Category: Book reviews

Has it come to this?

The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning

James Lovelock is renowned for his Gaia theory: using metaphor to illuminate science, he has argued that the earth is a living planet, a self-regulating system made up of organisms, surface rocks, the ocean and the atmosphere interacting to provide conditions favourable for life. Three years ago, in The Revenge of Gaia, he declared that our burning of fossil fuels, our replacement of too many eco-systems with farmland and our overload of human population had put Gaia under threat and badly impaired her ability to produce conditions comfortable for life and we will suffer dire consequences.

The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning is a follow-up and the little shreds of hope that one could sometimes discern in its predecessor are even less apparent, at least from the perspective with which I view life.  Lovelock himself is almost lyrical in his final vision of a future Gaia adjusted to a hotter state, populated by the remnant of human survivors from the disasters ahead, survivors strong in mind and body and ready to start a new evolution in which our intelligence will be beneficial to Gaia and may make of her an intelligent planet. (I don’t pretend to understand what he means by that.) I’m afraid my attention is on the billions who fail to make it to the lifeboat and I derive no consolation at all from Lovelock’s vision.

However that’s at the end of the book. An early remark perhaps suggests how he gets there. He describes himself as a scientist who works independently of any human agency:  ”Independence allows me to consider the health of the Earth without the constraint that the welfare of mankind comes first.”

He is critical of the IPCC and its reliance on models, not because he is a contrarian or lacks respect for the scientists involved but because its models are not correctly forecasting the course of climate change revealed by observation.  They have underestimated the rate of sea level rise and the rate of melting sea ice in the Arctic. They have not taken into account the progressive decline in the population of ocean algae, which act to cool the Earth in a number of ways. They do not in his opinion make use of the Gaia theory predictions of climate change but still act from within the various scientific specialisations as if Earth were a dead planet.  He produces a simple model of his own based on Gaia theory which shows an abrupt 5 degree rise in global mean temperature at an atmospheric CO2 level of between 400 and 500 parts per million.  The smooth path of slowly and sedately rising temperatures predicted by the IPCC will not be borne out in reality. There will be spells of constancy followed by jumps to greater heat.

Lovelock records with approval James Hansen’s call for a far greater reduction in CO2 than that suggested as adequate by the IPCC reports. He notes that Hansen’s concern is based on recent observations and on the Earth’s climate history and thinks this means that Hansen himself must have doubts about the adequacy of models based on atmospheric physics alone.

In fact Lovelock’s view of the possible changes ahead does not seem radically different from those of many other scientists who freely acknowledge that the IPCC predictions are proving too conservative.  The scientific consensus notion against which Lovelock rails does not seem to prevent them from pointing out inadequacies in the models. My understanding is that those working with the models are constantly seeking to improve them and are well aware of their limitations. The positive feedback potential from the loss of land-based ecosystems, the desertification of the land and ocean surfaces, and the loss of polar ice is frequently discussed by scientists I have read.

Where Lovelock differs most markedly from scientists equally aware of the dangers he points to is in the fact that he seems to think those outcomes already inescapable. So strongly is he convinced of this that he is roundly dismissive of many attempts at mitigation, especially if they carry a green tinge. Reducing carbon footprints and planning to drastically lower emissions are at best romantic nonsense and at worst a dangerous distraction from the real task.  We can’t save our familiar world.  What we need to do is to prepare for the coming changes in what will be a human world of lifeboat islands (the UK and NZ prominent among them) and a few continental oases in favourable latitudes. Greens who put their faith in renewable energy, and especially those who view negatively the development of nuclear energy, are sabotaging the future of the lifeboat societies.  He is particularly scornful of wind turbines, allowing they may perhaps be of some use in some places, but certainly not in his part of the world. Unexpectedly he presents solar energy in a favourable light on the grounds that it is not visionary – he even attaches the word hope to it, though any hope the book offers is always severely qualified.

He does allow for some geo-engineering possibilities, though without much conviction. Various schemes to manipulate the planetary albedo – sunlight reflected back to space – are acknowledged. Karl Lackner’s proposals to strip CO2 from the atmosphere and sequester it as described in Broecker and Kunzig’s Fixing Climate is treated with respect. Fertilisation with iron to encourage algal blooms that would cool the Earth by removing CO2 may be effective. He explains his own suggestion, in collaboration with Chris Rapley, of large pipes set vertically in the ocean to draw up cooler, nutrient-rich water to encourage algal blooms.  Most promising of all would be the widespread use of biochar. However he checks any undue optimism by recalling that whatever we do as geoengineers is unlikely to stop dangerous climate change or prevent death on a scale that makes all previous wars, famines and disasters small. Geoengineering would be better than business as usual, but that’s about the most that can be said for it.

The crux for Lovelock is that there are far too many people living as we do. Gaia has too many humans.  He briefly acknowledges that vegetarian diets and food synthesis by chemical and biochemical industries might help, but is pretty sure it will never happen this way. The effects of prolonged and unremitting drought, the greatest threat to humanity from global heating, will mean food and water shortages which will kill off most of us. Gaia will save herself by severely culling us.

Lovelock is a compelling writer. His prose is elegant and clear and his books packed with intelligent insights.  One can’t help but pay him attention. He is an able exponent of the worst case, but that doesn’t make his depressing prognostications right.  He himself praises the work of James Hansen, Tim Flannery and Al Gore among others, people who are not at all ready to give up on mitigation. I’m with them, and hope we can yet avoid the catastrophic and deeply depressing human future Lovelock foresees, through a combination of the means by which he sets little store.

Two Miles Down in Time

The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future Richard Alley’s The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future explains why ice cores are such a mine of information about past climates. He was right there when the ice cores from central Greenland were being extracted between 1989 and 1993.  There had been earlier extractions in places easier of access, but ice sheet flow had affected the lower layers and it was not until drilling was set up in a more central location that good records were obtained for the past 110,000 years – and less reliable records for longer than that. His story of how the camps were established, how the drilling of the 5.2 inch (for the sake of his American readers he doesn’t use metric measurements) cores was done, how the core sections were transported and stored, is interesting in itself. But the riveting chapters of the book are his explanations of the annual layers of snow being compressed to ice and stretching and thinning over time as the ice flows (a cardinal fact, the flow of ice) and of the information those annual layers contain and how it is coaxed from them.

In broad terms he explains that snow is compressed into ice under the weight of more snowfall in the top 200 feet or so of the ice sheet over a century or two as most of the air is squeezed out of it (though a very important little bit remains). By the time that foot-thick layer of ice has buried half-way through the ice sheet the layer has been stretched and thinned to half a foot in thickness; by seven-eighths of the way down it is only one-eighth foot thick and so on. As the layers stretch the ends melt very near the coast or break off as icebergs. Layers near the bed of the ice sheet are very thin, stretch and thin only a little, and don’t move down much.

How are the annual layers distinguished from each other?  There is a difference in appearance of winter and summer snow because of the transformation to coarser grained hoarfrost driven by the sun which only shines in summer. Readily observable in cores from shallow levels, the difference remains distinct even in the thinner annual ice layers where the remaining air has been trapped as bubbles.  Complications arise in ice a mile deep, when bubbles are replaced by clathrates, but late-winter dusty layers of soil particles blown on to the ice sheet can aid observation – or observers can wait for a few months after the ice has reached the surface when the bubbles begin to reapppear as the clathrates break down.  Apart from visible appearance there are other aids to dating the layers including volcanic fallout, electrical conductivity, and ice-isotopic ratios.

Once dated, what can we learn from the ice-cores?  Past temperatures for one thing. The isotopic composition of water that fell as rain or snow gives a reliable indication of temperature at the time, and has been checked against temperatures measured in the borehole (in a more complicated way than this bald statement may suggest, which he explains with a fascinating kitchen analogy).  We can also learn from the dust which the wind has deposited on the ice sheet (once dry and wet deposition have been teased apart) such things as how much sea salt and continental dust were blowing around, how many fires were occurring upwind, how well we were shielded from cosmic rays, how many meteorites were being dumped on earth, and much more.  Finally, the level of atmospheric gases such as carbon dioxide and methane can be determined from the air bubbles trapped in the ice. These gases are normally mixed globally by the winds, and checking the Greenland record against Antartica and high mountain glaciers has revealed a high reliability – so high that ice-core gases can now be used to correlate cores.

At this nearly half-way point in the book Alley turns to illuminating discussions of past climates and some ideas as to why the changes happened.  He announces his punch lines for the rest of the book. Past climate has been wildly variable with faster changes than anything agricultural industrial humans have ever faced.  Climate can be rather stable if nothing is causing it to change, but when ‘pushed’ it often jumps suddenly to something different rather than changing gradually. Such ‘pushes’ in the past have included drifting continents, wiggles in Earth’s orbit, surges of great ice sheets, sudden reversals in ocean circulation, and others. Small ‘pushes’ have cause large changes because many processes amplify the pushes – greenhouse gases are pobably the most important of these amplifiers.  We humans can foul our own nest – and we can clean it up.

I won’t follow this summary statement into the detail of the remaining chapters of the book.  Suffice to say that he is a master of illuminating analogy, writes with admirable clarity and establishes a happy rapport with the reader. He doesn’t take background knowledge in his readers for granted, but supplies relevant explanation and information as he goes so that the book is readily accessible to the non-scientist prepared to make a reasonable effort to follow the acount. His discussions are moderate in tone and always acknowledge uncertainties.

The book was published some time back, in 2000.  The science of climate change is advancing rapidly and the tentative nature of some of his prognostications has possibly firmed up somewhat since then.  He has recently commented:

For me, the 2007 IPCC provided neither a best estimate nor an upper bound on sea-level rise because of lack of understanding of ice-sheet changes.

He made that comment to Andy Revkin of the New York Times who had contacted him after he was recently co-awarded the 2009 Tyler Prize for environmental achievement.  He also said the following:

We know so much about climate science, and environmental science in general, and the gap between the knowledge of the scientific community and the general community is so large, and so much misinformation is in circulation, that the leading task now is probably education and outreach. We need to provide people, including policymakers, with the knowledge background that will allow them to do their jobs better.

Alley himself must be very well suited to that education and outreach task.  I thought that on the basis of his book, but I find he has other communication skills as well.  Song and dance no less!

Melting Point

Melting Point

Eric Dorfman is an ecologist.  He has been aware of the science of climate change since his doctoral student days in the 1990s but he credits Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth with inspiring him to make a larger contribution towards addressing the issue. Hence his book Melting Point: New Zealand and the Climate Change Crisis, published last September.

The book is not long, and is written in a relaxed style accessible to the general reader.  He begins with a brief overview of the global science, centring particularly on carbon sinks, carbon pumps and feedback loops as keys to understanding climate change. Debating whether climate change is real is senseless. Credible scientific opinion is unequivocal.  The risk of doing nothing in the face of the predicted consequences is foolhardy, and the problem is not beyond us.

Turning his focus to New Zealand he begins with the climate, pointing out that unlike Europe which is experiencing unprecedented weather patterns we are likely to see an intensification of the weather patterns we already have, much of it driven by an an intensification of the pattern of westerly winds and warmer sea surface temperatures.  He considers the effects of rising sea levels and details some of them; even one metre will cause an enormous and costly mess for the country – farmland around Invercargill inundated, salt water intrusion in many agricultural areas, water seep on to Wellington airport, Tamaki Drive under water, and much more.

He ranges through several aspects of New Zealand life explaining how they may be affected by the coming changes.  Primary production, human health, natural ecosystems and socio-economic impacts are the main areas considered. He offers something of a plug for organic farming as a goal, and has an intriguing look at farm animal alternatives such as beefalo, ostriches and emus, and angora goats. He explains the habitat constraints likely to be experienced by species both on land and in the sea, and the extinctions which may result. Human health is also likely to be affected, though less severely than in developing countries. Mosquito-borne and water-borne diseases are surveyed and psychological health considered. Likely impacts on the economy conclude with a positive reference to the previous government’s stance on carbon neutrality and emissions control.

Comparatively speaking we will fare better than most countries, though this is scant reassurance in a world mostly worse affected. For instance, Dorfman asks at one point how NZ will react to the arrival of most or all of the populations of small Pacific Islands such as Tuvalu as rising sea levels make their islands uninhabitable. A chapter on choices covers a familiar range from making personal emission reductions to engaging in political pressure.

The book is a reasonable and relatively gentle discussion around what may already lie ahead for New Zealand in the uncertain future into which climate change is launching us. That very uncertainty makes it difficult to be precise or trenchant, but it is important to be thinking ahead and realising that we are preparing a different world by our greenhouse gas emissions. Hopefully Dorfman represents a wide group of people who are doing just that.  Not that he is happy for us to continue along our present path.  Far from it. He rests what hope he can muster for the future on the decisions of international forums and the actions of superpowers and the author sees an important lobbying function for New Zealand in these arenas. One hopes he is not being too optimistic about New Zealand’s readiness to lobby.  We are getting mixed messages from government at present

Treating a Fever

Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change

William Calvin, emeritus professor in medicine of the University of Washington in Seattle, has written many books for the lay reader in the course of his career, most of them concerned with the human brain. But for a quarter of a century he has been following climate science literature closely, talking with its practitioners and writing articles for the public. Now he has produced a book on the subject: Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change. He likens himself to a GP reporting on the results of the tests and analysis of the specialists and helping the patient understand the treatment options.

He is keen on analogy and quotes a memorable passage from poet Robert Frost on the metaphorical nature of thinking.  Overheated frogs, things going pop, slippery slopes, creeps and leaps, domino effects, feedback loops, vicious cycles are some of the metaphors pressed into service in the major concern of the book – how one thing leads to another in climate change.

The book does not attempt a systematic account of modern climate science, the broad findings of which are taken as fully established.  Rather it focuses on trying to explain what Calvin calls the principles of acceleration which are at work in climate change – the “how” of things, the underlying mechanisms. Feedback loops alter the normal cause and effect sequences, leading to reactions out of all proportion to the stimulus.  Neurophysiologists (Calvin’s profession) study nerve and muscle cells with positive feedback mechanisms that help things to happpen very quickly.  So climate change is often not, in the manner of a dimmer switch, proportional to the provocation. It is more like the ordinary switch where a little more pressure will bring sudden change. Gradual warming is an inadequate metaphor.  Surprises are involved.

In a chapter on drought he shows how feedbacks are naturally a part of the process – for example over a tropical forest about half the rainfall comes from what recently evaporated from the leaves upwind. No evaporation means less rain. Things get worse. Drought is part of the normal instability of climate, but in the US most models agree in predicting that the dryness of the 1930s Dust Bowl will return to the American Southwest by midcentury – and for a very long time. He has some vivid pictures of the dust storms of the 1930s.

Another chapter discusses the climate creep whereby higher global temperatures lead to a widening of the tropic’s Hadley Cell movement of air which means dryer air for a further degree or two of latitude in the areas where deserts already exist.  Major cities become vulnerable to spreading desertification — San Diego, Los Angeles, Cairo, Tel Aviv, Cape Town, Perth and Sydney. This isn’t just gradual warming for the places concerned, but a massive change.

In discussing ice he looks at the way it is not only melting but moving on Greenland, and points out that collapse, not melt, is the operative concept. We would have centuries up our sleeves if Greenland melted simply from surface run-off.  It is one of the seriously incomplete aspects of the IPCC report that its estimate of sea-level rise depended mostly on melt run-off and thermal expansion of the ocean.

These are but a few of the matters Calvin discusses in his explanations of why and how we’re in trouble. Along the way he offers a very good short explanation of climate models and also of the comprehensive processes by which IPCC reports are prepared. His chapters are short and nuggety, not attempting to be comprehensive, not always strong on continuity, but packed with suggestions for better understanding the phenomena of climate change. His early pre-college experience in journalism and photography is reflected in the many pictures, diagrams and maps which accompany his discussions. Quotations from a wide variety of scientists and writers stud the text and give a good sense of the large community of people working in the climate science field.

When he’s finished with explaining how things are going wrong he turns his attention to what we need to do to turn things around by no later than 2020, his latest date for stopping the growth in emissions.  In spite of his awareness of how rapidly things can worsen in climate terms he is an optimist.  He considers that, once we understand what’s what, progress in addressing it can be rapid.  When tempted by pessimism he recalls the progress he’s seen in medical science in his lifetime.  He also pins hope on religious leaders coming to see that climate change is a serious failure of stewardship and our present use of fossil fuel as a deeply immoral imposition on other people and unborn generations. Their arguments will trump the objections of the vested interests, just as they did when slavery was ended in the 19th century.  And the developed nations already have the technology to achieve within ten years a substantial reduction in their fossil fuel uses.  He allows for a wide range of possibilities here, but selects three as the most likely to produce rapid turnaround – energy efficiency, hot rock energy and nuclear generation. Hot rock energy, for those who haven’t encountered it, takes advantage of hot and dry granite below the sedimentary rocks. It can be drilled, and the further down the hotter it gets. Water is injected, returns as steam for a turbine, and is subsequently recirculated. In recommending nuclear power generation he refers to improvements in safety and efficiency since the industry first started, and also looks ahead to the fourth generation reactors which will increase efficiency enormously. Finally, along with carbon-free generation we also need continent-wide low-loss DC transmission lines.

Different writers have different proposals for the best technologies, and the array can appear bewildering.  But it also means that there are plenty of options and most of them can at least contribute towards the solution.  Calvin is mainly concerned that we act quickly, and he turns to analogy again, the same one that we now hear from many quarters – arming as for a great war, doing what must be done regardless of cost and convenience.

 

Appendix:  The passage Calvin quotes from Robert Frost is very striking.  Worth pondering:

[All] thinking is metaphorical, except mathematical thinking. What I am pointing out is that unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values: you don’t know the metaphor in its strength and its weaknesses. You don’t know how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down with you. You are not safe in science; you are not safe in history.

Climate Code Red

Climate Code Red: The Case for Emergency Action

This week I watched a short video clip of climatologist James Hansen inviting people to join an act of civil disobedience on March 2 at the Capitol Power Plant in Washington DC which  powers Congress with coal-based energy. In his laid-back but serious way he remarks it is hard to realise that climate change is an emergency.  This is the realisation that Melbourne-based authors David Spratt and Philip Sutton invite in their book Climate Code Red: The Case for Emergency Action. The book was launched in July 2008 by the Governor of Victoria, Professor David de Kretser and has been commended by Hansen himself and many others.  It was also the basis of a 52-page advocacy report Climate Safety (pdf) issued by the Public Interest Research Centre in the UK in November and commented on warmly by George Monbiot, Mark Lynas, Fred Pearce and many others.

The authors paint a sombre picture. They point out that the predictions of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change in its report last year are already being shown as too conservative. The loss of Arctic sea ice, thought likely to take a century, appears to be happening in a much shorter space of time. Rapid sea ice disintegration will mean less reflectivity, greater regional warming, and permafrost melt with release of uncertain levels of carbon dioxide and methane.

The way in which the pace of climate change can quicken as its early effects trigger amplifying consequences is carefully explained for the general reader. Thus we face the possibility of faster disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet than has before been thought likely, vulnerability in the West Antarctic ice sheet, and the likelihood of much higher sea rises than anticipated, as well as widespread species and eco-system destruction.

The authors lament the limitations of the IPCC system, ascribing them partly to pressure from vested interests harboured by some countries, partly to the long process of gathering the information from published material and the early cut-off date for reports, and partly to scientists being uncomfortable with estimates based on known but presently unquantified mechanisms.  It adds up to a process so deficient as to be an unreliable and even misleading basis for policy-making.

The book looks at what the atmospheric targets for a safe climate need to be.  Where we are now, if methane and nitrous oxide are included, is equivalent to 455 parts per million of CO2.  They estimate this indicates a global temperature rise of 2.1 degrees centigrade, at present delayed by the heat being used to warm the oceans (minus 0.6 degrees) and the short-term net cooling effect of aerosols (minus 0.7 degrees) to give today’s warming of 0.8 degrees.

They discuss the target of two degrees of global warming regarded by some as tolerable.  To stop at two degrees probably means a CO2 equivalent level of 400 ppm. We have already exceeded that level, but the climate system’s inertia would enable us to not exceed two degrees if we returned to 400 ppm after an overshoot.

But in their view two degrees is too dangerous, and the three degrees cap effectively being advocated by Australia’s government and others is a recipe for devastation. The book looks at what a safe climate means and what action is required to achieve it.  A safe climate includes such features as: retaining the full summer Arctic sea-ice cover, the full extent of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and the full extent of the mountain glacier systems, including the Himalayas and the Andes; maintaining the ecological health and resilience of the tropical rainforests and coral reefs, with no loss of area or species;  maintaining the health and effectiveness of the natural carbon sinks; capping ocean acidity. To do this we need to cool the globe we have heated.

At this point they introduce the 2008 paper (pdf) by Hansen and others which considers a CO2 level of 300-325 ppm may be needed to restore Arctic sea ice to its area of 25 years ago.  They note that this would also be a reasonable boundary for achieving the other features of a safe climate.

Since the level of CO2 in the atmosphere is already too high we must not only stop its emission but also draw carbon out of the atmosphere. Some geo-engineering with aerosols may be temporarily required, but only as a complement to ceasing emissions.

So far as the science is concerned we have an emergency. At this point the authors turn from the science to the political action required. Political pragmatism collides with scientific necessity. Current political targets are reckless. The book explores and rejects all the reasons given for inadequate responses ranging from hopelessness through claimed uncertainty to the impossibility of a full solution. Compromise will not do. There is no lack of technical or economic capacity to cut greenhouse gas emissions to close to zero, only of political and social will. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere can be reduced by greatly enhancing natural sinks such as tree and other biomass planting on a large scale and by agricultural charcoal stored in soils. But such measures are unlikely under politics as usual.  The authors counsel moving into emergency mode to produce the economic restructuring needed, using the example of wartime US when the economy was rapidly turned to service the war effort.  Against those who protest that action on climate change will cause economic harm they note that in wartime US unemployment fell, wages grew faster than inflation and company profits boomed.

The book pulls no punches, and that is probably its chief value.  It assembles the latest science and shows how we are preparing a possibly cataclysmic future if we carry on as usual. It makes it clear that the threat can’t be countered by partial measures, as many politicians still seem to think. To those who declare it impossible that the political world will ever gather enough resolution for the steps required it replies that politicians will find resolution enough if they recognise we face an emergency. In other words, the economics and politics must be guided by the science, which is stark and inescapable.
A slightly off-topic postscript:  The Heartland Institute also saw the Hansen videoclip mentioned at the beginning of this review.  Here’s their excited response:

“Demands for the firing of NASA astronomer and global-warming fear-monger James Hansen are spreading rapidly through the World Wide Web.

“Hansen’s latest escapade – a YouTube video in which the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Sciences invites the public to “please join us” in forcibly occupying a D.C.-based coal-burning power plant – resulted in The Heartland Institute Monday calling attention to the growing chorus of voices urging President Barack Obama to fire Hansen. The astronomer has a tawdry record of doctoring climate data to fit his theory that the Earth is in a global-warming crisis, and he has demanded that scientists who disagree with him face a Nuremberg-style trial.”

Mark Bowen’s Censoring Science, recently reviewed on Hot Topic is obviously still relevant.