The politics of climate change by Colman Altman Many people, especially on the left, believe that climate change is an important, but essentially marginal problem, like other “green” topics such as atmospheric pollution or pollution of rivers. But Naomi Klein (author of the book “The shock doctrine”) writes that in her view even discussing climate change is a “serious threat to capitalism”. The big oil companies, who play a dominant role in determining American foreign policy, apparently hold a similar view. It is important for them that the public should deny the existence of global warming, and if there is nevertheless some slight warming, it arises no doubt because of natural causes and is not man-made. Without such a public consensus the big oil companies could not justify for instance the wars waged by the USA to take control of oil and gas fields throughout the world, the continued construction of power stations fired by coal, which is a very ‘dirty’ fossil fuel, or the extraction of tar from the bituminous sands in Canada, converting them into liquid fuel and then piping them to refineries in the USA (the Keystone project) – a process far ‘dirtier’ (i.e. releases far more CO2 and other noxious gases) than burning coal. During the period January 2009 until June 2011 the energy industry in the USA spent half a billion dollars (!) in its campaign against legislation to prevent climate change (New Scientist, 29.10.2011), and spent a further 73 million dollars on publicity against the development of ‘clean energy’. The most prominent organization advocating ‘climate denial’ is the Heartland Institute which received seven million dollars from Exxon-Mobil in the period 1998-2005, and then an additional five million dollars from an “anonymous donor”. This institute pays out some 300 thousand dollars to a group of scientists for ‘climate denial’ publications, and some of these climate deniers receive a monthly salary. Members of Congress and the Senate, universities, newspaper editors and correspondents, intellectuals…were among those who were remunerated for helping to shape public opinion. The oil companies have become a political and economic power which to a large extent shapes the policies of American imperialism. The Goldilocks planet and the Venus syndrome A well-known fairy tale tells the story of a little girl, Goldilocks, who enters the hut of three bears in the forest and finds three plates of porridge. One is too hot, the second too cold, but the third is just right and she eats it all. Planet Earth is sometimes called “the Goldilocks planet”. If it had been much further away from the sun then, like Mars, the solar radiation would not have been sufficient to warm it out of its deep freeze of -50֠ C. But if it had been much nearer to the sun then, like Venus, the increased heat would have liberated CO2 and other greenhouse gases, resulting in additional warming and a positive feedback loop that would have led to a hellish atmosphere, as in Venus, where the temperature is 460֠ C and the atmospheric pressure a 100 times greater than on earth. Is it conceivable that we too could end up in the foreseeable future with the “Venus syndrome”? It is estimated that the sun now radiates 25% more heat than 2-2.5 billion years ago when life first appeared on earth. In its youth the earth was relatively cool. In some stages of its development it was completely covered with ice to a great depth. The last time it was a huge ball of ice (Snowball Earth) was 640 million years ago. The slow warming up of the sun will continue until it becomes a “red giant” that will have expanded and engulfed the planets Mercury and Venus and possibly the Earth, in about 5 billion years from now. But this shouldn’t worry us – long before that the human species (if it still exists) will have to find another friendly planet to live on. A more urgent problem is not what will happen to us in the far distant future, but what will happen in another 30, 100 or 300 years from now. The ice sheet at the South Pole is more than 3 kilometers thick. It is possible to extract samples of ice from boreholes and from trapped bubbles to estimate the atmospheric temperature and CO2 concentrations during the last 650,000 years. During this time there was a periodic recurrence, every 100,000 years, of ice ages (each lasting some 85,000 years) followed by inter-glacial periods of 15.000 years. The temperature difference between the two periods was never more than 5-8°C, and the atmospheric concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere varied from 180 to 290 ppm (parts per million), rising and falling with the temperature – an increase in atmospheric temperature induced an increase in CO2 concentration, and vice versa. Atmospheric CO2 concentration never rose above 300 ppm during the last 650,000 years. In the last 10-15 years scientists were of the opinion that 350 ppm was the upper limit, beyond which climate warming would rise uncontrollably. Today the CO2 concentration has already reached 400 ppm, CO2 continues to pour into the atmosphere and the increase in its concentration is unchecked. We have never had such a high level of CO2 in the last 20 million years. We are now living at the end of a warm inter-glacial period that started at the end of the last ice age, about 12,000 years ago, but instead of the expected slow transition into the next ice age, we are witnessing a rapid unchecked rise of temperature which will transport us (at best) into a new, and extremely warm, state of equilibrium, completely unknown to us, with crocodiles roaming in Alaska and hot deserts at lower latitudes. But if we are not able to check the process, we can expect, at the end of the tunnel, to arrive at the Venus syndrome, even though, from our present vantage point, the prospect of it still looks slim. (New Scientist, 3.8.2014, publishes a research finding that were it not for the clouds which reflect part of the solar radiation, our oceans would boil away as in Venus). A leading climatologist, James Hansen, writes in his book, Storms of my grandchildren, “I have come to the conclusion that if we burn all our reserves of coal, oil and gas, it is possible that we would create an uncontrollable green-house. But if we also burn the tar sands and oil shales, I have no doubt that we will finally have the Venus syndrome.” Positive-feedback loops in the global climate One should understand the processes that will determine whether the human species will still be here in another 50 or another 100 years (there is no clear answer to that question!). Let us consider the feedback loops involved. • Increase of atmospheric CO2 concentration causes the global temperature to rise because of the greenhouse effect, and vice versa: increase of temperature of the ocean kills the phyto-plankton which by photosynthesis would normally absorb CO2 from the sea and from the atmosphere. Net result – further increase of CO2 and temperature. • In addition, increase in temperature decreases CO2 solubility in sea water, again reducing the ocean’s ability to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. • Rise of sea and atmospheric temperature increases the amount of water vapor in the air. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas much more powerful than CO2. An especially acute problem is the floating ice cap over the Arctic circle, which is warming much faster than anywhere else on the globe, The area of the floating ice cap is diminishing rapidly – at the end of summer in 1980 it extended over 8 million square kilometers, in September 2012 this had been reduced to 3.4 million km2, and it is estimated that in some tens of years the Arctic will be ice free at the end of summer. In the last three million years, at least, our planet has never known an ice-free Arctic. Why is this important? Well, the Arctic ice cap reflects almost all the solar radiation falling on it. When the ice melts it exposes the sea water which absorbs almost all of the solar radiation falling on it, thereby drastically changing the energy balance and accelerating the warming of the ocean and atmosphere. The loss of polar sea ice has become the dominant cause of warming in the northern hemisphere, more so than CO2. (The freezing winters during recent years in Europe, North America and Asia have led some people to doubt the existence of global warming. Normally, the low polar temperatures causes the atmospheric pressure at high altitudes to fall, resulting in strong winds called the jet stream to encompass the pole and preventing the cold polar air from escaping. When the poles warm faster than elsewhere, as happens now, the pressure difference between the two sides of the jet stream decreases, it destabilizes and begins to meander and freezing polar air flows out. Thus, paradoxically, the exceptionally cold winters in northern latitudes are an expected consequence of global warming.) • But this is only half the story. Increase in temperature and melting of ice at the bottom of the ocean lead to the liberation of methane which is trapped there in huge quantities. This is happening also in the frozen earth (permafrost) in Alaska and Siberia. Methane gas is bubbling continuously from ponds and lakes which form from the melting ice, and from the Siberian ocean. Now methane is a greenhouse gas, 25 times stronger than CO2. Its atmospheric concentration has now reached 1.2 ppm, almost 3 times more than at the start of the Industrial Revolution, and equivalent to 45 ppm of CO2. Its concentration is rising rapidly, and it is becoming the dominant factor in global warming. We no longer have control over it, just as we cannot control melting of the ice cap over the North Pole. Is a sixth mass extinction of species on Earth a possibility? Our planet has already experienced five periods of mass extinction. In the most devastating, known as The Great Dying, which took place 250 million years ago, 96% of the creatures living in the sea and 75% of those on land were destroyed. The conjectured cause – 3 million cubic kilometers of lava from huge volcanic eruptions in Siberia which resulted in atmospheric CO2 concentrations jumping from 300 to 3000 ppm. An analysis of the carbon isotopes revealed however that the principal gas ejected was methane (which is largely converted into CO2 in the atmosphere over 10 years). It seems that the ejection of methane from the oceans and the land played an important role also in the other mass extinctions. The fifth and last great mass extinction took place 55 million years ago. It was not preceded by a volcanic eruption, nor by a meteoritic encounter, but just by a slow and steady warming that continued for several million years (not rapid warming, as now, that has lasted for about 100 years). A large amount of methane and CO2 was injected into the atmosphere, causing a warming of 5֠ - 9֠, with about half the ocean population dying out. What was the source of these gases? During the period 60 to 50 million years ago, the Indian sub-continent was drifting northwards and collided, 55 million years ago, with Asia (creating the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau), liberating CO2 from carbonates and methane trapped in deep shale deposits (compare the mining of methane by ‘fracking’ the extensive deep-lying methane-bearing shales in the USA). Millions of years later Planet Earth cooled down again, the poles were covered with ice-caps, and the “methane gun” was fully charged, ready for any huge future explosion. And in answer to the question posed in the title of this section: “Is a sixth mass extinction of species on Earth a possibility?” - it would seem so. We can modify its impact, not avoid it. The Great Climate March On Sunday, September 21 this year, there was a mass Climate March in most of the world’s capitals with the express aim of saving our planet Earth from the destruction that would be an inevitable consequence of global warming. An estimated 400,000 people participated in New York, and in Paris, where I was present, there were more than 50,000 participants. In countries like the USA and England, where about half of the population are “climate deniers” (who believe that if the climate is warming, which they doubt, then it is certainly from natural, not man-made, causes), the demonstration can be considered very positive. On the other hand, one notes sadly that there was not a single placard condemning those responsible for the warming, the oil and coal companies that pumped millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, while actively fostering doubt as to the existence of climate change. Nor were there any proposals how to solve the global warming problem besides the central slogan: “100% renewable energy!” (meaning, develop wind and solar energy – we’ll discuss this demand presently). To make sense of this situation, it is helpful to read the comments of Rabbi Michael Lerner (Tikkun, 23/9/2014): “Some of the most opportunistic climate destroyers – among them the oil and gas companies – declared that they supported the March, also financially”. (We recall the folk saying: “whoever pays the piper, calls the tune”). The March was organized by the Internet social organization Avaaz, which in its appeal for mass participation quotes the recently published results of research workers at the University of Stockholm, in which they describe their observations of plumes of methane (not just bubbles) emerging from the bottom of the ocean. Avaaz quotes the well-known climatologist, Prof. Jason Box, of the Geological Institute of Denmark and Greenland: “If even a small part of the carbon [methane] at the bottom of the ocean will reach the atmosphere then we’ve all ‘had it’ ” [“then we’re all f*d”]. He adds “Maybe I’ll escape all this, but my daughter perhaps not. She’s only 3 years old”. Sea-level rise after the great polar melt-down Sea level rise will undoubtedly be one of the dramatic consequences of climate change. In the last inter-glacial period, 100,000 years ago, when the temperature was one degree higher than now, the sea level was 5 meters higher – high enough to cover Bangladesh, Florida, the low-level countries in Europe and many other towns in the world lying on the sea shore. Three million years ago, when the world was 3 degrees hotter than now (as we expect it to be later in the present century), atmospheric concentration of CO2 was 400-450 ppm (at present it is 400 ppm with methane having a CO2 equivalent of a further 50 ppm), western Antarctic was ice free, and sea level was 25 meters (!) higher than now. About a billion people are living today at altitudes less than 25 meters above sea level. The source of the additional water in the world oceans is the melting of water locked in ice shelves covering continental rock – Greenland, West Antarctic and glaciers on high mountains. Melting of the ice shelf over Greenland would add 7 meters to the sea level, melting of the West Antarctic shelf would add a similar amount. How long will it take until this inevitable flooding reaches us? Hundreds of years, no doubt. If we can rely on past precedents: 13,000–14,000 years ago, when the Earth was emerging from the last ice age and entering the present inter-glacial period, the sea level rose 3-5 meters a century for several centuries (Hansen, Storms of my Grandchildren, p.143). Sea-level rise is irreversible in the short term, but at best could return to its present level in some thousands of years. Can we avoid descending into hell? The Kyoto Protocol which was adopted in 1997 and entered into force in 2005 was the first international agreement that tried to contend with the problem of climate change. The main operative section dealt with setting an upper limit (‘cap’) to the amount of green-house gas emissions that industries and governments were permitted to emit. One could then ‘trade’ in emission permits. The success of this scheme was limited. Naomi Klein noted that such schemes for ‘carbon trading’ encouraged industrialists to increase their production of harmful greenhouse gases in order obtain compensation when they later they reduced it again. The main slogan in the Great Climate March was “100% renewable energy from now until 2050”. Fliers were distributed praising Germany for closing part of her nuclear power stations and promising to close the others by 2022, while simultaneously developing ‘renewable energy’ for production of electricity. In 2013, 23% of the electric energy in Germany was produced by renewable energy, but because of a shortage of electricity following the dismantlement of the nuclear stations, new power stations burning black and brown coal (lignite) were built, lignite being even ‘dirtier’ (i.e. produces more CO2) than black coal. Germany (with all her achievements in the field of renewable energy) produces more CO2 emissions than any other West European country. What exactly is included under the heading of ‘renewable energy’? Besides wind turbines and solar panels, we have water power (hydro-electric stations) and ‘bio-fuel’ (ethanol, produced largely from maize grown on cleared land in the Amazon rain forest, or ‘bio-diesel’, produced from the palm oil from trees grown in the burnt-down forests of Indonesia. Now most of the water power available from damming rivers has already been exploited, and creation of bio-fuel requires the deforestation of the Amazonian and Indonesian rain forests, which are the lungs of the earth, absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere and generating oxygen. It is doubtful whether this method results in a net greenhouse gas reduction. Can the remaining renewable energy, wind and solar, replace fossil fuels which produced 67% of world electricity in 2011? Sun and wind were responsible only for about 4% in this period. In China and the USA, the two largest producers of electrical energy, the proportion of energy from these sources in 2012 was 2.7% and 3.5% respectively. The demand that these two sources, wind and solar, replace fossil fuel energy in the foreseeable future is totally unrealistic, and can only make the climate activists despair of ever finding a solution – and give up their efforts of even looking for a solution. And to this we can only add that electricity production and heating produces less than a third of all greenhouse gas emissions. In the USA (in 2012) it was 32%, with transportation contributing 28% and industry 20%. In the world (in 2004) it was 26%, with transportation 13% and industry 19%. Solving the greenhouse emission problem is clearly no trivial problem. The nuclear option Two leading climatologists, James Lovelock (The revenge of Gaia, Penguin, 2007) and James Hansen (Storms of my grandchildren, Bloomsbury NY, 2009), discussed and recommended the nuclear option even before the threat of the ‘methane bomb’ was appreciated by climate research workers, and their conclusions are today all the more relevant. They both note that even if wind and solar power stations are built in large quantities, the electricity they supply will be irregular and discontinuous, and they can only be exploited if backed by large and stable sources like coal or natural gas; and they both assert that the only source that can replace fossil fuel is nuclear energy! (I expect that at this point many readers will stop reading). In the Great Climate March in Paris there many placards with the slogan “Don’t nuke our climate”, (in English), imported it would seem from the USA after passing the filter of the big donors - the oil companies and the banks. But we also noticed two modest placards reading “Environmentalists for nuclear energy”. We recall that in the USA 19% of the electrical energy is produced in nuclear power stations, and the US is the largest producer of electricity from nuclear energy in the world, producing almost twice as much as in France where 79% of the electricity is nuclear. But, would you believe it, the last time a new nuclear power plant started to operate in the USA was over 40 years ago, many years before the accident in the nuclear power station “Three miles island” in Pennsylvania in 1979. It would seem no easy task to extend the use of nuclear energy for electricity production in a land dominated by oil and coal companies. In recent years the US government, under international pressure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, encouraged the construction of nuclear power stations, and by March 2009 26 applications to build nuclear power plants had been submitted, but the oil and coal companies had the last word. Under pressure from the big power companies and from Congress (especially after Fukushima) all applications were either rejected by legislation or withdrawn. Nuclear energy generally arouses apprehension and fears, fanciful and largely irrational, before the unknown and unfamiliar, often stirred up by sensation-mongering media or by groups or individuals having a prescribed agenda. Mankind has developed in an environment in which the flux of cosmic ray particles is greater than 1000 particles per square meter per second. These particles pass through our bodies, day and night, with every particle leaving in its wake a line of destroyed molecules. The human body, and all living creatures, have adapted to this situation and repair the damage that is done (up to a limit). Let us examine the damage done in the last 35 years in accidents in nuclear power stations. In the ‘Three Mile Island’ accident a cloud of radioactive material escaped into the atmosphere. A commission of experts (the Kemeny Commission) found that “there would be no cancer cases (or other damage to health), or else the damage would be so marginal that it wouldn’t show up in the measurements”. Chernobyl and Fukushima The most serious accident took place in Chernobyl in the Ukraine in 1986. The nuclear reactor was of the “first generation’, and had a built-in flaw – if the temperature of the reactor rose, the activity of the reactor also rose, causing a further rise in temperature - so that the reactor was inherently unstable. If the control rods were removed (as indeed they were!), it was only a matter of time before the reactor exploded. A second flaw was the absence of a steel or concrete containment dome covering the reactor, aimed at preventing the escape of radioactive fission products in the case of reactor failure. We note that no first generation reactors have been built since 1972. Much misleading information has been published on the Chernobyl disaster, but in 2005 a comprehensive review was published by the Chernobyl Forum, comprising 8 professional UN agencies including the World Health Organization (WHO), the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR). Among their conclusions we find: • By mid-2005 there were less than 50 deaths caused directly by radiation from the damaged reactor, most of those affected being rescue workers exposed to large radiation doses, and many of them dying within a few months after the accident. • Some 100,000 people live in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia in areas declared by the authorities as “areas of strict control”. The existing “zoning” definitions need to be revisited and relaxed in the light of the new findings. • About 4000 cases of thyroid cancer, mainly in children and adolescents at the time of the accident, have resulted from the accident’s contamination and at least nine children died of thyroid cancer; however the survival rate among such cancer victims has been almost 99%. [Remark: The principal radioactive material to which people were exposed was Iodine-131 (whose half-life is 8 days), which was absorbed mainly by children who drank contaminated milk. We note that in Poland, Germany and other European countries – and later in Fukushima – people took (ordinary) iodine tablets in order to saturate the thyroid with iodine to prevent absorption of the radioactive iodine. In Fukushima we haven’t heard of a single case of a child becoming ill with thyroid cancer. - C.A.] • In the radiation contaminated zone… no evidence of decreased fertility among the affected population has been found, nor has there been any evidence of increases in congenital malformations that can be attributed to radiation exposure. • Persistent myths and misperceptions about the threat of radiation have resulted in “paralyzing fatalism” among residents of affected areas. “In most areas the problems are economic and psychological, not health or environmental”. As to Fukushima, in the report of the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) on April 2, 2014, one learns that “the scientists found no evidence which supports the claim that the melt-down of the nuclear core in Japan in 2011 will lead to an increase in the incidence of cancer cases or in the number of genetic mutations. Not one of the workers in the plant died of acute radiation poisoning.” Nevertheless, despite the facts, part of the media has endeavored, and succeeded, to arouse panic and mass hysteria in the general public with regard to anything nuclear. One Internet newspaper, ENE-News, for instance (27.12.2013), wrote an article under the headline: “Experts say that the victims in Fukushima will include up to 600,000 deaths, more than 100,000 still-births and more than 100,000 births of babies with genetic deformations.” A correspondent of the newspaper Asia News (18.2.2011) remarks (discretely) with regard to this anti-nuclear crusade: “The mass media…exaggerates to the point that one could think that somebody has an interest to arouse panic in the public…facts no longer have any influence in the face of metaphysical fear and terror. But behold, somebody is trying to do just that.” We leave to the reader to guess to whom he is referring. What remains for us is to compare the death toll caused by the use of nuclear energy to generate electricity with that due to the use of coal. The World Health Organization (WHO), 2009, estimates that a million people die every year from atmospheric pollution caused by burning coal. Compare this to the 63 people who have died throughout the period 1952-2011 from radiation in nuclear power stations, including Chernobyl, and we see that even without the consideration of preventing our planet from being ‘fried’ because of greenhouse gases, we must replace coal (and other fossil fuels) by nuclear energy as our basic source of electrical power. Summary It is doubtful whether the planet Earth will be able to escape the uncontrolled melting of ice at the poles or the discharge of the ‘methane gun’ from the polar sea floors or from the frozen earth in the north – which will inevitably lead to the extinction of species, among them possibly the human species. What is certain is that the continued pumping of huge quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere can only reduce our chances of survival, and increase the probability that our planet will become a hell like the planet Venus. As we have seen, the first condition to limit and perhaps even to reduce the amount of atmospheric greenhouse gases is to go over to nuclear energy as the basis of the world’s energy economy. Let us not flee from a remedy (late as it is) to the disease which is threatening our very existence, but demand that nuclear reactors be built with (existing) technology that will avoid accidents like those that occurred in Chernobyl and Fukushima, and with (existing) technology which uses and burns the long-lived nuclear waste which we find so frightening. Haifa, October 2014 https://facebook/582185255259960/photos/a.582190988592720.1073741828.582185255259960/582190861926066
Posted on: Wed, 29 Oct 2014 21:04:16 +0000
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