Rescue That Frog!

The Great Oxidation Event: A cautionary tale

In the midst of our summer living with COVID-19, a novel virus that attacks our respiratory system, and with people in our streets protesting excessive police force, literally wearing face masks bearing the phrase, “I can’t breathe,” it may not be surprising that I have been reflecting on the subject of respiration as it relates to Our Earth’s atmosphere.

As I write this, Our Earth’s atmosphere contains 413.5 ppm (0.04135%) CO₂, and most of this blog is concerned with how changes in that small percentage control Our Earth’s energy balance and climate. But a far greater percentage, 20.9%, is molecular oxygen (O₂), and of course this is vital to every breath we take.

Have you recently thought about why we breathe O₂ and exhale CO₂? How Our Earth’s atmosphere came to contain O₂ in the first place?

It’s a fascinating story. In fact, it has been persuasively argued by many that the transition in Our Earth’s atmosphere I will describe, known as the Great Oxidation Event (GOE) or, sometimes, the “Oxygen Crisis,” is the single most momentous, impactful event ever to occur in Earth’s history. You see, Our Earth is about 4.5 billion years old and, for about half its life, there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. Zero.

“Try to imagine something so profound, so fundamental, that it changed the whole world. Think of something so revolutionary, that it forever changed the chemistry of the atmosphere, the chemistry of the oceans and the nature of life itself.”
–Prof. Donald Canfield, geologist, University of Southern Denmark, writing about the GOE in his book, Oxygen: A Four Billion Year History

Life got started on Our Earth without free oxygen. And it didn’t take long for it to get started, in geological terms. In fact, life got started on Our Earth just about 500 million years after its formation (maybe a bit earlier or a bit later). The required ingredients for life, at least life as we know it (based on carbonaceous DNA) seem to be hydrocarbon molecules and water in which they can dissolve. And life got started on Our Earth not long at all after the formation of its water oceans 4.4 billion years ago.

Image credit: Wikipedia. Crowd-sourced timeline of life on Earth, referenced in over 140 Wikipedia articles. Click here to access a version with clickable links to other articles.

So how do things live without oxygen? With some effort (and an expensive high-pressure submersible), we can still visit life forms on Earth much like the earliest ones that appeared. Like they did then, they exist in the deep oceans, near hydrothermal vents, volcanically active regions of the ocean floor where seawater co-mingles with mineral-rich magma and becomes superheated creating jets of mineral-rich steam. In the deep ocean, there is no oxygen and no light, and conditions are much like they were in the deep oceans of early Earth. The base of the food chain is formed by colorless bacteria that decorate the seafloor like fluffy snow. (Color has no use in the darkness there, so it hasn’t evolved.)

“Do you get claustrophobic?” the man asked. “No, not at all,” I lied. “Good,” he replied, “and whatever you do, don’t touch the red handle. That’s used only in emergencies.”
-Conversation between Prof. Canfield and the pilot of the deep-diving submersible Alvin, preparing to dive roughly a mile under the ocean to explore a preserved hydrothermal vent powered ecosystem containing organisms similar to the first living things on Earth, as recounted in Prof. Canfield’s book, Oxygen: A Four Billion Year History

They are methanogens, single-celled bacteria that derive their energy by combining hydrogen gas and carbon dioxide, both present in hydrothermal vent steam, to make methane and water. Here is their respiration equation, the chemical equation by which they derive energy to grow:

There’s no oxygen in their respiration equation, because there wasn’t any to be had. These bacteria are also from a category of bacteria called autotrophs, which means, by a set of more complex chemical equations I won’t get into here, they can produce all the mass they need to build themselves — carbohydrates, fats, etc. — straight from carbon dioxide and hydrogen. They work with simple stuff, because simple stuff was all there was when they got started. By observing methanogens, you can see the bare minimum required to make what we call life. You need a way to harness energy (respiration), a way to use that energy to transform stuff in your environment into whatever you’re made of, and (at least for all life we know of) water, which is the medium in which all these chemical transformations happen.

Other simple bacteria co-existed with methanogens on early Earth, living off their dead bodies and off sulfur compounds also issuing from the hydrothermal vents. But, by about 3.5 billion years ago, the random machinations of evolution (and about 500 million years of time) had made a significant innovation: Earth’s first form of photosynthesis. Anoxygenic phototrophs had evolved tiny pigment-driven bio-machines that could use light energy directly from the sun to combine hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, making their own biomass:

In any sunlit and wet part of the Earth, life no longer had to settle for eking out just 134 kilojoules of energy for every mole of CO₂ and 4 moles of H₂ it could find, then use that bit of energy to do other reactions to make itself. In fact, these little guys had, at a basic level, the same chemical equation for energy and mass building. And, in any sunlit part of the Earth, light energy was abundant. While the early methanogens and their cohorts slummed it near rare, mineral rich hydrothermal vents, the anoxygenic phototrophs inherited the entire wet, sunlit surface of the planet.

In short, life was good. If only hydrogen sulfide were a little more abundant. I mean, volcanoes were erupting, but not, like, every day. So evolution kept at it… About a billion years went by…

Then boom! Some little upstart cyanobacteria (otherwise known as blue-green algae) developed modern photosynthesis. For a billion years of random experimentation, the equation only looks a little bit different:

We’re still using light to form cell mass directly but, oh my! We don’t need a whiff of H₂S here and a whiff of H₂S there. The fuel is carbon dioxide and … water. We’re floating in food! Life was easy, and now in any sunlit, wet part of the Earth it was growing like crazy. But notice the key byproduct of this new respiration equation: oxygen.

So the now dominant blue-green algae spread across the globe, blithely spewing oxygen. This went on for about a billion years until, about 2.5 billion years ago, their waste oxygen began rapidly building up in the atmosphere. This was the Great Oxidation Event, arguably the most transformative period in Our Earth’s history.

For example, it led directly to you and me and to other complex, multi-cellular life, who learned to use the oxygen as part of aerobic respiration, the most energetically powerful respiration equation yet discovered by evolution:

If you compare the amount of energy generated by our oxygen-powered respiration equation with that of the humble methanogens that started life on Our Earth (above), you see that this is a luxurious amount of energy — over 3 and a half times as much as methanogens can produce! This plentiful energy made complex life possible, and powers the energy-hungry brain with which you’re reading this.

So the success of the oxygen-producing cyanobacteria transformed Our Earth’s atmosphere, setting in motion the Great Oxidation Event that put the oxygen in the air that makes life possible for us lucky humans. What a success story! Except, here’s the rub.

IT WAS A LIFE-ENDING DISASTER FOR ALMOST ALL SPECIES OF THE CYANOBACTERIA THAT DID IT, AND ALMOST ALL OTHER LIFE ON EARTH AT THE TIME.

To almost all life on Earth back then, oxygen was a toxic poison. The same hyped-up chemistry that makes oxygen reactions so energetic makes oxygen highly reactive with, well, everything life is made of. For example, it oxidizes, degrades, and wrecks the very DNA that contains the blueprints for life. Also, further changes in the atmosphere occurred. The newly present oxygen oxidized methane (a potent greenhouse gas) in the atmosphere to carbon dioxide (a less potent greenhouse gas). This caused geologically rapid global cooling, resulting in a Snowball Earth that lasted for 300 million years.

The Great Oxidation Event wrought a mass extinction of almost everything living on the planet. When the evolutionary dust settled, the few surviving species had evolved protections that enabled them to live in an oxygenated world. For example, sexual reproduction is an evolutionary invention that repairs oxidation errors in DNA each generation. But that’s another story.

So that’s the story of how we came to breathe oxygen. And how complex life came to flourish across Our Earth’s seas and land, sustained by a virtuous balance of producers that harvest energy from the sun, consuming carbon dioxide and giving off oxygen as a waste product, and eaters (like us) that eat the producers, breathe their waste oxygen, and give off carbon dioxide as a waste product.

But it’s not that simple, is it? Because, unlike other living things, we have developed a civilization. And our civilization has its own respiration equation that greatly amplifies the energy available to us by consuming the buried remains of long-dead plants and animals that have accumulated over the millions of years in this story.

Unlike your personal aerobic respiration equation, our civilization’s respiration equation is returning to the atmosphere carbon dioxide not from plants growing now, but from ancient (fossil) plants. So that carbon dioxide is not part of the virtuous cycle that has governed our atmosphere’s composition since we evolved as a species. The waste CO₂ is building up in the atmosphere, and quickly.

Our success as a species is transforming the composition of Our Earth’s atmosphere on a geologically rapid timescale.

Sound familiar?

“The GOE makes it clear that, at an earlier point in Earth’s history, life fully and completely changed the course of planetary evolution. It shows us that what we are doing today … is neither novel nor unprecedented. But it also tells us that changing the planet may not work out well for the specific forms of life that caused the change.”
–Dr. Adam Frank, astrophysicist, in his book, Light of the Stars

Thoughts on this cautionary tale during COVID

COVID-19 reminds us of some valuable things. It reminds us that the routines and luxuries of our lives should not be taken for granted. It reminds us that many of the things we count on in our daily lives — from food and water to the mail — rest on complex systems of civilization we have created. And it reminds us that those systems are more fragile than we are used to thinking.

As all of us, regardless of wealth and status, are stalked by a virus that doesn’t read our resumes or care about our bank account balances, COVID-19 reminds us that we are all in this together. In sundry and crucial ways, we count on each other.

The privations of COVID-19 give us time to think. And I think some time thinking about how we want to come out of this — what kind of human civilization we want to have — would be time well spent. I do not think we should want to “return to normal.” By any objective measure, normal is not working and normal will not remain, well, “normal” for much longer. We are cruising pell-mell into a time period entirely analogous to the Great Oxidation Event, and most scientists who study it believe Our Earth’s 6th mass extinction is already underway.

Unlike the mindless cyanobacteria that caused the Great Oxidation Event, we have these big, oxygen-consuming brains with which to think. Plan. Solve. Create. For example, it would be nice if our civilization’s respiration equation looked less like intensified animal respiration and more like photosynthesis. Of course, this is exactly what the solar panels we’ve created are: synthetic photosynthesis. We’ve already used our big brains to develop most of the solutions we need.

We’re just not using our brains to put them to work at nearly the speed required to avoid some really scary outcomes for our species.

So now we have a chance to think about what our “new normal” should look like. It’s a good time to reflect on some assumptions that have been part of our daily routine in our “old normal.” For example, we expect an economy fundamentally based on extraction of valuable resources from Our Earth to continue growing, at an ever faster rate, indefinitely. The assumption is embedded in our daily news, which plays happy music if the stock market grows (typically meaning many of our businesses are growing at a faster rate than they were the same time last year), and otherwise plays sad music.

Hold that thought.

I brew beer at home. It starts by boiling a soup of grain extracts (called “wort”) in a pot. Once the wort is cooled down, you throw a little bit of yeast in. Yeast, a kind of fungi, uses an enzyme called zymase to digest the sugars and carbohydrates in the wort to make ethanol and carbon dioxide.

Several hours after you pitch the yeast in, they enter an exponential growth phase. The beer foams like crazy from all the carbon dioxide being released; you have to have a “blow off” tube on the top of the brewing vessel to let all the foam escape. But the yeasty party is ultimately doomed. The ethanol they are making is poisonous to them, and they are trapped with their toxic ethanol waste inside a closed vessel. Depending on the strain of yeast, once the ethanol reaches between about 5 and 12 percent, the conditions become toxic and most of the yeast die and fall to the bottom of the brewing vessel.

Beer in my closet, with blow-off tube, somewhat after the end of the exponential growth phase. A mass extinction of yeast is underway inside that closed vessel. You can see their little bodies beginning to pile up on the bottom.

We are doing the same right now. Our civilization has a number of waste products, the most worrisome being fossil carbon dioxide. Which, as ignorant-sounding politicians occasionally remind us, is not “toxic” in the classical sense. But, if allowed to accumulate in our atmosphere unabated, it’s certainly capable of ending our civilization by driving the conditions of our planet (a closed vessel) far outside of those in which we evolved.

“We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”
Greta Thunberg, 16 year old Swedish climate activist, speech at the UN Climate Action Summit, New York, Sept. 23, 2019

So, every batch of beer I brew reminds me that the assumptions underlying our economy are unsustainable. Nothing grows exponentially forever inside a closed system. I certainly don’t have all the answers, but here are some things I think we should be thinking about as we consider what future “normal” we want to have.

How can we keep the best parts of our way of life (significant personal freedom, the value and efficiency of competition) while making it more sustainable?
How can we pay ourselves and each other not to do some things we shouldn’t do?
As we get better and better at automation, how can we pay ourselves and each other not to work as hard at the now automated tasks we used to do ourselves?
How can we find a healthy balance between the benefits of competition and the divisiveness and inhumanity of an economy that awards most of its benefits to a handful of people who control the increasingly automated capital?
How can we get past our tendency for xenophobia and start thinking of ourselves as a global species with a shared future?

Of course, it goes without saying that I think we should be investing aggressively in the energy transformation needed to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. According to the International Panel on Climate Change, we have about a decade to be making serious headway on that. For the most part, we have all the solutions we need. The only thing standing in our way is excuses.

And, it seems to me, working together on that (while being necessary for our survival) would also be a good vehicle to start answering the bigger questions.

Visualizing Carbon Dioxide Pollution

Global Carbon Dioxide Emissions Visualized by NASA

In undergraduate chemistry labs we do a multi-step experiment to help students explore chemical reactions. I like the part where we add concentrated nitric acid to a beaker containing a US penny (it has to be minted before 1982 when they were made entirely out of copper). You can tell that there is a reaction right away – exciting and vigorous bubbling, the solution turns blue green and a dark reddish-brown gas pours out of the beaker. You can see it here.

If you craft the balanced chemical equation for this reaction you find that one of the products is gaseous nitrogen dioxide or NO₂, formed by the oxidation of the copper by the nitric acid (copper (II) nitrate and water are also formed in the reaction).

Even if you did not know that concentrated nitric acid is very dangerous (it is), the minute you see that deeply colored reddish-brown gas bubbling out of the beaker, you would probably take a step back and make sure your safety glasses were fixed firmly on your face. It looks ugly and chemical. If you caught a whiff, it would be pungent and acrid (we do the experiment in a fume hood). The gas does everything it can to scream “poison”, which it is .

Nitrogen dioxide is one of a couple of gases that are referred to collectively as a NOx (as in “knocks”) – a mixture of nitric oxide (NO) and nitrogen dioxide. In addition to the reaction of metals with nitric acid, NOx gases are formed by chemical reactions in internal combustion engines.

In an engine cylinder, the hydrocarbon fuel reacts with the oxygen in the air to make carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and water, and nitrogen gets converted into NOx. Untreated, the mixture of gases released from the tailpipe includes pollutants – carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons and NOx. Complex technology has evolved to deal with the products of these complex reactions.

In the early eighties, before I started studying chemistry seriously, I hiked part of the Pacific Crest Trail in California north from the Mexican Border to the southern Sierra Nevada Mountains. Aptly named, the trail runs along the crests of the western mountains. Around Los Angeles, you walk through the San Bernardino and Angeles National Forests, and the ridge trail sometimes runs a zigzag course from the west to the east side of the mountains and back again.

When I was hiking in that area, I hated when the trail led you to the west. You would cross a ridge and descend into the foul, brown photochemical smog from Los Angeles that butted up against the mountains. Relief only came from crossing the ridge back to the east towards cleaner air.

Photochemical smog over Los Angeles.
From the Sierra Club.

In the seventies, we started to like the idea of clean air and decided we had to do something if we wanted to continue to drive and continue to breathe. Carbon monoxide will kill you, hydrocarbons stink and cause cancer and NOx is an acrid poison which also interacts with moisture in the air to form acid rain. We saw the ugly pollution and the devastating health effects and acid rain caused by untreated vehicle exhaust and decided to regulate the automotive industry and mandate the use of catalytic converters in our vehicles.

With the development and adoption of three-way catalytic converters, the oxygen sensor and advanced engine control technology, our cars are now optimized to balance performance and fuel efficiency, and are able to convert exhaust carbon monoxide and excess hydrocarbons to carbon dioxide and water, and convert the NOx gases to nitrogen and carbon dioxide. Today, if all goes well in your car (the fuel and air are in a stoichiometric balance), the only gases that come out of your tailpipe are nitrogen, carbon dioxide and water. The history and future prospects of the catalytic converter are interesting and important to know.

Back when I was on the trail, before catalytic converters were on all cars, you knew Los Angeles was polluted because you could see it. Like most major cities, it had an ugly brown haze that hung over everything. As a nation we addressed the visible problem and because of government regulations, catalytic converters are now reliable and effective in reducing dangerous vehicle emissions. And our air is cleaner. And we like it.

We no longer tolerate billowing smoke from cars, coal plants and factories. Smoky coal plants with massive smokestacks have given way to “clean” natural gas plants (like combined cycle power plants). We call them cleaner because all they emit is carbon dioxide and water. The exhaust stacks on gas plants can be shorter and less obtrusive with no noxious smoke – check out St. Paul, MN before and after the conversion to “clean” natural gas. We like how it looks, it makes us happy and we call it progress.

Coal fired power plant (top) in St. Paul, MN was replaced by a combined cycle natural gas plant (below). Images from Power Magazine.

We think air pollution is better now because our air appears to be cleaner. We cleaned up the air and kept driving. We cleaned up the air because we tuned the tailpipes so all that came out was nitrogen, carbon dioxide and water. We felt good because we could not see the pollution anymore.

But now the existential threat is a gas we cannot see when we make it. Colorless and nontoxic, carbon dioxide from all those combustion sources accumulates in the atmosphere, confounding the global energy balance on the planet we live on, trapping more energy and causing devastating global warming. We can’t see it, and it doesn’t make us cough or our eyes water, but if we don’t act, it will end up killing us all.

Maybe we would act with the urgency of the sixties and seventies if we could just see carbon dioxide – maybe if instead of being colorless, it was red or brown and we could see it everywhere, we wouldn’t be so complacent.

In Minnesota, you can only see vehicle exhaust emissions in the winter as the water vapor condenses into a cloud. We see plumes on every heated house and from the stacks on the power plants. If that gas did not dissipate invisibly into the air, but rather hung over us as an ugly red cloud, we would act. If only we could see it.

Training ourselves to visualize colorless CO₂ pollution requires us to create and embed in our minds a vivid mental image of gas coming out of tailpipes and smokestacks. NASA created a super HD view of global carbon dioxide emissions in 2006. Back then the carbon dioxide concentration averaged 381 ppm with a high average of 385 ppm in May, which NASA assigned a deep maroon color on this arbitrarily chosen color scale.

[As I write this, the concentration of carbon dioxide is 417 ppm].

NASA’s visual of the generation and circulation of carbon dioxide around the globe is scary, hypnotic and compelling:

Seeing carbon dioxide pollution for what it is, even if it is a false color video, allowed me to fix a vision in my mind of carbon dioxide pollution as a red plume coming out of anything that is burning – car exhausts, heating vents on houses, and industrial and powerplant smokestacks.

Visualizing the sheer amount about of carbon dioxide emitted is also a big challenge. Carbon Visuals is a group “making the invisible visible”, starting with the premise that, all things being equal, a metric ton (a “tonne” or 1000 kg) of carbon dioxide gas would fill a balloon that was 10.07 m or 33’ in diameter.

The balloons look like this:

One tonne (1000 kg) of carbon dioxide fills a 10.07m (33′) diameter balloon.
From Carbon Visuals.

Imagine driving through New York City and seeing carbon dioxide balloons filling the streets:

At the end of a year the 54.3 million tonnes that New York City emits is a mountain of carbon dioxide balloons. As you can see below, if New York had to actually deal with 54.3 million 33’ balloons clogging the streets, it would take immediate and dramatic steps to reduce their carbon dioxide pollution – the hidden cost of fossil fuel use visualized as a mountain of carbon dioxide gas balloons.

The mountain of 54.3 million 33′ diameter balloons representing the annual carbon dioxide emissions of New York City. From Carbon Visuals.

Globally, the scale of the emission of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is so immense that we measure it in gigatonnes or 1 billion tonnes. Last year humans emitted 35 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide or 35 billion balloons. If you live an average life in Minnesota, you personally contributed 15 balloons to that total – using natural gas (75 therms per month), using electricity (750 kWh per month) and driving 10,600 miles at 25 MPG a year all add up to 15 tonnes of carbon dioxide annual emissions per capita. Try and imagine where, at 33′ in diameter, you would store your 15 annual carbon dioxide balloons

We need a way to have a visceral reaction to “seeing” an invisible gas. Maybe it works for you to think of carbon dioxide pollution in terms of blowing up a 33’ balloon. Start seeing carbon dioxide balloons – coming out of the tailpipe of the car in front of you, spewing out and piling up outside of the power plant in downtown St. Paul, and from blowing up on your roof when you heat your house in the winter. See them accumulate in mountains across the landscape.

If you try really hard you might reduce your personal yearly emission from 15 carbon dioxide balloons to maybe 12 (you can explore the impact of your greenhouse gas emissions here). It might make you feel good… like you were contributing. And it is certainly a good thing to increase our awareness and tend to our personal carbon footprint.

But to save ourselves we have to do really big things as a global society to avoid our dismal and dangerous future. We figured out how to dramatically reduce smog and rebuild the ozone layer, through political will, regulation and legislation, through technology and innovation, and most importantly by clearly seeing the problem and knowing we had to act. We will have to do it again and soon.

The Frog Levels Up

Dr. Howard Creel addressing the International Electrotechnical Commission Standards Committee, Jamaica Energy Symposium, Jamaica, 2013.

The Frog has been quiet for a while. But big things are afoot.

I’m excited and proud to announce I have a new partner on rescuethatfrog.com. Dr. Howard Creel is a scientist and co-worker. Like me, he is not a climatologist, but he has spent a number of years directing substantial attention to developing a scientific understanding of climate change. I first became aware of Howard in 2006, when he organized a series of technical presentations, called Scary Futures, at the company where we both work. Featuring lectures by globally-recognized scientific experts on subjects such as water resources, food production, global pandemics (yes!), and climate change, the series was an eye-opening exploration of how human civilization is straining Earth’s natural systems and resources on multiple fronts, with potentially scary consequences. It may not surprise you that the 2006 lecture on the potential for a global pandemic, probably originating in Asian bats, seems to have been remarkably prescient.

Like I have, Howard has long made a sort of hobby of informing himself about the science of climate change. Unlike me, Howard has actually spent a good bit of his career working on technology for renewable energy. In the photo above, he is speaking at a renewable energy professional conference. The tie he is wearing is a hand-painted tie made by Dr. Lawrence Kazmerski, Executive Director of Science & Technology at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, who does a tie thing.

Howard “walks the walk” — his family home has rooftop solar panels that not only provide renewable energy for his family, but give electricity to the grid when the sun is shining on his roof and they’re not using it all. He loves sharing with me and other friends his solar power output graphs on sunny days. Howard also leads a technical club of scientists and engineers at our workplace that gets together to discuss climate change and technology and societal solutions for its manifestations, and educate other people about those topics.

So, as you can see, this represents a substantial level-up for the Frog Blog.

I know Howard will provide what you have come to expect from rescuethatfrog.com: solid, no-B.S., scientifically referenced information about our changing climate. Read more about Howard and what has inspired him on the About us page. And look for his posts. I know he’s already working on a couple you won’t want to miss.

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Planetary feedback loops that could lead to a ‘hothouse Earth’ already active: Recent scientific reports

Image credit: *Newsweek*/EcoWatch/Streluk/iStock/Getty Images Plus. Methane bubbles frozen in clear ice in Baikal Lake, Siberia. Thawing permafrost across the Arctic is irreversibly releasing previously trapped CO₂ and methane, a greenhouse gas about 30 times as potent as CO₂ in terms of global warming over a 100-year period.

A 2008 scientific paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America considered potential “tipping points” in Earth’s climate system, arriving at a list of 15 that could suddenly and drastically change Earth’s habitability and narrowing that to a list of 9 that the authors thought could potentially happen during this century and might be prevented through public policy choices.

Tipping Point (scientific definition): A sudden transition occurring when a changing system reaches a critical point, beyond which a feature of the system becomes qualitatively different.
-The Frog’s scientific definition of a Tipping Point

An example of a tipping point is what can happen when you heat up a pot of water. At first, things seem predictable, gradual, and linear. The water just sits there kind of quietly in the pot. You’re adding heat, and the water slowly gets warmer. If you’re measuring the temperature and watching a clock, pretty quickly you can accurately predict the state of the water into the future. You can judge how much warmer it will be 2 minutes from now, for example.

But something wacky happens the moment the water reaches 212 degrees Fahrenheit (100 degrees Celsius). Bubbles start popping out everywhere in the water! The water turns into a hot gas, and starts to escape the pot and disperse throughout the room! It becomes very difficult to predict the future state of the water into the future. And, if you leave the heat on, there’s nothing you can do to stop what’s going on. The water is now qualitatively different. It’s no longer a sort of dense mass that sits quietly in a pot; it’s a chaotic, diffuse substance that’s invisible and goes anywhere it wants.

Tipping points can have various degrees of reversibility and many times frustrate efforts to bring things back to the original state. Assuming you weren’t prepared with substantial resources for the tipping point in your pot of water — with a tight lid and the ability to apply significant pressure to it and the pot — you won’t get your water back into the pot. Beyond the tipping point, it has expanded to many times its earlier volume. Even if you can quickly marshal the resources to cool the room, the water will condense back to liquid on surfaces everywhere in the room, not in the pot. You will have lost what you started with, and you won’t have any practical way to get it back.

For living things, tipping points can suddenly change the survivability of an environment in unpredictable ways. We could imagine a super-intelligent fish in our warming pot of water. Maybe it senses the water is slowly warming, but it finds that the warming is slow and predictable, and it invents and continues upgrading some technology — some sort of fishy fire suit — that protects it from the excess heat. All good. But at 212 degrees Fahrenheit, not good! Suddenly, our clever fish’s environment becomes qualitatively different! The liquid water is disappearing altogether, and everything it has learned about fishy fire suits won’t help the fish. Indeed, the influence our fish would need to exert to return things to their former state would extend far outside the pot. Poor clever fish.

Dumb clever fish, if it has also been operating the flame that’s been heating the water.

The qualitative change in water’s physical state at its boiling point is a tipping point in a simple system that we understand quite well. We observe it every time we make tea or have pasta for dinner. But scientists have come to appreciate that tipping points can exist in Earth’s much more complex climate systems. These we don’t understand well — if our species experiences one (or more) of them, it will be for the first time. They will defy easy adaptation by any of the methods we have been exercising gradually to cope with climate change.

We will be dumb clever fish in a pot.

A Nov. 28, 2019 commentary paper published in the scientific journal, Nature, updates the scientific state of knowledge of these tipping points, identifying nine planetary feedback loops that are currently active. Accounting for over half of the potential planetary “tipping points” identified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) starting two decades ago, the scientists warn a potential cascade among the nine active planetary feedbacks could result in out-of-control progression of our Earth to a “hothouse” state much less habitable than current conditions.

Lenton, *et al.* (2019). Map showing the geographical locations of 9 currently active feedback loops in Earth’s systems with the potential to create planetary tipping points.

Scientists admit they have under-estimated the risks of some of these tipping points:

Lenton, *et al.* (2019). Graph showing how the IPCC’s assessment of risk of “abrupt and irreversible changes in the climate system” has evolved over successive IPCC reports.

(While apologists for the fossil fuel industry and opponents of aggressive climate action often cite the uncertainties in climate science, we should understand that uncertainty is a two-edged sword.)

Economic models seeking to define the “lowest cost time frame” over which to transition to a sustainable energy economy have similarly been shown to have dramatically under-estimated the economic risks of delayed climate action by under-valuing what have been considered low probabilities of catastrophic consequences.

As the bar graph above shows, our assessment of the probability of catastrophe has evolved in recent years and, as we sit at about 1 degree Celsius of warming, the time for aggressive climate action is now.

This is the first post of a new series by which I plan to build a page about tipping points. The nine or so nightmares that keep climate scientists up at night wondering if, in the absence of urgent action, we might someday soon end up like dumb clever fish.

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“Bird Graveyards” Under Windmills [Turbines] Not Actually a Thing: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

“I never understood wind. You know, I know windmills very much. I’ve studied it better than anybody I know.”
President Donald Trump, remarks at Turning Point USA Student Action Summit, West Palm Beach, FL, December 22, 2019

[Frog comments: Windmill n. a structure, generally wooden, driven by the force of wind acting on a plurality of sails or vanes to create rotational motion to grind grain or pump water.

Wind turbine n. a structure, generally constructed of lightweight composite materials, for utilizing the wind’s kinetic energy to drive a turbine to generate electricity.

Not to nitpick, but it seems relevant to the nature of the devices the President has “studied better than anybody.”]

“But they’re manufactured tremendous — if you’re into this — tremendous fumes. Gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right? So the world is tiny compared to the universe.”
President Donald Trump, continuing remarks

[Frog comments: “You know we have a world, right?” True-ish. The existence of a world is widely acknowledged; it’s debatable whether it will continue to belong to us if we don’t take care of its attributes that make our lives possible.

“…the world is tiny compared to the universe.” TRUE! That definitely checks out.]

“So tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything. You talk about the carbon footprint — fumes are spewing into the air. Right? Spewing. Whether it’s in China, Germany, it’s going into the air. It’s our air, their air, everything — right?”
President Donald Trump, continuing remarks

[Frog comments: Writing in the International Journal of Sustainable Manufacturing, scientists in 2014 determined that a 2.0 MW wind turbine with a working life of 20 years, operating in the American Northwest, offsets the carbon emissions of its own manufacture within about the first 6 months. Thus, for the following 19.5 years, such a wind turbine powers about 500 U.S. homes with effectively carbon-free electricity.

By contrast, a coal, oil, or gas based power source with a working life of 20 years would be expected to generate “fumes … spewing into the air” for, well, 20 whole years. Whether in China, in Germany, or, really, anywhere. Yes indeed, our air, their air, everything. Just to talk about the carbon footprint.]

“They kill the birds. You want to see a bird graveyard? You just go. Take a look. A bird graveyard. Go under a windmill someday. You’ll see more birds than you’ve ever seen ever in your life.” (Laughter.)
President Donald Trump’s speech, according to the official White House transcript

Yeah, well, that’s not actually a thing. At least, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (who, it just turns out, has gone to take a look):

Graph: statista. Underlying data: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

A Chorus for Our Earth: An open letter from 11,258 scientists

Image credit: Michael Wilson/CBC. Demonstrators at a climate strike march in Toronto on Sept. 27, 2019.

9 Nov 2019

On Monday, the United States formally submitted to the UN its plans to exit the Paris climate agreement. This was an expected formality; according to UN rules, Monday was the earliest day the plan could be submitted pursuant to President Trump’s June 1, 2017 announcement of our intention to leave the agreement shared by 187 other nations to make their best efforts to limit global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius or, better yet, 1.5 degrees Celsius, above pre-industrial temperatures.

U.S. Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, explained on Monday that the Paris agreement threatens to impose an “unfair economic burden” on the United States, a nation which has enjoyed the economic benefits of being the #1 cumulative carbon dioxide emitter over approximately the past 170 years since the Industrial Revolution.

This statement appeared to expand on President Trump’s declaration of his reaction to his own government’s detailed 2018 climate assessment report, “I don’t believe it.”

Neither Secretary Pompeo nor President Trump has provided any significant evidence, measurements, expert reports, computations, graphs, tables, or numerals to back up their opinions based upon which they are busy making globally consequential decisions on behalf of all Americans.

In other news…

On Tuesday, a group of 11,258 scientists from 153 countries jointly published in the journal, BioScience, an open letter not-so-subtly entitled, “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency.” I recommend reading the entire letter, which is just 4 pages long and straightforwardly written.

“Scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to ‘tell it like it is.’ On the basis of this obligation and the graphical indicators presented below, we declare, with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from around the world, clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency.”
-Opening paragraph of the letter

The writers recount a 40-year history of explicit warnings from various groupings of scientists that have occurred since scientists from 50 nations assembled in Geneva at the 1979 First World Climate Conference (see U.S. National Academy of Sciences report published that year).

“Despite 40 years of global climate negotiations, with few exceptions, we have generally conducted business as usual and have largely failed to address this predicament … The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected … It is more severe than anticipated, threatening natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity … Especially worrisome are potential irreversible climate tipping points and nature’s reinforcing feedbacks … that could lead to a catastrophic ‘hothouse Earth,’ well beyond the control of humans … These climate chain reactions could cause significant disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies, potentially making large areas of Earth uninhabitable.”

Unlike Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Trump, the scientific authors of this open letter present an abundance of data supporting their arguments. Arguing that simple global surface temperature alone is an inadequate measure of humanity’s progress on the climate (a reasonable argument, since inertia in Earth’s climate system will ensure that the excess CO₂ already in the atmosphere will continue to warp Earth’s geologic state for decades and longer), the authors present a suite of 15 graphical “vital signs” measuring various aspects of human activity that affect the climate (Figure 1, reproduced below).

Figure 1 from the open letter. Panels quantitatively showing global changes in 15 measures of human activity since 1979. Sources and details about the data are provided by the authors in this supplemental file.

Similarly, they present 14 graphical panels documenting measured impacts on, or responses of, Earth’s climate system (Figure 2).

Figure 2 from the open letter. Panels quantitatively showing 14 measures of Earth’s climate responses since 1979. Sources and details about the data are provided by the authors in this supplemental file.

Finally, the authors propose 6 “critical and interrelated steps” that humanity must take to avoid the worst consequences of climate change:

Energy – Rapidly reduce CO₂ emissions by leaving remaining fossil fuels in the ground and moving to renewable energy sources and improved energy conservation practices as quickly as can safely be done.

Short-lived pollutants – Vigorously reduce emissions of short-lived climate pollutants like methane, black carbon (soot), and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which the authors tie directly (with evidence) to the saving of millions of lives over the upcoming few decades.

Nature – Rapidly reduce ongoing losses in Earth’s biodiversity, including forests, sea grasses, and microorganisms that store large amounts of carbon. Take on reforestation efforts at large scales, which could accomplish a third of emission reductions needed to meet the 2030 Paris agreement targets.

Food – Eating more plants and less meat, particularly ruminant livestock meat (beef), would result in substantial emission reductions while simultaneously freeing up cropland currently used for feeding and grazing livestock to instead grow food for people and plant carbon-sequestering trees.

Economy

“We need a carbon-free economy that explicitly addresses human dependence on the biosphere and policies that guide economic decisions accordingly. Our goals need to shift from GDP growth and the pursuit of affluence toward sustaining ecosystems and improving human well-being by prioritizing basic needs and reducing inequality.”

Population – Strengthen policies like provision of and easy access to family-planning services, improving gender equality, and making primary and secondary education of girls ubiquitous — policies that have proven to lead to stabilization of population while simultaneously improving human rights.

“We are encouraged by a recent surge of concern … Schoolchildren are striking. Ecocide lawsuits are proceeding in the courts. Grassroots citizen movements are demanding change, and many countries, states and provinces, cities, and businesses are responding … The good news is that such transformative change, with social and economic justice for all, promises far greater human well-being than does business as usual. We believe that the prospects will be greatest if decision-makers and all of humanity promptly respond to this warning and declaration of a climate emergency and act to sustain life on planet Earth, our only home.”

I wonder, how shrill will the warnings of scientists need to become, how strongly worded their opening paragraphs, how unambiguous the titles of their studies, how many scientific signatories will their papers require, how voluminous the data and inventive the graphical methods will they they need to employ, just how complete will their consensus need to become? How many schoolchildren will feel compelled to strike from school and how many tears will they need to shed before parliaments and international governing bodies in their efforts to call attention to the science?

How much all of that?

Before we will stop tolerating government representatives who stand in front of bouquets of microphones trolling scientists and making vapid statements about “unfair economic burdens” and “the reality of the global energy mix” while themselves living conspicuously unburdened economic lives and transparently being on the take from the similarly economically unburdened purveyors of the “current energy mix?” Before we will stop entertaining the crackpot ramblings of this or that radio personality or pseudo-scientist on Fox News questioning mainstream climate science, as if he represents an actual dispute among real scientists when real scientists author papers with hundreds or thousands or over 11,000 signatories and while the land-based ice on Greenland is quite obviously melting in great torrents and California burns? Before we will listen instead to the scientists and our own schoolchildren, who are striking because they realize they will own the consequences of the decisions we make right now and the real-world effects of climate change are so glaring as to be easily apprehended by any fourth grader?

How much evidence will be required? Before we will vote out the idiots and the profiteers, and vote in the pragmatists, the scientifically literate, the inspirational and justice-minded leaders ready to set to work on the difficult choices that need to be made and the hard but rewarding work that needs to be done?

How much, before we start to put things right?

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A Voice for Our Earth: Greta Thunberg at the 2019 UN Climate Summit

https://youtu.be/PpNmFKXXeqQ

Video credit: Global News/YouTube

On Monday, September 23, 2019, Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist who began demonstrating alone in front of the Swedish parliament in August, 2018 and now leads a global youth environmental movement, made an impassioned speech to delegates at the UN Climate Summit. Watch the complete speech above.

As detailed in the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report, released Oct. 6, 2018, every factual and forward-looking statement Greta made in the speech is consistent with the best available scientific consensus.

Donald Trump, “leader” of the free world and president of the nation credited with the greatest cumulative historical greenhouse gas emissions, was not present for Thunberg’s speech. He did pop in at the UN Climate Summit for about 14 minutes, during which he listened to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech before applauding and then leaving without making any remarks. While other national leaders were speaking about their specific plans to meet their commitments under the Paris climate agreement, the U.S. leader was silent.

It was a striking juxtaposition between the bravery and moral authority of a teenager who, after starting her own global youth movement by herself, had crossed the Atlantic Ocean to demand action from all the world’s leaders; and the cowardice and intellectual and moral vapidity of a president who can’t face a 16-year-old and clapped emptily at another leader’s speech while working to remove his own country from the Paris agreement and roll back sundry existing environmental regulations, from auto standards to methane emission controls.

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Zombie arguments: How to recognize climate change disinformation before it eats your brain and then makes you help eat the brains of others

disinformation (noun)
dis·in·for·ma·tion | \ (ˌ)dis-ˌin-fər-ˈmā-shən \
: false information deliberately and often covertly spread (as by the planting of rumors) in order to influence public opinion or obscure the truth
–Merriam-Webster

zombie (noun)
[zom·bee]
: the body of a dead person given the semblance of life, but mute and will-less, by a supernatural force, usually for some evil purpose
–Dictionary.com

Since I’ve been writing the Frog Blog, a number of friends have encouraged me to create a section to debunk false claims and arguments about climate change. So far, I have not done that. I’ve found the prospect exhausting. Using a strategy straight from the playbook used earlier by the tobacco industry, the fossil fuel industry generously funds nonprofit organizations, like The Heartland Institute, which employ people in the wicked pursuit of writing and disseminating superficially scientific-sounding disinformation with the express purpose of sowing confusion and division in our collective efforts to understand and deal with the climate crisis, efforts which clearly threaten the fossil fuel industry. I’ve written about this elsewhere. Also read this nice paper and this one.

There’s an aspect of asymmetric warfare to the tactic behind climate disinformation. Institutional liars are employed by fossil fuel companies (effectively untraceably, thanks to our opaque financial disclosure laws) to write devilish hit jobs on climate science, which are probably easy to write since (as we’ll see) they usually don’t bother to provide much in the way of data, references, or context. Debunking them requires data, references, and context, the assembly of which are time-consuming. This blog is funded entirely by my free time, and I help my wife support my family with my day job. I’m outgunned, if my strategy were to try to debunk every nefariously false blog post created by these well-funded writers. Certainly, it’s been much more straightforward and satisfying to simply report on the science conducted by actual scientists, which is backed up by data and citations, and communicated with the intention to educate.

But two things happened. First, I was asked to debunk a particular article by a person I respect a great deal when it comes to the climate: Steve O’Neil, CEO of REC Group. He’s in my Facebook feed, by which I see REC Group’s busy activities supplying solar silicon wafers, cells, and modules for giant solar installations, at a feverish pace, all over the world; seeing photos of these beautiful installations is among my most hopeful moments each day. Second, having read over the past couple years quite a lot of actual climate science, as well as quite a few of these climate hit pieces, I can now see that the hit pieces have common attributes I think we can all learn to recognize. By debunking one, and using that as a template to illustrate these attributes, I think I can provide value by helping others recognize disinformation when they see it. Maybe I don’t have to debunk them all.

So here we go. The following article was the assigned homework from Steve, Mighty Wielder of Photovoltaics:

NASA admits that climate change occurs because of changes in Earth’s solar orbit, and NOT because of SUVs and fossil fuels
-Author Ethan Huff, published August 30, 2019, NaturalNews.com

It’s a relatively short read. Read it, but promise to come back before it eats your brain. Then, we’ll get to work.

The first 3 paragraphs set out an introductory narrative that the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has known for 60 years that changes to our Earth’s climate are “natural and normal,” but “for whatever reason” has “chosen to sit silently back and watch” as the human-caused climate change “hoax” has persisted.

(What would motivate NASA, the American organization that won the Space Race, brought us the moon landings, explored the solar system —and beyond — with the Voyager probes, and is currently exploring Mars with robot cars, to “sit silently back” while we all totally misunderstood our own planet is baffling to me. But “for whatever reason,” I guess.)

By a link in the first paragraph, we learn this article is derivative, as it references an earlier and very similar article posted on August 8 on the website of the Hal Turner Radio Show.

The first verifiable fact of the article appears in the first sentence of paragraph 4, a reference to an article published by NASA on its Earth Observatory website (among my very favorite websites; never stop looking at it!) in the year 2000:

“In the year 2000, NASA did publish information on its Earth Observatory website about the Milankovitch Climate Theory, revealing that the planet is, in fact, changing due to extraneous factors that have absolutely nothing to do with human activity.”
-Claim on NaturalNews.com that is both true and total B.S. (I’m about to prove)

Briefly, the article then goes on to recount how NASA has been outclassed by a Serbian astrophysicist, Milutin Milankovitch, who discovered prior to his death in 1958 that changes in our Earth’s climate occur due to periodically shifting eccentricity, obliquity, and precession of our Earth’s orbit around the sun.

(At which point in the article, incidentally, I encounter the following embedded advertisement:

Sketchy advertisement credit: NaturalNews.com

This would appear to be an advertisement for the “extraordinary benefits of turmeric gummy bears” embedded within our purportedly scientific article, buying of which help “support” the owner of NaturalNews.com. Real science articles don’t feature these.)

Well, I did some research, and Milutin Milankovitch (a serious scientist) was exactly right. His findings have been verified, and NASA has helped do that. It’s just not remotely the whole story.

To start out, I found that NASA did indeed publish information about the Milankovitch Climate Theory on its excellent Earth Observatory website in the year 2000. I found this out by going to Earth Observatory and typing into its search bar, “Milankovitch Climate Theory.” The first hit in that search is this article published by NASA on March 24, 2000.

The article recounts how Milutin Milankovitch (1879-1958), a Serbian mathematician, astronomer, and climatologist, formulated a theory that Earth’s periodic glacial periods have been a result of subtle, repeating changes in our Earth’s orbit about the sun. His theory was mostly ignored for 50 years. But then, in 1976, a study in the journal Science described how analysis of deep-sea sediment cores showed major climate variations over the past 450,000 years did indeed correspond to the variations in Earth’s orbit calculated by Milankovitch.

Having referenced this year 2000 NASA article, Ethan Huff goes on to reproduce a number of complicated-looking diagrams illustrating periodic variations in our Earth’s orbit. Then, he rushes to conclude:

“If we had to sum the whole thing up in one simple phrase, it would be this: The biggest factor influencing weather and climate patterns on earth is the sun, period.”
-Ethan Huff, rushing to a conclusion

Here’s the thing. That search I did on NASA Earth Observatory, “Milankovitch Climate Theory,” yielded the following 5 hits, all in the same list:

Mar 24, 2000 — Milutin Milankovitch (the article we’ve been talking about so far)
May 9, 2006 — Paleoclimatology: Examining the Evidence
Nov 5, 2007 — Earth’s Temperature Tracker
Jun 14, 2009 — Climate and Earth’s Energy Budget
Jun 3, 2010 — Global Warming

The 2006 article contains a link at the bottom to another article entitled, “Explaining Rapid Climate Change: Tales from the Ice.” This article basically recounts what I’ve written about in detail in Episodes 5-7 of my Brief History of Climate Change: how recent, rapid changes in both global temperature and atmospheric CO₂ concentration could not be explained by Milankovitch’s theory.

The 2007 article recounts how, around 1970, Milankovitch’s theory would have predicted our Earth was headed for another cooling trend, but other scientists (including the famous James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies) instead predicted and observed a warming trend due to fossil fuel emissions, which appeared to be overwhelming our Earth’s previously natural climate variations.

The 2009 article contains an excellent introduction to the greenhouse effect, as well as a section entitled “Climate Forcings and Global Warming” that includes the following explanatory sentences:

“Natural climate forcings include changes in the Sun’s brightness, Milankovitch cycles (small variations in the shape of Earth’s orbit and its axis of rotation that occur over thousands of years), and large volcanic eruptions that inject light-reflecting particles as high as the stratosphere. Manmade forcings include particle pollution (aerosols), which absorb and reflect incoming sunlight; deforestation, which changes how the surface reflects and absorbs sunlight; and the rising concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, which decrease heat radiated to space.”
–2009 NASA article, placing natural Milankovitch cycles within the greater context of all the other mechanisms that can alter Earth’s climate

The 2010 article again lists natural sources of climate change, including Milankovitch cycles, before going on to say,

“In Earth’s history before the Industrial Revolution, Earth’s climate changed due to natural causes not related to human activity … These natural causes are still in play today, but their influence is too small or they occur too slowly to explain the rapid warming seen in recent decades. We know this because scientists closely monitor the natural and human activities that influence climate with a fleet of satellites and surface instruments.”
–2010 NASA article, further clarifying that natural causes of climate change, including the well-understood Milankovitch cycles, do not explain rapid warming of the Earth’s surface over recent decades

It would seem that a discussion of Milankovitch Climate Theory alone lacks critical context when discussing the overall observed global warming trend in the decades since the Industrial Revolution in the mid-1800’s.

But all of the above NASA Earth Observatory references, including the earliest one referenced by Ethan Huff of NaturalNews.com, contain the following disclaimer right at the top of the article:

They appear to be old, static pages. Scientific knowledge is ever evolving and improving. If we really want to understand the current state of climate science, it makes sense to look for a more recent publication.

One such reference is the Fourth National Climate Assessment, the most recent of periodic climate assessment reports prepared by the U.S. government every 4 years since the early 1990’s. Published in November, 2018, the Fourth National Climate Assessment was prepared by over 300 climate scientists and policy experts spread across 13 departments and agencies of the federal government. In Volume II, Chapter 2, we find the following set of graphs:

Volume II, Figure 2.1: Human and Natural Influences on Global Temperature

In all 3 graphs, the black line is the actual measured global temperature since 1880. (This measurement has been performed by 4 independent groups in 3 different countries, with very similar results, as I’ve detailed here.) The top graph shows the modeled (mathematically predicted) temperature accounting for 3 natural influences in isolation, as well as all 3 of those combined (yellow). Milankovitch cycles are included! Calculations based on the Milankovitch Climate Theory appear in the top graph as the brown line labeled, “Orbital.” Milankovitch cycles occur on a time scale of thousands of years and, as can be seen in the graph, haven’t accounted for much of a change in temperature over the relatively short time since 1880.

The middle graph shows the modeled temperature according to 4 human influences in isolation, as well as all 4 of those combined (red). It’s clear that human influences, especially greenhouse gases, best explain the observed temperature increase. The bottom graph shows, in orange, the modeled temperature summing all the human and natural influences together. The modeled temperature matches the measured temperature very closely, suggesting modern climate science has developed quite a refined understanding of the climate.

So, the Milankovitch Climate Theory is accounted for in our understanding of the climate, and it matters. With respect to global warming since the Industrial Revolution, it matters just exactly as much as shown by the brown line in the top graph. Indeed, the calculations of Milutin Milankovitch have contributed substantially to our understanding of the climate by explaining the periodic cycling of the Earth’s climate between glacial periods and interglacial periods that occurs approximately every 100,000 years. These represent significant natural changes in Earth’s climate, for sure, but it’s important to note that human beings have already lived through two such natural cycles, during which the atmospheric CO₂ concentration never left a range between 184 and 287 ppm.

(Earth’s temperature and atmospheric CO₂ concentration move together during these natural cycles, due to a series of feedback loops between them. For example, a warming ocean caused by a warming phase of the Milankovitch cycle releases CO₂ into the atmosphere because the solubility of CO₂ in water falls with increasing temperature. This extra CO₂ then causes more warming by the greenhouse effect. And so on. But when the Milankovitch cycle again enters a cooling phase, both temperature and CO₂ again drop via the same feedback loops.)

Thanks to our greenhouse gas emissions since the Industrial Revolution, the atmospheric CO₂ concentration reached 415 ppm this past May, so we are deep into uncharted territory for our species. And, as I recently wrote about, we see glimmers of multiple of those feedback loops by which rising temperature and CO₂ could reinforce one another in ways we cannot control.

In short, the graph above shows the Milankovitch Climate Theory not to be a significant factor explaining the recent, rapid increase in global temperature. And Ethan Huff’s super rushy conclusion that climate change has nothing to do with fossil fuels is certainly not supported by the data.

But the conclusion of Huff’s article is not simply wrong. It’s impossible to escape the conclusion that it’s a clever and very intentional lie. As I summarized above, the very same web search that yields the year 2000 NASA article Huff references — the one based on which Huff reproduces a bunch of complex diagrams illustrating details of Earth’s orbital cycles — also yields four additional NASA articles that place the Milankovitch Climate Theory in context and unambiguously explain how human-induced greenhouse gas emissions have dwarfed the effects of the Milankovitch cycle in recent decades. Surely, Huff must have run across those articles as well. Why not mention that content?

Huff has selectively advanced a zombie argument — a once real scientific investigation that has long been settled science. He has wickedly re-animated poor Milutin Milankovitch’s dead mouth to say something Milankovitch, a serious scientist, would certainly never have said, had he lived past 1958 (the year when, coincidentally, direct atmospheric CO2 measurements began).

So there it is. Lying article rebutted. Drop the mike.

So how do we recognize climate disinformation when we see it? Or at least, what clues should make us suspicious?

Like all good lies, they contain a kernel of truth. But the kernel may seem too simple.
If you read my Brief History of Climate Science, you’ll see that the climate has been studied in detail for over 100 years now. After this substantial research, our knowledge about the climate has been built up by a massive number of interwoven threads of knowledge from multiple scientific disciplines — geologists, atmospheric scientists, astronomers, oceanographers, physicists, chemists, biologists, meteorologists, statisticians, computer scientists, and so on. (Good examples of the interwoven — and self-correcting — nature of scientific inquiry appear in Episode 3 of my Brief History.) Many threads of independent scientific inquiry agree, creating an understanding of human-caused climate change that’s like a thick, braided rope. This is why over 99% of scientists have the consensus opinion that climate change is real and caused by us, a consensus that has itself been studied scientifically. Someone wishing to assert that human-induced climate change is not real would need to unravel and explain in a different way this entire rope of agreeing data. In this example, Huff produces one single truth, the Milankovitch Climate Theory (which, as I’ve summarized above, is already braided into the rope) and then tries to use that to argue against this whole rope made up of the individual contributions of countless independent scientific conclusions. It’s pathetic, really. Huff would have to explain, for example, how the rising CO₂ concentration (which is a measured fact) has somehow not resulted in a temperature increase, even though we know CO₂ absorbs infrared sun radiation reflected from the Earth.
Fake science writing often lacks context and fails to reference other scientific work.
Click on any real scientific article from my Bibliography, or embedded in my Brief History of Climate Science, and you’ll see that any one of those articles is replete with citations to other related scientific work. Real scientists consider it part of their job, whenever writing about scientific findings, to reference related scientific work that puts their communication in context and serves to support any conclusions or arguments they make. Like many “fake science” articles, Ethan Huff’s references only (1) a similar — in fact, almost identical — earlier article on the website of the Hal Turner Radio Show (we’ll get to that in a moment), and (2) a single, old, archived NASA web page (which, as I’ve discussed above, is used selectively without regard to other references that appear in the same search). There is no effort to place Milankovitch’s theory in context with other readily available scientific knowledge about the climate. And, other than that, it’s all opinion.
Fake science often ignores the accepted scientific practice that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Ethan Huff asserts that all of mainstream climate science is wrong. Overturning an established theory in science is certainly possible, and has occurred. For example, Einstein’s theory of relativity superseded the previously well-accepted Newtonian theory of mechanics (at that time 200 years old). The burden of proof on Einstein was extremely high, requiring multiple publications and pages and pages of mathematical proofs. Einstein showed how Newtonian physics were an extremely good approximation of his new theory under most circumstances, but how they broke down in other situations (involving large objects and high speeds). This explained how Newtonian mechanics had been so successful for so long. Ethan Huff offers up one bit of “evidence,” then asserts that all of a 100-year-old body of scientific knowledge about the climate is wrong. He offers no explanation for how all the world’s scientists have collected various bodies of evidence with which his conclusion starkly disagrees. Sorry, that’s just not good enough.
Research and consider the credentials of the source.
It’s not elitist to say the expertise of a person making a scientific claim matters. Would you have a dentist fix your car? Would you have an auto mechanic fix your teeth? If your answer to those questions is “no,” then probably you should rely on scientists for your scientific understanding of the climate. I could not find any specific reference to the training of Ethan Huff, author of the article debunked herein. He reports himself to be “a freelance writer and health enthusiast.” The founder and owner of NaturalNews.com, the blog on which the article appears, is Mike Adams. Mike Adams’ education is described as follows on his own website: “Mike Adams has a four-year bachelor of science degree from a prominent university in the Midwest. He has minors in mathematics and economics.” His website has been widely panned within the real scientific community for spreading false information and conspiracy theories. At various times, NaturalNews.com has been de-listed by Google, YouTube, and Facebook for violation of their terms of service. The article we’ve been discussing appears to be a moderately modified re-print of an earlier article on the website of the Hal Turner Radio Show. Besides climate denialism, Hal Turner has also publicly espoused views of Holocaust denial and white supremacy, and he has called for the assassination of government officials. He spent 2 years in prison for making threats against a federal judge.

Let’s contrast the above credentials with those of an actual climate scientist. Just because her name comes to mind, I’ll choose Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, one of over 300 authors of the recent U.S. National Climate Assessment. Katharine’s credentials are detailed on her website. She has a Bachelors Degree in physics and astronomy (University of Toronto), and both a Masters Degree and Ph.D. in atmospheric science (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). Aside from multiple U.S. National Climate Assessments, she has authored or co-authored over 125 peer-reviewed papers, abstracts, and other publications, most based on original climate research results. She is a professor at Texas Tech University. I found no evidence she has spent time in prison.

Who do you believe?

One last thought. In the regrettable era of “fake news,” we must consider the ethical implications of forwarding or promoting information we are unsure about. Lot’s of content we forward around on social media is harmless. When it comes to climate change, though, I would argue that the content we promote has a compelling moral dimension. The future our kids inherit — not abstract future kids, but the children and grandchildren we are reading bedtime stories to right now — depends on the actions we will take over about the next decade. And the correct actions depend on all of us agreeing on some basic facts.

Don’t be a zombie.

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This won’t be possible once we finish Global Energy Economy 2.0

Image credit: CNN/Reuters. Fires burn at the Abqaiq oil processing plant in Saudi Arabia after a drone strike early in the morning on Sept. 14, 2019.

Early in the morning on Saturday, coordinated drone strikes on the world’s largest oil processing plants in Saudi Arabia shut down nearly half of that nation’s oil production, about 5% of global supply. Repair was expected to take “weeks, not days”. This sparked immediate fears that oil prices could spike $5-$10 per barrel on Monday, and analysts predicted crude might rise from the current price of about $60 per barrel to as much as $100 per barrel if Saudi Arabia is unable to compensate with alternative supply.

Yemen’s Houthi rebel group claimed responsibility for the drone attacks, but U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blamed Iran. (Houthi insurgents have been rebelling against the internationally recognized Yemeni government since 2015 in what is widely regarded as a proxy war between Saudi Arabia, which leads a coalition backing the government, and Iran, which backs the Houthi rebels.) Iranian officials dismissed the allegations and stated that Iran “was ready for ‘full-fledged’ war”, warning, “All American bases and their aircraft carriers in a distance of up to 2,000 kilometers around Iran are within the range of our missiles”. Thus, the threat to the world’s oil supply was further ratcheting up tensions in a region already embroiled in a simmering regional war.

Global Energy Economy 2.0, which we are building (though, I would argue, not quickly enough) will not be prone to such threats.

Our current energy economy features highly centralized and vulnerable operations:

Concentrated oil production facilities, like the ones just attacked in Saudi Arabia, often located in parts of the world plagued by regional conflict.
Coastal oil refineries vulnerable to our intensifying levels of catastrophic weather, like the ten refineries in the Houston and Corpus Christi areas damaged and shut down in 2017 following the landfall of hurricane Harvey.
Offshore oil drilling platforms subject to all sorts of disasters, like the Deepwater Horizon, which dumped an estimated 210 gallons of oil into the gulf of Mexico over a 6-month period in 2010 amid a desperate international effort to contain it.
Oil transport through vulnerable waterways, like multiple oil tankers that were attacked this summer in the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. blamed Iran, contributing to earlier escalation of global political tensions related to our current energy economy.

Moreover, our current energy economy exacerbates the very political instabilities that threaten it. It encourages concentration of wealth among the governing elites of resource-rich nations that lack the diversified economies necessary to adequately support their poorer populations. It supercharges the potential for both regional and global conflict among various groups for control of those centralized resources.

Energy Economy 2.0 will have none of these destabilizing vulnerabilities.

Our energy will be provided by a diffuse network of regionally distributed solar and wind installations with battery storage, like regional solar arrays and farm-based wind turbine networks, augmented by end-load installations, like rooftop solar panels on individual houses and businesses. Regionally connected by new electricity microgrids, the energy produced within these distributed networks will be efficiently utilized by new artificial intelligence technology, which will automatically adapt to changes in weather patterns and any localized disruptions in supply to send electricity efficiently where it’s needed.

Thanks to Xcel Energy’s Renewable*Connect program, my family’s home in western Wisconsin now receives the equivalent of 100% of its electricity from a renewable mixture of solar and wind installations nearby in Minnesota. In a future Energy Economy 2.0, in which 100% of energy will be so provided, someone would need to bomb multiple sites in Minnesota to disrupt my energy, and the damage would be highly localized in my area. Moreover, I might still have access to some energy provided by rooftop solar panels on my house.

In short, disrupting the entire world’s energy supply, as someone (Houthi rebels? Iran?) did this weekend will be a fool’s errand under Energy Economy 2.0.

Further, renewable energy is already raising the living standards of many of the world’s poor, by providing them locally produced electricity not reliant on centralized operations maintained by their governments.

More solar energy falls on the Earth’s surface each hour than is used by all of us on Earth every year. Energy Economy 2.0 will be capable of providing it more equitably and reliably to everyone on the planet, without the centralized operations that currently result in so much risk, conflict, and human oppression.

Oh, and it will also enable us to head off the looming climate catastrophe.

Price parity between renewables and fossil fuels has been reached in many regions. Thus, Energy Economy 2.0 will be built. The question is how quickly, and how much further climate-related suffering we will allow to be loaded into our future before we complete the transition. According to the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we have just a little over a decade to make an unprecedented transition in our global energy infrastructure to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.

Reflecting on the events of this past weekend, it would seem that those of us who value national security and those of us who value the environment have common cause in the expeditious pursuit of this transition.

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Cue Scream: July was the hottest month ever recorded, and weird stuff happened. Also, we talk about positive feedbacks.

Image credit: French meteorologist Ruben Hallali. Weather forecast map for Thursday, June 27, as generated by the U.S. predictive Global Forecast System on June 20. Hallali tweeted the image alongside Edvard Munch’s 1893 painting, “The Scream.” It was indeed frightening, forecasting in June a high temperature range across the whole of France consistent with a canicule (a weather pattern characterized by unrelenting high temperatures during both day and night that usually occurs in late summer between July 15 and August 15).

July, 2019 was officially the hottest month ever recorded by humans, according to scientists at both the Copernicus Climate Change Service, a program of the European Union, and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). It narrowly edged out the previous record month of July, 2016.

This is concerning, as the July, 2016 temperatures occurred at the peak of a strong, cyclical El Niño event that accentuated global temperature. This year’s record occurred in the absence of such a strong El Niño.

June, 2019 was also the hottest June in the 140-year record, according to the NOAA.

Some selected events that have attended our record hot summer:

Image credit: Live Science/NASA Earth Observatory/Joshua Stevens. Plumes from multiple wildfires in the Russian Arctic as photographed on July 21, 2019 by the Suomi NPP weather satellite operated by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

A weather station North of the Arctic Circle recorded a whopping 94.6 degrees Fahrenheit, and millions of acres in the Arctic — from Siberia to Greenland to Alaska — were consumed by an unprecedented extent of Arctic wildfire. People reported difficulty breathing in a number of Siberian cities that were blanketed in smoke. The most concerning of the fires, which emitted more carbon dioxide in June than Sweden does for an entire year, were peat fires resulting from drier than usual conditions in these usually water-logged areas. These are concerning because, unlike typical wildfires that burn presently growing trees (which is bad enough), peat fires burn in soil containing fossilized trees. If a growing tree burns, its carbon can be taken back out of the atmosphere, at least in theory, by growing a new tree to replace it. Not so with peat, the concentrated and fossilized remains of millions of years worth of vegetative carbon. And peat fires can smolder for months, years, or decades. Arctic peat fires represent a vicious possible feedback loop, holding the potential to return to the atmosphere fossil carbon much as human fossil fuel emissions do, but in a manner we don’t benefit from and can’t control. This could lead to yet warmer and drier conditions in the Arctic, favoring more peat fires, and so on. In Arctic peat fires lies the potential for a tipping point, a positive feedback that could reinforce our Earth’s transition to a warmer climate, independent of human control. If you’ve read Episode 9 of my Brief History of Climate Change, such a tipping point might be capable of putting human civilization on a trajectory of “Collapse With Resource Change,” even if we start doing everything right with respect to our own emissions. To what extent an extended range of peat fires can be tolerated without triggering such a tipping point is uncertain.

“These are some of the biggest fires on the planet, with a few appearing to be larger than 100,000 hectares [380 square miles] … The amount of CO₂ emitted from Arctic Circle fires in June 2019 is larger than all the CO₂ released from the Arctic Circle in the same month from 2010 through to 2018 put together.”
–Thomas Smith, Assistant Professor of Environmental Geography, London School of Economics

Europe was gripped by twin, record-shattering heat waves during June and July. The following all-time heat records and events occurred:

France: more than 50 cities exceeded their previous record highs, including Vérargues with a temperature of 114.8 degrees Fahrenheit on June 28. Ten deaths were reported in June and July as a direct result of the heat wave. Two nuclear reactors were shut down, and 6 others were operated at reduced power, because the rivers they use for cooling water were too warm.
Belgium: 104.4 degrees Fahrenheit, town of Angleur, July 24. Passengers on a broken down Eurostar train were evacuated as many became ill. At least one person died.
Finland: 92.7 degrees Fahrenheit, Porvoo, July 28.
Germany: 108.7 degrees Fahrenheit, Linen, Lower Saxony, July 25.
Luxembourg: 105.4 degrees Fahrenheit, Steinsel, July 25. Several fires broke out and a fire truck exploded.
Netherlands: 105.3 degrees Fahrenheit, Gilze-Rijen, July 25. Train delays occurred as some trains had to be taken out of service. Thousands of chickens and pigs died in transit or due to ventilation failures. 400 extra people died compared with a typical summer week.
Norway: 95 degrees Fahrenheit, Mosjøen Airport, July 27.
United Kingdom: 100.6 degrees Fahrenheit, Cambridge, July 25. Widespread train delays occurred in July due to high track temperatures and damage to overhead lines. Rail tracks were painted white to prevent buckling.

Disconcertingly, new scientific research published in July in Geophysical Research Letters indicates Europe is warming more quickly than predicted by the European climate models on which, for example, the IPCC reports are based.

“Heatwaves are a silent killer; while for many people a heatwave just means a few hot days in the office, or even a nice day at the beach, heat is literally life-threatening to vulnerable groups like the elderly and chronically ill … Contrary to, for instance, storms and floods, these casualties usually do not even make the news. We only see them later in the statistics … no death certificate says ‘heat wave’ as the cause of death, even if the heat is actually a key factor in mortality.”
–Maarten van Aalst, Director of Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre

Image credit: Jeff Miller, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. 2019 Arctic sea ice melt onset expressed as differences (in days) from 1981-2010 averages, as measured using passive microwave satellite data. (Gradients of orange and red represent the extend to which sea ice melt occurred earlier in 2019 than the 1981-2010 average.)

Sea ice extent in the Arctic ocean reached the lowest July value ever recorded, according to the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center. Sea ice surrounding Alaska disappeared 6-8 weeks earlier than usual, and there was no sea ice within 125 miles of the state’s shores. Partly due to the warm water, Alaska set a new record monthly high mean temperature in July nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit higher than the previous record set in July, 2004. Another potential source of positive feedbacks to our Earth’s climate, melting sea ice exposes dark water, which absorbs solar radiation rather than reflecting it like ice does.

“It looks like the worst case scenario put forward by the IPCC could be an underestimate because we are seeing ice melting now that we expected 30 to 40 years from now. It’s alarming because it’s very fast-paced and the consequences are hard to predict.”
–Marco Tedesco, climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

Image credit: CopernicusEU atmospheric monitoring service, August 20, 2019. Biomass combustion optical depth as measured at 550 nm.

Fires in Brazil’s Amazon forest burned in August at a record rate, according to the Brazil National Institute for Space Research, which began tracking the fires in 2013. There have been 72,843 fires in Brazil this year, 80% more than last year.

The Amazon forest produces 20% of the oxygen in our Earth’s atmosphere, and additionally provides a substantial carbon sink for the planet. (The atmospheric oxygen content we are used to is a result of our Earth’s bacterial and plant activity; before the Great Oxidation Event about 2 billion years ago, there was no oxygen.)

Every minute of every day, more than 1.5 soccer fields worth of the Amazon rain forest were being destroyed by fire. Many of these fires were set purposefully, to provide pasture for cattle.

The Amazon rain forest creates its own weather; transpiration from the plants’ leaves creates the rain. It also creates a vast, atmospheric river of water vapor that carries moisture as far as the American Midwest. Beyond a certain point, deforestation of the Amazon could cause it to lose its ability to create the weather necessary to preserve its current state. It could revert to a dry savanna with vastly less carbon sequestration ability. A 2018 study published in the journal Science Advances estimated that a tipping point to eventual savannah could be reached at 20-25% deforestation.

About 17% of the Brazilian Amazon is currently deforested, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

This is yet another potential positive feedback to the climate crisis we need to be aware of.

“We worry that we will soon cross a threshold of forest loss, a point of no return, after which the water recycling pump will be insufficient to maintain the system and we will see forest collapse independent of further human depredations.”
–Scott Saleska, a University of Arizona professor who first began studying the Amazon more than 20 years ago

A July 22 report by the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative found that, across 5,301 government web pages, ranging from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to the U.S. Geological Survey, the terms “climate change,” “clean energy,” and “adaptation” have dropped 26% under the Trump administration.

(Fortunately, third party organizations have cloned many of the original sites — look for them. Also look for NASA Climate, which has managed to remain remarkably excellent.)

This reflects our brilliant federal government strategy with respect to the climate: if we don’t talk about it, it will just go away. Right?

Right.

The Great Oxidation Event: A cautionary tale

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A Voice for Our Earth: Greta Thunberg at the 2019 UN Climate Summit

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This won’t be possible once we finish Global Energy Economy 2.0

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Cue Scream: July was the hottest month ever recorded, and weird stuff happened. Also, we talk about positive feedbacks.

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