by Bill Nye
I was there long enough to watch the drilling crew get past the relatively low density “firn,” firmly packed yet obviously still-porous snow. I was helping (or trying to help) as a core from the year 1889 came up. All the researchers immediately recognized that layer as the core was laid out on the measuring bench; that is how well they have come to know the ice. I could see a distinctive, thin hard line indicating that it had been a particularly warm year. As I write, using the ice and a great amount of data gathered from around the world, 2016 was shown to be the warmest year on record. It’s part of the 250-year postindustrial trend. The ice carries proof of humankind’s global reach.
After the first day of drilling of the season, we all shared shots from a bottle of excellent Scottish whiskey, celebrating a new line (or cylinder) of research and a challenging job begun. When pieces of ice from great depths are brought up to the drilling workspace, the embedded air is ready to burst out with the force of the released pressure. It’s fun to grab some of the waste ice chips that are held in the outer barrel of the drill and put them in your glass of Scotch or whiskey. The ice sizzles as compressed bubbles from Earth’s long-ago atmosphere reemerge after thousands of years.
The most important thing to know about EGRIP research is that it does not merely record the past. It also provides ground truth (ice truth?) about what to expect in the future. It pits all the ideas and spurious theories purported to show that humans aren’t affecting the climate against cold, hard, absolutely irrefutable evidence. Along with the scary proof of modern human-caused climate change is another very frightening phenomenon. The Greenland ice contains detailed evidence of what ice researchers are calling “abrupt climate change.” Now, people, this is serious. Over very short periods, snowfall and rainfall patterns changed. Storm patterns changed. Ocean currents changed. We’re not talking about “short” on a geologic timescale. We’re talking about substantial climate shifts unfolding over decades, or even just a few years. If one of these abrupt climate-change events happened when you were born, by the time you graduated from high school, the land where your food had been grown might be completely barren. Can agricultural systems be moved fast enough to feed everyone? It’s a disturbing scenario described to me by climatologist Jim White of the University of Colorado. These abrupt events can happen embedded in what we perceive as the slow overall pace of natural processes. Today we are poking at the Earth’s climate system much faster than any natural phenomenon you can think of. At some point we may well run into one of those abrupt transitions in the climate system, and we don’t know when. What the computer models cannot (yet) predict is in some ways even more frightening than what they can.
Ice ages are dramatic examples of just how extreme climate change can be. We are living more than 10,000 years since the last great cold spell, but evidence of past ice ages is still all over the place. I went to college in Ithaca, New York, which is on Cayuga Lake. My first job out of engineering school was with Boeing in Seattle, which is on Lake Washington. My high school pal Brian lives in Cleveland, which is on the shore of Lake Erie. All these bodies of water were carved by glaciers. Cayuga Lake, like the rest of the Finger Lakes, runs north and south, as does Lake Washington. They all track the flow of long-gone sheets of ice scraping down from the cold, cold north. As those sheets moved, they carved out lowlands that became the lakes. The Great Lakes were formed from “dead ice”—enormous chunks of glacier that had stopped flowing downhill, their massive weight pressing down into valleys that had been gouged and enlarged by the once-moving ice.
The processes that triggered those dramatic events were remarkably subtle. The primary causes of ice ages are changes in the shape of Earth’s orbit, and in the degree and direction of our planet’s tilt relative to the Sun. These changes run in cycles of about 100,000 years, 41,000 years, and 23,000 years, respectively; they are called Milankovitch cycles, after Milutin Milankovitch, the Serbian mathematician who discovered them around 1912. Nowadays, though, the climate is changing much faster than any Milankovitch cycle. Our situation demands urgent, measured action.
When the effects of the cycles combine to put slightly less than average sunlight on the Earth’s surface, our planet cools a little. When the cycles align to deliver more sunlight, the Earth warms a little. The chemistry and circulation of the oceans amplifies these effects. When the Earth warms, the oceans release some of their dissolved carbon dioxide and water evaporates more quickly from the ocean; added CO2 and water vapor in the air exacerbate the warming. Conversely, when the Milankovitch cycles combine to deliver less sunlight, Earth cools a little, the ocean absorbs more carbon dioxide, and less water vapor makes its way into the air. That amplifies the cooling and you get an ice age.
To get a proper nerd perspective on climate change, what you would really want to do is run experiments on the planet to see how it behaves—to study cause and effect. We can’t do that, so we build computer models and compare their output with the data in the ice. We see if we can write software that predicts the past and models the facts in the ice. We can check our assumptions and biases.
Meanwhile, when we look through the ice cores from Greenland and elsewhere, we see abrupt changes in the layers. That is the proof that major changes can happen in less than 20 years. We still don’t know exactly how those changes happen, but we have a damn good idea why: It’s the interplay of temperature, carbon dioxide, ocean currents, water vapor, and the living things that respond to it all. There are a few other important factors, as well. If there is less winter snow and ice, Earth’s surface is darker overall and absorbs more sunshine, which leads to more warming. If more water melts off the Greenland glaciers, that changes the balance between freshwater and saltwater in the Atlantic Ocean, which can alter its circulation pattern. Ocean currents distribute heat around the planet, so any shift there can have great big consequences. These are the processes that humans are tinkering with by burning fossil fuels, clearing forests, and otherwise amplifying Earth’s greenhouse effect. The year 2016 was a milestone: The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide worldwide went above 400 parts per million for the first time in 4 million years. People caused it, and people will pay the price. The main questions are which people, and just how high will that price be?
We are in uncharted territory, which is why it is urgent to start moving toward a carbon-free future—and to start doing it now. The men and women of ice-core research describe Earth as a chaotic system. Roughly put, a chaotic system has inputs and interactions that can lead to unpredictable and sometimes enormous changes as a result of tiny disruptions. You may have heard of the “butterfly effect,” the idea that the flutter of a single butterfly in South America can eventually cause a hurricane to start spinning off the west coast of Africa. Well, we may be facing that kind of effect for real. That is part of the story recorded in the Greenland ice. Humans are taking on the role of the butterfly—but instead of a tiny wing flutter, we are dumping carbon dioxide and methane (an even more powerful greenhouse gas) into the air a million times faster than nature does.
Sometimes the self-proclaimed skeptics point out that climate has always changed. They are right—but only up to a point. It has always changed, but the rate of change that humans are introducing now is unprecedented. You can think of it this way. When you are driving on the highway, you might be going 70 miles per hour. But when you arrive at home, your speed is 0 miles per hour. And look, you are doing just fine. But note well: You could also go from 70 to 0 by crashing into a brick wall at highway speed. That would lead to a bit of a different outcome. Imagine hurtling down the highway with someone else at the wheel. You see a brick wall built right across the road up ahead. You yell, “Hey, slow down.” Then the driver says, “Don’t worry about the brick wall; car speeds are changing all the time.” It ain’t the change that’s the problem, my esteemed colleagues—it’s the rate of change that gets you. It’s very much the same thing with the climate. And imagine, even as the wall approaches, that same
someone further telling you, “Don’t listen to those car-crash experts, they are just trying to get rich with those physics grants.”
These days, it seems as though for every genuine nerd expert, there is someone else peddling false doubt. That’s why we have to work together, do some thoughtful information-filtering, and make the informed voices heard. We need to make sure everyone understands the real situation; the welfare of the planet (and those of us who happen to live on it) hangs in the balance.
While I was up there on the Greenland ice, I got the creeps. And I don’t mean the creeping movements of the ice sheet, which slides about 15 centimeters (6 inches) a day. I mean, my stomach did a flip when I thought about the consequences of the discoveries being made there. As goes Greenland, so goes the rest of the planet. The rise and fall of ice ages recorded in those half-meter (22-inch) EGRIP ice core sections reflect ancient climate changes that were, and may be soon again, buffeting the entire world. The rapid warming now under way will be felt around the world, too. Despite occasional heavy snowfalls, we will probably see more droughts in California, summer heat waves across Europe, and catastrophic flooding in South Asia. There will surely be other butterfly-effect consequences we haven’t even considered yet. This is the tragedy of the commons in the extreme. No single person thought he or she would or could have an effect on the entire planet. But all of us carrying on as we are, with business as usual, will all soon feel the effects in big ways.
Researchers predict and estimate the possible consequences. Drastically altered rainfall patterns may lead to repeated failures of crucial crops—rice, wheat, corn, soybeans, and cotton. Warmer winters could allow insects to spread. They may destroy crops or spread heretofore-tropical diseases like malaria and dengue fever to London, Moscow, Tokyo, and Minneapolis. Major urban areas may run into shortages of drinking water. And without adequate ways to get rid of their sewage, all sorts of diseases may emerge. In the extreme case, climate chaos may unfold in such an unexpected, rapid, catastrophic fashion that it becomes difficult to prepare suitable large-scale responses. Even if the warming unfolds in a more predictable way, such that we can more easily foresee the food shortages, electricity shortages, fires, droughts, heat waves, and sewer system failures, we still probably won’t be able to stop all or even most of them from happening.
Climate change is the great test of our ability to harness critical thinking. So far, we are pretty much flunking this course. We need to do better. We need to pull out the best of everything—data, design, and execution, which will be shaped by our sense of collective responsibility—and get to work. We need to manage our greenhouse gas emissions. We need to provide clean water and reliable, renewably produced electricity for everyone on Earth. We need to hustle because the longer we wait, the worse the problem gets. The time to start is now. This problem is bigger than any one country and any one administration. If our leaders don’t take collective action soon, then we have to become leaders ourselves. If deniers and obstructionists make confusing noises of misinformation, we have to make our nerd voices heard more loudly.
When future generations look back at the record of Greenland ice from the 21st century, I want them to see the year when we sprang into action. A course correction of that magnitude will require a broad, sustained worldwide effort. To save the planet for us humans, we will have to pay attention to our shared interests rather than stumble into chaos as unconnected, self-interested individuals. We have to harness both knowledge and responsibility.
We have to change the world on behalf of all the species—especially our own.
CHAPTER 25
West Virginians and All That Coal
In October 2015, I was invited by the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission to present a lecture about science and the environment in Charleston, West Virginia. A central point of my presentation was the need to embrace clean, renewable energy. This part of my presentation always provokes strong reactions. Sometimes people laugh, and sometimes they nod their heads as I make a serious point. Better yet, perhaps, sometimes they shake their heads in violent disagreement, which means I’m getting a response and maybe even evoking reconsideration. I was prepared for plenty of the hostile variety of head-shaking when I spoke to the West Virginia crowd. This is coal country, after all, and I have some highly critical things to say about the black rock.
For those of you who haven’t visited Charleston, it is a beautiful place, much in keeping with the state song, John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” Then you drive down a genuine, postcard-perfect example of a country road and immediately lay eyes on—an aggressive coal-mining operation. Gazing down from the airplane on my flight in, I saw enormous open gray rocky areas, like barren islands in a sea of green trees. In some places the gray completely dominated, as if someone had dumped an enormous bucket of industrial paint over the landscape. All around there were muddy lakes, patches so drab that I wasn’t sure they held any water at all until I caught sunlight glinting off them. And those lakes aren’t clean water; they are tailing ponds—giant outdoor slop buckets of mining fluids.
To anybody with even a hint of environmental sensitivity, the scene would evoke despair. How could we have destroyed so much forest? How could we dig up ancient toxins and leave them sitting there on the ground? How could we have wrought such devastation on those gorgeous forests and Appalachian peaks in the span of less than 2 centuries? We built roads, ships, factories, and cities with the fossil fuel energy, but many of the people who once loved the land can no longer live upon it. No farming or hunting is possible near the human-made lakes of industrial goop, and drinking water is contaminated in many areas. Those long-ago entrepreneurs didn’t understand or didn’t care about the short- and medium-term, let alone long-term, consequences of their actions. Companies came in for enormous profits. Politicians made decisions that protected jobs for the next 2 or 4 years—not the next 20 or 40. Now the only coal that’s left is not so high quality, nor is it so easy to remove. The ends that justified these means are fading away, as clear an example of short-term gain in exchange for long-term loss as you’ll ever see.
I tried to maintain historical perspective as I contemplated that bleak scene. The whole-scale alteration of the natural landscape is a testament to technological innovation and the power of human industrial might. Earlier generations of nerds figured out how to harness the chemical energy stored in the once-living green plants of ancient swamplands—plants that got buried millions of years ago, compressed, transformed by heat, and converted into coal. Industrial-age innovators came up with ways to extract the coal, using it to power steam engines or converting its stored energy into the fossil fuel–powered electricity that drives so much of our modern world. Those were true nerd-genius moves. Many of those long-ago scientists and engineers were following the best design practices and working with the best-available information. They were trying to make a better world, too. Ultimately, theirs was a short-term solution. We have to change.
For about 2 centuries, the guiding approach in the industrialized world was essentially: dig, dig, dig. Burn, burn, burn! Earth’s natural resources looked enormous compared to human demands. As many a stranded driver has experienced, though, you can run out of gas. It took nature millions of years to create the coal (along with oil and natural gas). Once those resources are gone, they’re not coming back in anyone you know’s lifetime. Sooner or later we’ll have to turn to the new, better energy sources available to us—and the longer we wait, the worse things will be for everyone everywhere. We all share the air . . . But fossil-fuel energy technology is well established, and the profits from burning are solidly guaranteed. There are enormous political and social forces motivating industry to stick with bad energy policies that are based on outmoded perceptions of Earth’s capacity to absorb carbon dioxide.
In this region, as technology advanced, and miners removed the most accessible coal, the mining process got more and more disruptive. Even if you aren’t familia
r with the word, I’m sure you can conjure up a mental picture of an adit, the entrance to a mine. (“Adit” is a traditional crossword puzzle and Latin-class vocabulary word: the opposite or complement of “exit.” Add it to your φ phile.) An old-school coal mine’s adit leads straight into the hill or mountain that contains a coal deposit. The coal layer is often nearly horizontal, a coal “seam,” like the bottom of the calm pond that may have once rippled where the coal was formed millions of years in the past.
You can still see adits and mining tunnels on a tour through West Virginia, but they are relics. Nowadays, supersized mining equipment, shovels, and trucks have taken over. That is one big reason for the 10,000 lost jobs in the last 5 years: mechanization. The modern machines are huge. How huge are they? A dump truck can be three stories tall. Most of the time, it is easier to use these machines to remove the whole mountain than to tunnel into it. Mining companies coined the unsettling term “mountaintop removal” for this new style of getting at the coal. You do not have to be a miner to realize the first big problem: What do you do with the mountaintop itself? What happens to all the wildlife, forest plants, birds, bees, and trees that used to live there before you arrived? What happens to them after you leave?
The answers ain’t pretty. Everywhere the mines are dug, the “overburden”—the entire mountain that used to sit above the coal seam—is crushed and generally dumped into the valleys below. That dumping creates some of the treeless areas you can see from the air. Those areas were once forests with canopies, understories, and floors that provided homes to swarming insects and crafty trout. At the fertile bottom of these valleys is where the streams flow to nourish the wild ecosystem and provide drinking and tooth-brushing water for the humans living nearby. Or rather, it’s where they used to flow. Minerals from the mountain rubble leach into the streams, often rendering them toxic. Local fish and bird populations have taken big hits. People living nearby suffer elevated levels of cancer and heart disease, possibly from toxins in the water and air. And it costs a lot of money to relocate residents whose homes and property have been contaminated or outright destroyed. It ain’t cheap to ruin everything. Mountaintop-removal mining externalizes costs to all of us.