Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

by Elizabeth Kolbert

People have, by now, directly transformed more than half the ice-free land on earth—some twenty-seven million square miles—and indirectly half of what remains. We have dammed or diverted most of the world’s major rivers. Our fertilizer plants and legume crops fix more nitrogen than all terrestrial ecosystems combined, and our planes, cars, and power stations emit about a hundred times more carbon dioxide than volcanoes do.

And what’s happening to Plaquemines is happening all along the coast. Since the 1930s, Louisiana has shrunk by more than two thousand square miles. If Delaware or Rhode Island had lost that much territory, America would have only forty-nine states. Every hour and a half, Louisiana sheds another football field’s worth of land. Every few minutes, it drops a tennis court’s worth.

Whoa

Prominently displayed on one of the walls of the center is a maxim attributed to Albert Einstein: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

To match the pace of land loss, the state would have to churn out a new BA-39 every nine days. Meanwhile, with the drill removed, the pumps unplugged, and the pipes carted off, the artificial marsh had already begun to dewater and subside. According to the authority’s projections, in another decade, BA-39 will once again have sunk away.

“If this were a natural crevasse, I’d be all for it,” he said. “But when we as humans intervene, it rarely turns out well. That’s why we are where we are today.”

When you’re in the city, it’s hard to imagine the entire place sinking underneath you, yet it is. A recent study that relied on satellite data found some parts of New Orleans dropping by almost half a foot a decade. “That’s one of the fastest rates on earth,” Kolker noted.

But New Orleans’s world-class drainage system, like its world-class levee system, is a sort of Trojan solution. Since marshy soils compact through dewatering, pumping water out of the ground exacerbates the very problem that needs to be solved. The more water that’s pumped, the faster the city sinks. And the more it sinks, the more pumping is required.

Proposals to allow parts of the city to revert to water were floated and then, one by one, rejected. Retreat might make geophysical sense, but politically it was a nonstarter.

Post-KatRina

Since the close of the crevasse period, land loss to the south has brought the city some twenty miles closer to the Gulf. It’s been estimated that for every three miles a storm has to travel over land, its surge is reduced by a foot. If this is the case, then the threat to New Orleans has grown seven feet higher.

I was struck, and not for the first time, by how much easier it is to ruin an ecosystem than to run one.

There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount, a perfect ratio of water to rock, of water to sand, insuring that wide, free, open, generous spacing among plants and animals, homes and towns and cities, which makes the arid West so different from any other part of the nation. There is no lack of water here, unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.

But for whatever reason—call it biophilia, call it care for God’s creation, call it heart-stopping fear—people are reluctant to be the asteroid.

“Really what I am is a futurist,” she said at another point. “Our project is acknowledging that a future is coming where nature is no longer fully natural.”

By the time it ended, the following year, more than ninety percent of the Great Barrier Reef had been affected and something like half its corals had perished.

The Great Barrier Reef isn’t a reef so much as a collection of reefs—some three thousand in all—that stretches over one hundred thirty-five thousand square miles, an area larger than Italy. If there’s a more spectacular place on earth—or collection of places—I’m unaware of it.

At these latitudes, there’s not much mixing between the top and the bottom layers of the water column, and essential nutrients, like nitrogen and phosphorus, are in short supply. (The reason the water in the tropics is often so marvelously clear is that little can survive in it.)

Everyone I spoke to in Australia understood that preserving the Great Barrier Reef in all its greatness was beyond what could realistically—or unrealistically—be hoped for. Even settling for a tenth of it would mean shading and robotically seeding an area the size of Switzerland.

The history of biological interventions designed to correct for previous biological interventions reads like Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, in which the Cat, after eating cake in the bathtub, is asked to clean up after himself:

Paul Kingsnorth, a British writer and activist, has put it this way: “We are as gods, but we have failed to get good at it…We are Loki, killing the beautiful for fun. We are Saturn, devouring our children.”

Kingsnorth has also observed, “Sometimes doing nothing is better than doing something. Sometimes it is the other way around.”

“We know that rocks, they store CO2,” she told me. “They’re actually one of the biggest reservoirs of carbon on earth. The idea is to imitate and accelerate this process to fight global climate change.”

In 1776, the first year Watt marketed his invention, humans emitted some fifteen million tons of CO2. By 1800, that figure had risen to thirty million tons. By 1850 it had increased to two hundred million tons a year and by 1900 to almost two billion. Now, the figure is close to forty billion tons annually.

So much have we altered the atmosphere that one out of every three molecules of CO2 loose in the air today was put there by people.

One evening in the early 1990s, Lackner was having a beer with a friend, Christopher Wendt, who’s also a physicist. The two got to wondering why, as Lackner put it to me, “nobody’s doing these really crazy, big things anymore.” This led to more questions and more conversations (and possibly also more beers).

“Sometimes by thinking through this extreme endpoint you learn a lot,”

Lackner came to believe that, unwittingly, humanity had already committed itself to carbon dioxide removal. “I think that we’re in a very uncomfortable situation,” he told me. “I would argue that if technologies to pull CO2 out of the environment fail, then we’re in deep trouble.”

One of the reasons we’ve had such trouble addressing the carbon problem, he contends, is the issue has acquired an ethical charge.

Another family of negative-emissions technologies, or NETs,

A recent study by Swiss researchers estimated that planting a trillion trees could remove two hundred billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere over the next several decades. Other researchers argued that this figure overstated the case by a factor of ten or even more. Nevertheless, they observed, the capacity of new forests to sequester carbon was “still substantial.”

According to a recent study by a team of German scientists, to remove a billion tons of CO2 through “enhanced weathering,” approximately three billion tons of basalt would have to be mined, crushed, and transported. “While this is a very large amount” of rock to mine, grind, and ship, the authors noted, it is less than global coal production, which totals some eight billion tons per year.

“We have this integrated CO2 problem that you can’t do anything about very quickly. So if there’s pressure from the public to do something fast, my concern is that there will be no tools at hand other than stratospheric geoengineering. And if we start doing research at that point, I am concerned it’s too late, because with stratospheric geoengineering, you’re interfering with a highly complex system. I will add that there are a number of people who do not agree with this.

“The best possible material probably is diamond,” Keutsch told me. “Diamonds really will not absorb any energy. So this would minimize the change in stratospheric dynamics. And diamond itself is extremely unreactive. The idea that this is expensive—I don’t care about that. If we had to engineer this on a big scale because it solves a big problem, we would figure out a way to do it.” Shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere struck me as magical, like sprinkling the world with pixie dust.

The first government report on global warming—though the phenomenon was not yet called “global warming”—was delivered to President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. “Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment,” it asserted. The result of burning fossil fuels would, almost certainly, be “significant changes in the temperature,” which would, in turn, lead to other changes.

Whoa, didnt know this

Considering “the extraordinary economic and human importance of climate, costs of this magnitude do not seem excessive,” the report concluded.

“If we want everything to remain as it is, everything must change.”

During the period of “overshoot,” a great many people will suffer and changes that are, for all intents and purposes, irreversible may occur, like the demise of the Great Barrier Reef.

“Moving away from the kind of monomania that says, ‘The only thing we can do is cut emissions,’ or the more narrow version, which says, ‘The only thing we can do is renewables,’ I think may actually secure broader political agreement to deal with the problem. People might be more willing to spend the big money to cut emissions as part of a project that, overall, wasn’t going to just limit the damage but was actually going to make the world better.”

To deploy a fleet of SAILs would cost another $20 billion or so per decade. Again, this is nothing to sneeze at, but the world now spends more than three hundred times that amount every year on fossil-fuel subsidies.

the effect would be like opening a globe-sized oven door. All the warming that had been masked would suddenly manifest itself in a rapid and dramatic temperature run-up, a phenomenon that’s become known as “termination shock.”

Number 28 is “do humans have the right to do this?”

If we stop CO2 emissions tomorrow, which, of course, is impossible, it’s still going to warm at least for centuries, because the ocean hasn’t equilibrated. That’s just basic physics. We’re not sure how much additional warming that is, but it could easily be another seventy percent beyond what we’ve experienced. So in that sense, we’re already at 2°C. We’re going to be lucky to stop at 4°C.

“The idea that somehow research on solar geoengineering is going to open Pandora’s box, I think that’s just unbelievably naïve,” Schrag said. “Do you really believe that the U.S. military or the Chinese military haven’t thought about this? Come on! They’ve done cloud-seeding for rain. This is not a new idea, and it’s not a secret.

One way to gloss the Camp Century story is as another Anthropocene allegory. Man sets out to “conquer his environment.” He congratulates himself for his resourcefulness and derring-do, only to find the walls closing in. Drive out nature with a snowblower, yet she will always hurry back.

Like all glaciers, the Greenland ice sheet is made up entirely of accumulated snow.

All of civilization falls within this period of relative tranquility, and so this sort of calm is what we take to be the norm. It’s an understandable mistake, but still a mistake. Over the last hundred and ten thousand years, the only period as stable as our own is our own.

If you look at it, it’s amazing. Civilizations in Persia, in China, and in India start at the same time, maybe six thousand years ago. They all developed writing and they all developed religion and they all built cities, all at the same time, because the climate was stable. I think that if the climate would have been stable fifty thousand years ago, it would have started then. But they had no chance.”

“The current Arctic is experiencing rates of warming comparable to abrupt changes, or D–O events, recorded in Greenland ice cores,”

Greenland may be approaching the point beyond which the disintegration of the entire ice sheet becomes inevitable. This could take centuries—even millennia—to play out, but, all told, there’s enough ice on Greenland to raise global sea levels by twenty feet.

This has been a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems.

His preferred drug analogy for the technology is chemotherapy. No one in his right mind would undergo chemotherapy were better options available. “We live in a world,” he has said, “where deliberately dimming the fucking sun might be less risky than not doing it.”