Armageddon Science (12 page)

The existing fission power stations require a rare ore to be mined to produce uranium, and when they are used, the power stations produce long-lived, highly radioactive by-products (including plutonium) that need to be stored for many thousands of years and kept safe from terrorists. Fusion, by contrast, uses abundant hydrogen as fuel rather than those rapidly depleting stocks of uranium, and produces only low-level radioactive waste (though the fusion vessel will become radioactive over time). What’s more, fusion reactions are hard to keep going—they have built-in safety because should anything go wrong, the whole reaction instantly stops.

But that “hard to keep going” is as much a problem as it is an advantage. Despite nearly fifty years of research, we are still without a working fusion reactor that produces more energy than it needs to get it going in the first place. The next-generation device, which is expected to get to that self-sustaining state, is the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) an internationally funded project to be based in France and expected to be operational by 2016. (At the time of writing, the U.S. government has just, with supreme lack of foresight, cut $160 million from its contribution to ITER, which may well result in the completion date being pushed back.)

Assuming ITER is a success, plans are to have a commercial model available by 2050, though cynics point out that ever since the 1950s it has been said that a commercial fusion reactor is about thirty years away. There is a lot of hope, but the time frames here are such that nuclear fusion could not provide a sizable part of our power needs until somewhere between 2070 and 2100. The promise exists of nuclear power without the possibility of a hugely destructive accident—but it isn’t going to be available for a long time.

Some would argue that the next threat to humanity we will explore—climate change—is also a long way from being a meaningful danger. And it’s true that the estimates of the risk from climate change have tended to change over the last few years. But every new piece of data we have seems to make the threat more real, and more immediate.

It’s only now that we are beginning to face up to the reality of the impact that our everyday science and technology has had on the environment. You don’t need to look at some evil weapon of mass destruction conjured up by a mad scientist—our transport, housing, industry, and consumption in general are having a direct effect on the world we live in. Climate change is already under way. Just a few degrees of global warming would be enough to bring worldwide civilization to the verge of collapse.

This is the most insidious way that science can present a threat to humanity. We have all benefited hugely from the mechanization of civilization. We can achieve actions that once would have seemed incredible—like flying from one side of the planet to the other—with very little personal effort. But we are just beginning to realize the impact that our life-enhancing science and technology is having on the planet.

It would be fair to say that until recently, the threat from climate change was not well understood. In my
Oxford Dictionary of Scientific Quotations,
published in 2005, there is no reference to global warming and only one mention of climate change—and this is unconnected with the threat with which we are now concerned. Just take a look at that quote from the American atmospheric chemist Richard P. Turco, made in 1983, to see how much things have changed.

In a world still living under the threat of imminent nuclear war, it seemed that humanity’s main impact on the climate could be nuclear winter. The vast amount of smoke and debris from the explosions of atomic bombs would, like Krakatoa’s haze of dust writ large, act as a sunshade in the atmosphere long enough to seriously chill the planet, perhaps even bringing us to the apocalypse of a world undergoing a massive ice age that would wipe out life on the planet in all but a narrow equatorial band.

As the threat of atomic devastation has become less significant, a very different, much more subtle type of climate change has reared its head. This is the kind of change portrayed in Al Gore’s movie,
An Inconvenient Truth
. For a long time this has been played down or even dismissed by the press and those with vested interests in ignoring climate change. And it’s true that portrayals like
An Inconvenient Truth
have not always helped, because they have tended to be a little careless with the facts in their enthusiasm to get the message across. But we shouldn’t take this as meaning that climate change is not happening, nor that its impact on human life will be insignificant.

The obvious sources of opposition to the findings of environmental science are companies benefiting from products and services that threaten the environment. It’s not a simple equation that everyone involved in a polluting company is necessarily a bad guy. The executives of these companies are human beings with children—they may well want to help the environment. Yet history has shown that commercial organizations are very good at ignoring the negative aspects of their products until they are forced to take them into account. The past actions of cigarette manufacturers make it clear that companies are prepared to ignore evidence until the last possible moment, and to try to manufacture opinion that supports their business objectives.

Time and time again those who have a motive to suppress the bad news about climate change have ignored evidence and tried to counter expert views. Often such actions are done through third parties—organizations and individuals that present the anti–global warming message in an apparently independent manner, but whose funding can be traced back to energy companies and others businesses that find climate change a commercially irritating concept.

In early 2007, Senator Barbara Boxer, chair of the U.S. Senate’s Environment Committee, had a meeting with the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the body set up by the World Meteorological Organization and the UN to provide scientific evidence to governments around the world. At this meeting, Senator Boxer was given an unequivocal message that climate change was real, and there was a very high probability that the burning of fossil fuels was a major contributor to the problem. As she left the meeting, one of Senator Boxer’s staff pulled her to one side. She was told that a conservative organization, funded by an oil company, was offering scientists $10,000 to write articles that attacked the IPCC report and the models that had been used to produce its gloomy predictions.

This was organized resistance. Former senator Tim Wirth, onetime Democratic spokesman on the environment, drew a parallel with the tobacco industry at its height. “Both figured, sow enough doubt, call the science uncertain and in dispute. That’s had a huge impact on both the public and Congress.” The result has been to produce significant doubt and confusion in the public’s mind. The message the public has received from much of the media is that scientists and science are divided on whether or not human-caused climate change exists.

Those who feel that the whole idea of a covert alliance attempting to dismiss global warming smacks too much of conspiracy theory might be shocked to learn that as long ago as 1998, a group including representatives of well-known organizations that argue against global warming met with representatives of oil company Exxon at the hardly unbiased American Petroleum Institute to discuss a campaign to train twenty scientists to become media representatives for their viewpoint. (This campaign was quietly dropped when memos from the meeting were leaked.)

ExxonMobil seems finally to be losing its will to keep fighting the anti–global warming fight. After being rapped on the knuckles by the U.S. Senate for spending over $19 million on anti–global warming organizations producing, as one senator put it, “very questionable data,” the company has publicly announced that it accepts the risks posed by climate change. These could be weasel words, and there are still senior Republican politicians who have been unable to shake off the anti–global warming view—but the United States seems to be finally turning the corner on climate change.

Part of the problem with understanding the likely consequences of continuing to abuse the environment on the scale that we do is that the threats don’t always sound particularly scary. In worst-case scenarios there is talk of temperatures rising as much as five degrees Celsius (nine degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. This doesn’t sound particularly scary. Those of us who live at chillier latitudes may even think a few degrees warmer wouldn’t be a bad thing. But there’s a wealth of unpleasant detail hiding beneath those small numbers.

First, the numbers are averages. A rise of a few degrees in the average temperature can mean peak values that soar far above current levels. Averages are useful to get a broad picture of what is happening but can be extremely misleading when we try to understand what we experience. Just consider the difficulty of making deductions from averages. The average person has fewer than two legs (because some are missing a limb, the average is below two). Does this mean that shoe stores should stop selling shoes in pairs? It would be a ridiculous act—but that’s what would happen if you
only
considered averages. We don’t live the averages; we live through the peaks and troughs—however extreme they may be.

And then there’s the wider impact of climate change. It’s not just about the temperatures rising. Accompanying warming of this scale are impacts like droughts, the sort of wildfires that have swept California in the past occurring much more frequently, and sea-level rises from melting ice that could see whole low-lying swaths of real estate left useless. Think of what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, repeated on most of the low-lying coastal areas around the world.

We are reluctant to do anything about climate change, because preventing it is expensive, and it requires us to suffer financial pain now to deal with a future problem that can’t be exactly quantified—a difficulty that became doubly problematic as the world sank into recession in 2008 and 2009 and most governments decided that getting the economy going again was more important than thinking about the planet. We saw, for example, programs to encourage us to go out and buy more cars. This was great for jobs, but not so great for the planet.

It’s shocking how long it has taken for there to be widespread acceptance that climate change is really happening. It shouldn’t be news. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences made its first study of global warming back in 1978. Although widespread acceptance that there is a serious problem took time to develop, the impact of climate change has now been studied for a good number of years—and the vast majority of scientists accept that this change is strongly influenced by human activity.

The UN added its support in the form of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, stating that global warming is a fact, and that most of the rise in temperature since 1950 is most likely (with a better than 90 percent confidence) to have been caused by human intervention. “February 2 [of 2007] will be remembered as the date when uncertainty was removed as to whether humans had anything to do with climate change on this planet. The evidence is on the table,” said Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme.

Even the few scientists who don’t accept a man-made component to climate change admit that we are undergoing global warming. According to the IPCC, the world can look forward to centuries of climbing temperatures, rising seas, and disrupted weather. The ten warmest years on record have all occurred since 1990, and most of those were in the last decade. All the evidence is that the world is warmer now than at any time in the past two millennia—if current trends continue, by the end of the century it will be the hottest it has been in 2 million years.

There is a lot of talk about action to prevent climate change—but, realistically, this is not likely to have enough effect. It will almost certainly be a matter of too little, too late. Even if we persuaded the Western world to give up its love affair with the SUV and cheap flights, the economies of China and India are gearing up to rival those of the West. It has been argued that the only way to prevent climate change passing through a tipping point where warming will accelerate beyond our control is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 90 percent by 2030. No politicians are suggesting cuts that will achieve anywhere near this level of reduction.

We don’t have to reach that tipping point to see climate change accelerating. Already the trends are getting worse. As
New Scientist
magazine said in February 2007, “The [IPCC] authors acknowledge that they were being conservative. There is, though, a fine line between being conservative and being misleading, and on occasion this summary crosses the line. It omits some real risks either because we have not pinned down their full scale or because we do not yet know how likely they are.” Every week brings new revelations that global warming will hit us harder and sooner than was previously thought.

Apart from a relatively small impact from the heat of the Earth’s core, the world’s warmth comes from the Sun. Without the energy of sunlight, the surface of the Earth would be similar to that of a distant planet in the solar system with a temperature hovering below -240 degrees Celsius (-400 degrees Fahrenheit). The Sun’s warmth is essential to preserve life—but it is also the Sun that pushes us into global warming. Normally a fair amount of the Sun’s energy is reflected back off the Earth out into space. The more of that energy that is absorbed by the atmosphere and the planet, rather than reflected, the more Earth’s temperatures will rise.

The greenhouse effect, which we’ve heard so much about, modifies the amount of the Sun’s energy that escapes back through the atmosphere. Again, like the Sun, this isn’t a bad thing in itself. If there were no greenhouse effect, the Earth would be an unpleasantly chilly place, with average temperatures of -18 degrees Celsius (zero Fahrenheit), around 33 (60) degrees colder than it actually is. But living in a gaseous greenhouse can be just as troublesome as not having its protection.

The greenhouse effect is caused by water vapor and gases like carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere. Most of the incoming sunlight powers straight through, but when the energy heads back into space as infrared radiation, some of it is absorbed by the gas molecules in the atmosphere. Almost immediately the molecules release the energy again. A portion continues off to space, but the rest returns to Earth, further warming the surface.

We only have to look into the sky at dusk or dawn when the planet Venus is in sight to see the result of a truly out-of-control greenhouse effect. Venus is swathed in so much carbon dioxide (around 97 percent of its atmosphere) that relatively little energy ever gets out. Admittedly our sister planet is closer to the Sun than is the Earth, but it’s this ultrapowerful greenhouse effect that results in average surface temperatures of 480 degrees Celsius (900 degrees Fahrenheit)—hot enough for lead to run liquid—and maximum temperatures of around 600 degrees Celsius (1,100 degrees Fahrenheit) making it the hottest planet in the solar system.

No one is suggesting that the Earth’s atmosphere is heading for Venus-like saturation of greenhouse gases, but there is no doubt that the concentration of carbon dioxide, methane, and other gases that act as a thermal blanket is going up. Each year we pour around 26 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO
₂
) into the atmosphere. Around a quarter of the CO
₂
we produce is absorbed by the sea (though this process seems to be slowing down as the oceans become more acidic), and about a quarter by the land (much of it eaten up by vegetation), but the rest is added to that greenhouse gas layer.