Armageddon Science (16 page)

What all now seem to agree on is that we can’t afford to wait until things go horribly wrong before we start to try out different “geoengineering” approaches in small-scale trials. Without doing this, there is little chance of being able to assess the risk involved. Yet those trials that should be enabling us to get a better idea of what’s feasible tend to come up against strong opposition from environmental groups, worried about the effects on local ecosystems where the trial is undertaken. We have to accept that we can’t protect everywhere and everything. If we are to be ready to help reverse climate change, we need some short-term sacrifices to help us along the way.

Once more we see here the huge difficulty of dealing with a global issue, using actions that will have local effects. It’s the inherent problem of that trite mantra “Think globally, act locally.” When we act locally to influence a global issue, like climate change, the result will be not a global change but a variety of local changes. You can’t practically turn down the temperature on the whole planet. Any geoengineering solution is likely to result in some areas dropping more in temperature than others—which will result in winners who get a better climate and losers who might experience drought.

The fact that impacts may vary by location has already come close to generating an international incident. In late 2005, Russian scientist Yuri Izrael attempted to persuade the Russian government to try releasing around 600,000 tons of sulfur particles into the atmosphere. Just as happens after a large volcanic eruption, this would result in reduced sunlight hitting the Earth and a reduction in global warming. However, it would be impossible to ensure that such an action would not cause droughts in some parts of the world.

This wouldn’t necessarily be seen as just an experiment gone wrong. There are United Nations agreements in place prohibiting military (or other hostile) uses of environmental-modification techniques. This ban was brought in after U.S. attempts to use seeded rain to make terrain difficult to cross in the Vietnam War. If such a particle-based sunshade did result in droughts or other weather conditions dangerous to life, particularly in a second country, it’s quite possible it would be considered an act of aggression—though it might be hard to prove the source of the problem. It’s clear that any attempt to engineer our way out of the problems of climate change other than by reducing emissions is fraught with difficulty.

All the initiatives to reduce our impact on the planet, and more like them, are great. And it’s just possible that option one is true, and we don’t have to do anything, because the models are wrong. But I am pessimistic. Even if the Western nations managed to become carbon neutral overnight, aspiring economies like China and India are continuing to increase their greenhouse gas outputs at an alarming rate. They are willing to talk about caps on emissions—but it is only natural that they feel they should be allowed to catch up a bit before they are set the same limits as those of us who already make huge contributions per head to global warming.

The other problem here is that almost all the solutions to climate change require long-term investments—but our whole political system is not set up to support long-term investment. Politicians like to see a quick fix, with plenty of bang for the buck. Climate change investment just can’t be like that.

As we’ve seen, for instance, we need to invest a lot more in nuclear fusion. This technology would enable us to generate power with very low emissions—and without the reliance on rare minerals and the production of large quantities of radioactive waste that go along with traditional fission reactors. However there is only one new experimental fusion reactor planned
in the world
. The United States, which you might expect to be leading such research, doesn’t have a single experimental fusion reactor, and has reduced its level of funding to the ITER because the project is too long term.

The result of this short-termism is that the political action being taken to reduce the impact of climate change is too little, too late. It will help mitigate the impact—and every little bit helps—but I don’t believe we will see real-world commitment to dealing with climate change until we have a state of near disaster in large parts of the globe.

It’s depressing. I wish it were different. But it isn’t. Green campaigners can jump up and down and predict doom as much as they like, but I think we should instead be thinking as much as possible about how can we mitigate the impact of climate change on human beings and our cities, because we aren’t going to change our ways until things have gotten really bad.

One aspect of climate change that isn’t always noticed is that the phenomenon is not a problem for the Earth. Green publicity material often accuses us of putting the planet at risk. But we aren’t risking the Earth with our actions, not in any way. Our planet will cope just fine. We might end up making it temporarily uninhabitable for many of the living creatures we are familiar with, ourselves included, but to the planet itself there will be little change. What’s more, bacteria will continue to thrive.

We tend to think of ourselves as the dominant species, but bacteria have been around a lot longer, and thrive in a much wider range of environments. In the next chapter we look at the uncomfortable relationship human beings and science have had with these smallest of living things, themselves possible bringers of mass destruction.

At the end of 2002, a medical panic from Asia spread around the world. A new disease, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), seemed about to devastate humanity. In a few months, there were thousands of cases in and around China, with outbreaks occurring in unexpected cities like San Francisco and Toronto as modern air travel provided the virus with an ideal vector for taking on the world.

As it happens, SARS proved relatively easy to contain, but a more justified concern emerged in Mexico in April 2009. Swine flu is a respiratory disease that originated in pigs and then spread to humans. It is caused by a specific strain of the influenza virus known as H1N1. These letters refer to the proteins that stick out from the flu virus’s surface and are its mechanism for latching onto its victims. The H refers to hemagglutinin and the N to neuraminidase. Different variants of these two proteins mean that the virus will attach to different receptors in the victim’s body. So, for instance, H1 viruses tend to bind in the upper respiratory tracts, making them easier to spread by coughing and sneezing, but often making them less severe than an H5 virus (like bird flu), which tends to bind in the lungs and bring on pneumonia.

The 2009 outbreak of swine flu is related to the common seasonal flu strain that kills thousands of people every year, but because of genetic variation it requires a different vaccination. On June 11, 2009, the World Health Organization declared swine flu to be pandemic, putting it at the top level of the WHO’s alert structure, Phase 6. This means that it has caused sustained outbreaks in at least two countries in one region (the WHO divides the world into six regions, mostly but not all corresponding to continents), and in a third country in a different region. Once a disease is pandemic it is spreading around the world, and is impossible to contain.

At the time of writing more than seven hundred people had died from swine flu and more than 1 million Americans had been infected. By September 2009 cases were in decline, but they were expected to take off again as northern countries headed into winter conditions, where flu thrives. Swine flu is frightening because of that pandemic nature—its spread around the world is unstoppable. Thankfully, it appears to be a relatively mild variant compared to an earlier H1N1 pandemic. The so-called Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 is thought to have infected around 40 percent of the world’s population and to have killed more than 50 million people.

A virus like flu is one of nature’s weapons of mass destruction. In general, a biological weapon is one where the active ingredient is a dangerous infectious microorganism, or the toxins that such organisms produce. To give an idea of the potential for damage of biological weapons, it has been estimated that sixty pounds of anthrax, the material used in the postal attacks that followed 9/11, could kill a similar number of people to one of the nuclear weapons dropped at the end of the Second World War—between 30,000 and 100,000 people.

Although the creation of biological weapons is outlawed in most countries, this doesn’t stop research on deadly bacteriological and viral agents, both for medical purposes and for defense against biological weapons. Research labs have the potential to release, accidentally or intentionally, a deadly agent that, like the flu, can spread around the world.

We will see that there’s nothing new about the use of biological agents as weapons. But before exploring these most insidious of weapons of mass destruction, we need first to consider the less self-active agents that also address a biological weakness, which were deployed so horribly in the first half of the previous century: chemical weapons.

In a sense, all weapons interfere with the normal functions of the human metabolism—in the case of a bullet or a knife by crudely punching a hole in the body’s delicate workings—but chemical and biological weapons disrupt the body’s normal functions in a more indirect, and hence more scary, fashion. Arguably poison gas, with its indiscriminate killing and ability to sweep across a wide area, was the first true weapon of mass destruction to be deployed.

Although gas was probably used in poisoning well before the twentieth century, and had been proposed as a weapon as long ago as the time of Leonardo da Vinci, it had not been employed in a war, and was supposedly banned in the Hague Convention of 1899, which sought to place gentlemanly restrictions on the means for human beings to kill one another. But it soon became clear in the years following 1914 that the First World War was to be anything but gentlemanly, and both sides were prepared to try out gas if it meant a better chance of success in the dire battles of the trenches.

It can be argued (and has been) that there really is nothing different about the use of gas over any other weapon. Gas enthusiasts argue it’s just another way to disable or kill the enemy, and can often be used to move an enemy out of the way without significant casualties. This was certainly put forward as a defense of its use at the time of the First World War. But it is not an argument that feels
right
. Many military personnel on both sides were privately disgusted by the horror of this silent, creeping killer. One German officer, reflecting on his army’s early use of gas, commented, “Poisoning the enemy just as one poisons rats struck me as it must any straight-forward soldier…repulsive.” It was the military equivalent of knifing someone in the back, rather than face-to-face.

It’s true that gunfire and explosives can have horrendous effects on the human body—and don’t always hit the intended targets—but at least such weapons provide a
directed
killing force. Gas, once released, acts under its own casual influences, be they weather or terrain, drifting, diverting, rolling forward indiscriminately. What’s more, an individual bullet will kill one person. A shell might destroy tens, a conventional bomb hundreds. But gas can massacre thousands.

It seems likely that it was the repulsion raised by the idea of using gas that caused one extra and unexpected death during the First World War. Clara Haber, wife of the chemist and gas warfare pioneer Fritz Haber, shot herself in May 1915. Although she left no note, all the evidence is that she was driven to take her life by her disgust with her husband’s work. But her death would not stop him or his deadly program.

It’s possible that Clara’s suicide was in response to hearing about Haber’s first battlefield success with gas. This took place near Ypres in Belgium, one of the place names ingrained into the minds of all those with family members who took part in the First World War, and known to the English-speaking troops as “Wipers.” Algerian soldiers, part of the French army, were sheltered in rows of trenches opposing the German forces. The troops were locked in the slow, painful process of attack and retreat that typified the horrific muddy battlefields of that war.

On April 22, 1915, following an artillery barrage, the usual cloud of dust seemed strangely yellow-green in hue, and moved toward the troops with surprising vigor. But the Algerians saw nothing to fear, and carried on as normal. Minutes later, as the cloud continued to move forward and rolled into trench after trench, men were dying. The yellow-green cloud was chlorine gas, released from a chain of six thousand cylinders along the German front line and carried across to the French trenches by the prevailing wind.

Anyone who has handled swimming pool chemicals will be familiar with that burning in the nose and tickle in the throat that typifies the initial attack of chlorine—but this concentration of the gas produced symptoms on a wholly different scale. As the troops’ eyes and mouth burned, a terrible coughing fit shook their bodies. The delicate lining of their lungs was being burned away, causing them to drown in the fluid that oozed out, leaving them frothing at the mouth. There is some dispute as to how many were killed by the gas, but it numbered in the thousands.

The power of the gas attack consisted in much more than its ability to kill. It spread fear. Winston Churchill, shortly after the First World War, emphasized this with enthusiasm. “I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas,” he commented. He saw it as a positive that it “spread a lively terror.” For most, though, this was not a positive. Men died in the trenches all the time, and on the whole, their comrades fought on alongside the bodies. A gas attack was different. Those who didn’t die ran. The gas attack did not affect just the group of soldiers it disabled; it also cleared out the rest of the troops. One German soldier later commented after that first chemical offensive that they had been able to walk with their weapons tucked under their arms, just as if they were strolling along in a game hunt.

It was this ability to clear the battlefield of the enemy without necessarily killing them that made some insist that chemical weapons were, in fact, more humane than any other form of attack. As long as enough troops ran away or were partly protected by the limited gas masks of the time, the result was relatively few deaths, but many soldiers rendered incapable of fighting. This was put forward as a double benefit—not only was it less evil than killing outright; it also meant that the enemy had to expend more resources looking after those casualties. But few who experienced a gas attack could agree with the suggestion that this was a more humanitarian approach to fighting.

The Allies would also use gas within a few months, reducing any moral advantage they might have had from Germany’s breaking of the Hague Convention. Chlorine, though devastating, was only the beginning of the chemists’ excursion onto the battlefield. As more and more troops were provided with gas masks, scientists on both sides worked hard to ensure that they maximized the chances of exposing the enemy to the noxious gas. Extra materials were mixed into the cylinders to make the skin intolerably itchy or to induce sneezing, in an attempt to force the soldiers to remove their masks.

Although chlorine poisoned well enough, it gave the soldiers a fair amount of warning, both by being visible and from the initial burning sensations in the eyes and nose. Before long, Haber’s German scientists had brought another chemical agent to the battle front—phosgene. A little more complex than the elementary chlorine, this is effectively a compound merging carbon monoxide and chlorine—COCl
₂
. Phosgene is invisible, and though it has a detectable odor, it smells pleasantly of new-mown hay, making it unremarkable in the countryside. There is no real warning of its deadly attack. Furthermore, phosgene has a cumulative effect, so an earlier dose can later be supplemented to reach a fatal level as the gas blocks the proteins that enable oxygen to be processed by the alveoli in the lungs, leaving the victim airless and dying.

Phosgene was soon followed into the trenches by the more complex and horrendous mustard gas, a compound of carbon, hydrogen, chlorine, and sulfur. This was deployed by the Germans in 1917 and, unlike its predecessors, did not disperse in hours, but could leave the battlefield uninhabitable for weeks, or even months. This is because mustard gas is really a liquid that can be sprayed like an industrial weed killer. It is extremely poisonous and causes terrible blistering on any exposed skin, both externally and internally, where it can wreak fatal damage.

The effects of mustard gas may not be felt for a number of hours after exposure, making it easy to build up a debilitating or deadly dose without being aware of it. The Germans made heavy use of mustard gas, deploying over a million shells filled with the substance in just ten days when it was first brought to the battlefield. Mustard gas is one of the few First World War chemical agents to have been deployed in recent times, when the Iraqis used it on Kurdish separatists in the 1980s.

The Allies were not slow to pick up on the new gas developments, and though lagging behind the Germans for most of the period when gas was used, by 1918 they were ready to attack back on a massive scale with chemical weapons. The assault was prevented only by the ending of the war. An American researcher, Winford Lee Lewis, had even produced a next-generation chemical weapon beyond anything the Germans had made, modestly called Lewisite, though thankfully this was not to be used in anger.

Lewisite was a compound of carbon, hydrogen, arsenic, and chlorine that beat mustard gas at its own game. Not only did it attack tissue, raising horrible blisters; Lewisite poisoned its victim on contact with the skin, so it wasn’t even necessary to breathe it in. It was enough to be hit by droplets of this aerosol. Lewisite was capable of killing rapidly in very small concentrations.

The difficulty of controlling the spread of gases on the battlefield, and stronger conventions against their use, meant that chemical weapons would never again feature as significantly in warfare as they did in World War I. Yet, another poison gas developed by the same Fritz Haber would come to have even darker associations. This was the pest control fumigant Zyklon B. Releasing deadly hydrogen cyanide gas, the Zyklon canisters could kill in a confined space in seconds. Cyanide gas proved unsuitable as a battlefield weapon because it dispersed too quickly in the open air, but indoors it had a cold, killing efficiency. It would be deployed to horrendous effect in the gas chambers of the Nazi concentration camps.

The most modern class of chemical agents are nerve gases, which are usually split into kinds that act through breathing (and tend not to stay around for long), such as sarin, and those that act through contact with the skin (and are able to contaminate a site much longer), like VX. As is the case with many chemical agents, most nerve “gases” are actually liquids that are spread as an aerosol of fine droplets.

The majority of the nerve agents that attack through the respiratory system are called the G series, referring to their development in the late 1930s by German scientists. The skin-contact agents are the V series and were developed in the 1950s after a British scientist noticed the toxic effects on mammals of an organophosphate pesticide. These poisons are called nerve gases or nerve agents because they disrupt the nervous system, preventing control signals from being sent to the organs of the body and causing death as the body ceases to be able to activate the breathing mechanism. In effect, a nerve agent cuts the lines of communication within the body.