Here’s a little different slant on the old subjects of climate change and coronal mass ejections.
Climate: the Known Unknowns
Will the Earth be hotter in 2050 than today? What does the science say?
The simplest answer is, probably. A more complicated answer is, we don’t know.
We do know it is almost certain, that absent a 50% drop in carbon emissions within the next ten years, and a still steeper drop afterwards, Earth’s temperature will continue to rise dangerously fast on account of the enormous quantities of carbon dioxide we have already pumped into the atmosphere. But a 50% drop in ten years would be ruinous to the global economy and is, if not technically impossible, then politically so—even more the case now that the leaders of the world’s second worst carbon polluter have turned their backs on mitigation, and even adaptation. Furthermore, even a 50% drop leaves 50% still going, with the promise of (net) zero emissions still decades away.
Geoengineering to the rescue?
In an earlier post, to be found here I dwelled on the potential for geoengineering to slow or halt global warming. A short reprise of the earlier post: given the present trajectory of warming, geoengineering is almost inevitable. BUT the ecological risks are grave. For one thing, the simplest and cheapest method to cool things off is injection of sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere. However it will at the very least, lead to even more acidification of oceans. The most complicated method that has the least impact on the atmosphere would be the launching of giant mirrors into space. Besides being less invasive, there’s the added advantage of being able to regulate solar insolation by altering the angle of the mirrors. It has the disadvantage of being prohibitively expensive—another political impossibility. And we know any measure at such a scale has unforeseen risks.
Leave it to Nature? What Volcanoes Teach Us
In 1991 Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines blew twenty million tons of sulfur particles into the atmosphere, and the result was a global drop in temperature of 1-plus degrees Celsius for the next two years.
The known instances of volcanic eruptions lowering planetary temperatures amount to a cautionary tale. The 1257 eruption of the giant volcano Samalas in the island of Lombok in present-day Indonesia led to crop failures and devastating famine—not to mention outright deaths from freezing—in higher latitudes, such as were recorded in England. It is very likely that Samalas also contributed to the medieval “Little Ice Age.” (More on the Little Ice Age at the end of this post.) The Laki eruptions in Iceland in 1783 produced effects similar to Pinatubo in the northern hemisphere. The 1815 eruption of Mt. Tambora, in Indonesia, resulted in the notorious “Year without a Summer,” also producing crop failures, livestock deaths, famine, and human death in 1816. And these volcanoes are dwarfed by the so-called “supervolcanoes”—enormous, once-eruptive monsters that linger, dormant, below places like Yellowstone and Lake Toba, Indonesia.
The relevance to geoengineering is obvious: volcanoes have shown us what works. And we have simple methods to loft sulfates into the atmosphere.
See links at end of this piece to explore further the dynamics and effects of volcanoes.
A minority of scientists calculate that a Yellowstone super-volcano eruption is overdue by 20,000 years or so. Hmm. . . stock up your larder!
The point is not the reversal of global warming by volcanic eruptions any time soon—highly unlikely! The point is uncertainty.
As well as the plain old garden variety resistance to science by the apostles of ignorance, what most bedevils the climate debate is uncertainty. For example, you’ve become accustomed to disclaimers from the science community concerning the contribution of global warming to any one extreme weather event. The metaphor most often invoked in defense of the science is the trope of “loading the dice.” The increasing frequency of these events seems to be bringing this concept home to the public—should we hope for more of the same to become fully convincing?
The “loaded dice” analogy captures perfectly the idea of uncertainty when it comes not only to climate change, but also to other dimensions of science. For example, countless experiments are being conducted on cancer treatment and prevention, but most of them have only statistical probabilities of success, and those that have good probabilities often have serious side effects. I read about these weekly in New Scientist. What avenues of cancer research should we pour the most resources into? No one really knows.
What’s certain is that adherents to fundamentalist religions find uncertainty of the magnitude of Climate Change intolerable. Fundamentalist absolutism concerning scripture primes them to seek certainty and simplicity—things happen because God ordained it—in areas where natural science provides complex explanations. One quarter of Americans still believe in the literal truth of the Bible—the Bible, at least, is permanent (as is the Quran, the basis of other fundamentalist sects). That quarter is a large proportion of the supporters of Donald Trump, whose sweeping oversimplifications appeal to those seeking certainty.
But in science–particularly in that area of science dealing with global warming and climate change—there are endless uncertainties. There are even questions about how permanent the “constants” of nature (e.g., the mass of the proton, the electric force) are. That is why, still, there are scientists who loathe to declare publicly that climate change is real, very dangerous, worsening, and is mainly caused by human activity. It’s not that they personally are in doubt about the consensus on climate change, it’s that they fear not just attacks by deniers . . . they also fear doubt from large members of the public when a polar vortex swoops down from Canada, triggering record ice storms and record cold temperatures in Texas. This allows James Inhofe to walk into the Senate on a winter day and declare the snowball in his hand evidence that climate change does not exist. Talk about probabilities and anomalies doesn’t penetrate far into doubting minds when you have such conspicuous events. The very idea of global warming changing the shape of the Jet Stream and conveying polar blasts ever-southward seems suspect even to many climate scientists: interesting concept, but the evidence is still shaky.
The non-fundamentalist American public is also uncomfortable with uncertainty. They are now seeing the effects of climate change to date, but uncertainty about future effects makes them wary of committing to mitigation (they are happier about adaptation, which seems a lot more obvious, and cheaper). Climate change deniers (as well as a dwindling handful of true “skeptics” who revel in their gadfly role) exploit this uncertainty to drive a wedge between non-scientists and scientists.
Who doesn’t want scientific certainty? Well, scientists for one. They may differ in what areas of life they’d like the uncertainties, but it’s uncertainty in their area of research that drives them. Once a question gets answered to a near-certainty, it’s on to the next question. Even a theory as apparently solid as the Newtonian “Clockwork Universe” got questioned by Einstein, and the theories of Special and General Relativity were born.
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Links to Volcano Info from Scientific American and IFL Science:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-do-volcanoes-affect-w/
http://www.iflscience.com/environment/whats-the-most-dangerous-volcano-in-the-world/all/
Classic Uncertainty: What Caused and Ended the “Little Ice Age”?
https://www.skepticalscience.com/coming-out-of-little-ice-age.htm
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Geoengineering potential: