Reading New Thoughts: Hessen’s Many Lives of Carbon and the Two Irresistible Forces of Climate Change

Disclaimer:  I am now retired, and am therefore no longer an expert on anything.  This blog post presents only my opinions, and anything in it should not be relied on.

Dag Hessen’s “The Many Lives of Carbon” is the best book I have been able to find on the chemical details of the carbon cycle and CO2-driven climate change (despite some odd idioms that make it difficult to understand him at times).  In particular, it goes deeply into “positive feedbacks” that exacerbate departures from atmospheric-O2 equilibrium and “negative feedbacks” that operate to revert to equilibrium.  In the long run, negative feedbacks win; but the long run can be millions of years.

More precisely, if humans weren’t involved, there are medium-term and long-term “global warmings” and coolings.  The medium-term warming/cooling is usually thought to result from the Milankovitch Cycle, in which Earth orbit unusually far from the Sun during winter (“rubber-banding” of its elliptical orbit), a more severe tilt of the Earth’s axis as it oscillates periodically, and “precession” (wobbling back and forth on its axis) combine to yield unusually low Northern-Hemisphere winter heat from the Sun, which kickstarts glaciation, which acts as a positive feedback for global cooling along with atmospheric CO2 loss.  This cooling operates slowly over most of the next 100,000 years to descend into an Ice Age, but then the opposite effect (maximum heat from the sun) kicks in and brings a sharp rise in temperatures back to its original point. 

Long-term global warming is much rarer – there are instances 55 million years ago and 250 million years ago, and indeed some indications that most of the previous 5 largest mass extinctions on Earth were associated with this type of global warming.  The apparent cause is massive volcanism, especially underwater volcanism (the clouds from on-land volcanism actually reduce temperatures significantly over several years, but then the temperatures revert to what they were before the eruption).  It also seems clear that the main if not only cause of the warming is CO2 and methane (CH4) released into the atmosphere by these eruptions – carbon infusions so persistent that the level of atmospheric CO2 did not revert to equilibrium for 50 million years or so after the last such warming.

For both medium-term and long-term global warming/cooling, “weathering” acts as a negative feedback – but only over hundreds of thousands of years.  Weathering involves water and wind wearing away at rock, exposing carbon-infused silica that are then carried to the ocean.  There, among other outcomes, they are taken up by creatures who die, forming ocean-floor limestone that “captures” the carbon and thus withdraws it from the carbon cycle circulating carbon into and out of the atmosphere.

Human-caused global warming takes the slow negative feedback of animal/plant fossils being turned into coal, oil, and natural gas below the Earth’s surface and makes it into an unprecedentedly fast direct cause of global warming, mostly by burning it for fuel (hence “fossil fuels”).   The net effect of CO2 doubling in the atmosphere is 2-2.8 degrees Centigrade land-temperature warming, but it is also accompanied by positive feedbacks (including increased cloud cover, increased atmospheric methane, and “black carbon”/soot decreases in albedo [reflectivity of the sun’s heat]) that, in a slower way, may take the net global warming associated with CO2 doubling up to 4 degrees C.  Some of this can be overcome by the negative feedback of the ocean’s slower absorption of the increased heat, as the ocean “sink” can take more carbon out of the atmosphere, but at some point soon the ocean will be in balance with the atmosphere and much of what we emit in carbon pollution will effectively stay aloft for thousands of years. 

My point in running through the implications of Hessen’s analysis is that there is a reason for scientists to fear for all of our lives:  The global warming that, in the extreme, disrupts agriculture and food webs extremely and makes it unsafe for most of us to operate outside for more than a short period of time most of the year, except in the high mountains, is a CO2-driven “irresistible force”.  There is therefore a good case to be made that “mitigation” – reducing carbon emissions (and methane and black carbon and possibly nitrous oxide) is by far the best way to avoid the kind of global warming that literally threatens humanity’s survival.  And this is a point that I have argued vociferously in past blog posts.

The Other Irresistible Force:  The Business/Legal Bureaucracy

And yet, based on my reading, I would argue that there is an apparently equally irresistible force operating on its own momentum in today’s world:  what I am calling the Business/Legal Bureaucracy.  Here, I am using the word “bureaucracy” in a particular sense:  that of an organization operating on its own momentum.  In the case of businesses, that means a large-business bureaucracy operating always under a plan to make more profit this year than last.  In the case of the law, that means a court system and mindset always to build on precedents and to support property rights.  

To see what I am talking about, consider David Owen’s “Where the Water Goes”, about what happens to all the water in the Colorado River watershed.  Today, most of that water is shipped east to fuel the farms and businesses of Colorado and its vicinity, or west, to meet the water needs of Las Vegas and Los Angeles and the like.  The rest is allocated to farmers or other property owners along the way under a peculiar legal doctrine called “prior appropriation” – instead of the more typical equal sharing among bordering property owners, it limits each portion to a single “prior claimant”, since in the old mining days there wasn’t enough water in each portion for more than one miner to be able to “wash” the gold effectively.  Each new demand for water therefore is fitted legally within this framework, ensuring that the agricultural business bureaucracy will push for more water from the same watershed, while the legal bureaucracy will accommodate this within the array of prior claimants.

To see what creates such an impression of an irresistible force about this, consider the need to cut back on water use as climate change inevitably decreases the snowpack feeding the Colorado.  As Owen points out, there is no clear way to do this.  Business-wise, no one wants to be the one to sacrifice water.  Legally, the simple solution of limiting per-owner water use can actually result in more water use from each owner, as seasonal and annual variations in water needs mean that many owners will now need to draw down and store water in off-seasons “just in case”.   The result is a system that not only resists “sustainability” but in fact can also be less profit-producing in the long run – the ecosystems shafted by this approach, such as the now-dry Mexican terminus of the Colorado, may well be those that might have been most arable in the global-warming future.  And the examples of this multiply quickly:  the wildfire book I reviewed in an earlier blog post noted the extreme difficulties in fighting wildfires with their exacerbating effect on global warming, difficulties caused by the encroachment of mining and real-estate development on northern forests, driven by Legal/Business Bureaucracy.

The primary focus of the Legal/Business Bureaucracy with respect to climate change and global warming, therefore, is after-the-fact, incremental adaptation.  It is for that reason, as well as the dangerous trajectory we are now on, that I view calling the most disastrous future climate-change scenarios “business as usual” as entirely appropriate.

Force, Meet Force

It also seems to me that reactions to the most dire predictions of climate change fall into two camps (sometimes in the same person!): 

1.       We need drastic change or few of us will survive, because no society or business system can possibly resist the upcoming “business as usual” changes:  extreme weather, loss of water for agriculture, loss/movement of arable land, large increases in the area ripe for debilitating/killing tropical diseases, extreme heat, loss of ocean food, loss of food-supporting ecosystems, loss of seacoast living areas, possible toxic emissions from the ocean. 

2.       Our business-economy-associated present system will somehow automagically “muddle through”, as it always seems to have done.  After all, there is, it seems, plenty of “slack” in the water efficiency of agriculture, plenty of ideas about how to adopt businesses and governments to encourage better adaptation and mitigation “at the margin” (e.g., solar now dominates the new-energy market in the United States, although it does not seem to have made much of a dent in the existing uses of fossil fuels), and plenty of new business-associated technologies to apply to problems (e.g., business sustainability metrics). 

An interesting example of how both beliefs can apparently coexist in the same person is Steven Pinker’s “Enlightenment Now”, an argument that the “reason reinforced by science” approach to the world of the late 18^th century known as the Enlightenment is primarily responsible for a dramatic, continuing improvement in the overall human situation, and should be chosen as the primary impetus for further improvements.  My overall comment on this book is that Pinker has impressed me with the breadth of his reading and the general fairness of his assessments of that reading.  However, Pinker appears to have one frustrating flaw:  A belief that liberals and other proponents of change in such areas as equality, environmentalism, and climate change are primarily so ideology-driven that they are actually harmful to Enlightenment-type improvements, and likewise their proponents within the government.  Any reasonable reading of Jeffrey Sachs’ “The Age of Sustainable Development”, which I hope to discuss in a later post, puts the lie to that one. 

In any case, Pinker has an extensive section on climate change, in which he both notes the “existential threat” (i.e., threat to human existence) posed by human-caused climate change, and asserts his belief that it can be overcome by a combination of Business/Legal-Complex adaptation to the findings of Enlightenment scientists and geoengineering.  One particular assertion is that if regulations could be altered, new technologies in nuclear power can meet all our energy needs in short order, with little risk to people and little need of waste storage.  I should note that James Hansen appears to agree with him (although Hansen is far more pessimistic that regulation alteration will happen or that nuclear businesses will choose to change their models) and Joe Romm very definitely does not.  

One also often sees the second camp among experts on Business/Legal-Complex matters such as allocation of water in California in reaction to climate-change-driven droughts.  These reactions assume linear effects on water availability of what is an exponential global-warming process, and note that under these assumptions, there is plenty of room for less water use by existing agriculture, and everyone should “stop panicking.” 

So what do I think will happen when force meets force?

Flexibility Is the Enemy of Agility

One of the things that I noticed (and noted in my blog) in my past profession is that product and organizational flexibility – the ability to easily repurpose for other needs and uses – is a good thing in the short run, but often a bad thing in the long run.  How can this be?  Because the long run will often require fundamental changes to products and/or organizations, and the more that the existing product or system is “patched” to meet new needs, the greater the cultural, organizational, and experiential investment in the present system – not to mention the greater the gap between that and what’s going on elsewhere that will eventually lead to the need for a fundamental change.

There is one oncoming business strategy that reduces the need for such major, business-threatening transitions:  business agility.  Here the idea is to build both products and organizations with the ability for much more radical change, plus better antennae to the outside to stay as close as possible to changes in consumer needs.  But flexibility is in fact the enemy of agility:  patches in the existing product or organization exacerbate the “hard-coded” portions of it, making fundamental changes more unlikely and the huge costs of an entire do-over more inevitable.

As you can guess, I think that today’s global economy is extraordinarily flexible, and that is what camp 2 counts on to save the day.  But this very flexibility is the enemy of the agility that I believe we will find ourselves needing, if we are to avoid this kind of collapse of the economy and our food production.

But it’s a global economy – that’s part of its global Business/Legal-Bureaucracy flexibility.  So local or even regional collapses aren’t enough to do it.  Rather, if we fail to mitigate strongly, e.g., in an agile fashion, and create a sustainable global economy over the next 20 years, some time over the 20 years after that the average costs of increasing stresses from climate change put the global economy in permanent negative territory, and, unless fundamental change happens immediately after that, the virtuous circle of today’s economy turns into a vicious, accelerating circle of economic collapse.  And the smaller our economies become, the less we wind up spending on combating the ever-increasing effects of climate change.  At the end, we are left with less than half (and maybe 1/10^th) the food sources and arable land, much of it in new extreme-northern areas with soil of lower quality, with food being produced under much more brutal weather conditions.  Or, we could by then have collapsed governmentally to such a point that we can’t even manage that.  It’s an existential threat.

Initial Thoughts On What to Do

Succinctly, I would put my thoughts under three headings:

1.       Governmental.  Governments must drive mitigation well beyond what they have done up to now in their Paris-agreement commitments.  We, personally, should place climate change at the top of our priority lists (where possible), reward commitments and implementation politically, and demand much more.

2.       Cultural.  Businesses, other organizations, and the media should be held accountable for promoting, or failing to promote, mitigation-targeted governmental, organizational, and individual efforts.  In other words, we need to create a new lifestyle.  There’s an interesting take on what a lifestyle like that would look like in Peter Kalmus’ “Being the Change”, which I hope to write about soon.

3.       Personal.  Simply as a matter of not being hypocrites, we should start to change our carbon “consumption” for the better.  Again, Kalmus’ book offers some suggestions.

Or, as Yoda would put it, “Do or do not.  There is no try.”  Because both Forces will be against you.

Reading New Thoughts: Struzik’s Firestorm and How Climate-Change-Driven Wildfires Affect Us All

Disclaimer: I am now retired, and am therefore no longer an expert on anything. This blog post presents only my opinions, and anything in it should not be relied on.

Note: My focus in these “reading new thoughts” posts is on new ways of thinking about a topic, not on a review of the books themselves.

Edward Struzik’s “Firestorm: How Wildfires Will Shape Our Future” adds, it seems to me, three important points to my understanding of climate change:

1. We are on the verge of an era in which wildfires more massive than we have ever seen produce harmful effects of which we have seen only glimpses: shattering of ecosystems, traveling of mercury pollution around the world, blackening of ice that hastens melting and sea level rise, and of course death and destruction.

2. Understanding of climate change’s reality “on the ground” is no longer limited to scientists and environmentalists, but is a fundamental reality of firefighters who must anticipate each season’s worsening challenges.

3. We are near a breaking point in terms of our overall societal response to wildfires, as evidenced by the fact that the majority share of US and Canadian budgets for forestry management is now being devoted to firefighting rather than planning, researching, and holistic approaches to forest management that would mitigate the upcoming effects cited in (1).

Upcoming Global Harmful Consequences of Wildfires

One virtue of Struzik’s Firestorm is that it goes into extensive detail about the actual effects of wildfires, on the forests, on neighboring humans and ecosystems, on human-generated toxins such as mercury which past resource extraction has left in the forests, and (via airborne carriage of wildfire byproducts) on geographies as far removed as British Columbia from New York and Alaska from Greenland. He tells us also of efforts to contain these harmful consequences, including pre-emptive “back-burning”, forecasting and planning to fight fires in locations such as Banff, and strengthening building codes and evacuation procedures in places such as Alberta near the oil sands.

The overall picture is of an entire region – the forests of western Canada and the US, certainly echoed in Australia and northern Russia, and probably echoed in areas such as Indonesia – increasingly subjected to wildfires whose massive intensity and destructiveness is hard to express. Two key factors drive this future of massive wildfires: the legacy of forest management that for a century did not burn these forests and thus increased the power and ecosystem destruction of these burnings, and climate change that is bringing increasing drought, greater energy for the wildfires, and new invasive species that combine with wildfires to exacerbate the resulting damage.

What harmful effects should we really be concerned about above all? As I understand it, deaths from being trapped in a wildfire, horrible as they are, are the least damaging of these. The following seem of greater import:

· Death from ingesting or breathing the byproducts of wildfires, at a distance from the fire itself. Struzik cites the French fires that caused the deaths of thousands of Parisians in the early 2000s. Upcoming wildfires are likely to produce more intense and therefore more deadly byproducts, and to affect regions much further away than the distance between two regions in France.

· The destruction of northern ecosystems (e.g., trees, caribou, polar bear) and replacement by impoverished more southerly ecosystems prone to erosion and collapse (tundra). In other words, the new ecosystems not only decimate existing northern species but replace them with more temperate ecosystems that are far less functional (and therefore less arable) than the temperate ecosystems we have now. To put it bluntly, if humanity looks to survive in the future on the bounty of Canada and Siberia, wildfires are going to make that far more difficult.

· There is a strong danger of increased carriage of black soot (black carbon) to areas of existing land and sea ice in the Arctic (apparently, not in the Antarctic). This may well speed up Greenland land ice melt and Arctic sea ice seasonal melting significantly, thus turbocharging that part of sea level rise. So far, this seems less of a factor, but with the increasing power of wildfires, all bets are off.

People Start Seeing Climate Change In Their Jobs

To me, one of the striking things in Struzik’s book is the extent to which western firefighters are having their noses rubbed into the fact of climate change. Granted, this awareness is centered in those firefighting coordinators who must plan for each season’s likely wildfires. However, Struzik suggests that any experienced wildfire fighter recognizes the differences from 20-30 years ago – and certainly some awareness should be rubbing off on newbies.

To me, this puts the debate about climate change on a whole different level. Generally, firefighters are part and parcel of communities; they can’t be written off as “outside” environmentalists and scientists. And climate change is not something they can face or not face as part of being a well-rounded person outside of their jobs – handling climate change is now an integral part of their jobs. At the very least, this ought to change somewhat the conversation from caricatures of “us vs. them” or “effete soft-hearted eggheads” vs “hard-headed real-world types.”

The Wildfire Breaking Point

If there is a sense of urgency in Struzik’s Firestorm, it lies primarily in his worries about our responses to the increasing threat over the last 30 or so years. He documents how very recent fires such as the one near Fort McMurray came very close to being far, far worse in terms of lives lost and destruction of valuable property. He suggests that although there has been a massive increase in the knowledge of how to manage wildfires for the best combination of destruction followed by ecosystem repair, minimal long-term impact on human and plant/animal environment, and long-term solutions to the increasing pressure of humans on forest environments, these have been far from widely applied in the field. Instead, asserts Struzik, lack of government and other funding means that, more and more, long-term strategy is coming in a poor second to simply managing to contain the next season’s fires.

Inevitably, then, unless things change, the system will reach a point where each season, the costs of wildfires will mount catastrophically, because not only do budgets not cover all the firefighting needed but the accumulated “debt” of things undone in previous seasons will add to the destruction. In other words, to get back to anything approximating today’s halcyon days will require far more planning, back-burning, and ecosystem repair than is required now – if it can be done at all.

The answer, I think, is that, like Struzik, we need to see our efforts with regard to wildfires as an integral and inevitable part of our climate-change spending. There is far less argument about adaptation than mitigation, and, unfortunately, probably far more spending on adaptation than mitigation. Wildfire strategy is primarily an adaptation strategy – it affects carbon pollution, but much less than fossil-fuel combustion. Therefore, there should be much less resistance to this type of approach and spending. One hopes.

Climate Change: The Winter of Our Discontent

Usually, I try to get right to the point in these blog posts, but in this case I’d like to take a side trip into the phrase “the winter of our discontent.”  Trust me, it relates to climate change.

The phrase comes from the very beginning of Shakespeare’s play Richard III, in which Richard himself sets the theme of the entire play – the denouement of the entire cycle of history plays – by saying:

“Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this sun of York.”

Richard then goes on to reveal that he does not share this happiness, cannot share it, and intends to destroy it.

I have always felt that interpretations of this have failed to consider one reasonably likely interpretation.  Over and over throughout the history cycle, once the rightful king (Richard lII) is deposed, people choose to start wars instead of trying to reestablish peaceful order.  As a final result, this produces a Richard III – a war hero with PTSD; a man whose “withered [right] arm” could just as easily be seen as a massively over-developed left arm, which in England then would have made him an especially effective fighter but also made him a sinister (Latin for left-handed), distorted monster to others; a man whose sense of humor is a desperate and failing attempt to overcome these demons.  Now let’s re-read:  “Now is the winter of our discontent [true, for Shakespeare] made glorious summer by this sun [untrue, for Shakespeare] OF YORK.”  Utterly sarcastic, that the son of one of the chief war-makers, a son whose job as king seems to be living it up, should solve the whole problem of disordered war.

By the way, the interpretation goes on all the way to just about the end, as this embodiment of English war destroys or wounds everyone around him, until even the kingship of England is less important to him than simply going on destroying – but with a sense of the absurdity of it all:  “A horse [to escape and fight again], a horse, MY KINGDOM [despairing irony] for a horse.” This, perhaps Shakespeare is saying, is the tragic solution to an unnecessary attempt to solve the original problem by deposition of the rightful king – to let those who have made a living from perpetual war destroy each other, and clear the path for a new peacemaker and a reversion to order.  Also by the way, Alison Weir estimates iirc that most of the nobility of England was killed in the Wars of the Roses, paving the way for Tudor upstarts to utterly dominate the peerage.

So what does this have to do with climate change?

Media Summer

OK, try this rephrasing of Shakespeare:  “Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by the sun OF MEDIA COVERAGE.”  I trust you can hear my sarcasm.

Over the last few months, suddenly the media coverage of the news seems to be taking climate change seriously and producing many hopeful signs, where it rarely did before.  We have Years of Living Dangerously on Showtime garnering attention, sustainability being connected to the climate change movement, Bill McKibben being heard with greater attention, a spate of dire reports with notes that mitigation will be far cheaper from the IPCC, a greater focus on solar and wind technology, reports of isolated successes such as Germany’s ability one day to supply 74% of its needs from renewables, and on and on.  Where media coverage of climate change science last year, especially, was atrocious winter, now it seems as if hopeful signs of upcoming media-reported technological-fix summer abound.

And yet, if we look at the facts on the ground, things continue to get worse.  In yearly average, the rate of CO2 atmospheric growth is steadily going up, with the second largest rate of growth since measurements started in the 1950s.  China, now the largest carbon polluter (although not per capita – that’s still the US) promises massive solar investments and actually ramps up coal use to the point of unbelievable air pollution in major cities.  In the US, business talks sustainability and solar/wind technological-fix projects abound, but any decrease in US carbon pollution, data suggest, is counterbalanced by business investments that effectively export that pollution abroad.  Meanwhile, an el Nino “Kelvin wave” greater even than the one in 1998 that produced a previous spike in global temperatures is probably heralding weather patterns starting around July that give a heavy push to Arctic sea ice and permafrost melt, which in turn would mean more violent weather, warmth, and ocean level rise sooner than now expected.

Above all, the machinery of business and infrastructure, like the machinery of war in Shakespeare’s day, continues to grind on and produce a heavy counter-pressure to any significant change.  Businesses and hence nations continue to talk about developing Arctic oil and gas resources.  Despite serious questions about fracking’s effects and studies indicating that its improvement over oil and coal in carbon pollution is much more minimal than originally thought, fracking and natural-gas infrastructure continue to proliferate.

No, I’m not a Richard III.  But I can recognize the similarities between Shakespeare’s play and this situation.  Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer – no, it isn’t. 

Vocal Spring

At this point, inevitably, a reaction to these points says, you can’t just be negative; you have to encourage people in positive efforts.  That is true; but it’s just as true that if we do not clearly say that these positive efforts are nowhere near having significant impacts, at the same time as we applaud the positive effort, people suffer “compassion fatigue” – encouraging the next project, and the next, but getting tired of pouring their energies into things and still having little impact on the problem.

But there’s another reason to pair encouragement and honest realism.  I don’t have the exact quote from Keynes handy, but many are familiar with his saying, “In the long run, we are all dead.”  Few, however, understand what he meant.  Here’s my translation:  We [economists] set ourselves too easy a task if we say [however truthfully] that in the long run, these troubles will pass, the sun will shine again [and the economy will be back to functioning normally].  In the long run, we are all dead.  [In the meanwhile, we will all have unnecessarily suffered, because the economist did not identify a better solution and push the government to implement it.]

In other words, if we all simply say, these efforts are enough, rather than honestly facing the fact that as of yet they aren’t, we will unnecessarily be condemning ourselves and our grandchildren to greater suffering before we are dead, and we will be inevitably condemning our great- and great-great-grandchildren to far greater suffering and death, well before their “long run” arrives.

I do not want a real-world Hellish summer with High Water (Joe Romm’s phrase).  I do not want a Silent Spring with few or no species left, even human.  But if we are to get to a real Spring of hope, much less minimizing the disastrous impact of climate change, we must tackle how we are failing; we must not set ourselves too easy a task. 

Now should the winter of our discontent/Be yet made glorious spring, by toil, by honesty.  What do you know, I think it scans.