21. Survival in the Time of Global Warming

March 6, 2021

Hopelessness:  a hopeless approach

A bug shows the way;  a metaphor for our times.

History of the global warming theory.

Forcings:  measured in watts per square meter (incoming and outgoing)

Examples of positive and negative forcing

How many trees do we need to plant?

Problems for shellfish.

NEWS ABOUT PH&F

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 3:39

That was the first third of Chopin's Scherzo number two and B flat minor. Chopin wrote four scherzi. In Italian, scherzo means joke, and scherzi, of course, means jokes. According to the Wikipedia entry, all four jokes written by Chopin begin with some fragmented musical gestures that create tension and unease, followed by rising crescendoes, strident chords, and lots of other musical drama. The Scherzi were written in his mature period, along with his four ballad, of which I am especially fond. Okay, on to the podcast, which is entitled Survival in the Time of Global Warming. And this begins a series, I do not know how long, of um treatments of the our prospects. But mainly uh this is going to be today's is going to be about um the situation we are in, and then all the subsequent ones are things that we are doing to get ourselves out of the situation. So today's is the most practic, I mean pragmatic and real realistic in terms of this is where we are, and all subsequent ones are very optimistic, really, because it's a lot of gee whiz technological stuff, which I find very fascinating and heartening also, uh, because we aren't doomed necessarily if we do pay attention, but that's a big if. Anyway, so my last podcast was about five possible endings of the world, cheerful subject. Uh, and I called it a modern interpretation of the apocalypse. I wrote that podcast one week before the looming climate crisis slammed Texas with a vicious polar vortex, depriving 4.7 million homes of power, driving temperatures lower than minus 10 degrees in an area of the country that never sees such low temperatures. Today, I just talked to two friends who expressed feelings of hopelessness regarding climate change. One felt that the only way to address the looming crisis is to completely change our economic systems, which seems in itself a hopeless endeavor, as it probably requires a complete retooling of the human genome, and that is not very likely. The other friend said that whatever technologies we choose, the situation is hopeless because they all all these alternatives to oil involve some massive form of pollution. So in that interpretation, the situation is equally under uh is equally unlikely. Um so we might as well just give up. Well, being of a Midwestern background that is tinted by German dark pessimism on the paternal side and Swedish giddy optimism on the maternal side, I am decidedly bipolar when it comes to our chances of survival. Uh sometimes I feel optimistic and sometimes I feel very pessimistic, especially when I watch how people talk about it and how they behave and how they don't do anything and don't feel any personal responsibility for the situation that we are in. Anyway, here's a metaphor illustrating how I feel about our prospects. About fifty years ago, while I was renovating a friend's kitchen, I saw a bug on the windowsill. It was long and spindly, and its abdomen was maybe an inch in length, terminated by a substantial ovipositor used by many insects to deposit their eggs. I bemusedly and heartlessly squashed the bug's head and then watched in utter fascination as its ovipositor sprang into life, carrying out its intended purpose. It arched and squeezed out one egg after another, laying them neatly in a row on the unfinished wood of the windowsill. I almost wept out of a mixture of shame for my cruelty and wonder at the sheer beauty of creation. I was witnessing life's purpose. That one moment in time was a lesson, both religious and biological. If one subscribes to the notion of a deity, that moment represented the sanctity and the beauty of life. If one is fascinated by the complexity and durability of life, that would be the more the biological perspective, that moment represented a fundamental urge to reproduce in the face of daunting odds. In the spirit of standing up for life, despite the odds, I'm embarking on a series of several more podcasts dedicated to the proposition that a little knowledge might just develop in listeners and in me, feelings of empowerment and determination. An auditory salve to meet feelings of hopelessness. Today's podcast starts the series with a general lay of the land, where we are in our fight to save ourselves and the planet. I start at the be bottom with the history of the global warming theory. Hypotheses, theories, and laws are all part of the scientific method developed by Aristotle some twenty three hundred years ago. Aristotle's method involves collecting data, studying the data, recognizing patterns, and then fitting current theories to explain the patterns. And if one theory doesn't fit the data, a good scientist will admit that fact and search for a better theory. The data associated with global warming goes back to the eighteen twenties when a French mathematician, Charles Fourier, postulated that the Earth would be much colder without its atmosphere, which he speculated acted like a lens to concentrate the sun's rays. Thirty six years later, an American female scientist physicist, Eunice Newton Foot, that's foot with an E, noticed that a bottle of CO2 warmed much more than a neighboring bottle of air when placed in the sun. She was not allowed to present her findings, however, because she was a woman. So the director of the Smithsonian did the honors at that year's meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Just a few years after that, Irish physicist John Tyndall demonstrated that carbon dioxide preferentially absorbs long wavelengths of radiation that is typically emitted by the Earth's surface, thereby heating the atmosphere. So the sun's rays penetrate the atmosphere in a mixture of wavelengths and then are reflected back in the longer wavelengths, which are absorbed by the carbon dioxide. Toward the end of the 19th century, Svante Arrenius, the Swedish physical chemist, showed mathematically that having the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere would drop its temperature by four degrees centigrade, and doubling the concentration of CO2 would raise the temperature by four degrees centigrade. In the early 20th century, the CO2 global warming theory entered a dark age when chemists and physicists decided that water vapor had a stronger effect, thereby awarding any untoward warning warming to God rather than to man. After all, hadn't God designed the planet in a mere week's time? It wasn't until a British polymath named Guy Callender wrote nine papers in the 1930s which conclusively knocked the water vapor hypothesis off its theistic pedestal. From then on, CO2 was awarded the honors as the agent of humanity's demise and laid global warming in humanity's lap. Back to Enlightenment thinking. Callender's work was still a little too in vitro and required additional clinical data. This was provided in 1958 by Charles David Keeling. Dr. Keeling had earned his PhD at Northwestern in Chicago, where he spent years crushing rocks. On graduation, elated to leave the rock crushing business, Keeling accepted a junior faculty position at Sunny Caltech. Now in California, he chose to flee the confines of walls and spent his research time in Big Sur measuring local CO2 concentrations with a machine that he had designed and built. His machine was sensitive enough to detect the rise and fall of local CO2 concentrations resulting from plant photosynthesis and respiration reactions. His machine was so sensitive that he could measure CO2 increase during the day and decrease, I mean CO2 decrease during the day and increase at night. Those represent CO2 being uptaken to make plant tissue, and at night the plant is respiring rather than photosynthesizing. So it gives off CO2. Keeling eventually persuaded the Scripps Institute of Oceanography to fund a long-term study of atmospheric CO2 levels. He chose to measure CO2 in the atmosphere on top of the volcano Monoloa, which towered 11,135 feet above sea level, well away from the vacillations caused by vegetation. Their first measurements were made in 1958. Within months, Keeling and his assistants measured the biannual vacillations in CO2 levels corresponding to the seasons. Vegetation decayed in the fall and winter, releasing CO2, and absorbed CO2 in the spring and summer when new vegetation absorbed it in order to build new tissue. In essence, the planet was breathing and he was measuring it. Since 1958, when the first of Keeling's atmospheric measurements was 315 parts per million, the CO2 concentration has climbed to 410 parts per million, that's 100 parts per million, at the rate of 2.5 parts per million per year. In 1998, Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania introduced his hockey stick graph, which shows almost no warming for a thousand years, but then shooting upward, imitating the business end of a hockey stick. The two curves, the Keeling curve, which shows the vacillations between vegetation death and vegetation growth, and the gradual rise of 2.5 parts per million rise per year, and the hockey stick curve, which shows the beginning of the industrial revolution and the business end of the hockey stick rising up as we increase the CO2 levels in the atmosphere. So as atmospheric CO2 rises, so does global air temperature. Both data, both curves, uh represent the foundation of the global warming theory, and the picture is not pretty. The question of what other factors cause our inexorable and rapid temperature rise is another matter. Climate scientists refer to these causes as forcings, climate forcings or radiative forcings. Measured in watts per square cent per square meter, radiative forcing is represented by a simple equation. Incoming energy minus outgoing energy. Incoming energy is from our sun, located a mere ninety-three million miles away. Outgoing energy is primarily infrared radiation, which can be trapped by various gaseous molecules as well as aerosols such as dust from a volcanic eruption. By the time you can by the way, um sorry, by the way, you can download a PDF of all this by going to EPA.gov slash climate dash indicators. The last issue printed by the EPA was in 2016, as that's the year we entered a dark age, and we are not out of it yet. Regarding forcings, let's start with the negative ones, which cause the imbalance between incoming energy and outgoing to shift so that less energy is hitting the planet or more energy is leaving the planet. Smaller negative forcings include variations in solar output as our neighboring sun is a bit on the moody side and can fuse less hydrogen into helium from time to time. But so far, variations in solar output are minuscule compared to the steady increase in CO2 caused by human activity, anthropogenic CO2. Stratospheric volcanic eruptions can be much larger and more effective as negative forcings. In June 1991, Mount Pinatubo belched 10 cubic kilometers of material into the stratosphere, dropping Earth's atmospheric pressure, temperature, I'm sorry, by half a degree centigrade for a year or more. Soot and aerosols, the results of burning forests or burning peat, can also act as negative forcings in the short run, but of course have a profound positive forcing in the long run by releasing so much CO2. Reflection of sunlight also serves as a negative forcing. Clouds can block solar radiation. High, very high clouds can do that very effectively. Polar ice is also an effective negative forcing. That's why we're so worried about the rapid disappearance of the northern and southern polar ice caps. Loss of ice at the poles not only means rising oceans, but it also means less heat loss, therefore not a very negative forcing anymore. Now let's consider positive forcings, meaning either increased solar output, increased solar penetration of the atmosphere, or reduced energy loss in the form of longer wavelength radiation, infrared radiation. The most important positive forcing is the accumulation of carbon dioxide, which we have already covered. However, there are other greenhouse gases. Methane is the second most important greenhouse gas. It is 83 times as powerful as CO2, but because it's found in much smaller proportion in the atmosphere, it has a less of an effect overall. However, methane has shot up 2.5 times since the Industrial Revolution. So it is definitely part of the problem. The biggest contributors to methane are melting permafrost. So as permafrost melts, and they've done this all the time, you know, you can actually take a um a sharp object and make a hole in a northern lake, like up in Yellow Knife Lake in Canada. And you can melt a hole in the ice and then hold a match over it, and a giant flame many feet high will shoot up because there is a lot of methane in the boreal regions because they have a lot of life and it's producing it produced that's part of the whole cycle. So melting permafrost releases that methane, which is very bad news. Rice patties are very strong releasers of methane. All wetlands, of course, we've dried up a lot of our wetlands, but wetlands are big producers of methane, therefore they contribute to global warming. Industrial activities, oil drilling, of course, and when you drill for oil, methane is always a side byproduct, and often they burn it off instead of uh um using it. Uh, and of course that just puts more CO2 in the atmosphere. And then cow farts, and that's not a joke, it's real. Um human activities, rice patties, industry, oil drilling, and cow farts account for 62% of the methane in our atmosphere now. Methane is scrubbed out of the atmosphere by natural chemical processes. A methane molecule is destroyed after 12 years of behaving wickedly and hurting us. Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, takes millennia to be removed from the atmosphere. The best way to get rid of CO2 is to plant trees. That will handle it really well. However, to do that effectively, we need to plant a trillion trees while not cutting another one down. And uh we'll talk about that in the coming weeks, how to how to bring CO2 levels down. It's a tall order, and especially when you consider that many or most of the world's governments pay mere lip service to their responsibility for the future of our lovely planet. As that lovely uh Swedish girl, I forget her name, um so powerfully said, stared at the adults in the room and said, This is your fault. What are you going to do about it? Um, but of course they're just said, Oh, she's just a girl, what does she know? But she's really she deserves the Nobel Prize for that. I hope she gets it. Since CO2 is by far the most dangerous atmospheric gas toward human survival. Here is a brief rundown on the carbon cycle. As mentioned earlier, a mention a Major contributor of carbon in the atmosphere is the burning of fossil fuels caused by human activity. This is referred to as anthropogenic carbon flow and is measured in gigatons of oil. Since eighteen fifty, the burning of coal has put two hundred gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere and the burning of oil and natural gas have added a little over two hundred and twenty gigatons of oil. During that same time, land and bodies of water have absorbed less oil than that, meaning a net increase in uh gigatons of CO2 in the atmosphere of carbon. CO2 reacts with water in the atmosphere to produce carbonic acid, which falls to the earth as acidified ring. This reacts with concrete and limestone, causing weathering and a reduction in atmospheric CO2, as well as the destruction of some of our most beautiful monuments, such as Notre Dame Cathedral, and the Taj Mahal. The ocean absorbs CO2 and the dissolved carbonic acid causes acidification of its waters. Oysters and other univalves and bivalve um mollus are finding it increasingly hard to form shells or reefs, causing desertification in the oceans and disruption of the ocean's ability to sequester or scrub CO2 out of the atmosphere. The biggest forcing of all, however, is spiritual rather than physical. I'm speaking about the lack of imagination in the human mind, the lack of consciousness of uh the importance of all of us over self, a fact which is very well documented in Jared Diamond's book, Collapse, in which he describes situations where humanity historically rose to the occasion, beloved honestly, and solved climate crises. And he also documents situations where humanity failed dismally to recognize and combat such crises. American public opinion appears to be just as firmly entrenched in climate denial as it is in the many popular lies such as bertherism, uh who attacked the Cavill on January 6th, or anti-vaxxers, or whether we landed on the moon, or chemtrails. In short, the greatest barrier of all to tackling climate change is our attitude of the human mind and the recognition that science holds the key to our capacity for survival. Well, that's it for today. My next podcast will be about technologies and behaviors that just might save our collective rear-in. A note on Project Open Fairness. David, who lives in Daipa, Kotiwa, is making good progress building his new warehouse office and processing complex. If you want to find out more about it, contact me at TW Newhouse N E U H A U S at Gmail.com. And also talk to me about the products that we're making, and maybe uh you'd like to be involved in selling them and we can start importing bars. Um, we'll be receiving three new machines. Uh on my end, uh we'll be selling and I live in France. Uh we'll be selling African truffles starting the uh final week of uh March here in Court surface at the store called Oba. Uh yesterday I visited a local Eau de V distiller in Veneuve-Courve, which is maybe six kilometers away, who wants to start importing cocoa beans and chocolate from David. So positive things are happening. And it's all because if you believe that you can do something, then uh there's hope. But if you're just saying that there's no hope, then there is no hope. Um, anyway. Uh and now for the end of Scared Soul number two in B flat minor, which I think is a very positive, has lots of positive energy, even though it is in a minor key. Well, that's it for this time. See you next time.