During the last ice age, temperatures over central Greenland swung wildly.
One night at North GRIP, I interviewed Steffensen in the geodesic dome. It was midnight but polar day, so outside the sun was shining. The glaciologists were drinking beer, playing board games, and listening to the soundtrack from Buena Vista Social Club.
I brought up the issue of climate change. Perhaps, I suggested hopefully, it would ward off another ice age and more D–O events. At least we could dodge that particular disaster!
Steffensen was unimpressed by my suggestion. He pointed out that if you believed the climate to be inherently unstable, the last thing you’d want to do is mess around with it. He recited an old Danish saying, whose pertinence I didn’t entirely understand but which nonetheless stuck with me. He translated it as, “Pissing in your pants will only keep you warm for so long.”
We got to talking about climate history and human history. In Steffensen’s view, these amounted to more or less the same thing. “If you look at the output of ice cores, it has really changed the picture of the world, our view of past climates and of human evolution,” he told me. “Why did human beings not make civilization fifty thousand years ago?
“You know that they had just as big brains as we have today,” he went on. “When you put it in a climatic framework, you can say, well, it was the ice age. And also this ice age was so climatically unstable that each time you had the beginnings of a culture, they had to move. Then comes the present interglacial—ten thousand years of very stable climate. The perfect conditions for agriculture. 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.”
* * *
—
I was contemplating another trip to Greenland, where Steffensen and his colleagues were drilling a new ice core, when COVID-19 hit. Suddenly everyone’s plans were upended, including my own. As borders closed and flights were canceled, travel to the ice sheet—or, for that matter, pretty much anywhere—became impractical. Here I was, trying to finish a book about the world spinning out of control, only to find the world spinning so far out of control that I couldn’t finish the book.
Scientists are still trying to puzzle out what caused the wild temperature swings first glimpsed in the Camp Century core. One hypothesis is that they are related to a loss of sea ice in the Arctic, which is worrisome, given that global warming is causing a loss of sea ice in the Arctic. But even putting aside the possibility of a human-induced D–O event, the calm of the last ten thousand years is clearly coming to an end. Without intending to, or even realizing it, humanity has used the stability it lucked into to create Greenland-scale instability.
Since 1990, temperatures on the ice sheet have risen by almost 3°C (more than 5°F). During the same period, ice loss from Greenland has increased sevenfold, from thirty billion tons a year to an average of more than two hundred fifty billion tons a year. Melt is occurring over more and more area and at higher and higher elevations: during an exceptionally warm couple of days in the summer of 2019, melting was detected on more than ninety-five percent of the ice sheet’s surface. That summer—a record-breaker—Greenland shed almost six hundred billion tons of ice, producing enough water to fill a pool the size of California to a depth of four feet.
“The current Arctic is experiencing rates of warming comparable to abrupt changes, or D–O events, recorded in Greenland ice cores,” a team of Danish and Norwegian scientists recently reported. Since the melt process is self-reinforcing—water is dark and absorbs sunlight, while ice is light-colored and reflects it—there’s widespread concern that 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.
As with temperatures, sea levels have in the past varied dramatically. At the end of the Wisconsin, as the great ice sheets were breaking up, there were periods when they rose at the astonishing rate of a foot a decade. (It’s been proposed that one of these “meltwater pulses” inspired the account of the deluge in Genesis.) Obviously, our ancestors dealt with this tumult, or we wouldn’t be here. But, in contrast to us, they traveled light. How—and where—would you relocate a city like Boston or Mumbai or Shenzhen? Private ownership, national boundaries, subway lines, transmission cables, sewage pipes—all these are relatively recent developments in human society, and they all militate against picking up and moving. In this sense, just about every coastal city is, like New Orleans, committed to stasis and to the costly and increasingly elaborate interventions that maintaining stasis will require. To combat rising sea levels and the more deadly storm surges that they bring, the Army Corps of Engineers has proposed building a series of artificial islands in New York Harbor. These would be connected by six miles of huge retractable gates. An early cost estimate for the project ran to more than $100 billion. Alternatively, it’s been proposed that sea-level rise could be slowed by propping up Antarctic ice shelves or by blocking the mouth of one of Greenland’s largest outlet glaciers, the Jakobshavn ice stream.
“We understand the hesitancy to interfere with glaciers,” the authors of this proposal—scientists from the United States and Finland—observed in Nature. “As glaciologists, we know the pristine beauty of these places.” But “if the world does nothing, ice sheets will keep shrinking and the losses will accelerate. Even if greenhouse-gas emissions are slashed, which looks unlikely, it would take decades for the climate to stabilize.”
First you speed up an ice stream; then you try to slow it down by erecting a three-hundred-foot-tall, three-mile-long concrete-topped embankment.
* * *
—
This has been a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems. In the course of reporting it, I spoke to engineers and genetic engineers, biologists and microbiologists, atmospheric scientists and atmospheric entrepreneurs. Without exception, they were enthusiastic about their work. But, as a rule, this enthusiasm was tempered by doubt. The electric fish barriers, the concrete crevasse, the fake cavern, the synthetic clouds—these were presented to me less in a spirit of techno-optimism than what might be called techno-fatalism. They weren’t improvements on the originals; they were the best that anyone could come up with, given the circumstances. As one replicant in Blade Runner says to Harrison Ford, who may or may not be playing a replicant: “You think I’d be working in a place like this if I could afford a real snake?”
It’s in this context that interventions like assisted evolution and gene drives and digging millions of trenches to bury billions of trees have to be assessed. Geoengineering may be “entirely crazy and quite disconcerting,” but if it could slow the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, or take some of “the pain and suffering away,” or help prevent no-longer-fully-natural ecosystems from collapsing, doesn’t it have to be considered?
Andy Parker is the project director for the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative, which works to expand the “global conversation” around geoengineering. 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.”
But to imagine that “dimming the fucking sun” could be less dangerous than not dimming it, you have to imagine not only that the technology will work according to plan but also that it will be deployed according to plan. And that’s a lot of imagining. As Keutsch, Keith, and Schrag
all pointed out to me, scientists can only make recommendations; implementation is a political decision. You might hope that such a decision would be made equitably with respect to those alive today and to future generations, both human and nonhuman. But let’s just say the record here isn’t strong. (See, for example, climate change.)
Suppose that the world—or just a small group of assertive nations—launched a fleet of SAILs. And suppose that even as the SAILs are flying and lofting more and more tons of particles, global emissions continue to rise. The result would not be a return to the climate of pre-industrial days or to that of the Pliocene or even that of the Eocene, when crocodiles basked on Arctic shores. It would be an unprecedented climate for an unprecedented world, where silver carp glisten under a white sky.
To my boys
Acknowledgments
This book could not have been written without a lot of help. I am deeply grateful to the many people who shared with me their expertise, their experiences, and their time.
For help understanding how Asian carp got to the United States and where they’re going, I’d like to thank Margaret Frisbie, Mike Alber, and the Friends of the Chicago River, who took me on a wonderful adventure on City Living. I also want to thank Chuck Shea, Kevin Irons, Philippe Parola, Clint Carter, Duane Chapman, Robin Calfee, Anita Kelly, Drew Mitchell, and Mike Freeze. Thanks, too, to Tracy Seidemann and the Illinois DNR biologists and contract fishermen who put up with me and my endless questions.
Owen Bordelon kindly (and expertly) flew me over Plaquemines Parish, and David Muth and Jacques Hebert helped make that happen. Clint Willson, Rudy Simoneaux, Brad Barth, Alex Kolker, Boyo Billiot, Chantel Comardelle, Jeff Hebert, Joe Harvey, and Chuck Perrodin were all great guides to the complexities of life along the Mississippi.
The people working to keep the desert fishes of the United States alive deserve a special kind of gratitude. Thanks to Kevin Wilson, Jenny Gumm, Olin Feuerbacher, Ambre Chaudoin, Jeff Goldstein, and Brandon Senger, who took me pupfish-counting at Devils Hole. Thanks, too, to Kevin Guadalupe, who showed me Nevada’s poolfish and without whom there might not have been any to show, and to Susan Sorrells, who has worked so hard to keep the Shoshone pupfish alive. I am grateful, too, to Kevin Brown, who shared with me his report on the history of Devils Hole.
Ruth Gates passed away when I was midway through this book. I feel very fortunate to have been able to spend time with her on Moku o Lo‘e and for her help when I was just beginning to conceive of this project. I am also extremely grateful to Madeleine van Oppen and to all of the other dedicated marine scientists I met when I was in Australia, including Kate Quigley, David Wachenfeld, Annie Lamb, Patrick Buerger, and Wing Chan. Thanks, too, to Paul Hardisty and Marie Roman.
Mark Tizard and Caitlin Cooper were incredibly generous to me when I visited them in Geelong. Paul Thomas was equally so when I went to visit him in Adelaide. Genetic engineering is an immensely complicated topic, and I thank all three of them for so patiently explaining their work to me. Lin Schwarzkopf very kindly took me toad hunting. Thanks to Royden Saah at GBIRd, and many thanks to Luana Maroja, at Williams College, who generously helped me with the finer points of gene drive.
I was very lucky to visit the Hellisheiði Power Station with Edda Aradóttir despite the restrictions imposed by COVID. Thanks to her and also to Ólöf Baldursdóttir for making that happen. Klaus Lackner was a wonderful host when I met with him at ASU. Jan Wurzbacher, Louise Charles, and Paul Ruser were generous with their time when I visited Zurich. Gratitude to Oliver Geden, Zeke Hausfather, and Magnús Bernhardsson.
I went to talk to Frank Keutsch, David Keith, and Dan Schrag at Harvard just a few days before the entire campus shut down due to COVID. I want to thank them all for taking the time to walk me through the many complexities—both technical and ethical—of solar geoengineering. Thanks to Allison Macfarlane, who, in a very real sense, walked onto these pages, and also to Lizzie Burns, Zhen Dai, Sir David King, Andy Parker, Gernot Wagner, Janos Pasztor, and Cynthia Scharf.
In a roundabout sort of way, this book owes its origins to the visit I paid to North GRIP when it still existed. Thanks to J. P. Steffensen, Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, Richard Alley, and the many intrepid glaciologists who are working to understand the past and the future of the Greenland ice sheet. Thanks, too, to Ned Kleiner, my favorite climate scientist, who read and commented on key chapters, and to Aaron and Matthew Kleiner, who offered crucial last-minute advice.
I am grateful to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for its generous assistance. A grant from the foundation supported research and travel for this book and allowed me to report from places I otherwise might not have been able to go. In 2019, I spent a month working on this project at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. The setting was amazing and the company inspiring. Parts of this book were also written while I was a fellow at the Williams College Center for Environmental Studies. A shout-out to the students and faculty at CES. A special thanks to Walton Ford, whose great auk provided inspiration in dark times.
Many people worked under a tight deadline to turn the manuscript I submitted into a book. Heartfelt thanks to Caroline Wray, Simon Sullivan, Evan Camfield, Kathy Lord, Janice Ackerman, Alicia Cheng, Sarah Gephart, Ian Keliher, and the team at MGMT Design. I am indebted to Julie Tate, who fact-checked several of these chapters, and to the fact-checking team at The New Yorker. Any errors that remain are entirely my own.
Sections of this book first appeared in The New Yorker. I am profoundly grateful to David Remnick, Dorothy Wickenden, John Bennet, and Henry Finder for their counsel and support over lo these many years.
Gillian Blake never lost faith in this project despite the complexities that arose along the way. I can’t thank her enough for her encouragement, her editorial advice, and her good judgment. Kathy Robbins was, as always, a great friend. An author could not ask for a more discerning reader or a more stalwart advocate.
Finally, I want to thank my husband, John Kleiner. To borrow from Darwin, this book came half out of his brain, and I’m not sure how to acknowledge this sufficiently “without saying so in so many words.” Not a single page of this would have been written without his insight, his enthusiasm, and his willingness to read yet another draft.
Notes
Down the River
1
“the grimmest and most dead-earnest of reading matter”: Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, reprint ed. (New York: Penguin Putnam, 2001), 54.
“Going up that river”: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer, reprint ed. (New York: Signet Classics, 1950), 102.
Water in Chicago River: The New York Times (Jan. 14, 1900), 14.
became known as the Chicago School of Earth Moving: Libby Hill, The Chicago River: A Natural and Unnatural History (Chicago: Lake Claremont Press, 2000), 127.
an island more than fifty feet high and a mile square: Cited in Hill, The Chicago River, 133.
transformed more than half the ice-free land on earth: Roger LeB. Hooke and José F. Martín-Duque, “Land Transformation by Humans: A Review,” GSA Today, 22 (2012), 4–10.
felt all the way in Des Moines: Katy Bergen, “Oklahoma Earthquake Felt in Kansas City, and as Far as Des Moines and Dallas,” The Kansas City Star (Sept. 3, 2016), kansascity.com/news/local/article99785512.html.
“humans and livestock outweigh all vertebrates combined”: Yinon M. Bar-On, Rob Phillips, and Ron Milo, “The Biomass Distribution on Earth,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115 (2018), 6506–6511.
to disguise the project’s true purpose: “Historical Vignette 113—Hide the Development of the Atomic Bomb,” U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Headquarters, usace.army.mil/About/History/Historical-Vignettes/Military-Construction-Combat/113-Atomic-Bomb/.
The Corps considered more than a dozen: P. Moy, C. B. Shea, J. M. Dettmers, and I. Po
lls, “Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal Aquatic Nuisance Species Dispersal Barriers,” report available for download at: glpf.org/funded-projects/aquatic-nuisance-species-dispersal-barrier-for-the-chicago-sanitary-and-ship-canal/.
“ruin our way of life”: Quoted in Thomas Just, “The Political and Economic Implications of the Asian Carp Invasion,” Pepperdine Policy Review, 4 (2011), digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/ppr/vol4/iss1/3.
“the first documented example of integrated polyculture”: Patrick M. Kočovský, Duane C. Chapman, and Song Qian, “ ‘Asian Carp’ Is Societally and Scientifically Problematic. Let’s Replace It,” Fisheries, 43 (2018), 311–316.
almost fifty billion pounds in 2015 alone: Figures from the China Fisheries Yearbook 2016, cited in Louis Harkell, “China Claims 69m Tons of Fish Produced in 2016,” Undercurrent News (Jan. 19, 2017), undercurrentnews.com/2017/01/19/ministry-of-agriculture-china-produced-69m-tons-of-fish-in-2016/.
whose working title was The Control of Nature: William Souder, On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson (New York: Crown, 2012), 280.
“The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance”: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 40th anniversary ed. (New York: Mariner, 2002), 297.
the first documented shipment of Asian carp: Andrew Mitchell and Anita M. Kelly, “The Public Sector Role in the Establishment of Grass Carp in the United States,” Fisheries, 31 (2006), 113–121.
the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission found a use: Anita M. Kelly, Carole R. Engle, Michael L. Armstrong, Mike Freeze, and Andrew J. Mitchell, “History of Introductions and Governmental Involvement in Promoting the Use of Grass, Silver, and Bighead Carps,” in Invasive Asian Carps in North America, Duane C. Chapman and Michael H. Hoff, eds. (Bethesda, Md.: American Fisheries Society, 2011), 163–174.
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