rest of the book. Its bailiwick is to act on behalf of future generations, and indirectly, for the nonhuman species being driven by the hundreds into extinction by human economic activities.

The book covers about a 25-year span, from 2-3 years from now (call it 2026) until the late 2040's. One thing author Robinson likes is lists. Numerous chapters contain lists: Chapter 85 mostly consists of the names of greening and restoration projects in many countries from Argentina to Zimbabwe (and most of them are real already), taking up 4 pages; sundry lists of possible geoengineering projects including Chapter 71 which focuses on putting yellow dye in the Arctic Ocean to keep it from warming by absorbing sunlight; in Chapter 30 the author ruminates on what to call the turning point (the Great Turn, the Trembling 20's...) and devotes a page to a list of lists, of the various ways the past has been divided into a list of periods; Chapter 20 discusses several (numerous) alternatives to GDP as a measure of prosperity.

Where Robinson really shines is the ability to write in numerous voices. While many of the chapters are third-person narrative, more are first-person soliloquy in the voices of key characters and others including unidentified refugees—several thereof—which instantly forge emotional bonds with readers, bringing us into the story. Some of the soliloquys are personified objects: the Market, the Blockchain, a Photon, a Carbon atom, and a puzzle that, I think, refers to the total number of base pairs in the DNA of an entire person (Chapter 95; the key is the words "sextillions" and "spiral").

I take issue with the soliloquy of a Carbon atom: it claims it was forged in a supernova. Carbon is formed in main-sequence stars during the red giant phase of helium burning. Thereafter, there are two scenarios that produce most supernovae. One is the Type Ia, in which a white dwarf star, which consists mostly of carbon and oxygen (the ratio depends on the mass of the original star), orbits with a companion star that has yet to become a red giant. When the companion swells into a red giant, much of its material is swept onto the white dwarf, increasing its mass until it reaches the Chandrasekhar limit of mass, upon which it explodes, ejecting much of its mass while the core becomes a neutron star. During the explosion, elements of all masses are formed, but very little of that is likely to be carbon because the already-existing carbon is instead forged into silicon and other heavier elements. The other is Type II, in which a very heavy star burns beyond carbon and oxygen, through silicon and the transition metals until it has an iron core; once the core cannot be further "burned", the star implodes and rebounds, forging elements of all masses, primarily heavier ones. It's where gold comes from, for example. Thus, Chapter 66 should state that the carbon atom in question was formed in the core of a red giant until it was left behind in the substance of a white dwarf, but then later ejected in a Type Ia supernova. Perhaps it escaped during the ejection of the red giant's atmosphere, but that would have contained little carbon.

My favorite of the geoengineering methods is one told part by part through several chapters: drilling through the Antarctic icecap to pump water from beneath the ice up onto flat places and internal basins, where it freezes. This is to remove the lubrication from Antarctic glaciers and re-ground them to slow their movement. In the book it works, and I think it really would work.

A current running through the book involves terroristic activities by "the Children of Kali". It is not clear whether all the events that seem to emanate from them are really theirs, because a "black wing" of the Ministry for the Future, led by a fellow named Badim, probably also carried out targeted assassinations. This is implied but kept out of sight.

Robinson likes happy endings, so (mild spoiler alert) the book ends with carbon dioxide levels being reduced as great numbers of mitigation efforts take effect. Global population is also decreasing by 2050. I had to keep in mind that, from the disaster of the mid-2020's onward, this book is a world-building exercise. Many of the things therein are possible, some quite unlikely, but the positive polemical point of the book is clear: if we are to make an effective change in the trajectory of the climate, numerous efforts of many kinds will be needed. There is no silver bullet. 

I was unhappy with a near-absence of nuclear energy. It comes up only in Chapter 76, when a Navy officer discusses these facts: 83 nuclear powered ships and subs, over 5,700 reactor-years, and 134 million miles of travel, with nary a nuclear accident. "Probably the Navy should run the country's electricity system." Personally, I've been in favor of that for a long time. Electricity would cost more than it does now, because the Navy places more of a priority on safety, compared to the folks who ran Three Mile Island or Chernobyl. I am in favor of using breeder reactors to turn U238 into Plutonium even as the U235 is being used to make energy; I favor recycling radioactive waste to extract even more fuel and reprocess it. This would be an energy source that would more than bridge the gap between the largely carbon-based system we have now and a non-carbon, non-nuclear future system, with nuclear waiting in the wings if needed. I hope for a world in which hydrocarbon and coal are being deposited faster than we use them (for chemicals, not for fuel).

Robinson's message is clear. In this possible future Earth, whether we make it more livable, or less, is up to us. I agree.