Whole Earth Discipline

by Stewart Brand

  Climate is so full of surprises, it might even surprise us with a hidden stability. Counting on that, though, would be like playing Russian roulette with all the chambers loaded but one.

  • Some climate events are already having an impact on humans. Despite our suppression efforts, forest fires are increasing everywhere because, as one science writer puts it, “with global warming, we don’t get fire; we get fire squared.” Large fires in the drying forests and newly cleared peat bogs (such as those in Indonesia) dump vast quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere, which further warms and dries land vegetation, making it ever more flammable. A 2007 megafire in southern Greece caused the government of the once-popular Costas Karamanlis to fall. Persistent drought in Australia led, in 2007, to a switch from a climate-denialist prime minister to one whose first official act was to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. His administration soon had its own megafires to deal with.

  In Europe, studies show warmer temperatures are moving north at 25 miles a decade, whereas animals and plants are moving north at only 3.75 miles a decade. That’s a formula for extinction. Olive and avocado trees now grow outdoors in London, at Kew Gardens. With the overfished ocean becoming warmer and more acidic, vast swarms of jellyfish are drifting north, killing whole fish farms in the Irish Sea. In Africa, warmth-loving mosquitoes are carrying malaria and dengue fever to higher elevations, and even bringing tropical diseases to southern Europe.

  The glaciers of the Tibetan Plateau, which feed all the rivers of China, north India, and Southeast Asia with meltwater, are now vanishing. Three billion people depend on those rivers. In addition the billion in India live, as they say, “at the whim of the monsoon” for rain. The monsoon in turn lives at the whim of the El Niño cycle, which is being disrupted at the whim of the mid-Pacific trade winds, which are slackening due to ocean warming.

  How human societies will respond to climate calamities remains to be seen. At Global Business Network, we’ve been studying the likely consequences of a growing frequency of extreme events such as the 2003 heat wave that killed thirty-five thousand in France and Italy. Nils Gilman at GBN notes that “while a single extreme event may be relatively easy to withstand, a second in succession is likely to be far more devastating, as normal resiliency measures are built to deal with one but not multiple consecutive extreme events.” Governments, he concludes, “will experience climate change not as a smooth transformation, but rather as a series of radical discontinuities—as a series of bewildering ‘oh shit’ events. Environmentally failed states are a nontrivial possibility.”

  Repetition knocks you down; duration kills you. Complex societies can handle drought, but not multidecade drought. That’s the historic civilization killer, says archaeologist Brian Fagan. It brought down the ancient empires of the Middle East and Central America. When the rains fail, agriculture fails, the cities convulse and empty, and what’s left of the society builds shacks in the ruins of its former glory. In this century, the effects of rising sea levels, catastrophic as they may be, could look temporary and fixable compared to the effects of permanent drought.

  • “We have to understand that the Earth system is now in positive feedback and is moving ineluctably toward the stable state of one of the past hot climates,” atmospheric chemist James Lovelock told a Royal Society audience of scientists in 2007. “I can’t stress too strongly the dangers inherent in systems in positive feedback.”

  Two of Lovelock’s books, The Revenge of Gaia (2007) and The Vanishing Face of Gaia (2009), give the clearest warning yet of the extreme dangers we face and how radical our measures may have to be to deal with them. I’ve learned to trust Lovelock’s judgment ever since 1974, when a magazine I edited, CoEvolution Quarterly, was the first to publish his Gaia hypothesis, coauthored with microbiologist Lynn Margulis. Since then, their idea of Earth as a self-regulating living system “comprised of physical, chemical, biological, and human components” steadily matured from hypothesis into theory; it became formalized as Earth System Science, and it has won Lovelock no end of prizes.

  I phoned Jim Lovelock after his Royal Society talk to get details on why the gentle optimist I’ve known for three decades is so alarmed. “The year 2040 is when the IPCC is estimating that Europe, America, and China become uninhabitable for the growth of food,” he said. “They’re grossly underestimating the rate of temperature rise, so that 2040 may be 2025. People don’t realize how little time we’ve got. The planet really is on the move.”

  “On the move toward what?” I asked.

  He said: “I don’t think there’s much doubt at all now amongst those few of us that have worked on the problem, that the system is in the course of moving to its stable hot state, which is about 5 degrees Celsius globally higher than now. Once it gets there, negative feedback sets in again, and the whole thing stabilizes and regulates quite nicely. What happens is, during that period, the ocean ceases to have any influence on the system, or hardly any. It’s run entirely by the land biota. That’s what happened in the past, anyway. There’s a good deal of geologic evidence; the best evidence comes from the 55-million-years-ago event. The Arctic ocean temperature was about 23° Celsius [73.4° F]—crocodiles swam around in it. The whole damn planet was tropical, probably. And will be again, if it goes on the way it’s going. The equatorial regions were a hell of a lot drier than they are now. You see that already happening.”

  I asked him what might be the human carrying capacity in that hotter, stable Earth. “Oh, I think it’s less than a billion,” he said. “It will be too hot for things to grow.” Then he added: “The earth will continue to move to its hot state almost regardless of what we do. Peter Cox at the Hadley Centre in our country has done some very careful analysis on how little CO2 is needed to start the automatic jump from the cool to the hot state, and it’s an astonishingly and worryingly small quantity. He probably doesn’t want to be quoted. It turns out to be about a quarter of a gigaton of carbon per year. Now that compares with the eight gigatons that we’re actually emitting to the atmosphere. So you’d have to cut back below that level to keep it stable, and you wouldn’t succeed if it’s already on course up towards its hot state. You’re not going to turn it back.”

  • That’s bleak. If the transition to a less livable Earth is already under way, we’re ants on a burning log. We can rush around all we want; there’s nothing in our ant repertoire that can fix the problem.

  But we know a couple of things. We know the worst that can happen. We know that we probably have to extend our repertoire of capabilities to either head it off or live with it. The three broad strategies for dealing with climate change are mitigation, adaptation, and amelioration. Mitigation, cutting back on greenhouse gas emissions, has been called avoiding the unmanageable. Adaptation, then, is managing the unavoidable—moving coastal populations to higher ground, developing drought-tolerant agriculture, preparing for masses of climate refugees, and keeping resource warfare localized. And amelioration is adjusting the nature of the planet itself through large-scale geoengineering.

  Civilization is at risk, but civilization is the problem. The key positive feedback in the current Earth system is us. Accelerating wealth (especially in developing countries these days), a still-growing human population, and accelerating industry are pouring overwhelming quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. As Australian biologist Tim Flannery puts it, “The metabolism of our economy is now on a collision course with the metabolism of our planet.”

  • If Lovelock’s is the worst-case climate scenario—Earth stabilizes at 5°C (9°F) warmer; a fraction of the present human population survives—then what is the best case? What can we hope for? The person with the most realistic numbers is Saul Griffith, a materials scientist and inventor who received a MacArthur “genius” award in 2007. To begin with, he says, “It is not accurate to say, ‘We can still stop climate change.’ We are now working to stop worse climate change or much-worse-than-worse climate change.”

  The most common stat
ement of an achievable goal for dealing with climate these days is leveling off at 450 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 in the atmosphere, so Griffith builds his analysis around that outcome. We are currently at about 387 ppm and rising fast—each year it goes up more than 2 ppm. Griffith reminds everyone that the hope with the 450 ppm goal is that it will involve a global temperature rise of only about 2°C (3.6°F), and that is expected to mean “large loss of species, more severe storms, floods and droughts, refugees from sea level rise, and other unpalatable, expensive and inhumane consequences.”

  A convenient measure of energy generation is the gigawatt: a billion watts. A large coal-fired plant generates a gigawatt of electricity; so does Hoover Dam; so does a nuclear reactor. Multiply that times a thousand, and you have the terawatt—a trillion watts. Humanity currently runs on about 16 terawatts of power, most of it from the burning of fossil fuels. It’s like leaving 160 billion 100-watt lightbulbs on all the time. That’s what is loading the atmosphere with lethal quantities of carbon dioxide. Griffith calculates that, in order to keep the atmospheric concentration of CO2 at no more than 450 ppm, humanity has to do something that is almost unimaginably difficult. We have to cut our fossil fuel use to around 3 terawatts, which means we have to produce all the rest of our power from non-fossil-fuel sources, and we have to do it in about twenty-five years or it will be too late to level off at 450 ppm.

  So, Griffith says, “Imagine someone said you need 2 terawatts of wind, 2 terawatts of photovoltaic solar, 2 terawatts of solar thermal, 2 terawatts of geothermal, 2 terawatts of biofuels, and 3 terawatts of nuclear to give you 13 new clean terawatts. You add the existing 1.5 terawatts of biofuels and nuclear that we already use. You can also get 3 terawatts from coal and oil. That would give humanity around 17.5 terawatts—that allows for a little growth over the 16 terawatts we currently use. What would it take to do all that in 25 years?”

  Here’s the answer: “Two terawatts of photovoltaic would require installing 100 square meters of 15-percent-efficient solar cells every second, second after second, for the next 25 years. (That’s about 1,200 square miles of solar cells a year, times 25 equals 30,000 square miles of photovoltaic cells.) Two terawatts of solar thermal? If it’s 30 percent efficient all told, we’ll need 50 square meters of highly reflective mirrors every second. (Some 600 square miles a year, times 25.) Two terawatts of biofuels? Something like 4 Olympic swimming pools of genetically engineered algae, installed every second. (About 61,000 square miles a year, times 25.) Two terawatts of wind? That’s a 300-foot-diameter wind turbine every 5 minutes. (Install 105,000 turbines a year in good wind locations, times 25.) Two terawatts of geothermal? Build three 100-megawatt steam turbines every day—1,095 a year, times 25. Three terawatts of new nuclear? That’s a 3-reactor, 3-gigawatt plant every week—52 a year, times 25.”

  Add it up, and when you’re done, you’ve got an area about the size of America—“Call it Renewistan,” says Griffith—covered with stuff dedicated to generating humanity’s energy. That’s not counting transmission lines, energy storage, materials, and support infrastructure, plus the costs of shutting down all the coal plants, oil refineries, etc. I asked Saul Griffith if he thinks we can really do it. “Technically,” he said, “it is possible. Industrially, humanity has the collective capacity. But politically, I don’t see how.” Then he added, “But we have to try. Why else bother to be human and be in this game?”

  A tranquil climate, we’re coming to realize, is one of the “ecosystem services” that civilization requires in order to prosper; indeed, to survive. The only nonjumpy period in all of climate history (apart from the vast frozen stillnesses of the nine major ice ages) is the relatively benign “long summer” of the past ten thousand years during which humans developed agriculture, cities, and complex societies. Of course we take a gentle climate for granted; civilization has never experienced anything else.

  How do we value ecosystem services? The usual panoply (food, water, air, energy, drugs, decomposition, delight, and so on) defies economic valuation, but that doesn’t stop people from trying. One ecology textbook puts the number at more than $40 trillion a year, close to the world’s current gross domestic product. The hope seems to be that once we know how to value ecosystem services, we’ll know how to manage ourselves in relation to them.

  Once upon a time, I dreamed that economics would eventually swell up and include ecology, and we would no more be misled by notions of “externalities.” Now I’m not so sure. I recall a friend leaning on me to admit that ecology and economics are the same thing. “No, damn it,” I said. “Ecology is devoid of intention, and economics is made of little else.” (I suspect that my friend was on to something, though, because economics enthusiasts and ecology enthusiasts share an affliction. Conservatives think that the self-organizing properties of a market economy are a miracle that must not be messed with. Greens think that the self-organizing properties of ecologies are a miracle that must not be messed with.)

  In one of the most influential Green books, Natural Capitalism (1999), Paul Hawken and Amory Lovins propose replacing industrial capitalism, which “liquidates its [natural] capital and calls it income,” with a natural capitalism based on higher efficiency in everything, biology-inspired industrial processes, a focus on services instead of products, and restoration of the all-sustaining envelope of natural systems. It’s a good book with a helpful metaphor.

  • But I find it more fruitful to think of ecosystem services as infrastructure. A bridge is infrastructure, and so is the river under it. Both support our life, and both require maintenance, which has to be paid for somehow. Radio spectrum is infrastructure, and so is an intact ozone layer. Both support our life, and both require international agreements to avert a “tragedy of the commons.”

  Between headlong industrial capitalism and a necessarily patient natural capitalism is a pace gap that is hard to bridge. With infrastructure, however, we already think in terms of duration and responsibility, so it’s no stretch to extend that thinking to natural systems. When there are problems with built infrastructure, we’re used to solving them with science, engineering, collaborative public agreements, and financial instruments such as bonds and public-private contracts. Those tools apply just as well to natural infrastructure.

  Oddly enough, although humans have been building infrastructure for thousands of years, it’s still an intellectual no-man’s-land. I’ve yet to find any economic theory of infrastructure. One wry definition of infrastructure is: “something gray, behind a chain-link fence.” The message is: “Don’t look, don’t touch, don’t even think about what this gray thing is for.” We’re trained to overlook infrastructure.

  There are some exceptions. People like the romanticism of railroads and admire bridges and ships. Small towns decorate their water towers. But working mines, containership ports, power plants, power lines, cellphone towers, refineries, dumps, sewerage—all bear one sign: KEEP OUT. Those places are left to the workers, who are low-status.

  One might say exactly the same about ecosystem infrastructure, such as watersheds, wetlands, fisheries, soil, and climate. As the truism says, we only notice infrastructure when it doesn’t work. And so, a deep bow of thanks is due to the environmentalists who for decades have been drawing attention to dangerous breakdowns of natural infrastructure and setting about the protection and restoration of watersheds, wetlands, fisheries, soil, climate, and the rest. Without their warnings and work, we would be in a far worse situation than we are.

  • How did we start worrying about climate? In 1948 a conservationist named Fairfield Osborn wrote a book titled Our Plundered Planet (the first jeremiad of its kind) and, with Laurance Rockefeller, founded the Conservation Foundation in New York. In 1958 Charles Keeling began his epic project measuring the atmospheric concentration of CO2. When the worrying upward trend of that concentration became apparent, Osborn’s Conservation Foundation assembled the first climate change conference in 1963; this resulted in a paper, “Implicati
ons of Rising Carbon Dioxide Content of the Atmosphere.” According to Spencer Weart’s Discovery of Global Warming (2004), “Their report warned that the doubling of CO2 projected for the next century could raise the world’s temperature some 4°C (7.2°F), bringing serious coastal flooding and other damage.” The Conservation Foundation urged renewed funding for Keeling’s CO2 project and pressed the National Academy of Sciences to pay attention to the subject. From then on, awareness of climate change ascended right along with the Keeling Curve. In 1971 Barry Commoner’s environmentalist best-seller, The Closing Circle, gave an early public warning about greenhouse gases. In 1978 a young congressman from Tennessee, Albert Gore, held hearings on global warming, starring his Harvard teacher Roger Revelle, who had sponsored the Keeling CO2 research.