Alley - Earth : the operators manual

Also by Richard B . Alley

The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change,

and Our Future

Copyright 2011 by Richard B. Alley, Geoffrey Haines-Stiles, and Erna Akuginow

All rights reserved

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Alley, Richard B.

Earth : the operators manual / Richard B. Alley. 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-393-08109-1 (hardcover)

1. Energy developmentEnvironmental aspectsHistory.

2. Renewable energy sources. 3. Global warming. I. Title.

TJ163.2.A43 2011

621.04209dc22

2010054016

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

1234567890

To my wife, Cindy, and daughters, Janet and Karen,

with thanks and hope.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

Today, almost seven billion of us live side by side with whales and woodlands because we get almost all of the energy we use from oil, coal, and natural gas. If we suddenly quit using these fossil fuels and returned to burning whale oil and wood, we wouldnt come close to powering enough of our tractors, trucks, and irrigation pumps to feed us all.

The good we get from fossil fuels is a mixed blessing, though. If we keep using them, and accept the risks of oil-well blowouts and mountaintop removal, for long enough, the fossil fuels will run outwe are burning them about a million times faster than nature saved them for us. We thus must decide whether to burn most of the fossil fuels and then look for replacements, or to learn while we burn and while we still have a fossil-fuel safety net in the ground.

Our decision must be made under the shadow of global warming from the CO released by burning fossil fuels. Sensors on heat-seeking missiles are affected by the interaction between CO and energy transfer through the air, and so is the climate. The atmosphere really doesnt care whether we study it for warring or warming, and military as well as civilian physics research shows that CO matters. We thus have high scientific confidence that continuing to burn fossil fuels will cause large climate changes, which will make life more difficult for poor people living in hot places now, and for most people in future generations.

But if CO emissions especially harm poor people, are we wiser to reduce emissions, or to reduce poverty by helping people become wealthier? Not surprisingly, economics answers Yesdo some of each. How much of each may depend on national security, jobs, ethics, and insurance, as well as economics.

You will hear a lot of shouting from the wings that partially drowns out discussion of these important issues, but this shouting is nothing new. President Abraham Lincolns administration found ways to get good scientific advice through the noise, and following his example still works. I will try to stick closely to Lincolns example in giving you the best scientific insights. There are things that science doesnt know, more things that I dont know, and I am far from infallible, but much of the science really is solid, and I will tell you when it isnt.

Lincoln also showed us part of the solution for powering the planet. Earth offers vast, sustainable energy resources with the potential to improve the economy and generate a lot of fortunes, including the wind that so intrigued Lincoln on the Illinois prairie long before his presidency.

Being a truly honest broker on such complex topics may be impossible, but I will do my best for you. This could be easier for me than for most people: I enjoyed working for an oil company and benefited from its largesse, my political registration is right of center, and I have won scientific awards for helping show just how bizarrely Earths climate can behave without any interference from us. But I also helped the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and played a small role in the Nobel Prizewinning effort of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), where my knowledge of Earths history and behavior contributed to the confident realization that the CO from our fossil-fuel burning is highly likely to change the world in fundamental ways that will increasingly make life harder for future generations. Our two lovely daughters give me a personal as well as a professional stake in the search for a stable, sustainable world. Onward!

PART I.

THE BURNING QUESTION

Prepare to Come About

Synopsis. We humans have always used energy and always will. We now rely greatly on fossil fuels, which promise to make our lives much harder before they run out. But there are plenty of ways to get rich and save the world by remaking our energy system.

May you live in interesting times. Old curse

Power On

M ore and more of us are living better than ever before. In most of the world, an expectant mother can be reasonably confident that she will deliver a healthy baby, who will parent the next generation and live long enough to help educate the generation after that. Wars continue, but the all-out disaster of World War II is ancient history for many of us, and a fading memory for the rest. We have used our accumulated knowledge and wisdom, and the things weve built, to convert a world that might support a few million hunter-gatherers into home for over six billion of us, heading for nine or ten billion. When problems arise, we usually invent and cooperate to solve them. We have never fully agreed on the purpose of our existence (and we are not likely to agree in the near future), but if we approve of any form of The greatest good for the greatest number, then this really may be the best time in history.

And yet, we can easily believe we are cursed to live in these interesting times, with disasters waiting at every turn. Perhaps a billion or more peopleone in six of usexist in such poverty or violence that they cannot reasonably expect their children to live long and prosper. Various accounting methods suggest that we are using, and often using up, nearly half of everything that the planet makes available to us and to all other species, with rising population and expectations pushing us rapidly toward using 100 percent.

We have removed perhaps 90 percent of the large fish from the ocean; in fact, we have no idea what a natural ocean ecosystem looks like, because we fished out so many species before scientists learned to see what is going on. so farming is becoming more difficult, especially as we use up the easy deposits of phosphate for fertilizer.

With human population expected to increase, many of us not getting even the minimum that most civilized people believe is needed for a proper life, and almost everyone hoping to improve their lot, it takes an optimist to believe that the demands on the planet will only double. If our use is already approaching half of everything supplied by Earth, where will the rest come from? And what does our growing use mean for the other species that share the planet with us, and their ecosystems on which we rely?