Greenland was once green

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, geoscience, ice science, ice drilling, ice coring, greenland, ice caps, climate change

This is the rig
That drilled the ice
Down into the soil
That proved the land
Was free of ice,
Less than a million years ago.

The climate then
Was like today's
But CO₂
Was half so much.
It shows that it
Could happen again:
It's really up to us.

When the Ice is Gone: What the Greenland Ice Core Reveals About Earth's Tumultuous History and Perilous Future by Paul Bierman concludes with a prognosis for human civilization: Get ready for tremendous upheavals, no matter what we do; we can easily make things worse, or with effort mitigate the pain but not eliminate it.

Dr. Bierman has worked in Greenland and around the world. He brings us the history of Greenland, and particularly the US/Danish military efforts to establish DEW-Line-extension radar stations and under-ice military encampments during the Cold War.

Don't know what is/was the Distant Early Warning Line? I grew up knowing about it, plus the two Lines closer in, that were intended to detect ballistic missiles coming over the polar regions from Russia. We also had periodic tests of the radio warning system that a DEW Line alert would trigger. We would then have 15 or so minutes to prepare for nuclear hell to rain down. We practiced in school, to duck under our desks and hold our legs ("and kiss your ass goodbye," we said under our breaths).

Ice is hard to live on or in. A light touch is necessary, so the Inuit and other northern peoples manage it. A military is not known for having a light touch. Ice at any temperature above -40° (either C or F; that's the crossover temperature) slowly flows under pressure. The warmer it is, the faster it flows. The tunnels and other under-ice structures needed to be maintained by crews of ice trimmers because the walls close in at least several inches yearly, and the floor heaves, etc., etc. The Army put a lot of effort and buckets of money into studying the properties of Greenland ice (and ice in other places, though they are not the focus of the book). One effort was deep drilling.

It took a few decades to learn how to drill into the ice and extract a core. Drilling makes friction which causes heating, so there needs to be a "drill fluid" that is at least as dense as ice, to keep the drill hole from closing around the drill shaft and capturing the drill string and bit. If that happens all you can do is move over and start a new hole, with new equipment. Various drill fluids were used. The most effective were based on diesel oil with various additives to make it more dense and less corrosive to the equipment. To this day, if you go to one of the ice core storage facilities, such as the one in Copenhagen, the cores stink of diesel oil and other noxious materials.

Camp Century, situated atop almost a mile of ice, housed the first drill rig, shown above, to extract ice cores, not only to the base of the ice, but tens of feet into the sediment beneath, which at the time was a type of permafrost called "permacrete": just as hard to drill as concrete, but with ice binding everything together. The story is told in loving detail, and it was a truly heroic effort. The hole was completed in early July 1966.

Here a mystery intervenes. For several decades, a dog-in-the-manger scientist stingily parceled out bits of ice core to scientists he favored, and the below-the-ice material was ignored. Finally that material was discovered among some odds-and-ends sent to an ice laboratory in Copenhagen, and in 2019 the author and a large collaboration of scientific teams were able to get portions to study. One finding in particular shook them up.

One of the researchers working with Dr. Bierman noticed dark bits that didn't look like mineral grains. Under a microscope, they were seen to be plant matter. Gathering more was easy. Melt a few grams of permacrete, centrifuge, and wait. Little dark bits will float to the top. Botanists were able to identify some of the species represented. It proved that the land had once been ice free, not nearly as long ago as everyone thought. A lot more work finally demonstrated that the ice-free period ended a bit less than half a million years ago. Other measurements, such as isotope ratios from the water in the permacrete, showed that the average temperature during the ice-free time was similar to what it is today on the coast of Greenland at that latitude, but that atmospheric CO₂ was about 280 ppm; it is 420 ppm now. Camp Century is more than 100 miles inland of the present edge of the ice.

There are multitudes of other findings, but this is the smoking gun. The ice cap of Greenland is more fragile than we thought, and at least 2/3 of it melted away for some period before snow and ice accumulated again. If all of the ice in Greenland were to melt, that alone would add 24 feet, or about 7.5 m, to the depth of the ocean. Two-thirds of that would result in 16 feet, or 5 m.

The last chapter of the book describes some consequences of the sea rising by 5 m. The timeline is instructive, though. That sea level rise will take at least a couple of decades. A lot depends on politics and business, as the author acknowledges. Here's my take on that.

Nearly all of the leaders in Washington are at one extreme or the other. Genuine Democrats and Republicans rarely rise to national leadership. An often-misquoted Bible verse begins, "The love of money is a root of all evils…" (1 Tim 6:10). Note that it says "a root" not "the root." There are other roots. A close second root is the lust for power and control. Whether far Right or far Left, the Totalitarians of both political parties want to exert control. Over us. Mitigating the climate crisis is not in the interest of either of them. The situation itself, and exaggerating its direness, is their weapon against us. The more moderate national leaders are utterly swamped by the control-mongers. In the world, the top five carbon emitters are:

1. China, 34% of total, 9.24 Ton/y/person
2. USA, 12% of total, 13.8 Ton/y/person
3. India, 7.6% of total, 2.07 Ton/y/person
4. Russia, 5.3% of total, 14.5 Ton/y/person
5. Japan, 2.4% of total, 7.54 Ton/y/person

Those five add up to 61.3%. If China could "catch down" with Japan on a per person basis, its percentage would go from 34% to just under 28% of the current total, or 29.6% of a total amount that is 93.7% of today's total. That difference would be nearly half of total US emission. China is the elephant in the room.

I wanted to go into much more detail, but I decided this is not where that belongs. I would add only this: our only bridge to a future without fossil fuels, or nearly so, is nuclear fission. Nuclear fusion is too far in the future to be of any help. As it happens, I've recently learned that China is building experimental Thorium reactors, perhaps hoping to replace Uranium. Apparently Thorium "burning" produces less (or less dangerous?) radioactive waste. Similar research is starting up here also. I need to do more research, but it is a hopeful sign.

All these things have long lead times. Part of the problem is regulatory. With control freaks in charge of both sides of Congress, I am not sure they will be any help. I hate to end this review on a downer, but at present, I see a long tunnel ahead before any light might appear.

This book is required reading for everyone, particularly voters.

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.

Trees on the move

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, forestry, biology, trees, climate change

The lighter green area in this figure shows the Canadian range of the Great Horned Owl, Bubo virginianus, an iconic North American owl.

The northern boundary of the owls' range is close to the northern tree line, for these birds need trees. It illustrates the American range of the subject of The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth by Ben Rawlence.

The tree line (or sometimes treeline) in the north circles the Arctic, passing through nearly every circumpolar country, although Greenland is nearly all to its north, and Iceland is wholly south of it, being warmed by the ocean currents that produce an equable climate in the British Isles and southern Norway. The tree line is the northern boundary of the boreal forests of Canada, Alaska, Siberia and northern Europe. To its north we find tundra, which is consumed where the trees advance, and itself advances anywhere the trees might retreat (just about nowhere, in living memory). This forest, primarily its northern portions, is the subject of the book.

The six primary sections of the book weave their stories around six species of hardy tree, each being the primary tree species in one or another section of the northern boreal forest. From the Scots Pine in Scotland (in America it is called Scotch Pine, which is probably a solecism), around the circumference of the Arctic to the Greenland Mountain Ash of southern Greenland and eastern Canada, these trees respond quickly (in tree terms) to climatic trends. Their varied methods of seed dispersal either facilitate or limit the rapidity with which they can spread northward as the land warms over years and decades. But all are on the move to the North.

The core story of Treeline is that in the North, the warming trend of recent decades is in no way subtle. Most of us live in areas of temperate weather. For us, a difference of a degree or two F (half to one degree C) is hardly noticeable. Year-to-year variations swamp the signal. But in Alaska, for instance, the people have noticed dramatic changes for at least 30-40 years, in the kinds of plants that have been spreading across the landscape, sightings of birds not seen before but that are becoming common, and the instability of the landscape itself wherever permafrost is melting and in some places washing away entirely.

Throughout, the author describes the dependence upon trees seen in all the life around them. This is not just species that feed on their substance, nor birds that nest in them, but such things as the many beneficial substances emitted by pine trees as their leaves and cones grow: the "fresh pine smell" is actually medicinal, which may be what is behind the practice in Japan of "forest bathing". A walk in the forest is healthier than a walk in the absence of trees, for both physiological and psychological reasons. Trees' roots host fungi that help them extract water and minerals from the soil, and the fungi in turn are fed by the trees in one of the oldest synergistic relationships. Materials shed by the trees and their fungi make their way into nearby waters, where—in ways we have not yet determined—they greatly increase the fertility of the waters. Forest pools and streams are very rich in species of fish and other vertebrates and in insects and other small invertebrates, as compared to bodies of water in meadows and other areas far from forests (though those can be rather prolific in their own right).

The author sums up the matter in this marvelous sentence: 

"If how the treeline made our world habitable in the first place, if how forests create rain, drive winds, manage water, seed the oceans, provide the foundations of much modern medicine, cleanse the air of man-made pollution and disinfect the atmosphere were more widely taught and understood, it would be much harder to cut them down." (p 266)

Clearing forested areas does more harm than we ever imagined. If somehow everyone on Earth could be made to know the true value of the forests, everyone would nurture them as priceless treasures, rather than exploit them for a dollar today and leanness of soul tomorrow.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, as bittersweet as it is. I am glad to live near a forested area that is intended to remain so. When our son was growing up, he and I sometimes "rock hopped" our way down a little stream, sometimes for as much as a mile. Just breathing feels different in a forest, even a little one.

I have a nit or two to pick, so if you don't care to see the errata, feel free to stop reading here.

• On page 93 the Russian Bios-3 experiment was described. It was stated as having an internal volume of 1,111 cubic feet. That is slightly bigger than a 10-foot cube. I looked it up. The volume is 1,700 cubic meters, which comes to a bit over 60,000 cubic feet.
• On page 185 it is stated, "Sunlight activates their [plants'] chloroplastic structures, and they use the photons from the sun's gamma rays to split carbon from the oxygen in carbon dioxide." Solar gamma rays do not make it through the atmosphere; if they did, we would soon be consumed with cancers, if we did not first die of radiation poisoning. Leaves are green because chlorophyll uses the red and blue photons to do the splitting. They have sufficient energy, while a gamma ray typically has a million times as much energy as a visible photon.
• On page 222 beluga whales are called baleen whales. They are not. They are toothed whales, as are all dolphins.
• In the same paragraph but on page 223, plus in the last paragraph on the page, the whales are described as attracted to oxygenated water. They breathe air from the atmosphere, as do all mammals, and the oxygen content of the water is irrelevant to them. They are not fish!
• This is more of an anomaly. Each place the author visited is prefaced with a name and a latitude, but the latitude is expressed thus: 64° 50' 37' N. In only one place did I find the correct notation, for Huslia, Koyukuk, Alaska: 65° 42' 7" N (p 160). The subtle difference between using " and using ' for seconds of latitude is easy for a reader to compensate for, but it is a bit jarring on first sight.

The dance of climate and biology

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biology, bioclimatology, climate change

The title of the book caught my eye: Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid: The Fraught and Fascinating Biology of Climate Change, by Thor Hanson. Midway through the book I found the stories behind the title. This illustrates the first. The three overlaid images show an anole lizard clinging to a branch in artificial winds of 35, 55, and 85 mph.

Anole lizards on Caribbean islands are frequently caught in gales or hurricanes. In the article that is the source of this image, "Lizards, toepads, and the ghost of hurricanes past", by Raymond P. Huey and Peter R. Grant, the authors report mapping the frequency of past hurricanes and comparing the forelimb strength and toepad size of anole lizards with each island's "hurricane index". They used the simple expedient of bringing a high-powered leaf blower to island after island, and measuring how much wind it took to blow a lizard off a branch it chose to cling to when the "wind" began blowing. Islands with more frequent hurricanes harbored stronger lizards with bigger toepads.

I'll leave it to you to check out the story of the lifestyle plasticity of certain species of squid. Such plasticity is one characteristic that helps some species thrive in spite of change, compared to less plastic species, which are more likely to go extinct. Perhaps bears and roaches really will outlive all of us.

Dr. Hanson spends little time discussing climate change as such; leaving that to others, he begins with the fact that climate warming is happening, and chronicles the various ways animals and plants are changing along with it. 

Some change by moving, either poleward or uphill. Census surveys of mountaintop species over many years reveal just how rapidly such changes can occur. The species that "liked" the crest of a mountain in cooler times find themselves with nowhere to go (unless they are birds), and die out, even as species that had been living at lower elevations move upward. I was quite interested by the description of just how rapidly some tree species can "move" by sending fruits and seeds on their way. Some can move many miles per generation, if they produce a fruit that is eaten by a mobile creature. Others are restricted to the distance a nut might be blown during its fall from the treetop. But the love some birds such as jays have for acorns means that oaks can be dispersed quite a distance, by acorns that birds hide but forget about (the trees are hoping for imperfect memories!).

Evolution is generally considered too slow to help creatures survive a warming as rapid as the one currently going on. That is probably true in many cases, but not all. The anoles shown above are actually evolving fast enough that some will survive a doubling or tripling of the number of category 5 hurricanes across their island. Initially, adaptation keeps some anoles alive through a season, but there is also the weeding-out of weaker-limbed individuals, so the next generation includes a larger proportion of stronger lizards. Random genetic drift ensures that a few will be extra-strong, as the occasional helpful mutations accumulate. This can go pretty fast in animals with a generation time of a year or two.

How far will climate change go? Dr. Hanson describes a "kitchen experiment" with carbon dioxide and a heat lamp, originally done a couple centuries ago in a brewery (where huge amounts of CO₂ are produced), that illustrates the heat-blanketing effect of the gas. It roughly confirms a calculation that I learned to do before I was in high school (I had smart parents and a couple of good mentors): it shows that greatly increasing CO₂ seems to top out the heating at 4°C. That may not end civilization, but it won't be pretty. It certainly won't "destroy the earth" or the biosphere, but it will make some big changes. So of course the author asks us, "What can we do?", answering, "As much as we can, in as many ways as we can." For me, that includes convincing Limousine Liberals to drop out of the jet set. A single cross-country or cross-ocean flight produces, for each person aboard, as much CO₂ as a few months of driving an SUV.

Meantime, I'm a homebody, married to a homebody. Out total miles driven for two cars is less than 12,000 miles yearly, while the average distance driven by most cars in the US tops 14,000 miles. It doesn't mean we are particularly virtuous, just boring. This book is anything but boring. It's a fun read, with many interesting stories. 

Will Greenland get greener?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, exploration, geography, science, greenland, global warming, climate change

The main title of The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey into Greenland's Buried Past and our Perilous Future, by Jon Gertner, embodies a double entendre. Even today, to be in the middle of the Greenland ice sheet puts you at a "pole of inaccessibility", really at the end of the Earth; and what happens to that ice could indeed portend the end of the world (though not the Earth).

World versus Earth: The Earth is the physical planet, "third rock from the Sun", from its core to the edge of the atmosphere a few thousand miles above the surface, including the biosphere, of course. The world is the collection of human civilizations and systems that form the environment for human life and living. The Earth is incredibly robust. The biosphere is very robust. The world is fragile. Even the much-vaunted "western world" that provides comfort, sustenance, and amazing conveniences to about one-third of the total human population, is remarkably fragile.

About a tenth of the world population, nearly 700 million, lives at or below an elevation of 10m above sea level. For every meter of sea level rise, about a tenth of these (more at first, fewer later) will have to move uphill. But the three laws of real estate value, "location, location, location", meaning "higher ground for better view (except for that seaside vacation home!), close to conveniences (stores, etc.), and close to work" will drive costs up, and up and up.

The Ice at the End starts with the history of the exploration of Greenland. While it is called the largest island, I think of it as the smallest continent. It is nearly 1/3 the size of Australia, and is about 3 times the size of the New Guinea island. Being mostly covered with an ice cap about two miles thick makes its exploration extremely arduous at best, any time prior to the use of aircraft and tracked heavy vehicles; now it is merely "very arduous". One of my favorite turn-of-the century scientists, Alfred Wegener, died there at age 50, in 1930.

Once the early explorers, combining European and Inuit materials and methods, showed it is possible to cross the ice sheet, scientists made up a growing proportion of "visitors", a proportion that exploded once the American military began pouring money into Arctic exploration right after World War II. Now the ice volume can be measured daily by satellite, on-ice expeditions can continue to determine snowfall accumulation and compaction rates, and ice cores have been drilled to bedrock in a few locations. Now the true significance of Greenland and its ice are becoming clear.

To cut to the chase: Even if we ignore Antarctica, progressive melting of Greenland's ice alone can cause catastrophic damage to the infrastructure of every nation that has a coastline (nearly all of them). I gathered a number of calculated amounts for the amount of water in that ice. If it were all put into the ocean at once, without heating up beyond melting temperature, the seas would rise by 27 feet, or 8.2 meters. Then, as it warmed to the 40°F (4°C) average temperature of the ocean, sea level would rise about another couple of inches (5-6 cm).

Compare that to current rates. Since the 1960's, sea level has risen between 3 and 3.3 mm/yr. About a third of that is from Greenland, about half from ocean thermal expansion, and the rest from Antarctica, mainly the Thwaites glacier and a few lesser ones. See this montage:

The four images of Greenland plus Iceland were made in December of 1984, 1994, 2004, and 2014, from left to right. It may be hard to see the decrease in ice cover from decade to decade. The total difference in ice volume over these thirty years is 0.75%. Here is a closeup of the northeast quadrant, where the difference is more evident:

On first sight, one may say, "It's just a difference in snow cover," but with a careful look, one may see that the ice front has also receded, and we need to note that the entire ice sheet has gotten thinner by more than a half percent (30 ft or 9.5 m) in that time. Over that same interval the sea has risen nearly 100mm, or 4". And a third of that was Greenland's ice melting, over and above the snow that fell.

Though I am a political/social conservative, I have long known of the greenhouse effect, and what it can do to this planet. Will rising temperatures and rising seas drive human life off the Earth? That isn't likely. However, those phenomena will drive humans inland everywhere, and will likely eliminate a few oceanic nations such as the Maldives, Palau and Tuvalu. Of continental nations, Bangladesh would be one of the hardest hit: a quarter of its land area is below an elevation of 8m.

I have always been in favor of research into renewable energy, primarily solar. At present levels of efficiency, it would take less than 200,000 square miles (500,000 sq km) of solar panels to meet all energy needs for the world. That's about the area of Spain, but it would be spread everywhere, mainly within 40° of the equator. This needs to be coupled with better batteries to take care of cloudy days. At present prices, the investment would be huge, something like 200 times the world yearly GDP. However, research also results in lower prices, which can only help.

Someone who denies the importance of climate change would call this book a polemic. I do not. It is even-handed and factual, without the shrillness that pervades so much public discourse on the subject. I learned some great history and gained a better perspective on the importance of Greenland in the total ice/water/ocean budget of the planet. I recommend the book, no matter what your political stance.

Tragedies that ring the continents

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, climate change, sea level, flooding

I approached Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, by Elizabeth Rush, with a skeptical attitude. The book, though filled with stories of people facing tragedy, was actually a pleasant surprise. Ms Rush is a thoughtful, energetic, and compassionate writer. She is definitely not pushing the über-leftist anti-everybody-who-doesn't-agree-with-hyped-climate-propaganda agenda. She visited a lot of people who live along the coasts of the Unites States, particularly those who had recurring flooding problems before "climate change" was "a thing"; she did her best to winkle out the factors that are increasing their suffering; and she tells their stories.

She introduces her subject by describing her first visit to Jacob's Point, Rhode Island, soon after she moved nearby a few years ago. She spoke to long-term residents and others who had know the area and described for her the impact of rising sea level on the marshes. A marsh by the seaside has a way to grow vertically as sediment is brought in by natural processes. Many marsh plants send roots uphill and upwards also, moving away from encroaching salt water. Building a road alongside a marsh blocks this inflow, and gives the migrating root structure nowhere to go. Even without filling a marsh, we can kill it this way.

I knew already, though, that the biggest factor causing "rising sea level" along much of the American coastline, particularly the East Coast, is that the land is sinking. The dissected appearance of the coastline, particularly in New England, is diagnostic of sinking land. Why is it sinking? The technical term is isostasy, or recovery from a past distortion. In this case, the cause is glacial rebound of the northern North American continent because a few miles of ice that were there during the most recent ice age are no longer there. In mid-continent, centered roughly on western Ontario and northern Minnesota, land is rising. How fast? Something less than a centimeter per year, or about 3/4 meter (2.5 ft) per century. Then, why is the land sinking along the East Coast? The ice was a lot thinner there. The ice pushing down the center of the continent caused the edges to rise. Now, as the center rises, the edges are going down.

This doesn't mean that rising global temperatures caused by the the greenhouse effect aren't making the ocean get a little deeper. It just means that this is a minor effect, but it is troublesome because it adds to an existing problem. So let's look at the subject of the first chapter, Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana. First, images of the area southeast of Houma, including this island community:

These were taken from Google Earth. The panel on the left is from 1990; on the right, from 2015. One must look closely to see that many of the scattered bits of land in the various lagoons that line the southern coast, seen in the 1990 panel, are missing in the 2015 panel. A more prominent feature of both panels is a dark green area...except it has moved over the 25 year span. In 1990, the area north of Isle de Jean Charles was a salt marsh, and looks very dark green. Further to the northwest, west of Chauvin, is what looks like an ordinary piece of coastal land. It was marshy, but upland and more of a fresh water marsh. By 2015, the salt marsh north of Jean Charles is all under water, and the land west of Chauvin is now salt marsh. The difference in water level from one picture to the next is just a couple of feet. That is all it takes.

This picture shows Jean Charles and some surrounding territory, in the same time periods:

In this case, the 1990 imagery at this resolution is grayscale only. But it shows what we need to see: the longish island was significantly larger, and there were more bits of land scattered throughout the bays 25+ years ago. Take note of the small roadway that crossed from left to right in 1990, that had mostly vanished by 2015, and the larger one to its north, that appears impassible now. Prior to 1970 or so, the island had 4-5 times the land area compared to today. I wish I could have located a satellite image from late 2018, after the exceptional hurricane season. In Rising I read that Isle de Jean Charles now hardly exists outside the narrow strip bounded by the levee system. Most of the residents have already moved inland. The residents are native Americans, and have been enabled, financially, to move due to persistent activism by tribal leaders to obtain Federal aid. Prior to the early 2000's, they were ignored by both state and Federal aid agencies.

This is not all passive changes in water level. Higher water means that hurricanes and other storms can wash away more soil, and the channelization of the Mississippi River over the past century has resulted in very little replenishment. This area is part of the river's delta system. It is worth noting just a few things. The major problem in the area, climate or not, is the channelization of the Mississippi River, that cut off sediment replenishment; secondarily, there is subsidence that every delta system experiences as soil slowly compacts due to gravity pressing out water that it contained when it was first deposited.

All around the US, the author tells of her visits to places in Maine, Staten Island, both northern and southern Florida, and the San Francisco Bay. In some places, the land is subsiding due to compaction, as in Louisiana and S.F. Bay; in others such as Maine, glacial rebound is dragging the land underwater, a few inches per decade. In all these areas, however, governmental inaction coupled with over-development has been the greatest and most tragic force behind the destruction of coastal wetlands and the coastal landscape in general. Two stories of human blindness and greed known to me come to mind:

1) The Rapid City Flood of 1972.

When South Dakota was first settled, by people came in wagon trains up the flood plain in the valley of Rapid Creek. They took note of debris in the trees partway up the valley walls. When they were ready to stop for the night, they would carry everything of value, particularly food, and drive the animals, up to terraces and ledges above this flood line. When they settled Rapid City, they settled on those terraces, which are geomorphological remnants of earlier levels of the flood plain in the distant past. I lived in a house on such a terrace from 1982-86. It is 50 feet above the flood plain.

Later residents with less wisdom built homes and businesses further down, some even right on the flood plain. They installed a "flood control basin", Canyon Lake, upstream. It was designed inadequately, and a big rainstorm that dropped 11 inches of rain in 12 hours caused the flood control dam to burst. Water coursed through the town, destroying hundreds of homes and businesses, killing more than 270 people, and stacking up automobiles from a few car lots like clams on a shelly beach, downstream of town.

When we moved to Rapid City in 1978, areas on the flood plain outside town (now the town had laws against building on the flood plain within city limits) had already been rebuilt with mobile home developments. They are sitting in the crosshairs of the next flood.

2) Newport Beach "view homes", throughout the Twentieth Century.

I was taking an Engineering Geology course in 1971, and we learned about landslides and other earth-engineering matters. The professor, Dr. Martin Stout, is a person I greatly admire. He showed us the sand hills of Newport Beach, and described this scenario:

• An early developer noticed that these hillsides had a great view of the ocean.
• The development company persuaded the city or county government to issue permits to build ocean view homes.
• To get the best view, on each rather steep lot, a cut was made to flatten the land, and the sandy dirt so removed was dumped and leveled so as to extend the flat area beach-ward.
• Each home was built mostly out on this fill dirt, sometimes with pillars installed into the soil to "stabilize" it.
• On such a hillside (there were several), a few dozen such houses were built, sold, and occupied by people who love an ocean view and will pay for the privilege.
• Things rock along fine for a few years.
• An extra-rainy season occurs. The sandy soil gets soft and the houses start falling down, each into the back yard of the one below.
• The homeowners below sue the owners of the homes now in their back yard, for trespass or whatever their lawyer suggests.
• The city or county steps in, condemns all the dwellings involved, and has the homes bulldozed. 
• The land is graded back to an even hillside. Ground cover plants are planted.
• Five to ten years pass. Everyone on the city council or county council that currently has jurisdiction has been replaced with "new faces."
• A development company persuades them to issue permits to build ocean view homes.

On some of these hills, this had happened three times by 1971. When people are this shortsighted, how much hand-holding can we do? And there weren't even any hurricanes!

Genuine sea level change is real, but it is not happening nearly as rapidly as the natural cycles I've mentioned, such as glacial rebound and subsoil compaction. Governmental regulations of the past actually made things worse for people who received aid to deal with a flooded house: They were required to use the money to rebuild the house exactly where it stood before. Only recently have rules in some places been changed to allow people to take their payout and move further uphill or inland to rebuild there.

Here is the actual magnitude of climatic sea level change: 

• Sea water has a moderate coefficient of volumetric thermal expansion, approximately 0.00025 for temperatures between 0°C and 5°C, the temperature of the oceans deeper than a few tens of meters.
• Unlike fresh water, sea water does not get less dense in the lower degree or two before it freezes. It keeps getting more dense.
• The average depth of the oceans is about 3,700 m.
• Multiply this by 0.00025, to get 0.925. That means, if the entire ocean becomes one degree warmer (Celsius), it will get nearly one meter deeper.
• The best figure I can find is that the average ocean temperature has risen 0.2°C in the past century. That means the oceans are 0.185 m (about 7 inches) deeper due to thermal expansion.

The wild card is melting of ice caps. Contrary to what many vocal critics worry about, melting of the the Arctic ice cap cannot contribute to sea level rise because that ice is floating already. The major ice cap that can cause trouble is Antarctica. If it all melts, the seas will get roughly 60m deeper, or 200 feet. That would be catastrophic. The secondary ice cap is Greenland. It has about a tenth as much ice, so melting it entirely would mean a 6m, or 20 ft, rise in the oceans. Less catastrophic, but still catastrophic. I cannot find a good estimate of how many people would be displaced by a 6m rise; the reports are all over the place. It is somewhere between 1/20 and 1/5 of the human race, between 400 million and 1.5 billion.

I have no way to know how likely this is. There was a report just this week that the deep ocean is actually cooling, due to delayed effects of the "Little Ice Age" of the 1700's and early 1800's. Some portions of the Antarctic ice cap are also being strengthened rather than weakened, as this cold pulse works its way down through the miles of ice. But other portions of both Antarctica and Greenland are softening.

What is Ms Rush's conclusion? Humans are to blame for the human tragedies, it is true. But local matters are bigger and more damaging than global effects. It is hard for people to think in terms of centuries, or to plan for the ages. She writes of a "five generation window": most of us knew our grandparents and we may know their stories, and we expect to know our grandchildren and tell them our stories, and maybe some of our own grandparents' stories also. For most of us, that is about a one-century window. But we see evidence everywhere that most decision makers do not plan beyond their next promotion, or the next election, or sometimes the next paycheck. At least 1/3 of Americans have less than $5,000 in any kind of retirement savings account, and 1/5 of them have nothing...zero. zip, nada. I can understand for the 12% that live below the "poverty line", saving isn't feasible. But for the rest, who could save but don't, their "golden years"...not so golden.

We need a national consciousness like the wisdom of the people in those wagon trains, looking for signs of old floods to inform them of safe places to spend the night or locate their new homes.

Climate Change or Climate Forcing...redux

kw: musings, greenhouse effect, greenhouse warming, global warming, climate change, climatology, analysis

When I wrote a book review on the subject of climate change a few days ago, I had something in mind, but the review went in a different direction. The title actually didn't fit any more. Here are charts I made to illustrate my thinking on the terminology about "carbon pollution" and all the hype surrounding it, on both sides. Firstly, an nGram of the usage of three popular terms since 1970:

Although warming caused by the greenhouse effect, in particular that caused by carbon dioxide, was quantified by Svante Arrhenius in 1896, only after about 1970 was it brought to public attention. The great promotion of this issue really took off after 1985. This nGram shows that, in print at least, "Greenhouse Effect" was soon superseded by "Climate Change" and "Global Warning". But let's focus on a different term and its scientific synonym:

You can see from the upper chart that the term "Climate Forcing" has been scarcely a blip on the radar. But on the scale of the lower chart we see that about the time "Greenhouse Effect" peaked, "Climate Forcing" began to surge (relatively speaking), and shortly after that, "Anthropogenic Climate Change", a more scientific synonym, came along, but it is quite a mouthful.

It is a pity that Google stopped scanning books in 2008. I'd like to see how these words have fared in these past ten years. Nonetheless, I did a Google search for all these terms and a few others I've thought of in the past day or two (put in quotes to force literal searching), setting the search time to the past year, here is how they score:

• 7 - Anthropogenic Climate (allows "change" or other following words): 488,000
• 8 - Anthropogenic Climate Change: 478,000
• 6 - Carbon Pollution: 523,000
• 1 - Climate Change: 147,000,000
• 9 - Climate Forcing: 366,000
• 4 - Climate Science: 2,310,000
• 5 - Climate Warming: 975,000
• 2 - Global Warming: 56,600,000
• 3 - Greenhouse Effect: 4,360,000
• 10 - Greenhouse Warming: 295,000

The number preceding each term is its rank in this alphabetized list.

Why do people use the words they use? Impact. "Climate Change" and "Global Warming" get the public's attention. But the actual debate is not really about whether climate is changing or the globe (i.e. its atmosphere) is warming. It is about the extent that human civilization contributes to the change or the warming. However, "Anthropo..whatever" is too much of a mouthful, and "Climate Forcing" doesn't have quite the ring of the more popular terms.

But: Climate Forcing is really the best term about which to have a policy debate. The atmospheric climate will change gradually over time, whether the human race is highly civilized or goes extinct. Prior to 1975, the big worry about "Climate Change" was about "Global Cooling". A cooling trend highlighted by the first 15-18 years of weather satellite measurements triggered fears of a new ice age. And we find that the recent Solar Maximum had lower sunspot activity than most prior cycles. Based on historical records, this could indicate a cooling trend because lower solar activity heats the Earth's atmosphere less than average. Sunspot numbers are an indicator (not a cause) of the number of flares and other phenomena that send extra energy our way.

So, how big a factor is Climate Forcing? Let's call the Climate Forcing Factor the CFF. The way the media report things, one group called "climate deniers" would say the CFF is close to zero. In the same media, a group called "established science" claims the CFF is "most" or "nearly all" of the difference, in the range 50%-90%. Putting aside my conviction that the media are rather incredibly biased, we can instead identify the poles of the debate as "Large CFF" and "Small CFF" factions. Who is right? Do we have a way to know?

We don't, actually! But we can dig out an indication or two.

This article in ScienceDirect states that variations in sunspot activity account for about 40% of long term temperature rise in Norway over the past century, with a probable range of 25-56%. For a different portion of the North Atlantic, the range is 63-72%. This ought to please the Large CFF folks.

Remember the ozone hole? Starting about 30 years ago colleagues of mine at DuPont determined the great amount of damage being caused to the ozone layer some 15 miles (~25 km) overhead, and this triggered research efforts at DuPont and other chemical companies to find new refrigerants for air conditioners and new propellants for aerosol cans. The ozone "hole" was a dramatic thinning of this layer mainly over Antarctica, but spreading halfway to the equator, and there was a similar, but smaller thinning over the Arctic. But we need to be clear: the "ozone layer" isn't pure ozone; it is where ozone is concentrated to a level of about one part in 100,000 (0.001%); it is still mostly nitrogen. Ozone at sea level is around 1/30th of this, about 1/3,000,000th. Chlorine from refrigerants and propellants in use before 1980 had reduced the level of ozone over the poles by about 2/3, and elsewhere by about 20%. "Ozone hole" is the dramatic term that refers to the reduction of ozone from 1/100,000 to 1/300,000 over Antarctica during the southern summer.

Ozone is funny stuff. It is created from oxygen by ultraviolet light (UV), and then it absorbs UV, which heats it up. So the more ozone, the more the atmosphere is heated from the top. Specifically, at subtropical latitudes, surface temperature averages about 300K (27°C or 81°F), while 15 km (9½ mi) above, air temperature has fallen to about 200K (-73°C or -100°F). Ozone and other stratospheric gases absorb UV and some IR to raise the temperature back to 300K by about 50 km (30 mi) altitude. This warm gas in the mid- to upper stratosphere emits thermal radiation (longwave infrared) both upwards and downwards, which heats the air below a little. The gradual increase in stratospheric ozone levels over the past 30 years have contributed a little heating, but I have not found a rigorous analysis of the matter. "About a degree" is a general statement I have read. This is a factor that tends to please the Small CFF folks.

These things indicate that the CFF is unlikely to be greater than 50%, and is probably closer to 25% or less. I would not say, "close to zero", so I am not in the extreme Small CFF crowd, but neither do I favor Large CFF. As I have stated elsewhere, I learned that if we were to raise carbon dioxide levels to, say, ten times their present level, the amount of greenhouse heating would not exceed 4°C or about 7°F. That is quite significant. Is it enough to end civilization? I don't think so, but it will definitely change it. We are unlikely to find out, though. If we were to burn all the fossil fuels that we currently know about, it would no more than double the amount of carbon dioxide that we have already emitted. That's another way of saying that we have already burned about half the global reserve of fossil fuels. In rough terms, it means we have so far doubled atmospheric carbon dioxide, from around 200 ppm to around 400 ppm. Once we run out of natural gas, oil and coal—should we continue freely burning them—the level could become around 600 ppm. I don't think we have enough fossil fuel available to push that to 1,000 ppm, where some people begin to feel the effects.

For all that, we must continue to find other sources of energy, on all fronts. No source of energy is perfect. Wind farms (currently 4% of global electricity generation) disturb wind patterns, heat the air that passes through the fan blades, and kill migrating birds; solar panels turn about 15-20% of sunlight into solar energy and the rest is turned into heat, and much of this would be in desert areas where the sand usually reflects 75% of the light right back out into space; geothermal energy is "clean" from a heat perspective, because the heat will emerge from the earth anyway, but using geothermal energy causes pollution of surface water and ground water, a whole lot of pollution; and so forth. The more we learn about all these things, the better we can select energy generation methods that cause the least harm. That, and that alone, will reduce the CFF. It will probably never be zero, until human population is zero.

Postscript: Do you know what the global average temperature is? I am a geophysicist. Including the whole planet, the average temperature is about 4,000K (over 7,000°F). We need a different term for "global average atmospheric temperature", and we need to always specify at what elevation; is it surface, or at the average elevation of continental plains (about half or 2/3 a kilometer), or some other "standard" height?

Climate change or climate forcing?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, astronomy, astrobiology, exoplanets, climatology, climate change, global warming

Do we need to save the planet? It doesn't need it. Do we need to save the biosphere? We don't yet have the power to end it. Do we need to save civilization? Probably. This last is the question taken up by Adam Frank in Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth. He takes a new approach, you could say a Galactic approach, even a Universal approach, to setting parameters around the future of human civilization.

Dr. Frank uses a quieter tone than the noisy polemicists in the toils of public debate. He is nonetheless speaking as a prophet, warning us all of the consequences of the greatest of human endeavors, "the project of civilization." I found it notable that he never mentions the IPCC Reports. This is not to say that he doesn't give them any credence, but he is preaching to the unconverted: I learned long ago, in Christian evangelism, it does no good to quote Bible verses to someone who doesn't believe the Bible. Similarly, the content and methods behind the IPCC's work are challenged at every point by "climate deniers", so it is no use appealing to those reports.

In this book the author begins with Carl Sagan's metaphor of Western civilization as a teenager, grown up in body but not in judgement. Here in the US at least, we give 15- or 16-year-olds licenses, and the keys, to drive automobiles, knowing full well that their minds won't mature, and they will have very poor impulse control, for at least ten more years. So, at the very least, we in the First World are like a teenager with the keys to the energy sources of Planet Earth, and we have shown an utterly insatiable appetite for more and more energy use. This chart is instructive:

This shows energy use per person (credit: Our Finite World). The technology to mine and use coal jump-started the nascent Industrial Revolution in about 1850. Petroleum and Natural Gas triggered a further jump beginning right after World War I, which was stalled by the Depression, and then re-invigorated by World War II. The "flat spot" from about 1970-2000 is the effect of the Arab Oil Embargo. I suspect the development of Fracking to rejuvenate oil production in non-Arab nations is responsible for the jump after 2000.

So now we use four times as much energy per person as someone in 1820. That is a global average. Per-person use in the First World is in the 250-300 GJ/yr range, or 3-4 times the global average. So that is our "car". It has a lot of horsepower.

The question Sagan asked, based on figures from the 1960's, is, "Can the Earth provide the needs of human civilization, forever?" To abolish poverty worldwide, we'd need to roughly triple global resource use, particularly energy use. But we are seeing "cracks in the wall" already. Someone once said, to raise the entire population to the American level would require four more Earths.

What is Adam Frank's line of analysis? He continues with the Drake Equation, formulated in 1961,
that uses several factors to estimate the number of alien civilizations we might find using efforts such as SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, which uses radio frequency reception, in hopes of overhearing the alien version of "I Love Lucy". He dissects this for us and then presents the uses of a method developed by Svante Arrhenius, 122 years ago, to determine how much the earth will warm based on how much extra carbon dioxide gets into the atmosphere. "Climate science" is not new stuff, folks!

The Arrhenius method doesn't just work on Earth. It was used to understand what happened to Venus, to raise its temperature to 600°F, and why Mars is a bit warmer than it would be without any atmosphere, though daytime highs in its "Tropics" range around -10°F. Mars and Venus both have an atmosphere containing 95% carbon dioxide. Venus has a very, very heavy atmosphere while the air on Mars is very thin, about 1% of Earth-normal. But our air contains, at present, 400 ppm CO₂, or 0.04%. Martian air with enough nitrogen added to have the density of Earthly air would still have 0.95% CO₂, nearly 24 times as much! So the temperature range on, for example, airless Phobos, compared to that on Mars, validates the Arrhenius analysis for a CO₂-induced greenhouse effect (yes, Phobos is colder).

After presenting the history of exoplanet discoveries—a few thousand are now known—the author turns the Drake Equation on its head, to determine the "Pessimism Line". That is his term for how pessimistic you need to be to say we are surely alone in the Universe: Knowing that the stars in all the galaxies range in age up to 10+ billion years, and that there are about 100 billion stars in each of 100 billion galaxies (or perhaps even more) in the visible Universe, how pessimistic do you have to be to strongly aver that our Human civilization is the first and (so far) only civilization to have arisen in the Universe?

In 1961 the only factor of 7 in the Drake Equation that was known was the rate of star formation in the Milky Way Galaxy, about one per year. All the other terms were speculative, and all possible values of, for example, the chance that a planet will be at a "just right" distance from its star (in the habitable zone), were strongly supported by various people. You could find someone who'd argue that the probability was close to zero; someone else who'd argue that any star that had planets probably had at least one in the habitable zone. Now, with a few thousand known exoplanets, we know that nearly every star has multiple planets, and about 40% of those have at least one planet in the habitable zone. So the unknown terms are:

• Can life form easily, or not?
• Once formed, can life develop "intelligent" species easily, or is it very hard?
• Is the likelihood that an intelligent species will form a global civilization large, or small? and 
• Once formed, how long will such a civilization continue?

By turning all this around backwards, the combination of these "biological" and "sociological" terms needed to make it very unlikely that more than one civilization has ever been formed, was found to be 10^-22. That is one in ten billion trillion. This is a quantitative estimate of how hostile the Universe must be to civilization, for us to be alone in all space and time (to date). Effectively, this analysis presents you with a pile of sand, a trillion tons of it, containing ten billion trillion grains, and asks, "Knowing that at least one sand grain represents a civilization in the Universe, how likely is it that no other grain of sand represents a planet with a civilization? Not one single one?"

For most of us, the thought that civilization arose only once in ten billion trillion attempts is rather ludicrous. Even Peter Ward with his Rare Earth analysis, is probably not that pessimistic!

Dr. Frank then goes further, asking, "What does it take for a civilization to be sustainable, very long-term?" Numerous isolated and semi-isolated civilizations on Earth have risen and fallen. It seems even Earth, so hospitable to life of many kinds, can he hostile to civilizations…or, at least, unforgiving of egregious errors. Further, civilizations that fell, did so quickly. The environmental disasters, caused by the Easter Islanders and the Mayans all doing what people do to have a thriving society, reduced populations to about one tenth of what had once been in just one or two generations. Even today, there are fewer Mayans than there were in 1200 AD. These are two examples of civilizations that fell not because of conquest by someone else, but at their own hand. Two cases of a teenager driving right off a cliff.

The book closes with an appeal to wake up and grow up. It would be well to heed it. To my understanding, no civilization yet produced on Earth has figured out the trick to sustaining itself without perpetual growth. In the US, a growing GDP is required for a "robust" economy. The US government recently announced a 4.1% annual growth rate (that really means 0.335% growth for that particular month). It is good in a way. But if it keeps up, we can project it into the future: In just 17 years, GDP would double, and it would keep doubling again every 17 years. By 2100 AD the US GDB would be 27 times what it is today. What chance is there of that happening? Hmmm??

Suppose we finally get the analysis right, and find out that, for human civilization on Earth to be sustainable for 100, or 1,000, or 10,000 years, we would have to reduce our population to at most two billion, and the general lifestyle and level of energy expenditure (both personal and corporate) would need to match that of Peru (about ¼ of what us Americans are used to)? Then what? I'll tell you what: whatever the actual level of lifestyle really is, in time the biosphere will enforce it.

We are not divorced from Earth. We cannot act as though we were not part of nature. Nature can get along without us. We cannot get along without nature. Civilization is an experiment. It may be one that eventually fails. The Pessimism Line only tells us how unlikely it is that we are on the only planet to develop civilizations. It doesn't tell us how long they last. That part of the Drake Equation is still entirely unknown.

I would put it this way: If there is any chance for a global civilization to develop and thrive, and properly care for all its members, without constant growth in both population and standard of living, we need to figure that out right away. Or we, too, will crash, just a bigger version of the Mayans or Easter Island.

A plan to reverse global warming

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, climate change, compendia

The title of the book is Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming. It is edited by Paul Hawken, who founded and Executive Director of Project Drawdown. The Project has a large number of affiliated scientists and others who are working on numerous efforts that are at least "carbon neutral" and, it is hoped, able to actually take CO₂ back out of the atmosphere. He admits in his introduction that the plan he proposes is the "most comprehensive" because it is the only one. Fair enough. All other plans to date focus on mitigation, on slowing the increase of CO₂, and so forth.

It will take some doing for anyone to come up with a "more comprehensive" set of proposals. The book discusses 100, the top 100 from a pool of a few hundred. The top 80 are ranked according to expected reduction in greenhouse gases as "CO₂ equivalent"; for instance, methane is something like 30-40 times as effective as CO₂ is at trapping heat near the Earth's surface. So reducing a ton of methane is counted as about 40 tons of CO₂ equivalent. The other 20 ideas are gathered in a chapter titled "Coming Attractions", rather more speculative possible solutions that haven't been as thoroughly researched.

I was impressed with the scholarship and ingenuity that went into the chapters, including a half dozen essays on related subjects (so there are more than 100 chapters). But I looked for, and didn't find, one critical element. In the discussion of the history of the theory of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the early insight on human impact on the atmosphere, in 1831 by Alexander von Humboldt, is dwelt upon, but Svante Arrhenius, who quantified the effect in 1896, is not mentioned. Considering that the discussions of greenhouse effect, climate change, global warming, and a few similar and increasingly politicized terms, are based on mathematical analyses, the utter lack of even a fillip toward math dismayed me.

I remember learning of Arrhenius's work before I was a teenager, nearly 60 years ago. With the mathematical tools available to a ninth grader of the time, it wasn't hard to follow his reasoning, nor to reproduce his results. The tedium comes in adding up the effective ultraviolet/visible-versus-infrared spectra to determine an effective emissivity-temperature relationship for any particular gas. The concept is thus:

• There are "windows" in the spectrum of a gas, ranges of light wavelength that are transmitted with little or no hindrance.
• Conversely, there are "doors" in the spectrum, ranges of light wavelength that are absorbed by the gas and heat it up. It then radiates this heat as longer-wavelength infrared (IR).
• Ultraviolet (UV), visible (V), and near-IR (the shorter IR wavelengths) emitted by the Sun are little hindered by the atmosphere, and strike the ground, heating it.
• The warmed ground radiates mid- and far-IR (long to very long wavelength IR) upwards.
• Some of the re-radiated IR passes through "windows" of the various gases in the atmosphere, and so outward into space.
• Some instead hits one "door" or another, such that it heats the gas, which heats the rest of the atmosphere. Interestingly, nitrogen and oxygen, which make up 96-99% of the atmosphere, depending mainly on humidity, have spectra with very little in the way of "doors".
• Light that hits a "door" causes heating of the air, which then emits longer-wavelength IR (mostly far-IR) that is radiated in all directions. Simply put, half of it goes back down to increase the heating of the ground, and the other half goes up and out into space.
• The atmospheric temperature rises until the radiation passing upward through the "windows", and half of that which hit "doors", balances the radiation coming inward from the Sun. At that balancing temperature, total emissivity upward equals total emissivity downward, across all wavelengths.

That is the greenhouse effect. What gases cause the most greenhouse warming, that is, which gases have the biggest and thickest "doors"? Number 1 is water vapor! If Earth had no water at all, being as dry as the Moon, it would be 33°C (59°F) colder than it is (as the Moon is), with an average temperature near -18°C or 0°F. But Earth's atmosphere contains between 1% and 3% water vapor, which causes all this heating.

Although CO₂ is much less effective as a greenhouse gas than methane or nitrous oxide, it is much more abundant: a few hundred parts per million (ppm) versus 1.5-2 ppm for methane. The critical thing about CO₂ is that we can influence its abundance. We do so by burning stuff. Almost everything we burn for heating and creating energy such as electricity contains carbon. Coal is almost pure carbon; methane has the least, but is still 75% carbon by weight (and 25% hydrogen). But the heating value you get from a ton of methane versus a ton of coal means, kilowatt for kilowatt, it produces only about half the CO₂.

Since the year 1800, the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere has risen from about 280 ppm to about 400 ppm. That has caused an average heating of Earth by about half a degree C, or close to 1°F. Note that the same climate scientists who compiled the various IPCC reports on global warming over the past 30 years differ quite a lot over whether it is half a degree, or one degree, or perhaps less than half. "Half a degree" is a sort of average of their opinions.

Here is a point I haven't read anywhere since about 1990: If we go far out on a limb and calculate the effect of CO₂ going way, way up, to perhaps 1% (where it affects our breathing reflex), and which is 10,000 ppm, the average temperature of the Earth would rise no more than 4°C (~7°F) above what it was in 1800 AD.

Now, 4 degrees is a large change, and would cause a lot of trouble. But it would not end human life on Earth...just human comfort! Because the #1 issue discussed in Drawdown, the factor that can reduce the greenhouse effect the most, is to eliminate refrigerants containing carbon! No A/C, folks, unless you want to return to using ammonia or CO₂ as a refrigerant. Ammonia is actually a great refrigerant, but it is so toxic that even a tiny leak could be catastrophic were it to leak into your house. Effective A/C using ammonia would have to be totally redesigned, to operate outdoors only, in a very well-ventilated area, creating chilled water that would be pumped through the indoor cooling system. More complexity, more cost, and just how rapidly do you think the world's slightly-less-affluent nations are likely to embrace it? CO₂ is a less efficient refrigerant, but at least it isn't toxic, though it can cause suffocation, so it still would have to be used in outdoors-only water-loop systems.

Before closing I need to address a typo and an unfamiliar concept. On page xiv in an introductory section, the author is discussing just what a gigaton is. After showing that it is the amount of water in 14,400,000 Olympic-size swimming pools, it is stated, "thirty-six billion gigatons is the amount of carbon dioxide emitted in 2016." The word "billion" needs to be omitted. It is either 36 GT or 36 billion tons, but not both! Secondly, the words "a billion acres" appear a few times, or various amounts such as half a billion or 1.5 billion acres, etc. To help us get our hands around it, one billion acres is about 2.7% of the land area of Earth. Since only a quarter of that land is arable, that comes to about 11% of land that can be farmed.

I like the ideas discussed in Drawdown; it's more practical and well-thought than most other writing I've seen on the subject. I hope the efforts of the Drawdown Project continue. These folks are more level-headed than most of the other loud voices in the climate arena.

Bill Nye the Climate Guy

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, scientific method, climate change, polemics

Bill Nye is one of my all-time favorite people. The fact that I was dismayed by some aspects of his recent book doesn't diminish my admiration for him. He is a top-notch science educator and a writer I enjoy reading.

Bill Nye's new book, Everything All At Once: How to Unleash Your Inner Nerd, Tap into Radical Curiosity, and Solve Any Problem, is ostensibly about that middle phrase: "Release your inner nerd." It is primarily an evangelical work, aimed at anyone on the fence between those who "believe" in climate change and the climate-change "deniers". Along the way, though, he offers great examples and advice for many folks who may be a bit tech-averse, to see how humans are by nature technical beings, and that solving problems is what we do best—or we can, if we go about it right.

I hope a great many people will indeed read this book. It is very well written. The author manages to press his pro-climate change case pretty hard without becoming entirely disagreeable. I will address my concerns in a moment.

Let me first state my background in the matter; it is a subject I have followed for nearly sixty years.

When I was a child I heard about the "Greenhouse Effect". It was already old news, because the term was used by Svante Arrhenius in 1896 to describe his calculations that a doubling of CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere would raise average global temperature by about 5°C (that is 9°F to us Americans). At the age of twelve I was able to learn enough math to reproduce Arrhenius's result.

In actuality, "greenhouse effect" is not an entirely accurate metaphor. In a greenhouse, the glass physically traps air warmed by the sun, while also providing spectral emissivity to enhance the effect. A "greenhouse gas" cannot physically trap warm air, but causes extra heating solely via spectral emissivity.

The terms "Global Warming" and "Climate Change" began to be used by some in about 1975, and their use ramped up greatly after 1985. "Greenhouse Effect" also took off about that time, when the atmospheric effects they all refer to became a political football. Then a funny thing happened. Looking at the Google Ngram Viewer, I find that since 1992 "Greenhouse Effect" rapidly fell out of favor, "Climate Change" became the term of choice, with "Global Warming" running a rather distant second.

The problem with all this is that "Greenhouse Effect" denotes a possible cause, while the other two terms refer to effects. So now let us back up and examine the term I threw in earlier, "Spectral Emissivity". For solid materials, this refers to a departure from the spectral behavior of a blackbody or graybody. If we could produce a paint that was perfectly gray—at any level of grayness—throughout the electromagnetic spectrum, we could paint it on a surface and it would cause an amount of heating, when the sun shined upon it, directly correlated to the total emissivity. To be specific, a perfect blackbody surface will heat up to a temperature that depends only on the energy being radiated to it. It has an emissivity of 1. A perfect reflector will not be heated at all. It has an emissivity of 0. A perfect graybody surface with emissivity of 0.5 will heat up to an intermediate temperature according to a proportional constant times the Boltzmann factor t⁴.

Now, consider a "step-spectral" surface. Suppose it has an emissivity of 1 for visible light, and an emissivity of 0 for infrared light. Let's put the cutoff at 700 nm. A surface with this characteristic, in a vacuum so air will not carry off any heat, and with only visible light shined upon it, would heat up until it was hot enough to radiate away that same amount of radiant energy. In visible light it would appear black. It absorbs light, but if it is cool, emits nearly none. Thus it must heat up. You might know from experience that the heating element in an oven gets to about 600°C before it begins to glow reddish, and at 800°C it is getting orange-red. The great majority of its radiation, however, is at infrared wavelengths longer, much longer, than the 700 nm radiation we call "deep red". If it is prevented by the step-spectral emissivity from radiating at those longer wavelengths, it must, perforce, heat up until it is radiating a lot of visible light, to balance the incoming light. Thus a step-spectral surface tends to get very hot indeed, hotter than an oven element.

Now we can consider gases. Oxygen and nitrogen hardly absorb any light at any wavelength of interest to us as we consider the heat balance of our atmosphere. There is a common gas, however, that does absorb a lot of light, at a range of wavelengths that make it a strong greenhouse gas. That is water vapor. Surprised? We will look at some spectra in a moment. First, qualitatively, we find that water vapor absorbs a lot of ultraviolet light, but absorbs even more strongly in several ranges throughout the infrared, with narrow absorption bands at about 1.2 and 1.9 microns, a wider band from 2.5-3 microns, and a wide, almost total absorption feature from 5 to 7.5 microns. The result of this is that if Earth had no atmosphere it would be 32°C (about 60°F) cooler than it is. A perpetual ice age without the ice. So water vapor is by far the strongest greenhouse gas, and is responsible for life being able to exist on earth.

"Climate Change" is all about carbon dioxide (CO₂). What does this gas do? It also has spectral emissivity, with an absorption band at about 2.7 microns, a stronger one near 4.2 microns, and a third between 12-16 microns. This last one is of primary interest. It is perfectly placed to absorb about 10% of the thermal radiation from warm dirt, meaning that the dirt has to get a little warmer to radiate that extra energy at other wavelengths. And that is what is behind Arrhenius's greenhouse effect calculation.

Greenhouse gases operate a little differently from painted surfaces. Dirt and other stuff on Earth's surface has spectral emissivity, of course, but not nearly with the perfection of the step-spectral material discussed earlier. So it reflects a lot of light, absorbs some, and gets warm enough to radiate some infrared. In a vacuum, dirt with sunlight shining on it would have some specific temperature. Now put a layer of greenhouse gas above it, an atmosphere containing water vapor. The incoming sunlight is not affected much. But the outgoing infrared from the warm dirt is partly absorbed by the water vapor, which heats up and radiates also, with half going up and half going down. This causes the dirt to get warmer, until it is able to radiate enough to balance its thermal outflow with the radiative inflow from sunlight and also the re-radiated infrared from the warm air above it. How does CO₂ modify this picture? It absorbs a little more infrared radiation, in portions of the spectrum in which water is rather transparent. So CO₂ strengthens the greenhouse effect. Now, here are the spectra:

I don't know the original source of this graph. It is found all over the place. It also shows a tiny contribution from oxygen and ozone, but we won't consider those here (in the "ozone layer" the temperature goes up significantly, however).

The blue line is for water vapor. The curve marked 255K shows the thermal radiation from a piece of ice at -18°C or 0°F. "Room temperature" is close to 300K or 27°C (81°F). Its radiation curve would be a little to the left of the one shown.

The point is, water vapor reflects back a lot of the radiation from the earth and even from glaciers. Yes, glaciers radiate infrared also. The blue line is for water vapor with a content near 0.3% of the atmosphere, or near saturation (100% relative humidity) at ice temperature. The CO₂ curve is for a few hundred ppm; the sources I read didn't state exactly. The result of increasing the amount of CO₂ would be to widen the bands, as their "wings" absorbed more and more. This shows what happens when these two gases lead to greenhouse warming.

Now it is a separate issue, whether this is actually causing climate change. "Deniers" say not so, proponents of the idea that CO₂ is a "pollutant" say it is. I won't get into that. We have measured that, from the time I was a little child and there was less than 300 ppm CO₂ in the atmosphere, and today, when the amount is 400 ppm, global atmospheric average temperature has risen just under 1°C.

Is that a lot, one degree C? Let's look at one factor. Water expands when heated. Heating water by 1°C yields an expansion of 0.000214, or 0.0214%. The ocean averages four km in depth. If the entire ocean were warmed by 1°C, it would be 0.000214x4,000m = 0.856m deeper (33.7 inches). That is enough to force the evacuation of some low-lying areas and certain island nations such as Tuvalu. "Climate evacuation" has already started. But has the whole ocean heated by that much? Not yet. Give it time. The early evacuations were the result of less than one-third of this figure.

I'll stop there. These are not easy points to make with a public that largely doesn't care. Thus, Bill Nye's passion. He wants to make everyone care. But as I read I took careful note: will he mention water vapor? He does not, except for a throwaway phrase in a late chapter. We can't ignore water, for another reason. Trapping a little more heat means adding energy to the system. That means more water could evaporate. Whether it will or not is a huge area of controversy in the climate modeling arena. Water is complex. It might be the most complex substance there is. It is possible that the added energy will yield a net drying rather than adding more water. We might see more rain, or less rain, overall, and nobody yet has a good handle on which areas might experience greater or reduced rainfall. Oh, I've seen a few predictions, but none is well supported by robust evidence.

I agree with Bill Nye, though, that we need to be reducing our dependence on "convenient" energy from burning stuff (mainly fossil fuels), and toward solar, wind and other "alternatives". A generation ago the oil companies began calling themselves energy companies. But they are really still oil and coal and gas companies, with only tiny amounts being spent on non-carbon energy production. They could become the heroes of the 22^nd Century. But I fear they will more likely be the goats. I just don't know who else has money enough to do the research to make solar and wind as ubiquitous as they need to become. And there, I think the Science Guy might agree. Read the book. Agree with Bill Nye or not, you're in for a fun ride.

A loss for the atmosphere

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, climate change, argument

Jonathan Swift wrote, "You cannot persuade a man out of a belief that he wasn't persuaded into."

"Answer not a fool according to his folly, Lest thou be like to him -- even thou. Answer a fool according to his folly, Lest he be wise in his own eyes." – Proverbs 26:4-5 Young's Literal Translation

Let's take up the Bible passage first. It is akin to a koan, seemingly self-contradictory, and is best understood in the context of political disputation. The first sentence warns against letting your opponent (fool or not!) set the terms of the debate. For example, to answer either 'yes' or 'no' to the question, "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?" leads you into a trap. The second sentence is wiser. It is best understood in a paraphrase: "Don't be reasonable with an unreasonable person." If you suspect your opponent is crazy, you must be crazier.

That leads us to the other quote. Cases of religious conversion are but one example of experiences that people describe in very emotional terms. The most frequent phrase is, "Once I was blind but now I see." This also happens in other arenas, and in particular in the science of climate change, this is what Anna Rose was hoping for when she embarked on a month-long odyssey with Nick Minchin, a retired member of the Australian Senate, to interview scientists and others engaged in the debate over climate change, global warming, or whatever you may call it. The journey was sponsored by ABC in Australia, and led to a program aired in April, I Can Change Your Mind About Climate.

Anna Rose is chair of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition. As we find from reading her book Madlands: A Journey to Change the Mind of a Climate Skeptic, nobody's mind was changed. And as I saw at the ABC website, a poll of those who viewed the documentary TV program shows that few minds were changed at all. If anybody changed their opinion, it was probably in the direction of skepticism. Of 29,900 poll responses, 56% were either doubtful or dismissive of climate change ("Dismissive" alone was 48%) and 40% were concerned or alarmed. That leaves but 4% in the middle. This is to be expected. Even if a majority of people have no strong feelings about the subject, they are the least likely to watch a documentary with an argumentative format. The rest already had their minds made up, and probably watched to either cheer or groan as one side or another made telling points.

To tell the truth, from reading Madlands, I didn't see hardly any telling points made by the experts chosen by Ms Rose. It was clear from the outset that she was trying to bat way out of her league. She writes midway through of feeling that she was following the rules, while Nick was not. Well, of course not. He is a politician. From the beginning his agenda was winning over people who would watch the program, not answering any of the arguments made to him. He chose only one (formerly) respected scientist, and several more telegenic spokespeople.

The month of travel covered all the continents except Antarctica (I suspect ABC producers quailed at the cost of getting a film crew to the Ross ice shelf). Fairly early on, they visited the scientist most likely to make a dent in Nick's skepticism, Professor Richard Muller of UC Berkeley. A profound skeptic, Muller thought that the famous "hockey stick" graph of warming in the 20th Century was based on faulty measurements. Climate skeptic web sites abound with pictures of standard recording stations located near air conditioning equipment, or in the midst of concrete covered areas. Unwilling to believe NASA or NOAA or anybody else, Muller gathered all the data used for these calculations over the past century or so, billions of measurements, and had a team re-analyze them, eliminating the ones that were the most likely to be compromised. His team produced a temperature graph almost identical to the "hockey stick". He changed his point of view, at least to some extent. Prof. Muller now declares that the climate is warming at a surprising rate, and that our emissions of carbon dioxide are largely responsible: "…we are dumping enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that we're working in a dangerous realm."

Nick was not swayed. Maybe nudged just a tiny bit, but at that point, Anna should have seen the light herself, and called off the rest of the project. Muller was not one of her picks, but had a better case to make than any of them. The basic story is that Anna picked a series of reasonable and very qualified experts, while Nick picked primarily pit bulls. He didn't bother to try to convince her. He was aiming at the TV audience. The documentary provided him with a platform on which she had at most a cameo presence.

Madlands is her attempt to salvage something from a disaster. She makes point after point in the text, and in each case, I asked internally, "So why didn't you say that for the cameras?" It proved much too easy for her to be shocked speechless.

The climate debate is not about science. The science has been known for 150 years. I replicated Arrhenius's calculations more than 50 years ago. The modern refinement is to pin down feedback effects and nonlinear transitions. "Pin down" is not quite accurate. The greenhouse effect alone can account for at most a rise of 4°C if we increase carbon dioxide to 5-10 times its current level. That is bad enough. But recent (since 1980 or so) measurements indicate that changes in water vapor in the atmosphere, aerosol production, and so forth, might multiply greenhouse warming by a factor of between 1.5 and 4; the consensus is "about 3". That is the basis of the IPCC prediction of warming by a further 1.2°C to 4°C by 2050. Greenhouse effects alone would add less than a degree.

To effect a change in policy, one must convince policy makers, not just of the truth of your propositions, but that a cost-effective solution can be had, one that does not threaten to end their career. Rule Zero of Politics: "Where you stand depends on where you sit." Anna Rose's book and further work are intended to shift public opinion. She does, at least, understand that to turn a policy maker's stance it is necessary to change the stance of the constituency. Too bad it takes so long, because Rule One is "Moses in the Wilderness": it takes 40 years for the old generation and their old ideas to die out and a new generation to rise up.