THE WEATHER MAKERS
HOW MAN IS CHANGING THE CLIMATE AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR LIFE ON EARTH
TIM FLANNERY
ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS 2005
PART I
Foreword by Paul Anderson, Chairman & CEO of Duke Energy Corp.
· The real message of The Weather Makers is not that global warming is real, although he does an outstanding job of explaining the science in a way that any of us can understand.
· The point that he drives home is that it is an issue that we must address today if we are going to avert cataclysmic changes that could affect us all by 2050.
· 70% of all people alive today will still be alive in 2050, so climate change affects almost every family on this planet.
· Energy CEOs and environmental scientists are not likely to agree on all aspects of an issue as complex as climate change. But there is one view in which Tim and I are in total agreement – it is time to move from denial to action.
The Slow Awakening
· By 1975 the first sophisticated computer models were suggesting that a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would lead to an increase in global temperature of around 5ºF.
· By 1988 climate scientists had become sufficiently worried to establish a panel, staffed by the world’s leading experts, to report twice each decade on the issue. Their third report, issued in 2001, sounded a note of sober alarm.
· For the past 10,000 years, Earth’s thermostat has been set to an average surface temperature of around 57ºF, allowing us to organize ourselves in a most impressive manner – planting crops, domesticating animals, and building cities.
· Earth’s thermostat is a complex and delicate mechanism, at the heart of which lies carbon dioxide, a colorless and odorless gas. It makes up around 3 parts per 10,000 in Earth’s atmosphere, a modest amount with a disproportionate influence on the planet’s temperature.
· Because we create carbon dioxide every time we drive a car, cook a meal, or turn on a light, and because the gas lasts around a century in the atmosphere, the proportion in the air we breathe is rapidly increasing.
· By 2004 almost every head of government in the developed world was alive to the issue but the most important thing to realize is that we can all make a difference and help combat climate change at almost no cost to our lifestyle.
· Climate change is very different from other environmental issues, such as biodiversity loss and the ozone hole.
· The best evidence indicates that we need to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions by 70% by 2050. If you own a four-wheel-drive and replace it with a hybrid fuel car, you can achieve a cut of that magnitude in a day rather than half a century.
· If you vote for a politician who has a deep commitment to reducing emissions, you might change the world. If you alone can achieve so much, so too can every individual and, in time, industry and government on Earth.
· The transition to a carbon-free economy is eminently achievable because we have all the technology we need to do so. It is only a lack of understanding and the pessimism and confusion generated by special interest groups that is stopping us from going forward.
· 70% of all people alive today will still be alive in 2050, so climate change affects almost every family on this planet.
· Four nations are yet to sign the Kyoto Protocol: the U.S.A, Australia, Monaco, and Liechtenstein. President Bush has said he wants more certainty before he acts on climate change.
· Excepting death and taxes, certainty simply does not exist in our world, and yet we often manage our lives in the most efficient manner. I cannot see why our response to climate change should be any different.
· What we need is good information and careful thinking, because in the years to come this issue will dwarf all others combined. It will become the only issue.
· We need to reexamine it in a truly skeptical spirit – to see how big it is and how fast it’s moving – so that we can prioritize our efforts and resources in ways that matter.
· What follows is my best effort, based on the work of thousands of colleagues, to outline the history of climate change, how it will unfold over the next century, and what we can do about it.
· With great scientific advances being made every month, this book is necessarily incomplete. That should not, however, be used as an excuse for inaction. We know enough to act wisely.
PART 1: GAIA’S TOOLS
Chapter 1: Gaia
· In 1979 the mathematician James Lovelock published a book, Gaia, that argued that earth was a single, planet-sized organism, which he named Gaia after an ancient Greek earth goddess. Because his arguments seem mystical, they discomfited many scientists.
· The atmosphere is Gaia’s great organ of interconnection and temperature regulation. A drop of one tenth of 1% in the solar radiation reaching Earth can trigger an ice age; so Earth’s long-term climate stability could not have resulted from mere chance.
· As life has diversified, Gaia has become better at regulating Earth’s temperature. With less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, Earth began to get very cold. Twice – around 710 million and again at 600 million years ago – Earth crossed a threshold that all but exterminated life, freezing our planet right to the equator.
· One third of all energy reaching the earth from the sun is reflected back to space by white surfaces. Once a proportion of the planet’s surface is bright ice and snow, enough sunlight is lost that a runaway cooling effect is created, which freezes the entire planet. That threshold is crossed when ice sheets reach around 30 degrees of latitude.
· Around 540 million years ago living things began to build skeletons of carbonate, and to do this they absorbed carbon dioxide from sea water, affecting levels in the atmosphere. Ever since then ice ages have been rare – only between 355 and 280 million years ago, and for the past 33 million years have they prevailed.
· If there was ever a single great advance in the establishment of Gaia, the evolution of planktonic calcifiers was certainly it; but at around the time they were proliferating, other changes were occurring.
· This was during the Carboniferous Period, when forests first covered the land, and when most of the coal deposits that now feed our industry were laid down.
· All of the carbon in that coal was once tied up in carbon dioxide floating in the atmosphere, so those primitive forests must have had an enormous influence on the carbon cycle.
· The evolution and spread of modern coral reefs around 55 million years ago drew unimaginable volumes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, further altering Gaia.
· The spread of grasses around 6-8 million years ago may have changed things in a very different way because of the fire they engender.
· Someone who believes in Gaia sees everything on Earth as being intimately connected to everything else, predisposing adherents to sustainable ways of living.
· In our modern world, the reductionist worldview is in the ascendant, and its adherents often see human actions in isolation. It is a reductionist worldview that has brought the present state of climate change upon us.
· The questions I wish to address are more amenable to a Gaian approach than to a reductionist one.
Chapter 2: The Great Aerial Ocean
· If we are to understand climate change, we need to come to grips with three important yet widely misunderstood terms – greenhouse gases, global warming, climate change.
· Greenhouse gases can trap heat near the Earth’s surface. As they increase in the atmosphere, the extra heat they trap leads to global warming, which in turn places pressure on Earth’s climate system.
· The atmosphere has four distinct layers, defined by their temperature gradient.
· The troposphere extends on average to 7 miles above the earth’s surface and contains 80% of all the atmosphere’s gases. Its temperature gradient is upside down – warmest at the bottom.
· The stratosphere gets hotter as one rises through it because it is rich in ozone, and ozone captures the energy of ultraviolet light, reradiating it as heat. Fierce winds circulate within it.
· Some 30 miles above the surface of Earth lies the mesosphere. At 130ºF it is the coldest portion of the entire atmosphere.
· Above it lies the thermosphere, which is a thin dribble of gas extending far into space. Temperatures can reach 2,000ºF, yet because the gas is so thinly dispersed, it would not feel hot to the touch.
· The great aerial ocean is composed of nitrogen (78%), oxygen (20.9%), and argon (0.9%). These three gases compose almost all of the air we breathe. At 77ºF, water vapor makes up 3% of what we inhale.
· The air you just exhaled could be feeding a plant on a distant continent next week. No volcano belches, no ocean churns, no creature breathes, without the great aerial ocean registering it.
· The last time you heard of telekinesis was probably when Uri Geller was bending spoons. It means ‘movement at a distance without a material connection.’ In the case of the atmosphere telekinesis allows storms, droughts, floods, and wind patterns to alter on a global level, and to do so more or less at the same time.
· Our global civilization is telekinetic, which is why it is such a force in the biosphere, but its telekinesis also explains why regional disruptions – such as wars, famines, and diseases – can have dire consequences for humanity as a whole.
· The atmosphere is opaque to most forms of radiative energy. Sunlight – visible light – is only a small band in a broad spectrum of wavelengths that the sun shoots our way.
· Light is important to us as our eyes have evolved to detect wavelengths in just that part of the spectrum. To other wavelengths, the atmosphere is as impenetrable as a brick wall, and it’s gases making up part of that barrier that are the focus of this book: specifically, the greenhouse gases, a collection of disparate molecules that share the ability to block long wavelengths of energy.
· We are more familiar with long wavelengths under the name heat energy, and heat is what these gases trap. By doing so, however, they become unstable and eventually release the heat, some of which radiates back to Earth.
· Greenhouse gases may be rare, but their impact is massive, for by trapping heat near the planet’s surface, they both warm our world and account for the ‘upside down’ troposphere.
· The atmosphere of Venus is 98% carbon dioxide, and its surface temperature is 891ºC. Should carbon dioxide ever reach even 1% of the Earth’s atmosphere, it would – all other things being equal – bring the surface temperature of the planet to boiling point.
· Heat in New York in August feels unhealthy, trapped in a crowded, built-up environment of concrete, hard edges, parched bitumen, and sticky human bodies. At night, humidity and a thick layer of cloud lock in the heat and you can smell the grime of the city’s 8 million human bodies, along with their refuse and exuviae.
· No matter how hot the day in a desert, the clear skies of night bring blessed relief. The difference between a desert and New York City at night is a single greenhouse gas – the most powerful of them all – water vapor.
· Water vapor retains two thirds of the heat trapped by all the greenhouse gases, but water vapor in the form of clouds blocks part of the sun’s radiation by day, keeping temperatures down.
· As recently as 30 years ago less than half of the greenhouse gases had been identified and scientists were still divided about whether Earth was warming or cooling. Without these molecules our planet would have an average surface temperature of -4ºF.
· The Keeling curve shows the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as measured atop Mt. Mauna Loa, Hawai. The sawtooth effect results as the northern spring extracts carbon dioxide from the great aerial ocean, recorded as a fall in concentrations on the graph. However, the inexorable rise is due to the burning of fossil fuels.
· The Keeling curve was the first definitive sign that the great aerial ocean might prove to be the Achilles heel of our fossil-fuel-addicted civilization.
· One need do nothing more than trace its trajectory forward in time to realize that the 21st century would see a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – from 3 parts per 10,000 that existed in the early-twentieth century to 6. And that has the potential to heat our planet by around 5ºF, and perhaps as much as 10ºF.
Chapter 3: The Gaseous Greenhouse
· Scientists realized that at very low temperatures such as over the poles and high in the atmosphere, more heat travels at bandwidths where carbon dioxide is most effective. Rather than being the sole agent responsible for climate change, carbon dioxide acts as a trigger for water vapor by heating the atmosphere just a little, allowing it to take up and retain more moisture, which then warms the atmosphere further, creating a positive feedback loop, forcing our planet’s temperature to ever higher levels.
· Water vapor is an enigma because it forms clouds than can both reflect light energy back into space and also trap heat.
· Around 56% of all the carbon dioxide liberated by burning fossil fuels is still aloft and accounts for about 80% of all global warming.
· Prior to 1800 and the start of the Industrial Revolution, there were about 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere equating to 645 billion tons. Today the figures are 380 ppm and 869 billion tons.
· If we wished to stabilize carbon dioxide emissions at a level double that which existed before 1800 (widely considered the threshold of dangerous change), we would have to limit all future human emissions to around 660 billion tons, a tough budget for humanity to abide by.
· By drilling two miles into the Antarctic ice cap, scientists have drawn out an ice core that spans almost a million years of Earth history, showing that carbon dioxide levels have dropped to 160 ppm but have never exceeded 280 ppm until recently.
· Most dangerous of all are the power plants that use coal to generate electricity. After carbon dioxide, methane is the next most important greenhouse gas.
· The places where the carbon goes when it leaves the atmosphere are known as carbon sinks. There is only one major sink on our planet and that is the oceans which have absorbed 48% of all carbon emitted by humans between 1800 and 1994. Over the same two centuries life on land has actually contributed carbon to the atmosphere.