If We Stopped Tomorrow

What would happen* if we stopped causing climate change tomorrow?

It’s a fantasy, obviously, though an appealing one. It’s also food for a lot of interesting thought. What would life be like? What kind of climate would we be left with? Would climate change stop right away, or would there be residual change? Here, I’m going to explore the climate part of the question; if humans stopped producing greenhouse gas emissions right now, how would the climate respond?

For simplicity, our scenario is that all humans everywhere simply vanish and that all our machinery shuts itself down safely at once–I’ll ignore complications caused by unattended machinery blowing itself up and so forth. I want to be clear that I do not actually think my whole species should go extinct, I just don’t want to get pulled off topic by an overly complex scenario.

When do greenhouse gas emissions stop?

Emissions of different greenhouse gases stop at different times in our scenario. These gases are carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and two groups of related gases, the chlorofluorocarbons and the hydrofluorocarbons (CFCs/HCFs), plus water vapor. I’m going to ignore water vapor here because the primary way its atmospheric concentration varies is not from emissions but from changes in the hydrologic cycle.

So, in our scenario, fossil fuel use and its carbon dioxide emissions stop immediately–but that’s only 57% of total greenhouse gas emissions worldwide by weight. Another 20% of the total is carbon dioxide from other sources, such as forest fires or aerobic decomposition. 14% is methane, 8% is nitrous oxide, and 1% is CFCs/HCFs. These gases come from different processes and some of these processes would continue a while.

Nitrous oxide comes largely from the production and use of nitrogen fertilizer. Its emissions should therefore drop off pretty quickly in our scenario. CFC/HCFC comes from industry and refrigeration and would therefore drop off much more slowly as abandoned refrigeration units slowly broke down and leaked. But the real issue would be methane and non-fossil-fuel-related carbon dioxide.

If the world were simple, then after our piles of wood and paper and other biomas finished burning or rotting (that might take a few years), atmospheric carbon oxide levels should stabilize. The only remaining emissions would be from natural wildfire or decay and that carbon would be taken up again as other plants grew. But the world is not simple. One of the things climate change is doing is shifting some places from forest to savanna. It’s unclear how much of that shift has happened yet, but it’s quite possible that some of our forests are essentially dead trees walking, so to speak. They won’t get the rain they need to survive and when they die they will be replaced by grass, shrubs, and the occasional tree, not forest. In that case, their carbon won’t be recovered, driving the atmospheric concentration up. One of the nightmare scenarios we’re looking at is if climate change caused by forest dieback becomes enough to cause further dieback–a runaway positive feedback cycle in which the planet starts warming itself.

If that nightmare feedback loop has not started yet, I doubt it would under our scenario, given the substantial emission cuts from the end of fossil fuel use. But elevated CO2 emissions will persist at least as long as it takes those forests doomed by climate change to die and rot or burn.

Methane levels might actually not drop in our scenario. Methane occurs as a fossil fuel and is also produced by anaerobic decomposition at the surface. Agriculture is a major source, mostly from rice cultivation and animal husbandry, and these emissions would probably taper off pretty quickly. Our vast herds of cattle are not going to survive us for very long. But landfills and leaky fossil fuel facilities will keep producing methane for a long time–only we won’t be here to capture and burn off those emissions (burning converts methane to carbon dioxide, which is actually a good thing because methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas). So those emissions could actually increase without us. I do not have enough information to calculate what the net result would be. And the nightmare scenario is that melting permafrost liberates enough methane to warm the planet enough to melt more permafrost and release more methane….

So, what we’re looking at is that if humans vanished and neither nightmare cycle has begun yet, total greenhouse gas emissions would drop immediately by somewhere around 60% and then probably decrease further over a period of years. When the system would reach equilibrium seems unclear. The relative contributions of each gas would change dramatically as well, with methane becoming co-dominant with CO2 by weight. Since methane is both more powerful and less persistent in the atmosphere, this shift would be very important to anyone running climate models of our scenario.

How long will the climate keep warming after emissions stop?

Even if the atmospheric concentrations of all the greenhouse gases stabilized today (which under our scenario they would not), the global climate would continue to warm for a period of years. This lag between cause and effect is actually a very familiar principle; if physics didn’t work this way, cooks would not have to use timers because food would become fully cooked the instant it went on the stove or into the oven. Earth’s climate has a longer lag than it might otherwise because we have oceans and water can swallow a huge amount of energy before changing temperature, but basically things just take a while to warm. The experts aren’t sure, but Earth’s lag is probably around 40 years–which means we are now experiencing the consequences of the greenhouse gas emissions of the 1970’s.

In our scenario, then, the loss of humans does not start to show on our climate for another couple of decades. Only then will the planet start responding to the dramatic decreases in emissions.

How long will sea level keep rising after the warming stops?

Here is another familiar principle: ice takes time to melt.Glacial dynamics are a bit more complicated, since they receive new snow as well as lose meltwater and they move, but when scientists say a certain amount of melting is “locked in,” that basically means that a certain amount of ice already has the conditions necessary to melt. It’s like an ice cube set out on the table at room temperature; that ice cube is going to melt away to nothing even if the air in the room does not get any warmer. Because glaciers are very big, some of the melting now locked in might take thousands of years–or it might go faster. Scientists aren’t sure, and of course the rate of melt is likely to increase because the temperature will keep rising (for at least 40 years!), but however long the process takes, the melting we have already triggered will cause at least three feet of sea level rise, probably more.

How long will greenhouse gas levels stay elevated?

Under our scenario, and assuming those cycles of viciousness aren’t in operation yet, greenhouse gas levels would level off as soon as emissions stopped and then eventually start falling. How long would it take for the atmosphere to return to something close to what it was before? The answer depends on which gas you’re looking at.

CFCs/HCFs and their kin vary a lot. Some can stay in the atmosphere for thousands of years, some for less than a year. I do not know how many of each kind we have up there and in what proportions, but we’re looking at a process that begins immediately and lasts for a very long time. Nitrous oxide breaks down in the stratosphere and takes just over a century to do it. Methane is quick, lasting only about 12 years (my source does not say what any of these chemicals becomes afterwards–I am suspicious that methane may become carbon dioxide, a complicating factor!).

Carbon dioxide is the tricky part, since it can leave the atmosphere by several different means. Much of it is absorbed into the ocean pretty quickly, where it no longer causes the greenhouse effect but instead causes ocean acidification. Also, this mechanism only works if there is more CO2 in the air than what the water near the surface can absorb. The upper layers of the sea are getting “full” now, meaning that not much more CO2 will go into the water until ocean mixing brings new water up to the surface. Chemical weathering of rocks also absorbs CO2, as does, of course, photosynthesis. And that last is the complicated one.

If the distribution of plants across the globe is roughly stable, then carbon sequestration by photosynthesis will be roughly matched by carbon emissions from fire and decay. But reforestation–and the re-establishment of wetlands–could become a powerful force for carbon sequestration with humans out of the way. Unless environmental damage has in some way precluded regrowth, which is possible, and unless the nightmare cycle has begun.

Without factoring in regrowth, somewhere above 65% of our carbon dioxide will be absorbed by the oceans in the next 20 to 200 years and the rest will drop very gradually, finally reaching equilibrium after a few thousand years. If plant regrowth proves significant, the process could go faster, maybe much faster–there is evidence that reforestation following the conquest of the Americas caused the Little Ice Age. In our scenario, it would be the entire world regrowing.

So what’s the scenario?

Bringing all of this information together, we can fill out the details of this scenario.

Humans either vanish or somehow become ecologically negligible in November of 2015. Right away, that very month, greenhouse gas emissions drop by about 60% and then continue dropping gradually over a period of years. Atmospheric concentrations of these gases also start to drop right away, though more gradually. Within a few years, meaningful reforestation begins in some areas, possibly balancing out climate-related deforestation elsewhere.

But the global average temperature keeps climbing–and it’s climbing faster than ever because the oceans have absorbed enough energy that now they’re warming rapidly, too. Extreme weather gets more so. If there are any humans left, they are having a very rough time of it. Somewhere around 2055, the climate begins to stabilize, although what it looks like by that point is anybody’s guess.

But by that point the atmospheric concentration of methane has fallen and leveled off at whatever its new normal is. Carbon dioxide levels are starting to fall meaningfully. I don’t know whether there is the same lag on cooling as there is on warming, but by sometime around the turn of the century I’m guessing the planet has started cooling again–and the cooling gradually accelerates over the following century as nitrous oxide starts to break down and as more and more carbon dioxide is absorbed by the oceans and by growing plants.

All this time, the sea level is rising. Water creeps gradually across the hurricane-ravaged ruins of many of the world’s major cities and upstream into previously fresh areas of the world’s rivers. Oysters grow on the streets of Manhattan.

I’m guessing that the cooling will take much longer than the warming, because greenhouse gas levels will stay somewhat elevated for thousands of years. The  planet would also see a lot of delayed effects of the warming–along the lines of changing plant growth patterns or changing ocean salinity triggering various feedback loops. I don’t know what those loops would be or when they might occur. At some point the pace of change would slow enough that the biosphere will start to recover–but recovery from a mass extinction takes about ten million years.

Feeling depressed?

I don’t mean this as an exercise in pessimism. I mean it as an illustration of what optimism looks like at this point, what we can look forward to in the best possible scenario we can anticipate. If being limited to this as optimism bothers you, consider how the next generation will feel if we do not get our butts in gear right now.

 

• Note: After writing this, I’ve thought of a bunch more complications that might change the details of the picture I’ve given. I stand by my factual statements, but my suppositions might be muddy. Creating a detailed, accurate climate projection is not my intention, though–that requires a supercomputer I don’t have. The point is to draw attention to the questions, to the issues of lag and lingering emissions–to provide food for thought.

About Batteries

Now and then I hear battery-operated versions of various machines touted as “environmentally friendly” because they produce zero emissions. Of course, a moment’s thought shows that this is not true–or not necessarily true, anyway. A battery stores energy, and if the energy in question came from a coal-fired power-plant then the battery-powered machine is responsible for a a lot of emissions. Those emissions are simply somewhere else.

But is that the only caveat batteries carry? Between personal electronics and new “greener” technologies such as hybrid and plug-in electric cars, batteries are a huge part of the modern energy landscape–and yet, I realized, I didn’t really know much about how they work or what problems they might cause. I set out to learn the basics, and here I pass them on.

As I’ve been saying for years, rechargeable batteries only store energy, they don’t create it. Of course, nothing except whatever started the Big Bang creates energy, that’s part of the First Law of Thermodynamics, but a gallon of gas is an energy source in a way that a battery isn’t. Most people know this, but don’t seem to really think about it. For example, plug-in hybrid cars receive praise for their wonderful gas mileage even though that’s the wrong measure of efficiency for those cars. Such a hybrid could be an absolute energy guzzler, sucking down kilowatts, and still use very little gas. And if the electricity comes from a coal-fired power  plant, the carbon footprint of a plug-in could actually be higher than for a traditional car of the same weight and engine type.

But batteries do not store energy the same way a jug stores water. For one thing, electricity, by nature, moves. You can’t keep it in a box any more than you can shine a light into a closet, close the door, and expect the brightness to still be there when you get back. Instead, a battery converts chemical energy into electricity–and back again, if it’s rechargeable. That means that beyond asking where the energy comes from, we also have to ask what happens to it inside the battery and whether storing the energy is actually a good option.

I had a really hard time tracking down information, here, in part because I didn’t understand the right questions to ask. In turns out the answers are both very technical and very specific to each battery type–turns out “a battery” is something like “a sandwich” in that all the members of the category look recognizably similar and all accomplish roughly the same thing, yet the insides of two batteries might have no more to do with each other than do peanut butter and roast beef. I didn’t research all possible types of batteries, and I am very far from being an electrician, but I can give you the questions I’ve found–and a few examples of some answers.

• How efficient is the battery?
• Can old batteries be recycled into new batteries indefinitely?
• What is the environmental impact of building and eventually disposing of the battery?
• How does the battery compare with relevant energy alternatives?

 

How efficient is the battery–and its charger?

When you put energy into a battery, how much of it do you get back out again? The answer depends on the battery type, its age and condition, and how it is being charged, but it’s never 100%. First of all, every time energy changes form, some of it dissipates, as per the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Charging a battery converts electrical energy into chemical energy, so some is lost in that process. Some is lost again when the battery is used, converting chemical energy to electricity. And of course charging a battery requires a charger, which is also not 100% efficient for a similar reason. For example, depending on its initial state of discharge, an eight-hour charge cycle for a lead-acid battery could be anywhere from 36% to 64% efficient. That means that if you’re charging car batteries to do a job that you could just as easily accomplish with an extension cord, you could find yourself using almost three times as much electricity as you really need. The picture gets worse if you leave the charger attached too long; these batteries accept less and less charge the closer to full they get and the electricity they don’t except just makes the battery hot. It’s wasted.

Can old batteries be recycled into new batteries indefinitely?

Not all batteries are rechargeable. It is possible to make a crude battery out of half a grapefruit and those don’t need an initial charging–the energy is present in the relationship between the fruit juice and the electrodes. If commercially available batteries also don’t need an initial charge, then they are, essentially, a form of fuel and we need to ask the same questions about them as we would with any other fuel–like, are we going to run out?

I was unable to answer this question, because internet searches on charging non-rechargeable batteries yield websites all about how to recharge non-rechargeable batteries (which, by the way, is a bad idea. We tried by accident some years ago and very nearly killed out cat in the process). But it doesn’t really matter because the important question–are we going to run out–applies to all batteries regardless of when or if they are charged. To put it simply, any battery made of something that cannot be recycled back into the same type of battery indefinitely is unsustainable long-term.

As far as I can gather, at least the primary materials in many popular battery types, such as lead or lithium, are closed-loop recyclable in theory. These are metals, and metals are pretty simple to work with. But that doesn’t mean they are being recycled. The issue is whether the price of the material is actually high enough to pay for the processing. With the exception of lead, it generally isn’t. In some cases, even the carbon footprint of recycling could be larger than that for mining, though I have not seen an analysis of that. Sometimes batteries are recycled at a financial loss for environmental reasons, but this isn’t closed-loop recycling. Recycled lithium might be sold for use as a lubricant, for example. Even in the best case scenario, most batteries also have non-recyclable components, such as plastic, that recycling centers simply incinerate.

What is the environmental impact of building and eventually disposing of the battery?

Potential environmental impacts include the life-cycle carbon footprint of the battery (how much carbon dioxide-equivalent greenhouse gas it is responsible for, from mining through final disposal), physical disruption of the land associated with mining, and any toxicity related to disposal. Again, the answer depends on battery type, but we just don’t have all the answers. For example, cadmium in the ocean might have come from batteries, but then again it might not have. Life cycle energy analyses have not been done for all battery types, and some of those that have been done may be out of date. Generally, lead-acid batteries have the lowest energy footprint and are the most recyclable, but they are also quite toxic if not recycled.

How does the battery compare with relevant energy alternatives?

This question is the big one. In some circumstances, batteries are clearly the best option around. They make small-scale solar or wind power generation practical, for example. Without them, these systems would only deliver when the sun shone or the wind blew. In other circumstances, since as in the duel between a lead-acid battery and an extension cord imagined earlier, they are clearly wasteful. Still other times, they fall into a gray area of very nuanced decision-making.

Any time energy changes form, some of it is lost. Part of overall energy efficiency is therefore keeping the number of transformations as low as possible. For example, if you have several gallons of gasoline and want to boil water, your best bet is to use some kind of gasoline-burning stove. Using the gas to power a generator to make electricity to run an electric stone is wasteful because it involves so many more transformations. If everything else is equal,therefore, any kind of heating device, from stoves to baseboards to clothes dryers, are better run on gas than on electricity, if the electricity was generated by burning fossil fuel (as it often is). But everything is not always equal.

For example, how energy-efficient is gas delivery? If it has to come a long distance by truck (in which case it will probably be propane, not gasoline), the calculation might even out. The situation gets even more complex with motors since the relative weight of different designs and the circumstances of operation all come into play. For example, a battery-powered car does have emissions, it simply has them at the power station not at the tail-pipe. But if the car drives into an area that is very vulnerable to pollution, leaving the emissions behind at the plant might be important.

What does it all mean?

The bottom line is that batteries are not a panacea. In fact, they make thinking about environmental issues much more complicated. They’re handy tools for “green-washing,” as long as the public believes that battery power always means pollution-free. But they are also important tools for increasing overall energy efficiency and sustainability, especially if used in concert with electricity generation from renewable sources.

The important thing to remember is that we can’t create energy, nor do we get to decide how much energy a given task requires. If you want to accelerate a two-ton vehicle up to sixty miles an hour, that will take X amount of energy whether you use a gas engine or an electric motor to do it. The electric version might well be better in some respects, and if so then that is definitely the version we should pick. But mobilizing that energy always comes with some cost, somewhere, and if we can’t see what the cost is, we need to start asking questions..

The only way to truly go “zero emissions” is to use less energy in any form.

 

Syria

The Syrian refugee crisis is starting to get scary. I mean, obviously the Syrian refugees themselves have been terrified for a long time, that’s why they have become refugees, but what I mean is that this is not a run-of-the-mill humanitarian disaster. This one has the potential to change the world, but not in a good way. The people are running from violence, primarily, and also poverty. For four years, now, people have been coming out–more than four million already. Mostly they go to neighboring countries, but many–more than three hundred and fifty thousand this year so far alone–make their way into Europe. Some are now being sent on to the United States.

To put this in perspective, Syria’s total population is now less than 24 million people, meaning that about one in every seven people in that country has recently left. Forced migrations on this scale leave scars that last for generations and radically change the cultures that take in the migrants–I’m thinking here of the Irish Potato Famine, which killed a million people and displaced a million, far fewer than in the Syrian crisis, but then Ireland was a much smaller country at the time. The whole world was much smaller. Almost two hundred years later, the Irish Diaspora continues to enrich the rest of the world–and the great-grand children of Irish refugees continue to take their history personally. I do, anyway.

The fact that I’m talking about Syria here suggests that climate change is involved somehow–and indeed it might be. The connection is that from 2006 to 2011, parts of Syria were in a very serious drought. Huge numbers of farmers were forced off their land and into the cities looking for work. The Syrian government severely mishandled the crisis, triggering the present civil war. The drought, of course, is just one more event made more likely by climate change. No less an entity that the US Defense Department warns that climate change is a destabilizing influence, capable of creating exactly the sort of mess currently exploding in the Middle East and into Europe.

The climate-deniers have, of course, cried foul, questioning the science of the drought attribution point by point. It is a mistake to argue science with those whose real objection is cultural or ideological, so I’m not going to offer a detailed rebuttal–but the point is not a direct causal chain, anyway. The point is that large areas of the Middle East and Africa are extremely poor, huge numbers of people living just above the poverty line–if anything goes wrong, they fall off into the abyss. Climate change simply makes it more likely for things to go wrong.

For rich countries, like the United States or most of Europe, a serious natural disaster (and we’re having two at present, the California drought and the related western fires) hurts us but does not destabilize us. We have enough of a safety margin that we can not only continue to take care of our own, we can simultaneously offer aid to other countries and take in refugees.

The reason the Syrian crisis is scary is that its scale hints at the possibility of a world where we will no longer be able to do that, where even if the United States remains comparatively rich, the number of things going wrong will rise so high that we will no longer be able to take our stability as a country for granted. Fourteen years ago today, many Americans made the unsettling discovery that we are not immune from attack. I did not–I never thought that our country was special in that way. It’s true we don’t get attacked very often, but that’s not because we live in a protective bubble. It’s not because we’re immune. But I gotta say, I’ve gotten kind of used to this national stability thing.

For weather to contribute to a civil war is nothing new. Weather and climate have always been one of the drivers of history–as James Burke elegantly demonstrated almost twenty years ago. Where crops fail and where they succeed, where floods and fires occur and where they do not, even something as simple as where the weather is pleasant, all these things have always been one of the several facets of historical events. The only thing that has changed is that weather, that thing that has always shaped events, is becoming ever more chaotic.

And the problem is that as long as we keep pumping greenhouse gasses into the sky, there will be no new normal to adapt to. Stability will not be available.

Mini Ice Age? Not Likely

Could the Earth be heading for a new ice age?

In a word, no, the insistence of the Internet last week notwithstanding. In fact, any suggestion that scientists have announced otherwise is a bald-faced lie. What scientists—or, rather, scientist, singular—have announced is that in about fifteen years the sun could enter a period of dramatically reduced sunspot activity, a condition last seen during the coldest part of the so-called Little Ice Age.

Valentina Zharkova gave a presentation on solar variation to a group of astronomers last week in which she described her prediction regarding sunspots. Although her research is not new—it’s material she published last year—apparently someone just now realized its potential to cause climate confusion. The logic is that since a lack of sunspots also means a very slight reduction in solar energy output, the Maunder Minimum, as it is called, caused the Little Ice Age and a new minimum will repeat the process.

But I have yet to find any suggestion that these dots were connected by scientists. Dr. Zharkova herself made no claims concerning climate. She had no idea her research would be taken this way; she meant only to talk about sunspots. This is why I’m calling the “scientists say” claims a bald-faced lie.

(Curiously, Dr. Zharkova is a climate doubter, but I have not encountered any suggestion that she is working to foster doubt among other people. She appears to be innocent in this.)

There is a good reason why scientists aren’t running with the mini ice-age idea—it’s full of holes. Most obviously, the Maunder Minimum began about three hundred years after the Little Ice Age started. Perhaps the Minimum deepened the Ice Age, but it obviously did not trigger it. The trigger may have been a series of volcanic eruptions followed by changes in ocean currents.

More subtly, the reduction in solar energy we’re talking about is extremely small. If everything else were equal, it would cool the Earth, but everything else is not equal, and the effect of solar variation on the climate is now completely swamped by the greenhouse effect—at most, we’re looking at somewhat slower warming for a few decades. A new Maunder Minimum can’t save us.

In fact, our current enhanced greenhouse effect makes it harder for anything to trigger a new ice age, and the more greenhouse gas goes into the sky, the higher the ice age threshold will rise—making it less likely the next glaciation will happen at all.

I was not surprised to find that this mini ice age prediction is erroneous. It sounded fishy the first time I heard it because I already knew what sort of things trigger ice ages and I knew that none of them are likely to work in the near future.

I don’t mean to set myself up as something special. I’m sure a lot of people, maybe even most people who aren’t climate skeptics or deniers, had similar suspicions. My point is that if you have a basic understanding of a given scientific field, then you can make pretty good guesses about what’s right and what isn’t in that field. It’s never a sure thing—even scientists are sometimes surprised by their work (they really like surprises, actually). But it’s like knowing a person well; some years ago, a friend of mine was charged with a crime and I knew he had not done it, because I know him. Sometimes people do commit crimes that shock their friends, but that’s pretty rare. In fact, the charges against my friend were dropped for lack of evidence.

This is my working definition of science literacy; knowing enough about a given field to be able to make intelligent guesses about which stories are true and which spurious. I am literate in both ecology and climatology. I am probably close to literate in botany, zoology, medicine, astronomy, and physics. I am not remotely literate in chemistry. I know a little, of course, since there is overlap between it and the fields I know about, but you could very easily construct some chemical malarkey that I’d believe.

How does a person go about becoming science literate in this sense? I wish there were a simple, unambiguous way to do it, but I know of none. A master’s degree helps, but they’re expensive. There are plenty of books and websites out there, but in the beginning it can be difficult to tell the difference between real science and pseudoscience—especially since mainstream opinion is sometimes wrong. How do you tell the difference between a brilliant new theory and something somebody just made up?

I’ve touched on that before and I will again. For now, I’ll just say that in the beginning it is better to go with mainstream scientific ideas, since the scientific process is pretty good at weeding out malarkey whereas the popular press has no such protections at all. Writing a book about how your pet fantasy is “a ground-breaking truth mainstream scientists don’t want you to hear” is easy. Making it through the peer-review process to get published in a reputable journal is hard.

So what does trigger ice ages?

Short-term cold periods can be triggered by volcanism, changes in ocean and air currents, or possibly, yes, solar variation. Human history can also play a part; large-scale reforestation in the wake of the Black Death in Europe (which killed about a third of the population, leading to crop field abandonment) may have helped deepen the Little Ice Age, which was then only a few decades old.  It also may not be a coincidence that after a brief warming, the Little Ice Age returned and deepened dramatically after a series of pandemics dramatically reduced the population of the Americas (again causing large-scale crop field abandonment and reforestation) since changes in land-use patterns can alter the carbon cycle.

But the really big glacial advances are generally caused by changes in Earth’s orbit.

The Earth’s orbit varies in three ways: the shape of the orbit shifts from strongly elliptical to nearly circular and back again; the tilt of our axis varies; and which hemisphere has summer while the Earth is closest to the sun changes. All three cycles are very long, in the tens of thousands of years. All three influence the climate, but major glacial advances happen when the cold part of all three cycles coincide.

Or, more precisely, when all three cycles together make Northern summers relatively cool. The Northern Hemisphere has much more land in high latitudes than the Southern Hemisphere does, so when snow on those land masses doesn’t completely melt in the summer, the resulting glaciers get large enough to trigger feedback loops and drop the global temperature still further.

The process takes a long time; from an interglacial to the deepest part of a glacial advance takes tens of thousands of years. It would make a very boring disaster movie. Melting, which happens when the three orbital cycles move out of alignment again, is comparatively quick, but still takes thousands of years. The climate change we are causing now is freakishly fast (and still makes a boring disaster movie).

These orbital variations are not new, of course, but in the last few million years, changes in the shape and arrangement of continents (the creation of the Isthmus of Panama and the Himalayan Plateau)have shifted air and water currents in such a way as to balance the planet precisely between freezing and thawing. Slight shifts in solar energy caused by the orbital variations are enough to shift the balance one way or the other.

The thing is, the warmest part of our current interglacial happened five thousand years ago—we’d been gradually cooling since then, until human activity reversed the trend. Could the Little Ice Age have actually been the onset of a true ice age, interrupted by the Industrial Revolution? I have not been able to find out. But the thing is, anthropogenic climate change is already occurring against what should have been a cooling trend. I was suspicious of the mini ice age because I knew that we’ve already put enough greenhouse gas into the atmosphere to overpower and delay the onset of normal glacial advance.

Which is pretty horrific, if you think about it.

A Novel Passage

Here is an excerpt from a novel-in-progress of mine. It is set in the near future, twenty years after the Age of Fossil Fuel (and civilization) ends in a cataclysm triggered by a global pandemic. Two characters are talking while hiking in Western Maine.  Andy is middle-aged now and remembers the world before the pandemic (our world) clearly. He is an ecologist. Elzy is in her mid-twenties and has lost her childhood memories.”Data” refers to a tropical storm that passed through recently. “Loosianer” is another hiker. This novel won’t be out for a year or two, but if you want to see what else I’m working on, check out my website, News from Caroline.

“Why did the pandemic have to happen?” She asked Andy. They were walking now through a mixed conifer forest with a rocky, irregular floor and a broken, equally irregular crown. The area had been damaged by an ice storm the previous winter and a couple more trees had come down in Data’s deluge. The place had a primeval, mystical feel. The weather was hot, sunny, and almost literally steaming after yet more rain.

Several days had passed since they’d seen the back of Loosianer, and they’d spent those days talking of inconsequential things or, more frequently, not talking at all. But the whole time, Elzy had kept returning to the thought of what might have been and the losses she could not remember. She stopped at the top of a little rise and waited for Andy to catch up to her. She was faster than he was on short slopes, though he had more discipline and hence more stamina.

“Why did the pandemic have to happen?” he repeated, when he came up alongside her. “What do you mean? I don’t know that it did have to happen.”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s an irrational question. It just seems so meaningless for all those people to have died.”

“Maybe nothing has meaning unless we decide to give it some.” He leaned on his hiking poles for a moment, puffing his breath out in a sigh. Whether he was physically tired or emotionally so, Elzy couldn’t tell. Either way, he walked on, conserving momentum. He would not risk resting for long.

“I just keep thinking,” Elzy began, picking her way downhill after him, “why couldn’t everything have stayed the way it was? But I don’t suppose that’s an answerable question.”

“On the contrary, that one is answerable. Humanity’s energy use was unsustainable. Pandemic, transitioning away from fossil fuel, global warming, whatever form it took, radical change was inevitable.”

“Climate change and everything else would have changed things already? I mean, if we hadn’t been forced to quit oil?”

“Things were changing already when I was a kid.”

“No, I mean, would things have fallen apart already?”

“Maybe. Maybe not, unless you lived in Manhattan, or Boston or Miami or Mobile.” He was referring to cities whose ruins had been raked by major hurricanes and which, presumably, would have been destroyed either way. It wasn’t an exhaustive list. “But generally? It’s hard to say. The climate might not be too different from what we see today—there’s a certain amount of lag-time in the system. Before the pandemic, heat-related illnesses and deaths were rising. There were a lot of droughts and floods and heat waves and so on. Food prices were starting to rise globally. It triggered weird problems in some of the poorer countries, revolutions and extremism and terrorism, which they then exported to their neighbors and to us. But you could ignore it, if you were wealthy and lucky, and many people did.”

Andy’s voice grew distant while Elzy climbed over and through a fallen tree. When she caught up to him he was waiting for her beside a soft little low point in the trail. She could see where water had coursed here, muddy and foaming, when Data came through. Wrack-lines of needles and leaves ran along some two or three feet above where clear water now trickled through braided beds of mud and sand.

“If we say for the sake of simplicity,” Andy continued, “that those trends would have continued…would national security and natural disaster costs between them have bankrupted the country by now? Would something else have caused the United States to unravel? Our descendants would be pretty well done for, but it’s possible the lucky and wealthy would still be able to pretend otherwise. Except”–and he hopped lightly across the water, turned, and faced her again. “Nothing is ever simple.” His eyes lit. All hint of exhaustion was gone. He grinned like he was daring her to join him in something.

“How so?” Elzy asked, from her side of the little stream.

“You remember bifurcation points?”

“Yes.” She had studied them in a class he taught, years ago in Pennsylvania. They were instances where complex systems—organisms, ecosystems, the biosphere—changed suddenly, like a switch had been flipped, and thereafter followed a completely different set of rules. Like how a hollow ball of cells could abruptly fold in on itself, becoming a human embryo with the recognizable beginnings of a spinal column, in a matter of hours. Bifurcation points aren’t random, their locations in familiar processes (like embryo development) are well-known, but neither can they be predicted from prior conditions alone. The first time such a system goes through a new process, anything could happen. “So, you mean we could have passed a tipping point by now, some kind of runaway positive feedback loop that would make everything horrible?”

“Or made everything better. Don’t forget, human societies are complex systems, too.”

Elzy hopped across the stream and landed beside him.

“You mean–we might have done it. We might have gotten off fossil fuel on our own?”

“Yes.”

Alaska Burning

Alaska is on fire at the moment.

Well, not all of it, but the state’s wildfire Preparedness Level is at 4. The scale only goes up to 5, so PL 4 means the state is starting to have real trouble dealing with its fires and needs help from other states. For a state, or region to go to Level 4 is not all that unusual–the state and regional wildfire response systems are not designed to be self-sufficient–but the fires are not inconsequential, either. In recent weeks, both forests and tundra in Alaska have burned–and some of the fires have been quite large and dangerous.

Fires are not exactly a new thing in Alaska, but there are more of them now, for a variety of reasons including the current successional stage of previously logged forests, the effects of fire-suppression policies, and, yes, climate change. Alaska’s climate is changing much faster than that of more temperate areas, becoming both hotter and drier. And the fires, in turn, might be causing dramatic changes to both the climate and ecology of the region.

In forests

Recent research suggests that larger, more intense and frequent fires might dramatically alter forest compositions that have been stable (despite repeated natural climate changes) for six thousand years–although the forests themselves could then act to slow further changes.

In the interior of Alaska, there are essentially two main types of forest; most areas are dominated by black spruce, berry bushes, and moss, but there are forests of aspen and other deciduous trees as well. Both types of forest burn, perhaps every hundred years or so, but after the fire, the same type of forest eventually grows back. The result is a mosaic of different forest communities that has kept the same pattern since before the pyramids were built. Basically, each forest type produces its own distinctive type of forest floor. Because spruce forest floors are very thick and wet, they don’t burn down to bare soil, whereas the thin deciduous leaf-litter layer does. After a fire, the two different forest floor types guide ecological succession in different directions so that, in time, black spruce and aspen each return to the areas where they grew before.

As Alaska dries out, however, the black spruce forest burns more intensely and more often, destroying its distinctively thick duff. Once the soil is bare, the deciduous trees can move in–and there they stay.

The neat thing about ecology, though, is that nothing is simple–as the number of deciduous groves in interior Alaska increases, it seems likely that the situation will stabilize itself because the deciduous trees do not burn as easily and may act to slow down and break up large fires. These trees are paler in color, too, and they release more water back into the air and so may act to cool the region somewhat. Both effects may act to protect the remaining black spruce forests, at least for a while.

All by itself, changes in the composition of Alaska’s forests is not necessarily a disaster, although we don’t know for sure that it isn’t, either. Both the human cultures in the region and much of its wildlife have developed ways to use both types of forests in different ways, and it is not obvious what changing the proportion and distribution of the two types is going to do. Change is not automatically bad, but the fact that we are changing something this old should certainly give us pause.

Of more obvious, clear-cut concern is the fact that black spruce forests, with their thick, slowly-decaying duff, are a carbon-sink. That is, they take in more carbon than they release and thus are one of the reasons global warming is not worse than it already is. The loss of these duff layers, either because forests convert to deciduous communities or because spruce forests can no longer build up as much duff between more frequent, more intense fires, is already starting to convert Alaska’s forests into a net carbon source.

That’s a problem.

In the tundra

Much of Alaska is still treeless tundra, plant communities dominated by shrubs, mosses, grasses, and lichens. The tundra, too, is a net carbon sink, because huge amounts of organic matter build up in the soil and do not rot. The layers of ligroundving and dead organic matter also insulate the soil, helping to keep the permafrost from melting. The permafrost, in turn, keeps groundwater close to the surface and keeps buried methane trapped. As permafrost melts, some lakes are actually draining away, destroying important habitat for fish and for migratory birds. And, of course, that methane is bubbling up–methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide is.

Alaska’s forests have permafrost as well, but it is discontinuous–rather like big, underground boulders of ice. Beneath the tundra, the permafrost is more like bedrock.

The thing is, when the tundra burns–as it may be doing more often now, in part because northern Alaska is getting more lightening strikes because of its warmer weather–it’s not just the thin living laying but also the soil that goes up in smoke. A tundra fire can release as much carbon dioxide as a forest fire can. Without as much insulation, and given the much darker color of the charred surface, the permafrost beneath can then melt all the faster.

Positively problematic

I have written before about how positive feedback loops are anything but positive in the colloquial sense of good or happy. A positive feedback loop is a self-intensifying cycle, such as where rising temperatures melt permafrost, releasing methane, which makes temperatures rise faster, melting more permafrost….

The really scary thing here is that initiating these loops–pushing systems to the point where they start releasing greenhouse gasses–means that even if we stopped burning fossil fuel tomorrow, climate change might continue to get worse. We are losing the option to save ourselves.

That isn’t an argument to give up, of course–no situation is so bad that it cannot be made worse, and that means no situation is so bad that we  cannot make things better by our restraint. But it does mean that the hour is later than we might think. The Earth is a live thing, and it has been protecting us from ourselves to some extent–but it won’t do so forever. To those of you who are doing the equivalent of calmly reading the paper while your house burns around you; it is time to get up, now.

 

 

 

Back to the Future

Now and then, someone complains that environmentalists want to “take us back to the stone age” and I feel compelled to explain why this is not anything we have to worry about. The time has once again arrived.

We’re not going back to any previous time period. History doesn’t work like that. For better or worse, the past is over. We will not somehow fall backwards five thousand years, five hundred years, or even fifty years, forgetting all we have learned and undoing all the changes we have made in the process. For example, turning off the machines of the Industrial Revolution will not reassert the 1700’s and make smallpox magically reappear.

But ending human-caused climate change might well involve adopting some practices from the past. Our lives might come to resemble the way people lived before the Industrial Revolution, or even before the development of agriculture, in certain key ways. And that isn’t a bad thing.

Fossil fuel use gives us a huge amount of energy. Most of the “advances” we have seen in the past two hundred years have not been the result of scientific and social development alone but have also involved a dramatic increase of the amount of energy we harness. Cars don’t go faster than horse-drawn carriages because they are technologically more advanced (although they are) but because they use a lot more fuel. Of course, horses eat hay whereas cars eat gasoline, so it’s hard to make the comparison, but just as a mental exercise consider why we don’t design cars to run on hay.

Basically, hay isn’t a very energy-dense fuel and so a hay-car would need an impossibly large fuel-tank. There probably isn’t enough hay in the entire world to fuel even a modest fleet of hay-cars anyway.

And the massive energy-use is part of the problem. As I’ve explained before, destabilized weather and dramatic biodiversity losses are just what we can expect from using more energy than the biosphere we live in can handle. An enhanced greenhouse effect is the way fossil fuel accomplishes these disasters, but if we invented an alternate way of using too much energy, an alternate path to the same disaster would develop.

So, in the climate-sane future, we’ll use advancing technology to live better on less energy. Greater efficiency will allow us to keep some of our high-energy luxuries, but others will have to go; better rather than more will be the watch-word of the day.

For example, turning night into day across entire cityscapes as we do requires a lot of energy. Even with more efficient lighting, cities that never sleep might have to go. But when people go home at night they need not illuminate their houses with whale-oil lamps as in days of old—they can use LEDs run off batteries charged by rooftop solar cells during the day. LEDs don’t require killing whales and they don’t set fires when they fall over. For the same small amount of energy, they unquestionably do a better job producing light.

But can we look forward to more as well as better?

We can—if we think about what it really means to have plenty. We’re used to thinking of plenty in absolute terms, where a person with thousands of dollars has more wealth than a person with hundreds of dollars. By this logic, a person who wants to have more must go about getting more. And if there isn’t more to get (the approximate situation of modern humanity), that person is stuck.

But in real life we know that’s not how plenty actually works. We know that a person who earns only a few hundred dollars in a week can be in a much better position financially than someone who brings in several thousand if the latter has a lot of unavoidable bills and a large amount of debt. What matters is not so much what you have so much as the relationship between what you have and what you need. It is possible to achieve a state of plenty even with a falling level of income by reducing expenses to the point where saving money is easy.

Think about the difference between a working professional trying to support three children in private school, a stay-at-home spouse, and a home big enough for the whole family, and the same person as a widowed empty-nester living in a small apartment with a modest pension and able to finally go visit Paris.

We can do that as a species in the distant but foreseeable future by radically shrinking our population.

How many people Earth can support is definitely subject to debate. There were certainly those who expected us to have fallen into chaos and horror due to resource shortages by this time and, by and large, they were wrong. I suspect that getting off fossil fuel will require shrinking our numbers (hopefully by attrition), but it’s possible that I am wrong. But trying to identify the maximum number of people who can cram themselves onto the planet—how little we can get by with per capita, in other words—is poverty-thinking. Let’s think about plenty instead.

If our species were, once again, very small—perhaps a few million of us scattered all over the Earth—our per capita Earth-shares would each be very large. So long as we kept our numbers contained and our needs modest, we’d all have more in the way of natural resources than we could ever hope to use. And we’d have some valuable things that money just can’t buy these days. For example, anyone who wanted adventure and freedom could walk out into the wilderness and just keep going as long as they wanted. And that beauty you see in National Parks and on nature specials on TV? It would be everywhere, basically for free.

True, such small population sizes might involve some sacrifice. You couldn’t go see a show on Broadway because New York couldn’t exist. In fact, population sizes like what they had in the Paleolithic might require something of the lifestyle of the Paleolithic.

But that wouldn’t be so bad. Historically, when stone-age peoples have met with so-called “advanced” cultures, they have fought very hard to retain their supposedly “primitive” way of life—these fights continue still. It’s not that these people want to maintain themselves as museum pieces, resistant to change forever—they generally accept steel tools, guns, snowmobiles, and whatever else makes their lives better by their own definition. The point is that there are aspects of Paleolithic (e.g., pre-agricultural) life that are worth more than life itself to the people who have it.

And some aspects are all that climate-sane future humanity would have of the Paleolithic, anyway. We can’t go back, and wouldn’t have to. Some communities might indeed be hunter-gatherers, or subsistence farmers or pastoralists. Horses and oxen and human feet might replace cars and trucks for most purposes. Leather, wood, and bone might replace metal and plastic for daily use. But we’d still have steel when we needed it—there’d be plenty of it available for recycling, just mine a landfill. And we’d still know how to make things like vaccines, antibiotics, and radios. Probably, technological advancement will continue and our hunter-gatherer descendants will be able to do things like replace their internal organs with synthetic ones when they fail.

Just something to imagine next time someone starts talking about the stone age.

Jack vs. Jenny for Climate

I could do an entire series on Presidential contenders and climate change, but barring a major change in the field I probably won’t. There is no real reason for me to cover the Republicans, unless one of them comes out strongly in favor of climate action (something I dearly wish would happen), and I’m guessing that  the Democratic field is more or less set, now. Yes, a Warren campaign would be fun to see, but she has disavowed interest for this cycle and we badly need her in the Senate right now. Her political star is rising and she will have time to run for President (and quite possibly win) at some point in the future. Joe Biden has run before but has no plans to do so now. His Presidential boat has probably sailed sailed. Martin O’Malley has shown some interest, and he certainly has his merits, but nobody outside of Maryland has heard of him and he has not announced.

So, we’re looking at Bernie Sanders and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

We’re also looking at the most important American Presidential election the world has ever seen. I’m not indulging in hyperbole, this is the big one. President Obama has made an important start on dealing with the problem, but he’s only been able to act through executive order, which means his successor could wipe out all his gains with the stroke of a pen–and without US leadership, much of the world’s climate response will fall apart. It’s not that the US is a shining example of climate concern–we’re rather the opposite–it’s that a huge portion of the problem belongs on our doorstep and everybody knows it. We got rich and powerful as early adopters of fossil fuel, and the only way to get countries like India and China to forgo their fair share of that wealth is for us to bite the bullet and clean up our own mess. And since the chance of getting a climate-sane veto-proof majority on both houses of Congress is roughly nil, and since we really don’t have time to wait another four or eight years  to act on this issue, the upcoming Presidential election is basically about saving the world. Or not.

So, the big question is, which Democrat should climate-sane people support? Yes, I said Democrat; the place to create a viable third party is in state and local elections. Who can go toe-to-toe with whichever champion the Kochs decide to anoint?

(The title of this post, by the way, is a reference to the male and female Democratic hopefuls; most people know that a male donkey is correctly called a jack, but less well-known is that female donkeys are jennets or jennies. I find the idea of “jenny” as a technical term for an animal completely charming. And, the unfortunate connotations of “ass” notwithstanding, donkeys make fine political mascots–they are extremely strong and sure-footed, and they have a reputation for not letting people push them around.)

Personally, I would love for Mrs. Clinton to become President. She is clearly capable of doing the job and it is simply ridiculous that the United States hasn’t had a female chief executive yet. But I hardly ever hear her speak on climate and she has a reputation (which may or may not be deserved) for political expediency. Would she really make the issue a priority if it got in the way of her ambition? Mr. Sanders clearly has no problem whatever with political integrity (if he were interested in lying to improve his image, he wouldn’t call himself a socialist) and his loyalty to liberal, progressive causes is unassailable. And while it’s true that he seems a long-shot for the White House, so did Mr. Obama, and for almost exactly the same reasons (complexion aside, of course). But those were first impressions, and the moment clearly needs more than that. So, let’s take a look at these people. And since both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders have extensive experience in office, we have something other than campaign promises to look at.

Bernie for President?

Bernie Sanders’ senator’s website (as opposed to his campaign website) includes a poll on climate change. The first question asks respondent to choose between cutting Medicare and similar programs and imposing a carbon tax on “big polluters” as a method of deficit reduction, so the political bent of the poll is obvious. The point is to frame climate change as a liberal, progressive issue and to paint any objectors as big-business bullies who want to take money away from old people. I don’t really like such bald politicking, and I worry that it could backfire by further alienating social and fiscal conservatives from the environmental cause, but at least Bernie and his advisers are willing to put a lot of their eggs in the climate basket. That’s a good sign.

(I make a point of using respectful last-name address here, but Bernie likes to be called Bernie, apparently).

Bernie Sanders is a career grass-roots politician with a long record of dedication to economic and environmental issues. He has been almost continually in office since 1981, first as Mayor of Burlington, Vermont, then in the US House of Representatives and now the US Senate, where he currently serves. He is 73 years old, so we can expect his physical fitness to be questioned at some point, but Mrs. Clinton is almost as old as he is and both belong to a long-lived generation. He has spent much of his career advocating for the middle class and for alternative energy, especially distributed solar energy (household solar panels rather than the solar equivalent of a big power plant).

He is currently ranked 1st on climate leadership within the Senate and in recent years has sponsored or co-sponsored a number of important climate-friendly energy bills (that went nowhere, unfortunately). He is certainly aware of oil money in politics and openly refers to it as an adversary he intends to conquer by mobilizing massive grass-roots support–an inspiring image. He attended the People’s March for Climate Change (as did I) and is responsible for a brilliant little political move earlier this year; he amended a bill that would approve the Keystone XL Pipeline with a question on climate change, forcing Senators to go on record as to whether they believed climate change is real.

However, Mr. Sanders has stopped short of asserting that all remaining fossil fuel should stay in the ground. There is some speculation that he might say it, but he hasn’t yet. And of course there is the question of whether he can get elected in the first place, given that he is an outspoken giant-killer. Giants don’t like giant-killers and they fight back.

Hillary! Hillary! (maybe)

Hillary Clinton actually had a very good voting record on environmental issues as a Senator–87%, according to the League of Conservation Voters, a record that would have been higher had she not missed some votes while campaigning for President eight years ago. In that campaign, she included an ambitious climate action plan in her platform.  On climate alone, in fact, her record is nearly as good as Mr. Sanders’, it’s just that he talks more than she does about it. Almost more to the point, Mr. Clinton has supported exactly the same climate policies as Barack Obama, both as a presidential candidate in 2007 and 2008 and when she was Secretary of State. That means that she has disappointed environmentalists and will probably continue to do so (as Secretary of State she championed fracking overseas, ostensibly because natural gas produces less carbon dioxide when burned than coal), but she is a vocal opponent of climate denial and has stated that “the unprecedented action that President Obama has taken must be protected at all cost.” Wherein she is absolutely right.

Where does this leave us?

So, where does all this leave us? In a pretty good position, actually. It means that whichever of the current two hopefuls actually get the Democratic nomination, we’ll have a major-party candidate who takes climate change very seriously and will, if elected, preserve and possibly extend Mr. Obama’s critical executive actions and diplomatic work on the issue. And it’s encouraging that they each have a passionate fan base that has been calling for their champion to run since approximately twenty-five minutes after Mr. Obama took office for his second and final term. We could win this.

The question really comes down to which one is more likely to beat a Republican and which one, if elected, is going to be better able to enact the climate-sane policies they both want.

At this time, I actually think that Bernie Sanders is the more electable of the two, and not because, or not only because, he is male. The issue is that neither of them are going to be able to win with a centrist, appeal-to-moderate-Republicans strategy–though Mrs. Clinton may try, since she seems to be temperamentally a pro-establishment moderate Democrat. The problem for her is that a lot of people really dislike her and always have. Frankly I do think sexism is part of it; as a candidate, Bill Clinton had a serious political problem in the person of his powerful, outspoken wife, who quite clearly was going to help him run the country if she could. A female President is no longer quite so scary a prospect a quarter-century later, but the venom spit on her then still clings to her career. She remains the target of an ongoing series of ad-hominem attacks thinly veiled as controversy and scandal. She can’t make people like her who don’t already. Like Mr. Sanders, Mrs. Clinton is only going to be able to draw additional votes by mobilizing people who would not otherwise vote at all–and as a pro-establishment politician, she’s unlikely to be able to do that. Bernie Sanders can and already is; radicals have been trading Bernie Sanders quotes on Facebook for a couple of years now.

But could Bernie Sanders use the Executive Branch effectively if Congress proves as intractable for him as it has for Mr. Obama? As an experienced legislator he clearly knows how to work with the Legislative Branch, but that won’t help if it refuses to work with him and that may happen (see my earlier comment about giant killers). Maybe he can, but he’s something of an unknown in that respect. Mrs. Clinton, in contrast, has extensive experience with executive power and diplomacy, and while she’s even more likely to face a hostile Congress (see my earlier comments about people disliking Hillary), it is entirely clear that she can and will play hardball when necessary. We will not lose President Obama’s climate actions on her watch.

We have time in which to make up our minds (or to watch registered Democrats make up theirs, in states with closed primaries). What we do not have to for is to be lackadaisical about making sure that everyone gets out to vote this time. We cannot see a repeat of the recent mid-term election, when liberal and progressive voters stayed home and pro-business, anti-climate candidates swept gubernatorial and congressional races in state after state.

The Earth has to win this one.

 

 

Sticking Together for the Climate

Last night, the PBS NewsHour told the story of Ferrock, a climate-friendly alternative to cement invented by the aptly-named David Stone. It was a good story, well-told—almost.

The reason that traditional (“Portland”) cement needs an alternative is that it is currently responsible for 5% of carbon dioxide emissions globally. And since cement is the binding agent used in concrete, the preeminent building material in the world, the demand for cement is likely to grow.

How does all that carbon dioxide follow from cement? PBS Newshour correctly reported that making the material takes a huge amount of energy. The first step in the process involves making limestone and other ingredients to 2,800 F. in order to create clinker, essentially a new mineral. Clinker plus gypsum is Portland cement. Cooking enough clinker for one ton of cement requires 4.7 million BTUs of energy. If that energy comes from coal (as it often does) then a ton of cement is another ton of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

What the Newshour did not add is that the kilns are only responsible for about 40% of the carbon emissions of cement production. 5-10% more comes from transporting raw materials and finished cement and the energy necessary to run machinery. The rest, 50%, comes from the chemical creation of clinker itself.

Limestone is calcium carbonate. Clinker is mostly calcium oxide. Transforming the one into the other liberates carbon dioxide as an inevitable byproduct. Worse, that is carbon that had been sequestered back when the limestone was created, millions or even billions of years ago. As regards climate change, there is a fundamental difference between recently sequestered carbon and ancient carbon.

Releasing recent carbon, for example, burning wood or even breathing, does not change the global carbon budget any (although deforestation on a large scale does)—just like adding and subtracting grocery money from a short-term checking account does not alter a person’s retirement savings. But liberating carbon that has been sequestered for millions of years does change the overall carbon budget—and warms the planet. In that sense, baking limestone is as bad as burning coal.

Ferrock offers an alternative because it is chemically different from Portland cement. The Newshour did not provide any detail on this point, and since its report did not explain the chemistry of clinker production it could not make clear how a “different recipe” could make Ferrock superior to Portland cement. But the report did include a brief shot of some chemical formulae and did state what Ferrock’s primary ingredients are: iron, silica, and carbon dioxide itself–the material takes carbon in, rather than putting it out.

That the raw materials are the wastes of other industries (steel dust, which is typically landfilled, and post-consumer recycled glass) is an added benefit of the process. The Newshour spent a good chunk of time explaining how the glass was originally sourced through a recovering alcoholic who picked up litter as a kind of self-appointed service position—a charming tale, but one that rather emphasized how small-scale Ferrock was, at least in the beginning.

Scale is Ferrock’s problem, according to the Newshour, which interviewed Steve Regis, the owner of a large Portlantd cement production facility, who asserted that

“Dave’s idea, I think it has a good niche market for — for nonstructural block, yard art, benches. But consider the scale of that compared to a 200-mile six-lane freeway eight inches thick or a runaway.”

David Stone appears to concede the point, or, at least, the reporter concedes the point and does not quote any rebuttal by Dr. Stone. He does say that

“I’m doing my part, as best I can, to respond, so that when the time comes and the world wants to build with new materials that are carbon-neutral or carbon-negative, I will be able to step forward and say, yes, I have such a material.”

Dr. Stone’s quote ends the report, except for some concluding narration, but Mr. Regis was the last person to actually provide the audience with information on what Ferrock can and cannot do–for a competitor to be given such an authoritative last word in an ostensibly friendly profile is striking, especially given that Mr. Regis’ claim is hard to believe. There is no shortage of post-consumer recycled glass, and steel dust is an otherwise unclaimed byproduct of the steel industry and probably quite plentiful. And of course, we have a lot of carbon dioxide…. So, why can’t Ferrock be scaled up? Perhaps it actually can’t, but in that case the reporter should have insisted that Mr. Regis make his case more clearly. Why should he be able to condescendingly bad-mouth his competition with a questionable argument, unchallenged by a journalist?

Most probably, if Ferrock can’t scale up it is because the construction industry is conservative. Industry standards and even the law require Portland cement and those standards are not likely to change without outside pressure because of a big alternative-cement project does fail, people could die and careers could end.

And this is true even when the alternative cement has shown itself in laboratory testing, as Ferrock has, to be superior to Portland cement in certain critical ways—the stuff is blast-resistant, meaning that an explosion (whether accidental or deliberate) that could collapse a building made of standard concrete would leave a similar building made of Ferrock-based concrete damaged but standing.

Industry conservatism is the real bugaboo of David Stone—and a startlingly large number of other people.

I have not done an exhaustive survey, but just a few minutes online turned up the following list—for ease of comparison I’ve included Ferrock on the list.

Ferrock

A cement-alternative made, apparently without kiln-baking. It uses iron and silica (from glass) rather than limestone and is a carbon sink rather than a carbon source. Concrete made from Ferrock is five times stronger than Portland cement-based concrete. Among other advantages, it is blast-resistent.

Liquid Granite

Liquid Granite is a cement-alternative whose composition is a trade secret; it is said to be made from an “inorganic powder” that is up to 70% recycled industrial waste and to be “carbon-free,” although it is only offered as a way to replace “more than two-thirds” of the Portland cement in concrete mixes. Its strength is comparable to Portland cement but with superior heat-resistance. Portland cement does not burn, but it does crack and crumble in fires.

Novacem

Novacem is not a substance but a London-based company that produces a cement-alternative based on magnesium silicates. Production requires lower temperatures and does not release carbon dioxide directly the way the creation of limestone clinker does. Over time, the material absorbs carbon dioxide and so becomes carbon-negative.

Calera

Calera is a company that produces calcium carbonate by bubbling flue gas through sea water. Flue gas is carbon dioxide created by gas-powered power plants (coal-fired plants would work as well). The sea water is a source of calcium and magnesium. The process adds nothing to the water, which can then be desalinated and used or released back into the sea. Waste heat in the flue gas is enough to dry the calcium carbonate, which is then used as a carbon-negative clinker.

This description confuses me because it is exactly the same chemical process by which sea animals create limestone in the first place—and limestone has to be stripped of its carbon in order to become clinker. So why Calera’s artificial limestone does not need to be cooked is not clear to me. Perhaps the process was simply not well explained in the source I found.

Carbon Sciences

Another company creating artificial limestone using flue gas, although Carbon Sciences derive their calcium and magnesium from waste water from mining operations. The company also uses flue gas to force the material to absorb carbon dioxide faster than curing cement normally does, although it is not clear to me whether this process actually increases carbon absorption overall.

Ceratech

Ceratech is a company using fly ash, a byproduct of coal combustion, as clinker. Although dependence of coal would be problematic for a large-scale, long-term replacement for Portland cement, until coal use stops fly ash can serve as clinker at no additional carbon cost. Fly-ash cement is also stronger than Portland cement, so engineers can use less concrete for the same job. It can take longer to set and sometimes contains toxins, however.

CSHub

CSHub is not a production company but a research group. It is working to understand the chemistry of cement production which is, surprisingly, mysterious except in its general outlines. They are working on a way to reduce the processing temperature for limestone clinker. So far, the problem with the new material is that the raw material is much harder to grind, so the energy requirement and therefore the carbon footprint of initial processing goes up even as the cooking temperature comes down.

So, What’s the Story?

In pointing out details that The Newshour missed, I do not mean to attack PBS. I have discussed the shortcomings of various media outlets before, but I basically like and respect The Newshour staff. I am inclined to think well of them.

But in this case, they missed the story. What they presented as the work of a plucky, isolated inventor, someone who may someday make a different (a feel-good story that requires no public action) is actually just one example of a whole wave of potential solutions to a serious problem that cannot be implemented for want of supportive government policy—remember the legal standards that more or less mandate the use of Portland cement. This is a much more disturbing story, and one that does require public response.

So, the PBS report presented information, information I might not have encountered otherwise –I knew about the carbon footprint of Portland cement, but not that alternatives exist. PBS did not present that information in context so as to tell a story the public really needs to hear.

So, here—I’ll fill in the gap.

Alternative cement requires supportive policy in the same way that alternative energy does and for the same reasons. It is in the public good that these technologies develop to the point where these companies can compete for business on a level playing field. That does not mean that all cement alternatives will actually work as cement or that all cements presented as carbon-neutral actually are—we still need building standards. But we need standards that support the switch to a carbon-sane future rather than inhibiting it.

And we need to stop pretending that the transition is not being deliberately held up. We need to demand actual, committed progress.

The Yellow Rose of Assateague

The following is an article I wrote for college almost eight years ago, on the personal dimension of environmental responsibility. The Chris in this article is now my husband.

I believe in the importance of relationships.

When my friend, Chris, asked if I would cheer for him on his firefighter pack test, I said yes. Later, he back-pedaled, asking only for help adjusting his straps, but I thought he really still wanted the cheering. I believe in paying attention.

But I am too self-conscious to be a cheer-leading squad of one, so I settled on making him a boutonniere instead. I’d use a yellow rose and maybe, if I could get it, some lavender. Lavender heals burns, so it’s appropriate for a fire-fighter. I know how to make boutonnieres and there is a florist in town from whom I can buy supplies.

But the florist is too far away for me to bike to. A co-worker offered to give me a rose from her garden, but hers are coral-colored–according to tradition, a coral rose symbolizes desire or seduction or something like that. Yellow symbolizes friendship, and Chris and I are definitely friends. I wouldn’t want him to get the wrong idea, so I’ll have to go to the florist’s.

That means asking for a ride.

A ten mile trip means about half a gallon of gas, which means about ten pounds of carbon dioxide released into the sky. One of the consequences of climate change is drier, hotter weather in some areas, which increases the chance of catastrophic wildfires—as in the kind that kill firefighters.

Now, are ten pounds really going to make much difference in the global scheme of things? Possibly not, but of course that isn’t the only instance of petrochemicals in my would-be rose’s history. I have just called the florist. They do, indeed, carry roses, imported from South America, California, and Holland…the designer didn’t seem to know or care which. Obviously, they take a long trip, whatever their origin, probably mostly by airplane. Any way you slice it, that’s a lot of hydrocarbon and a lot more drought in the Southwest. That’s not a good gift for a firefighter–I mean Chris already has a steady job.

This is the sort of thing I think about.

In my pocket I have a dollar, and that dollar is a vote towards the kind of world I want to live in. That dollar might not seem like much, but consider that corporate profit margins are sometimes calculated in pennies per purchase. Advertisers consult psychologists to mine our unconscious biases as they struggle to snag as many shoppers as possible. The corporate world understands the power of our individual choices very well.

I believe in the importance of relationship; the oil that makes the gas that might take me rose shopping is the medium of many relationships–between me and gas station attendants, delivery drivers, workers at the refinery, sailors on tankers and workers on pipelines, crews operating drill rigs, teams of geologists, and, in all probability, soldiers and contract workers in Iraq.

All these people are hidden from me by the complexity of our economy, by its sheer facelessness, but they do exist. I help put food on their tables, and they get me where I need to go.

Through the medium of oil, I also participate in relationships with the various employers of all these people: the board members, CEOs and major stockholders of Exxon-Mobil, perhaps, or British Petroleum. I don’t like these people. They are destroying the world in which I live, and using my money to do it. I don’t want to participate in abusive relationships anymore.

Nor do I want to hide from the true nature of the relationships I participate in.

Take this rose, for example. First of all, Chris is a guy, and while I hate to stereotype, I have worked at a florist’s over Valentine’s Day and most guys had no idea how to even order flowers let alone knowing—and taking seriously–the symbolism of different colors of roses. Chris is not going to see a coral-colored rose, gasp, and run off to buy breath mints and prophylactics.

Second, a yellow rose, coming from me, is distinctly weird. Yellow roses are what you give a friend who worries you might have other designs. A yellow rose says “See, I love you, but not that way.” It’s a sweet gesture with an asterisk attached. But Chris isn’t worried. And I don’t normally give my platonic friends roses anyway. If I did, it would be because he or she likes roses. I’d select my friend’s favorite color without even worrying about symbolism. I don’t even know if Chris likes roses, let alone what color roses he likes.

I saw a similar sort of fixation on roses at the florist’s; young, awkward men coming in with only a vague notion of what they want, knowing only that having a girlfriend means buying her flowers. Some have special requests—arrangements in her favorite color, a prominence of lilies or some other bloom she’s always loved–but the vast majority of them want roses. Roses, particularly red ones, are different. They are the chocolate box of flowers, the medium of choice of a ritual deeper and more universal than any couple’s personal preferences.

So why am I getting my purely platonic friend Chris a rose? Particularly a yellow one? Perhaps I protest too much. Perhaps I’m just trying to hedge my bets by indulging in a frankly romantic gesture while insisting he not perceive it as such, thereby protecting myself from having to make any definite decisions about what kind of relationship I want with this man.

Perhaps, in this case, yellow simply symbolizes chicken.

A few weeks ago I had an argument with the maintenance staff where I live. The issue was my refrigerators. The thing is, my building had two of them, since it was designed to house a dozen or so seasonal workers, but I was alone and I needed neither of them. As a vegan, my food seldom needed refrigeration. So, one day, acting on a suggestion in a book I’d read, I went looking for unnecessary energy use in the house. I unplugged the night-lights, unplugged the microwave (it has a clock that can’t be turned off) and turned off the refrigerators.

It felt amazing. I’d always taken constant electricity load for granted—little dribbles of electricity like the night-light, which was in the house when I got there, or the dozens of pointless digital clocks on all the household gadgets, or whole unnecessary floods, like the empty refrigerators. It had never occurred to me before that I could turn them off, that I could actually act on my world in that way.

That night, when I went to bed, the house wasn’t using any electricity at all, except for its smoke detectors. The next day, I laughed out loud for happiness just walking down the street.

And then my boss, who provides the house I live in, told me the refrigerators weren’t designed to be turned off and might not actually go back on again. That wasn’t what the maintenance people told me when I first asked, but then they all changed their minds. I argued, but lost, and so I did what my boss told me to do. I turned the refrigerators back on.

I can hear them humming now. I try to ignore them because I don’t want to think about things I can’t do anything about. And I don’t look so closely at beautiful things as I did when the refrigerators were off. I don’t feel as strong in my life. I don’t laugh as I walk down the street, unless I think of something funny. Turning a blind eye to the subtleties of my economic and ecological relationships constitutes a gap into which the better part of my day has apparently fallen.

I believe in the importance of relationships, and I believe in paying attention. I believe in the power of one individual to affect another, and in the moral necessity of taking responsibility for my actions, however small or subtle. I shall find a way to divest myself of those refrigerators, or I shall find a way to live with their influence without turning away. I shall count every ounce of petrochemical if that’s what I need to do, although I suspect that’s both much more and much less than what the planet really needs.

And I shall give my Chris a rose, if I can get one, and I shall not care what color it ends up being.