Red alert

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/04/2024 (890 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Hottest year of the last 2,000? 2023. Top 10 hottest years? All since 2012.

While many of the loudest voices yell “axe the tax,” Earth gets hotter and hotter, and people in areas such as Africa’s dry Sahel region and low-lying Bangladesh suffer more and more. We now have more carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere than at any time in the last 20 million years. The pandemic cut our CO2 by only 7 per cent and by the end of 2020, we were back to our normal, troubling emission levels.

Gwynne Dyer’s 2008 book Climate Wars warned of the foreseeable disasters associated with global warming. Sixteen years later, with governments making precious little progress in reducing greenhouse gases (GHGs), Intervention Earth takes a new tack as Dyer interviews over 100 scientists about possible interventions — not solutions, just interventions.

Dyer ponders both a “stabilized Earth” scenario and a “hothouse Earth,” the latter probably involving a huge die-back of humans. One of his interviewees reminds us that climate models all underpredicted the speed of glacial melting. And it’s worth remembering that the meltwater from our own Lake Agassiz raised global sea levels by 1-2 metres.

Before considering some of the promising interventions, Dyer considers how much GHG reduction we can expect from hydroelectric, solar, geothermal, wind, tidal and battery power. Unlike Utopian scenarists who imagine us quickly halving or eliminating our carbon emissions, Dyer knows that realistically, given continued global population growth and the concomitant need for such energy-intensive materials as concrete and steel (never mind the requirements of our supply chains), there is no quick fix. He therefore defends nuclear reactors, noting how few accidents have happened, a statistic that contrasts starkly with the many deaths already attributable to increasing droughts and rising sea levels.

Dyer attacks fake interventions, such as the oil company red herring known as “blue hydrogen” — really just natural gas re-branded — and the personal carbon footprint calculator, which turns CO2 emissions into mainly a personal issue while oil companies evade responsibility.

Although alternative energies, carbon sinks and rewilding are absolutely necessary to reduce GHGs over the long run, Dyer focuses on the quicker technologies that can buy us more time. Ocean iron fertilization could increase the growth of phytoplankton, allowing them to absorb carbon and eventually carry it to the sea bottom. Engineers have suggested ways of preventing Greenland and Antarctic glaciers from sliding into the ocean. There is even a Dutch company offering a cattle-food supplement — Bovaer — that reduces cows’ methane production. Direct air capture, an oil industry project, uses solids or liquids to capture carbon chemically and then inject it into the ground.

Free Press readers can attest that Dyer, whose syndicated column appears in 45 countries, is among the best columnists around. His journalism deals mostly with political issues and climate change is quintessentially a political issue, painfully so. The most depressing fact is that, as James Haywood points out, GDP is strongly correlated to energy use. As the economy grows, emissions grow. Cut energy use and you diminish the economy. Renewable energy has almost kept up with the growth in energy use, but has “not displaced any fossil fuel production.”

One of the biggest political issues is something the “axe the tax” crowd seems blissfully ignorant about: the relationship between the Global North (which has long benefitted from very high emissions) and the Global South (which wants the same benefits). Exempted from emissions limits in 1992, countries such as China, India and Mexico have made great strides in bringing people out of poverty. The cost: becoming huge carbon emitters. India’s GHG emissions equal the whole European Union, while China’s forms one third of total global emissions. Of course, the destructive effects (drought, sea-level rise) have so far been most noticeable in the Global South, not in our profligate North.

One of the most promising but worrisome last-ditch interventions, solar radiation management (SRM), recommends that human technology should mimic volcanoes, injecting sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight and thus reduce Earth’s temperature. Because Newt Gingrich praised this technology, an understandable reflex would be to dismiss it. But the late Paul Crutzen, the Dutch atmospheric chemist whose work on the hole in the ozone layer brought him a Nobel Prize, argued that, given our failure to lower emissions at all, SRM may be the only thing that can bring the temperature down quickly.

To those who ask whether we should tamper with the Earth, Dyer argues that we unwittingly became geo-engineers 5,000 years ago. The very slow and steady release of CO2 from small-scale farming eventually cancelled the next glaciation that should have arrived by this millennium. With our present sky-rocketing GHG emissions, the question is no longer whether we should become geo-engineers. For better and worse, we already are.

The question now: what should we do?

Reinhold Kramer is a Brandon University English professor. His most recent book is Are We Postmodern Yet? And Were We Ever?