Storms of My Grandchildren (36 page)

Allow me to briefly review a few facts about the PETM, which we covered in chapter 8. Numerous studies suggest that PETM warming of 5 to 9 degree- Celsius was caused by the injection of an estimated 3 gigatons of carbon (3,000 billion tons of carbon), although some estimates of the carbon injection were only about half that large. The Zeebe-Zachos-Dickens paper increases confidence that the PETM carbon injection did not exceed 3 gigatons and it draws attention to the inconsistency of such a (moderate!) carbon injection with the 5- to 9-degree-Celsius global warming, if climate sensitivity at that time were only 3 degrees Celsius for doubled carbon dioxide. Three gigatons is approximately the amount of carbon contained in the sum of oil, gas, and coal fossil fuels today. However, PETM carbon could not have been from the fossil fuels, as there was no plausible mechanism for the unearthing and burning of all of fossil fuels at that time. Indeed, it can be inferred from the carbon’s isotopic signature, as explained in chapter 8, that the PETM injection was caused by the melting of methane hydrates. There were dramatic changes in ocean circulation at the time of the PETM, with deep water formation shifting from the southern hemisphere around Antarctica to the northern hemisphere. It seems probable that the warmer deep water accompanying this circulation change initiated the methane hydrate destabilization.

The time scale for the ocean temperature to largely respond to a forcing, by itself, is only centuries. But if humans burn all fossil fuels, the ice sheets will begin to disintegrate, cooling the high-latitude oceans temporarily, and delaying full climate response to the forcing. The high-latitude cooling will have important consequences in the twenty-first century, to be discussed in chapter 11. However, the cooling effect of icebergs will not significantly increase the time needed for the global ocean to warm in response to a burning of all fossil fuels. It requires less than 10 watt-years of energy, averaged over the planet, to melt enough glacial ice to raise sea level one meter and increase the meltwater temperature to the global average ocean surface temperature. Once ice sheets begin to disintegrate rapidly, the planetary energy imbalance is likely to reach several watts. So even if the entire volume of ice on the planet, equivalent to about 75 meters (almost 250 feet) of sea level, were disgorged to the ocean, the planetary energy imbalance would provide enough energy to melt all of the ice within a century or so.

My conclusion regarding Circumstance 3, the time scales, is that they would largely work against us if we were to burn all fossil fuels. Carbon cycle diminishing feedbacks, which were important for keeping Earth away from runaway conditions during paleoclimate global warming events, are not likely to be as effective in drawing down atmospheric carbon dioxide during the very rapid burning of fossil fuels by humanity. Ocean thermal inertia slows global warming, allowing more greenhouse gas to accumulate before the public takes notice of climate change, but most of the climate response to fossil fuel emissions will occur within centuries, much of it within the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren.

The paleoclimate record does not provide a case with a climate forcing of the magnitude and speed that will occur if fossil fuels are all burned. Models are nowhere near the stage at which they can predict reliably when major ice sheet disintegration will begin. Nor can we say how close we are to methane hydrate instability. But these are questions of when, not if. If we burn all the fossil fuels, the ice sheets almost surely will melt entirely, with the final sea level rise about 75 meters (250 feet), with most of that possibly occurring within a time scale of centuries. Methane hydrates are likely to be more extensive and vulnerable now than they were in the early Cenozoic. It is difficult to imagine how the methane hydrates could survive, once the ocean has had time to warm. In that event a PETM-like warming could be added on top of the fossil fuel warming.

After the ice is gone, would Earth proceed to the Venus syndrome, a runaway greenhouse effect that would destroy all life on the planet, perhaps permanently? While that is difficult to say based on present information, I’ve come to conclude that if we burn all reserves of oil, gas, and coal, there is a substantial chance we will initiate the runaway greenhouse. If we also burn the tar sands and tar shale, I believe the Venus syndrome is a dead certainty.

Jake, two years old now, is full of remarkable bubbling optimism and energy. Anniek and I spent a week this summer at the shore with our children and grandchildren. After Jake went to bed at seven P.M. each evening, we could hear him over the monitor his parents use, babbling happily for an hour or so before going to sleep—mostly single words and names—Sophie, Conya (for Connor), Oma, Bopa. His mother, Yvonne, a psychologist, says that he enjoys reliving his day before falling asleep. Then he sleeps eleven hours, and it begins all over the next morning.

My parents lived to be almost ninety years old, so Jake may be around for the rest of this century. Jake has no idea what he is in for—that’s just as well. He had better first grow up strong and smart.

Over the past few years I thought about our grandchildren and the intergenerational inequity of human-made climate change. Larry King’s comment that “nobody cares about fifty years from now” didn’t seem right—people do care about their children and grandchildren. In fact, the concept of responsibility to future generations is as familiar to Americans as their Constitution, with its phrase “to ourselves and our Posterity” embedded in the preamble. I believed then, and believe now, that if the public had a better understanding of the climate crisis, they would do what needed to be done.

Year by year I began to make greater efforts to make clear the implications of climate science for the public, especially young people. In 2007 I started sending occasional communications about climate change to those on my e-mail list. The list started with several hundred scientists, but it grew as other people asked to be added—or I just decided to add them, as in the case of the top two utility commissioners of every state. My communications begin with a simple instruction for how to be removed from the list, and when a utility commissioner asked to be removed, I would add the next commissioner from that state. I wanted such people to understand that a strategic solution to the climate problem requires a phaseout of coal emissions—and consideration of young people demands it.

One of my early e-mail messages was titled “Old King Coal.” It was stimulated by a visit to my hometown, Denison, Iowa, where I gave a high school commencement talk—my younger brother Lloyd’s son Sam was graduating. The next day I drove with my younger sister, Pat, to Galland’s Grove, to the grave sites of our parents. All along the railroad tracks beside our eighteen-mile route from Denison to Dunlap on Highway 30 we saw trains parked back-to-back. I don’t know why they were stopped, but what struck me was that about half of the railroad cars in this long string were coal cars. The previous year I had started connecting the dots between global warming and species extinction, based on both the history of Earth and the current unusual rate at which climate zones are shifting.

Most coal trains are long, about one hundred carloads each. A large power plant can burn that amount of coal in one day. The Iowa coal trains made me wonder about the role of coal-fired power plants in the extermination of species. If we continue business-as-usual fossil fuel use, a conservative estimate is that by the end of the century we will have committed to extinction at least 20 percent of Earth’s species, that is, about two million species. Based on the proportion of twenty-first-century carbon dioxide emissions provided by one large coal-fired power plant over its lifetime, I concluded that a single power plant should be assigned responsibility for exterminating about four hundred species, even though of course we cannot assign specific species to a specific power plant. Later, in 2008, I cited this conclusion when I testified in defense of activists who had shut down a large coal-fired power plant, Kingsnorth, in the United Kingdom. But it was that day in Iowa when we visited our parents’ grave sites that I realized those coal trains are death trains. The railroad cars may as well be loaded with the species themselves, carrying them to their extermination.

But the climate and species story does not need to be one of gloom and doom. As E. O. Wilson, the Harvard biologist, explains, there is a potential path in which the species we have today would survive. Wilson suggests that the twenty-first century will be a “bottleneck” for species, because of extreme stresses, especially climate change. However, if we stabilize climate by moving to energy sources beyond fossil fuels, and if the human population begins to decline as developing nations follow the path of developed nations to lower fertility rates, then a brighter future is possible, a future in which we learn to live with other species in a sustainable way.

The next day I had an opportunity to try to improve communications, as July 7, 2007, was the first Live Earth event, with worldwide concerts organized by Al Gore and his Alliance for Climate Protection. I had agreed to go onstage at the Meadowlands in New Jersey, on the condition that I could take Sophie and Connor. I was to be the interlude between Jon Bon Jovi and the Smashing Pumpkins. It was deafening when we checked in backstage. I asked the stage manager, “Where’s Al?” believing that the plan was for us to go onstage with Al Gore for an impromptu discussion. Apparently, I had misunderstood. No, we were to go out alone, after being introduced by Alec Baldwin—and didn’t I have a message to put on the teleprompter?

Um, no. As somebody stood at my shoulder, I wrote down something about how phasing out coal is the essential action for stabilizing climate—and how we needed young people to get involved, to wake up older people, to make it happen. I couldn’t quite read the teleprompter, because of my cataracts, so I stumbled a bit. I had told Sophie the day before that I would ask her a question about how many of the animals we should try to save. When I asked her onstage, she answered rather softly, “All of them.” But then I asked again, and she said loud and clear, “All of them!” She was a big hit. I held the microphone to three-year-old Connor, whom I was holding, and he said, “Me too.”

Our daughter Christine also was onstage with us. Afterward, as the four of us were escorted to our seats, Sophie suddenly burst into tears. I had not thought about the stress of such an event on an eight-year-old. One of the young music fans took off his Live Earth headband and gave it to Sophie, and we reminded her how great she had done. The next morning she slept until eleven thirty A.M., the latest she had ever slept. And once school started that fall, she had something to talk about in third grade show-and-tell.

Participants at Live Earth were asked to pledge to support seven things for the sake of the environment and for the reduction of global warming. I would have preferred a focus on two strategic actions: a rapid phaseout of coal use and a gradually rising price on carbon emissions. The problem with asking people to pledge to reduce their fossil fuel use is that even if lots of people do, one effect is reduced demand for the fossil fuel and thus a lower price—making it easier for somebody else to burn. We must have a strategic approach to solve the problem, with governments providing leadership—it is necessary for people to reduce their emissions, but it is not sufficient if the government does not adopt policies that cause much of the fossil fuels to be left in the ground permanently.

One of the Live Earth pledges concerned fighting against new coal-fired power plants “without the capacity to safely trap and store the CO2.” The danger is that this wording can be taken to imply that a “capture-ready” power plant would be okay. “Capture-ready” is an illusion, a fake, designed to get approval for a coal-fired power plant under the pretense that carbon capture will be added later. The fine print in such applications for power plant approval always includes clauses about feasibility, etc. There is not a snowball’s chance in Hades of carbon capture and sequestration being added after the fact. The ratepayers, utility commissions, and politicians would never allow the addition of the technology to capture carbon dioxide, transport it, and sequester it, because it would greatly increase utility bills.

I sent a note to Al Gore and his staff asking for clarification of the pledge. Al responded that he meant exactly what I meant—new coal plants should be allowed only if they actually capture and sequester the carbon dioxide. But then I got a message from his assistant saying that the language allowing power plants that could eventually be retrofitted was what had been recommended by their energy experts. They referred me to a report endorsed by a huge number of energy experts. That, I believe, is the problem. The experts, including those at many nonprofit organizations, have been in Washington too long. They are careful to only nudge industry, asking only for what is “politically realistic” rather than what is in the best interests of the public. They will not state clearly what is needed. That is why young people will need to stand up for their rights.

At the end of my e-mail messages I invite criticisms. One criticism of “Old King Coal” was about my statement that young people should be doing “whatever is necessary” to block coal-fired power plants. This, it was suggested, seemed to be incitement to civil disobedience.

That criticism, it seemed to me, had merit. Even though I had come to see that the response all around—at state, national, and international levels—was basically one of greenwash, all conventional avenues for citizens to affect policy had not been exhausted. And I believed the 2008 elections in the United States could be important.

In my next message, “Old King Coal II,” I pointed out that action to deal effectively with climate change was practically impossible as long as our lawmakers are heavily under the undue sway of special interests. I recalled the revolutionaries who declared our independence from a prior king—the intrepid early Americans tried hard to devise a constitution and form of government that could guard against the return of despotic governance and subversion of the democratic principle for the sake of the powerful few with special interests.

The question we needed to ask was this: Did the system still work as intended? Or had special interests found a way to obtain undue influence, far out of proportion to one person, one vote? I warned that “the gleam of a new presidency, by itself, is probably fool’s gold.” It would be necessary, in addition, to vote in a large number of new representatives and senators from many states, replacing incumbents with those committed to urgent, necessary actions, not to greenwash. So I proposed a Declaration of Stewardship that young people, or anyone else, could use to gauge political candidates. By asking a candidate to make a pledge they would also have a mechanism to hold the candidate responsible for actions after the election.

The Declaration of Stewardship, specifically, was a pledge to support (1) a moratorium on coal-fired power plants that do not capture and sequester carbon dioxide; (2) a fair, gradually rising price on carbon emissions; and (3) measures to improve energy efficiency, for example, rewarding utilities and others based on energy and carbon efficiencies, rather than on the amount of energy sold. Although my proposed declaration never really caught on, in 2007 and 2008 young people did become involved in election campaigning in major ways. Young people, I believe, deserve much of the credit for the surge of support that swept Barack Obama to front-runner status and eventually the Democrats to a landslide victory in November 2008. Students that I met at universities were overwhelmingly supportive of Obama, with optimism that “Change” and “Yes, We Can” were more than just slogans. They put in big efforts to get out the vote. Young people clearly have been trying to use the democratic electoral process in the way it was intended.

Although, as we’ve seen, the historic election of 2008 has had little effect on the business-as-usual ways of Congress, which is haplessly pursuing an ineffectual cap-and-trade system, that story is not yet complete. It is still possible that the executive branch, with leadership from President Obama, could enter the fray and lead the nation and world in a dramatically different direction. That still may be the best hope for young people. Another possibility is that another nation or nations could force the discussions onto a more sensible track.