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.

The control freaks are coming

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, climate change, geoengineering

Planethacking: (not plane-thacking but planet-hacking) noun; informal synonym for Geoengineering, a set of technologies for effecting global influence or control over climate and atmospheric dynamics.

Did you ever suddenly become aware of your breathing, and then try to control it? For a moment or two, it seems cool [in, out, huff, puff], but just as suddenly you realize with horror that to continue to breathe consciously becomes a kind of slavery. You dare not give attention to anything else!

The dilemma we face in a technological world is to decide what is worth controlling and what is better left to its own devices. HACK the Planet: Science's Best Hope—or Worst Nightmare—for Averting Climate Catastrophe, by Eli Kintisch, raises this question a half-dozen ways. Though the author bases his premises on greenhouse warming by CO₂, clearly the big picture is that weather and temperature disasters are increasing, and this is going to lead to increased public desire, then pressure, to "do something about it."

In the author's view, we are quite likely to be pushed into doing something about it, and precipitously, all unprepared. Knowing that CO₂ is much of the problem, there are two sides to dealing with it: making less of it or removing some of it. Making less involves conservation and developing more solar and renewable and nuclear energy sources (There is enough sunlight to run all of civilization, if we just have the political and financial will to install the infrastructure). Removing some of it, the author calls by the colorful term "the sucking 1-ton challenge": What is the minimum cost to remove a ton of CO₂ from the atmosphere?

This is the first kind of geoengineering, because if it is done, it will be large in scale and global in scope. The atmosphere weighs 5.1×10¹⁵ metric tons (Tm). One part per million of this is 5.1×10⁹Tm, or about five billion tons (that is 5.6 billion English short tons). The current CO₂ concentration is 385ppm. To reduce this to 350ppm means removing 35ppm, or more than 175 billion tons of CO₂. Problem one: What does each ton cost? Problem two: Where will you put it?

The author doesn't just discuss the various ideas for removing and "putting" the CO₂, he discusses the people who are trying to work out the methods for doing so. These methods range from injection into the deep ocean or deep wells to making concrete, lots of it (build your next house from used CO₂!). As to the latter idea, I got no sense of where we'd get that much calcium. Most of Earth's calcium is already carbonated; we call it limestone. Another scheme is to fertilize the oceans so plankton will bloom, removing CO₂, at least for a while.

OK, that is one side. Many folks say we'll never be able to afford renovating the atmosphere directly, we should just do something to shield the planet from excess solar energy. This can be done by brightening clouds (force them to be made from smaller droplets) and by injecting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere. My take on this is, let's not block the sunlight, let's instead use it to make solar energy so we're producing less CO₂. All schemes for reflecting or blocking sunlight would make solar power less effective, a great loss. The only possible benefit of solar-blocking methods is that they cost a lot less than atmospheric revamping efforts.

Each chapter (there are twelve) is preceded by a short cautionary tale. Ranging from aerosol experiments in Russia a couple of years ago to introduction of various species (such as Nile perch) into new ecosystems to drying up the Aral Sea for Soviet agriculture, each resulted in disaster except the last, which utilized dung beetles in Australia to hasten the decomposition of cattle pats and reduce fly-borne diseases. That one, at least, worked well. Never mind that cattle are themselves an introduced species in Australia!

Clearly, while the author hopes something will work, he holds out little hope that it will. In a chapter on the politics of geoengineering experimentation, he found that the present social climate is very anti-experimentation. Nobody has yet been able to complete a large-scale experiment, so we haven't yet found out the most basic parameters.

Human emission of CO₂ is actually a geoengineering experiment that has been going on for a century, and we are just now getting scientifically clear about its effects. It is not the first, however. Agriculture, which directly affects more than a quarter of Earth's land area, was the first geoengineering effort, with a duration of eight or ten millennia so far. Earth's biosphere has been remade to support about seven billion of us and our two billion cattle. Without this huge project, Earth could support no more than half a billion of us, or perhaps far less.

What would a further geoengineered world be like? According to David Brower, technology makes the world into a cage. The author closes with a riff on this: "Maybe geoengineering makes [the world] more like a terrarium, an enclosed, controlled garden. Even if geoengineering helps us one day stave off the worst climate crisis, we'll still be inside its walls."

Gardening the atmosphere

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, global warming, geoengineering

A new book about global warming, pro or con, seems to come out every week. I've come to avoid them. One can only endure so many polemics. How to Cool the Planet: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth's Climate by Jeff Goodell is a middle-ground book. He takes human-caused global warming as a premise, and asks, "What can we do about it?"

It turns out there are just three approaches that could make a substantial difference:

1. Reduce carbon dioxide emissions
2. Shield the earth with a reflecting layer (AKA geoengineering)
   
3. Extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it somewhere (sometimes AKA geoengineering)
   

It has proven politically impossible to get anywhere with #1. #3 appears to be extremely costly. Now #2, well, it is cheap, but only in a monetary sense. It has so far proven too politically costly for anyone with the temerity to try an experiment. Also, the "mitigating" approaches, #2 and #3, are seen by many as a way for "big oil" to claim we don't need to do anything about carbon emissions: "just balance the emissions with sufficient geoengineering efforts and everything will be all right." Of course, "big oil" also claims carbon emissions aren't doing any harm in the first place.

Then we need to ask the question, whose ox is being gored here? What of people who think global warming (should it be happening) is a good thing? After all, other than the lack of air conditioning, and a little political bad news called feudalism, things were pretty good during the Medieval Climate Optimum a thousand years ago, when global temperatures were about two degrees C warmer than they are right now. (Personally, I prefer a slightly cooler climate. I am living about as far south as I can tolerate already. Maybe it is time to buy land in Canada!)

The author is wise to set aside the "reduce carbon emissions" argument. There are books aplenty on the subject, and a realistic look at the Montreal and Copenhagen debacles shows just how unlikely it is that the U.S., China, India and Japan will enact any significant changes in their economies. And there is nearly nobody else who matters, in this arena, just the E.U., but they are a distant fifth place in emissions; were they to emit zero carbon starting tomorrow, the effect would be pretty small. So instead, we are treated to an interesting tour of the various geoengineering methods and their proponents.

Carbon sequestration has two flavors: chemical extraction and storage, and "getting the plants to do it". In his second chapter, Goodell presents the work of David Keith in Calgary. Dr. Keith is building a prototype chemical extraction device. A test run in the author's presence reduced CO₂ by one part per million, or about 1/3 percent of its abundance. Dr. Keith is optimistic that engineering improvements can increase efficiency to a level near 10ppm (3% of total abundance).

The machine uses cheap chemicals, but in large amounts. To reduce atmospheric carbon from the current level (380ppm) to a pre-industrial level (280ppm), you'd have to pass the entire atmosphere through an array of these machines, ten times. Let's think about this. The weight of the atmosphere is 14.7 pounds per square inch, or 1.03 kg/cm². We want to remove 100ppm of it, or a portion of 0.0001; 0.0235 oz/in² or 0.103 g/cm². Let's go metric from here.

The surface area of Earth is half a billion square kilometers. A km is 100,000 cm. The math produces a requirement to "capture" more than 500 trillion kg, or 500 billion metric tonnes, of carbon dioxide. Dr. Keith's machine converts the gas to limestone, CaCO₃. 56% of the limestone is calcium oxide, CaO, so the end result would be 1.2 trillion tonnes of limestone. Let's see, the stuff has a specific gravity of 2.7, so a cubic meter weighs 2.7 tonnes; the volume is about 440 billion m³ or 440 km³. Anybody need a second White Cliffs of Dover, or have a place to put one? Maybe we could re-fill old open-pit mines. This is the amount of carbon storage needed to remove 100ppm from the atmosphere, whether it is to yield a pre-industrial atmosphere, or to keep the next 100ppm from accumulating in the first place.

How 'bout getting the trees to do it? You don't have to tie up half a trillion tons of calcium oxide to get this one to work; the gas gets converted to cellulose. Cellulose, however, is light. Hardwoods have specific gravities in the range 0.6-0.85. Let's pick 0.7 as an average. Here, you are tying up water with carbon dioxide in a 1:1 ratio, but releasing oxygen, so 44 grams of CO₂ produces 30 grams of cellulose. This is a benefit; you "only" need to produce 360 billion tonnes of wood to take 100ppm out of the atmosphere. But the volume of that wood is greater than the volume of the limestone above, just over 500 km³. Anybody ready to plant about ten trillion trees?

Fertilizing the oceans has also been seen as a possible solution. Iron is the rate-limiting nutrient in many parts of the open ocean. Here, experiments have actually been done, but not with geoengineering in mind. Impressive plankton blooms, visible to satellites, have resulted. But you still have the volume problem. How many cubic km of diatoms and coccolithophorids do you have to produce for half a thousand km³ of them to fall to the ocean floor and stay there?

So we come to global shields, of two types. Half the book investigates the scientific, political, and social aspects of these. One method is cloud-brightening, the other is sulfate-aerosol-blocking. In the book the author reports that it takes not millions but billions of condensation nuclei to make a cloud whiter so it reflects more sunlight. Actually, nuclei of the right size require droplets just under a micron in diameter; there are about a quadrillion such droplets produced from each liter of sea water one sprays. A quadrillion is a million billion (in American numbering, anyway). It takes thousands of liters of spray to make a substantial effect over a few square km of area. So far, no experiment has been tried, because of huge fears by environmentalists.

So: sulfate aerosols. This is potentially the cheapest method. Pump a lot of micron-size sulfur dioxide droplets into the stratosphere, and they'll stay there for 3-5 years, reflecting extra sunlight all the while. I wonder what astronomers think of the idea? Globally, some $20 billion have been invested in large telescopes in the past twenty years. How many of them would be rendered a lot less useful by a sulfate haze? The primary selling point of this approach is that we're not moving half a thousand cubic km of stuff, just a few thousand cubic meters.

The numerical analyses above are my own, not the author's. In a few places, he calls some of these methods akin to bad science fiction. He also worries about military uses of geoengineering technologies. There doesn't seem to be a good way of dealing with global warming. Yet his is a hopeful book. Human nature being what it is, we are likely to do something heroic when we really need to. As usual, heroes are a vanishingly small minority, so when the true crunch arrives (such as the imminent flooding of NYC or Bangladesh), a few visionaries will likely drag the rest of the human race, kicking and screaming, into a new kind of global economy. Let's hope the death toll is less than half of humanity.

I am hopeful in another way. The Medieval Climate Optimum showed that significant warming did not heat the ocean enough to make it rise much, at least not during that 400-year warming event. The real danger is melting ice caps, the ones on land, which are Greenland and Antarctica. They didn't melt much a thousand years ago.

All kinds of dreary forecasts are based on positive feedback effects. Negative feedback seems to be less well known, or ignored. I expect a warmer total climate to produce more polar snowfall, perhaps building Antarctica faster than it is being melted at the edges. Will a warmer planet be a cloudier planet? That's a possible negative feedback effect. Nobody at present knows. There is not one "global climate model" that models clouds properly. Cloud dynamics are still poorly known.

However, I am in favor of experimentation. How are we to know the effects of nano-nucleation of clouds without actually nucleating some clouds? Macronucleation for rainmaking purposes didn't work too well, but maybe cloud brightening can be one useful tool. Maybe sulfate aerosols can be "spot applied" in the stratosphere, and maybe not. We don't know if it could be helpful, or even possible, without trying. Can iron fertilization of ocean water do any good, or do enough good? Can't know until we try. The prime virtue of all these is, if things go bad, you just stop. In short order, natural processes will eliminate the change.

Goodell makes a good analogy here, that we ought to consider carefully. We are already engineering the atmosphere, as a by-product of energy use. Geoengineering methods that attempt to gain more control of the global thermostat are akin to gardening. There is no question that a garden is not a natural landscape. But it is not entirely artifice either. It is a synergy of human planning and natural processes, a compromise between gardener and nature. We will probably never be able to "produce" a pleasant, sunny day on demand in any particular location, nor order up a centimeter of rain when and where it is urgently needed. But we may be able to modify overall probabilities, to "tilt the roulette wheel" a little. Maybe.

In the longest of long runs, we'll run out of carbon based fuels. We won't add any more carbon to the atmosphere because we won't have any to add. What kind of world will that be? Will we have had the foresight to develop truly renewable and sustainable energy-production methods? Or will it be a return to horse-and-buggy days? Will anyone still have air conditioning? How much CO₂ will the atmosphere hold by then? 1000ppm? Things could be a lot different.