Storms of My Grandchildren (41 page)
Read Storms of My Grandchildren Online
Authors: James Hansen
Ma didn’t understand what was happening. “Why is Spud going to Earth? We learned that it is uninhabitable.”
“Ma, Spud has lost it.”
“Lost it?”
“It’s an American expression. Something snapped. He is not rational. It must be a regressive trait of claronians from millions of years ago.”
“Give me the coordinates of where the biggest big-shot coal CEO lived. The one who kept talking about ‘clean coal’ while bribing judges and Congress and pouring out pollution.”
“Why blame that CEO?” Male-West said. “The government in Washington was responsible. They were the ones who were elected to look out for the public interest. They accepted the coal money. Then they retired from Congress and accepted even more coal money. When Congress passed a climate bill, they slipped in rules to keep the coal fires burning. It doesn’t matter, though; all the top coal mining officials were located in Washington, close to the government.”
“Wait a minute, Spud,” said Female-East. “The way I heard it, tar sands became even worse than coal. And by the time they started mining tar sands, everybody knew about global warming. If they had not used tar sands, maybe methane hydrates would not have kicked in big-time. Maybe you should aim for Canada.”
“I’m not so sure about that. This is Female-West. It was the United States that egged the Canadians to do it. The pipeline project to bring tar sands oil to the United States was approved by the U.S. government, signed in Washington.”
“Washington again—damn!”
“You know, I think you may be looking at this superficially. This is Male-East. Why were they burning dirty coal? Everybody knows it’s bad stuff. But they needed energy. I would lay the fault more with the antinukes movement. Nuclear power was the one available alternative to coal. Yes, it made sense to put a hold on nuclear power after the accident in Pennsylvania, even though the antinukes protesters greatly exaggerated the effect of that accident. But after things had been checked out, and after it was realized that a hundred thousand people a year were dying from coal, and that coal was putting all the species on the planet in danger, it was time for reassessment. In fact, most of the public favored the safer next-generation nuclear power, but the antinukes people thought they knew better. Their lives were devoted to stopping it—nothing would change their opinion.”
“I don’t think you can blame the antinukes movement. They were arguing for what they thought was best. Even if they were in the minority, they can argue for their opinion.”
“She’s right, I think. It’s not so simple. It’s hard to point at any one villain. Anyone can express their opinion. But people were elected and sent to Washington to do what’s best for everyone, after hearing the opinions. They totally screwed it up, though. The democratic system didn’t work. Why?”
“Money, that’s why. The power companies wanted business as usual, and they paid for it. Even the nonprofit organizations needed money. They all became part of business as usual, so they didn’t want to say what was really needed. The only real priority in Washington was keeping the status quo.”
“Washington again—damn.”
They knew where Spud was headed. Female-East and Female-West went to the station’s observatory and trained the American telescope on the yellowed, dusty planet, setting the coordinates for Washington.
They heard Spud’s last words. “You fools. You had to take us with you too. Two civilizations.” His eyes narrowed and his muscles tightened as he prepared for impact.
“Oh!” cried Female-East. “There was a puff of yellow dust. He must have made a big crater. Do you want to look?”
“No. Let’s go down and tell Ma and Pa. They should send a message to Claron. The news on Claron, forty years from now, will not be pleasant.”
T
HE ABOVE SCENARIO—with a devastated, sweltering Earth purged of life—may read like far-fetched science fiction. Yet its central hypothesis is a tragic certainty—continued unfettered burning of all fossil fuels will cause the climate system to pass tipping points, such that we hand our children and grandchildren a dynamic situation that is out of their control.
Spud’s frustration and anger are understandable—he was handed a hopeless situation, so all that he could make was a big bang. We, in contrast, still have the opportunity to preserve the remarkable life of our planet, if we begin to act now. We must rally, especially young people, to put pressure on our governments.
The most essential actions are, first, a significant and continually rising price on carbon emissions, as the underpinning for a transformation to eventual carbon-free global energy systems, with collected revenues returned to the public so they have the resources to change their lifestyles accordingly. This is the most important requirement for moving the world to the clean energy future beyond fossil fuels, but a carbon price alone is inadequate.
Second, the public must demand a strategic approach that leaves most fossil carbon in the ground. Specifically, coal emissions must be phased out rapidly, and the horrendously polluting “unconventional” fossil fuels, such as tar sands and oil shale, must be left in the ground.
We must be jolted into recognizing the remarkable world we inherited from our elders, and our obligation to preserve the planet for future generations. Belief in this obligation is almost universal. Native Americans speak of obligations to the “seventh generation.” It is a paradigm of almost all religions and of humanists that Earth, creation, is an intergenerational commons, the fruits and benefits of which should be accessible to every member of every generation.
My grandchildren Sophie and Connor and I need your help. We started a project, but we can’t complete it by ourselves. I noticed that there do not seem to be as many monarch butterflies now as there were in the 1970s. At that time, Anniek and I could look out on our small piece of land in eastern Pennsylvania and see several monarchs at the same time. Now we are lucky to see one at a time. Although climate change is probably not the biggest threat to monarchs at present, if it were to affect the trees on the mountain in Mexico where they go to roost in the winter, it could soon become a problem for them.
The monarch population may be in decline in part because the milkweed plants that they are dependent on are diminishing as more land is developed and weeds are eliminated. So early this summer Connor, Sophie, and I dug up some milkweeds along the edge of Frogtown Road, where we expected they would get mowed, and we transplanted them along our horse fence. Though it was late in the year for transplanting, about half the plants survived, albeit with some slightly yellowed leaves. We saw one monarch flitting about them and hoped it would lay some eggs.
Monarchs migrate thousands of miles every year, with those east of the Rocky Mountains wintering in Mexico, millions of them gathering on trees in a small region in the mountains. A single butterfly cannot fly the whole distance—it takes at least a couple of generations. A female lays eggs on a milkweed leaf. When an egg hatches, a tiny larva emerges and eats milkweed until it grows out of its skin. It does this several times until it is a one-and-one-half-inch-long caterpillar. Then it finds a twig or horizontal surface from which it hangs by its back legs, curls into a J shape, and sheds its outer skin, miraculously molting into a shiny green-blue chrysalis, about the size of an acorn. More miraculously, two weeks later the chrysalis darkens, becomes transparent, and splits open, revealing an orange and black butterfly with crinkled wings. After pumping fluid into the wings and letting them dry off, the butterfly flies away to find something to eat and to resume the trip to Mexico, somehow sensing the direction that it must go.
FIGURE 32.
Sophie and Connor, ages nine and four.
When we returned from our trip to the shore this summer, we were surprised to find a caterpillar on our slightly forlorn-looking milkweeds, then another, and another. A few days afterward, one of them disappeared, but we soon found it hanging upside down from the horse fence in the J shape, and by later that afternoon it had become a shiny green-blue chrysalis hanging by a thread. The next day another caterpillar disappeared, but we found this one too on the horse fence, fifty feet away, already hanging in the J shape.
In September I had an operation to remove my cancerous prostate. Two days later Anniek drove us to our Pennsylvania home, stopping by the barn so I could check on the status of our “budding” monarchs. I shuffled slowly to the horse fence, as the wounds from my surgery were just beginning to heal.
The first chrysalis dangled as a flimsy shell—its former occupant probably on the way to Mexico. The other chrysalis, the one fifty feet down the horse fence, was beginning to darken, and there were a few sparkles of bright color within the shell.
Segments of bright orange and black wings could be discerned the next morning through the translucent chrysalis shell. When Anniek and I returned in the afternoon, we found a brilliant full-sized monarch hanging upside down from the fence, attached by slender black legs, waiting for its dripping-wet wings to dry. I banged two pot lids together to scare off the horses. Their magnificent, gargantuan heads, poking around for their usual carrot treat, could instantly have crushed the life from the remarkable insect.
I took photos of the butterfly to show Sophie and Connor. We had seen only a few monarchs all summer. This one would need to go south quickly—monarchs fly ten to fifteen miles per hour—to stay ahead of the encroaching cold weather and find a mate. Next summer their granddaughter may stop by to lay eggs on milkweeds that we will have ready.
And next year we will do better, planting seeds from the milkweed seed pods that we have collected. But there need to be more milkweed plants all along the flyway to Mexico. You and your children or grandchildren can help us with our project of planting or transplanting milkweed plants. It would be great to see an increase of the monarch population, or at least a survival of the species.
Our monarch project speaks to an important issue raised in chapter 11—the idea that life can be transplanted to another planet if it becomes no longer sustainable here. The notion that humans are so godlike that they could reproduce miraculous and fragile phenomena such as the monarch on another planet, or transplant them there, is patent absurdity. Once a species is gone, it is gone. And if we destroy this planet, we destroy ourselves.
As I gingerly sat down to write this afterword, postsurgery, my attention was drawn to a five-foot-tall poster that Anniek had found at a garage sale several years ago. It is a grainy blowup of an early 1950s newspaper photo, recording a famous moment in the baseball rivalry between the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Yankees.
In it, the baseball is frozen in the air, ten feet above the ground. Scooter (Yankee shortstop Phil Rizzuto), who does not fill out his baggy uniform, is pulling up in horrified dismay as he realizes he cannot reach the ball. Billy Martin is caught in mid-dash, glove outstretched, hat suspended in the air behind him. Jackie Robinson, already nearing first base with his graceful stride, looks back over his shoulder. The fate of the World Series depends on whether the ball can be captured before it crashes to the ground.
That ball, today, is planet Earth. We have reached the moment when we must make the full-effort dash to capture our precious globe before it crashes and our team—the team of all species on our planet—is destroyed. But for our team, unlike a baseball team, there will be no chance of a comeback, no next season to do better. This truly is our last chance.
How, though, can today be a critical moment when we do not yet observe great changes in climate? As we’ve seen, the effects of climate change have been limited in the near term because of climate system inertia, but inertia is not a true friend. As amplifying feedbacks begin to drive the climate toward tipping points, that inertia makes it harder to reverse direction.
The ocean, ice sheets, and frozen methane on continental shelves—all have inertia, resisting rapid change. Heat is pouring into the ocean, and ice shelves are starting to melt. Continued emissions growth will surely cause destabilization of at least the West Antarctic ice sheet.
How close we are to destabilizing frozen methane is unclear. There are already signs of an accelerated release of methane from high-latitude tundra and from the larger reservoir on continental shelves. So far the amount of methane released has been small. But if we continue to increase greenhouse gas emissions, the eventual destabilization of large amounts of methane is a near certainty. We must remember that the human-made climate forcing is not coming on just a bit faster than natural forcings of the past; on the contrary, it is a rapid powerful blow, an order of magnitude greater than any natural forcings that we are aware of.
Storms of my grandchildren—when will these hit with full force? Already the air holds more water vapor than it did a few decades ago. The strongest of the storms that derive energy from water vapor—including thunderstorms, tornadoes, and tropical storms—are becoming stronger, and the associated winds and floods are becoming more extreme.
But qualitatively different storms will occur when ice sheet disintegration is large enough to damp high-latitude ocean warming, or even to cause regional ocean cooling, while low latitudes continue to warm. Global chaos will ensue when increasingly violent storminess is combined with sea level rise of a meter and more. Although ice sheet inertia may prevent a large sea level rise before the second half of the century, continued growth of greenhouse gases in the near term will make that result practically inevitable, out of our children’s and grandchildren’s control.
Several uncertainties will affect the speed at which more obvious climate changes emerge. One is uncertainty about whether and how solar irradiance will change during the next few years and next few decades. As of October 2009, the sun remains in the deepest solar minimum in the period of accurate satellite data, which began in the 1970s. It is conceivable that the sun’s energy output will remain low for decades, as it apparently did a few centuries ago, which may have been the largest contributor to the Little Ice Age. But as we’ve seen, contrary to the fervently voiced opinions of solar-climate aficionados, such continued low irradiance would not cause global cooling and would
not
stop the continued progression of global warming. This does not mean, however, that the solar effect is negligible. Indeed, if the sun pulls out of its current minimum soon, resuming a typical solar cycle, there may be an acceleration of global warming in the next six to eight years. But whatever happens with solar irradiance, the world is going to be warmer during the next decade (the 2010s) than it was in the present decade, just as the present decade is warmer than the 1990s.
The other major uncertainties that will influence how rapidly climate change effects become obvious are the amount of human-made aerosols and the planet’s energy imbalance. Aerosols are the biggest source of uncertainty in terms of the overall forcing that humans are applying to the climate system. The planet’s energy imbalance is our best single measure of the state of the system, helping us define how much of a change in atmospheric composition is needed to restore climate stability. Both require improved data.
But our imperfect knowledge of these quantities does not imply uncertainty about the direction that global climate is headed—the world is getting warmer, and it will continue to do so during the next few decades. On the other hand, better knowledge of these quantities will help us refine the atmospheric composition target that we must aim for. We already know that we should reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide to, at most, 350 parts per million.
Key quantities we should watch to assess the status of potential climate tipping points are (1) the mass balance of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, including ice shelves and the principal outlet glaciers of the ice sheets, (2) the percentage of fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions that remains in the air, and (3) changes of atmospheric methane. I will provide organization, discussion, and updates of these and other key quantities at
www.columbia.edu/~jeh1.
Here are reasons to focus on these quantities: (1) If the ice sheets become more mobile, discharging more ice to the ocean, it will bode ill for both future sea level and storms. (2) The percentage of fossil fuel carbon dioxide remaining in the air has averaged about 56 percent for decades, the other 44 percent being taken up by the land and ocean. If the ability of the land or ocean to soak up carbon decreases, that could cause global warming to accelerate, which could amplify other feedbacks. (3) Methane is important because of the possibility of an increasing discharge from frozen methane.
You need to be well informed, to understand these matters, because you cannot count on governments, the people paid to protect the public, to deal properly and promptly with the climate matter. The problem with governments is not scientific ability—the Obama administration, for example, appointed some of the best scientists in the country to top positions in science and energy. Instead, the government’s problem is politics, politics as usual.
U.S. government scientists, at least those at the highest levels, cannot contradict a position taken by the president. And President Obama’s assertion that he would “listen to” scientists did not mean that he would not listen, perhaps with even sharper ears, to political advisers.
When you learn of a lightly publicized agreement with Canada for a pipeline to carry oil squeezed from tar sands to the United States, when you learn of approval for plants to squeeze oil from coal, when the president advocates an ineffectual cap-and-trade approach for controlling carbon emissions, when our government funnels billions of dollars to support “clean coal” while treating next-generation nuclear power almost as a pariah, you can recognize right away that our government is not taking a strategic approach to solve the climate problem.
The picture has become clear. Our planet, with its remarkable array of life, is in imminent danger of crashing. Yet our politicians are not dashing forward. They hesitate; they hang back.