The Fragile Earth

Writing from the New Yorker on Climate Change

David Remnick, Henry Finder

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780008446666
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Advocacy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A collection of the New Yorker's groundbreaking reporting from the front lines of climate change - including writing from Bill McKibben, Elizabeth Kolbert, Ian Frazier, Kathryn Schulz, and more.

Just one year after climatologist James Hansen first came before a Senate committee and testified that the Earth was now warmer than it had ever been in recorded history, thanks to humankind’s heedless consumption of fossil fuels, New Yorker writer Bill McKibben published a deeply reported and considered piece on climate change and what it could mean for the planet.

At the time, the piece was to some speculative to the point of alarmist; read now, McKibben’s work is heroically prescient. Since then, the New Yorker has devoted enormous attention to climate change, describing the causes of the crisis, the political and ecological conditions we now find ourselves in, and the scenarios and solutions we face.

The Fragile Earth tells the story of climate change - its past, present, and future - taking readers from Greenland to the Great Plains, and into both laboratories and rain forests. It features some of the best writing on global warming from the last three decades, including Bill McKibben's seminal essay "The End of Nature," the first piece to popularize both the science and politics of climate change for a general audience, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning work of Elizabeth Kolbert, as well as Kathryn Schulz, Dexter Filkins, Jonathan Franzen, Ian Frazier, Eric Klinenberg, and others. The result, in its range, depth, and passion, promises to bring light, and sometimes heat, to the great emergency of our age.

PART I

A CRACK IN THE ICE

How we got here

REFLECTIONS: THE END OF NATURE

Bill McKibben

September 11, 1989

Nature, we believe, takes forever. It moves with infinite slowness through the many periods of its history, whose names we can dimly recall from high-school biology—the Cambrian, the Devonian, the Triassic, the Cretaceous, the Pleistocene. At least since Darwin, nature writers have taken pains to stress the incomprehensible length of this path. “So slowly, oh, so slowly, have the great changes been brought about,” John Burroughs wrote in 1912. “The Orientals try to get a hint of eternity by saying that when the Himalayas have been ground to powder by allowing a gauze veil to float against them once in a thousand years, eternity will only have just begun. Our mountains have been pulverized by a process almost as slow.” We have been told that man’s tenure is as a minute to the earth’s day, but it is that vast day that has lodged in our minds. The age of the trilobites began six hundred million years ago. The dinosaurs lived for a hundred and fifty million years. Since even a million years is utterly unfathomable, the message is: Nothing happens quickly. Change takes unimaginable—“Geologic”—time.

This idea about time is essentially misleading, for the world as we know it, the world with human beings formed into some sort of civilization, is of quite comprehensible duration. People began to collect in a rudimentary society in the north of Mesopotamia some twelve thousand years ago. Using twenty-five years as a generation, that is four hundred and eighty generations ago. Sitting here at my desk, I can think back five generations—I have photographs of four. That is, I can think back one-ninety-sixth of the way to the start of civilization. A skilled genealogist could easily get me one fiftieth of the distance back. And I can conceive of how most of those forebears lived. From the work of archeologists and from accounts like those in the Bible I have some sense of daily life at least as far back as the time of the Pharaohs, which is almost half the way. Three hundred and twenty generations ago, Jericho was a walled city of three thousand souls. Three hundred and twenty is a large number, but not in the way that six hundred million is a large number, not inscrutably large. And within those twelve thousand years of civilization time is not uniform. The world as we really know it dates back to the Renaissance. The world as we really know it dates back to the Industrial Revolution. The world as we feel comfortable in it dates back to perhaps 1945.

In other words, our sense of an unlimited future, which is drawn from that apparently bottomless well of the past, is a delusion. True, evolution, grinding on ever so slowly, has taken billions of years to create us from slime, but that does not mean that time always moves so ponderously. Over a lifetime or a decade or a year, big and impersonal and dramatic changes can take place. We have accepted the idea that continents can drift in the course of aeons, or that continents can die in a nuclear second. But normal time seems to us immune from such huge changes. It isn’t, though. In the last three decades, for example, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased more than ten per cent, from about three hundred and fifteen parts per million to about three hundred and fifty parts per million. In the last decade, an immense “hole” in the ozone layer has opened up above the South Pole each fall, and, according to the Worldwatch Institute, the percentage of West German forests damaged by acid rain has risen from less than ten per cent to more than fifty per cent. Last year, for perhaps the first time since that starved Pilgrim winter at Plymouth, America consumed more grain than it grew. Burroughs again: “One summer day, while I was walking along the country road on the farm where I was born, a section of the stone wall opposite me, and not more than three or four yards distant, suddenly fell down. Amid the general stillness and immobility about me, the effect was quite startling. . . . It was the sudden summing-up of half a century or more of atomic changes in the material of the wall. A grain or two of sand yielded to the pressure of long years, and gravity did the rest.”

In much the same comforting way that we think of time as imponderably long, we consider the earth to be inconceivably large. Although with the advent of space flight it became fashionable to picture the planet as a small orb of life and light in a dark, cold void, that image never really took hold. To any one of us, the earth is enormous, “infinite to our senses.” Or, at least, it is if we think about it in the usual horizontal dimensions. There is a huge distance between my house, in the Adirondack Mountains, and Manhattan—it’s a five-hour drive through one state in one country of one continent. But from my house to Allen Hill, near town, is a trip of five and a half miles. By bicycle it takes about twenty minutes, by car seven or eight. I’ve walked it in an hour and a half. If you turned that trip on its end, the twenty-minute pedal past Bateman’s sandpit and the graveyard and the waterfall would take me to the height of Mt. Everest—almost precisely to the point where the air is too thin to breathe without artificial assistance. Into that tight space, and the layer of ozone above it, are crammed all that is life and all that maintains life.

This, I realize, is a far from novel observation. I repeat it only to make the case I made with regard to time. The world is not as large as we intuitively believe—space can be as short as time. For instance, the average American car driven the average American distance—ten thousand miles—in an average American year releases its own weight in carbon into the atmosphere. Imagine every car on a busy freeway pumping a ton of carbon into the atmosphere, and the sky seems less infinitely blue.

Along with our optimistic perceptions of time and space, other, relatively minor misunderstandings distort our sense of the world. Consider the American failure to convert to the metric system. Like all schoolchildren of my vintage, I spent many days listening to teachers explain litres and metres and hectares and all the other logical units of measurement, and then promptly forgot about it. All of us did, except the scientists, who always use such units. As a result, if I read that there will be a rise of 0.8 degrees Celsius in the temperature between now and the year 2000, it sounds less ominous than a rise of a degree and a half Fahrenheit. Similarly, a ninety-centimetre rise in sea level sounds less ominous than a one-yard rise—and neither of them sounds all that ominous until one stops to think that over a beach with a normal slope such a rise would bring the ocean ninety metres (that’s two hundred and ninety-five feet) above its current tideline. In somewhat the same way, the logarithmic scale we use to determine the acidity or alkalinity of our soils and our waters—pH—distorts reality for anyone who doesn’t use it on a daily basis. Normal rainwater has a pH of 5.6. But the acidified rain that falls on Buck Hill, behind my house, has a pH of 4.6 to 4.2, which is from ten to fourteen times as acid as normal.

Of all such quirks, though, probably the most significant is an accident of the calendar: we live too close to the year 2000. Forever we have read about the year 2000. It has become a symbol of the bright and distant future, when we will ride in air cars and talk on video phones. The year 2010 still sounds far off, almost unreachably far off, as if it were on the other side of a great body of water. But 2010 is as close as 1970—as close as the breakup of the Beatles—and the turn of the century is no farther in front of us than Ronald Reagan’s election to the Presidency is behind. We live in the shadow of a number, and that makes it hard to see the future.

Our comforting sense, then, of the permanence of our natural world—our confidence that it will change gradually and imperceptibly, if at all—is the result of a subtly warped perspective. Changes in our world which can affect us can happen in our lifetime—not just changes like wars but bigger and more sweeping events. Without recognizing it, we have already stepped over the threshold of such a change. I believe that we are at the end of nature.

By this I do not mean the end of the world. The rain will still fall, and the sun will still shine. When I say “nature,” I mean a certain set of human ideas about the world and our place in it. But the death of these ideas begins with concrete changes in the reality around us, changes that scientists can measure. More and more frequently, these changes will clash with our perceptions, until our sense of nature as eternal and separate is finally washed away and we see all too clearly what we have done.

Svante Arrhenius took his doctorate at the University of Uppsala in 1884. His thesis earned him the lowest possible grade short of outright failure. Nineteen years later, the same thesis, which was on the conductivity of solutions, earned him a Nobel Prize. He later explained the initial poor reception: “I came to my professor, Cleve, whom I admired very much, and I said, ‘I have a new theory of electrical conductivity as a cause of chemical reactions.’ He said, ‘This is very interesting,’ and then he said, ‘Goodbye.’ He explained to me later that he knew very well that there are so many different theories formed, and that they are almost all certain to be wrong, for after a short time they disappeared; and therefore, by using the statistical manner of forming his ideas, he concluded that my theory also would not exist long.”

Arrhenius’s understanding of electrolytic conduction was not his only shrug-provoking new idea. As he surveyed the first few decades of the Industrial Revolution, he realized that man was burning coal at an unprecedented rate—“evaporating our coal mines into the air.” Scientists already knew that carbon dioxide, a by-product of fossil-fuel combustion, trapped solar infrared radiation that would otherwise have been reflected back to space. The French polymath Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier had speculated about the effect nearly a century before, and had even used the hothouse metaphor. But it was Arrhenius, employing measurements of infrared radiation from the full moon, who did the first calculations of the possible effects of man’s stepped-up production of carbon dioxide. The average global temperature, he concluded, would rise as much as nine degrees Fahrenheit if the amount of carbon dioxide in the air doubled from its pre-industrial level; that is, heat waves in mid-American latitudes would run as high as a hundred and thirty degrees, the seas would rise several metres, crops would wither in the fields.

This idea floated in obscurity for a very long time. Now and then, a scientist took it up—the British physicist G. S. Callendar speculated in the nineteen-thirties that rising carbon-dioxide levels could account for the warming of North America and northern Europe which meteorologists had begun to observe in the eighteen-eighties. But that warming seemed to be replaced by a decline, beginning in the nineteen-forties; in any case, we were too busy creating better living through petroleum to be bothered with such long-term speculation. And the few scientists who did consider the matter concluded that the oceans, which hold much more carbon dioxide than the atmosphere, would soak up any excess that man churned out—that the oceans were an infinite sink down which to pour the problem.

Then, in 1957, two scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in California, Roger Revelle and Hans Suess, published a paper in the journal Tellus on this question of the oceans. What they found may turn out to be the single most important limit in an age of limits. They found that the conventional wisdom was wrong: the upper layer of the oceans, where the air and sea meet and transact their business, would absorb less than half of the excess carbon dioxide produced by man. “A rather small change in the amount of free carbon dioxide dissolved in seawater corresponds to a relatively large change in the pressure of carbon dioxide at which the oceans and atmosphere are at equilibrium,” they wrote. That is to say, most of the carbon dioxide being pumped into the air by millions of smokestacks, furnaces, and car exhausts would stay in the air, where, presumably, it would gradually warm the planet. “Human beings are now carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be repeated in the future,” they concluded, adding, with the morbid dispassion of true scientists, that this experiment, “if adequately documented, may yield a far-reaching insight into the processes of weather and climate.” While there are other parts to this story—the depletion of the ozone, acid rain, genetic engineering—the story of the end of nature centers on this greenhouse experiment, with what will happen to the weather.

When we drill into an oil field, we tap into a vast reservoir of organic matter—the fossilized remains of aquatic algae. We unbury it. When we burn oil—or coal, or methane (natural gas)—we release its carbon into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide. This is not pollution in the conventional sense. Carbon monoxide is pollution—an unnecessary by-product; a clean-burning engine releases less of it. But when it comes to carbon dioxide a clean-burning engine is no better than the motor in a Model T. It will emit about five and a half pounds of carbon in the form of carbon dioxide for every gallon of gasoline it consumes. In the course of about a hundred years, our various engines and industries have released a very large portion of the carbon buried over the last five hundred million years. It is as if someone had scrimped and saved his entire life and then spent everything on one fantastic week’s debauch. In this, if in nothing else, wrote the great biologist A. J. Lotka, “the present is an eminently atypical epoch.” We are living on our capital, as we began to realize during the oil crises of the nineteen-seventies. But it is more than waste, more than a binge. We are spending that capital in such a way as to alter the atmosphere.

There has always been, at least since the start of life, a certain amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and it has always trapped a certain amount of the sun’s radiation to warm the earth. If there were no atmospheric carbon dioxide, our world might resemble Mars: it would probably be so cold as to be lifeless. A little greenhouse effect is a good thing—life thrives in its warmth. The question is: How much? On Venus, the atmosphere is ninety-seven per cent carbon dioxide. As a result, it traps infrared radiation a hundred times as efficiently as the earth’s atmosphere, and keeps the planet a toasty seven hundred degrees warmer than the earth. The earth’s atmosphere is mostly nitrogen and oxygen; it is only about .035 per cent carbon dioxide, which is hardly more than a trace. The worries about the greenhouse effect are worries about raising that figure to .055 or .06 per cent, which is not very much. But enough, it turns out, to make everything different.

In 1957, when Revelle and Suess wrote their paper, no one even knew for certain whether carbon dioxide was increasing. The Scripps Institution hired a young researcher, Charles Keeling, and he set up monitoring stations at the South Pole and on the side of Mauna Loa, in Hawaii, eleven thousand feet above the Pacific. His data soon confirmed their hypothesis: more and more carbon dioxide was entering the atmosphere. When the first readings were taken, in 1958, the atmosphere at Mauna Loa contained about three hundred and fifteen parts per million of carbon dioxide. Subsequent readings showed that each year the amount increased, and at a steadily growing rate. Initially, the annual increase was about seven-tenths of a part per million; in recent years, the rate has doubled, to one and a half parts per million. Admittedly, one and a half parts per million sounds absurdly small. But scientists, by drilling holes in glaciers and testing the air trapped in ancient ice, have calculated that the carbon-dioxide level in the atmosphere prior to the Industrial Revolution was about two hundred and eighty parts per million, and that this was as high a level as had been recorded in the past hundred and forty thousand years. At a rate of one and a half parts per million per year, the pre-Industrial Revolution concentration of carbon dioxide would double in the next hundred and forty years. Since, as we have seen, carbon dioxide at a very low level largely determines the climate, carbon dioxide at double that very low level, small as it is in absolute terms, could have an enormous effect.

And the annual increase seems nearly certain to go higher. The essential facts are demographic and economic, not chemical. The world’s population has more than tripled in this century, and is expected to double, and perhaps triple again, before reaching a plateau in the next century. Moreover, the tripled population has not contented itself with using only three times the resources. In the last hundred years, industrial production has grown fiftyfold. Four-fifths of that growth has come since 1950, almost all of it based on fossil fuels. In the next half century, a United Nations commission predicts, the planet’s thirteen-trillion-dollar economy will grow five to ten times larger.

These facts are almost as stubborn as the chemistry of infrared absorption. They mean that the world will use more energy—two to three per cent more a year, by most estimates. And the largest increases may come in the use of coal—which is bad news, since coal spews more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than any other fuel. China, which has the world’s largest hardcoal reserves and recently passed the Soviet Union as the world’s largest coal producer, has plans to almost double coal consumption by the year 2000. A model devised by the World Resources Institute predicts that if energy use and other contributions to carbon-dioxide levels continue to grow very quickly, the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide will have doubled from its pre-Industrial Revolution level by about 2040; if they grow somewhat more slowly, as most estimates have it, the amount will double by about 2070. And, unfortunately, the solutions are neither obvious nor easy. Installing some kind of scrubber on a power-plant smokestack to get rid of the carbon dioxide might seem an obvious fix, except that a system that removed ninety per cent of the carbon dioxide would reduce the effective capacity of the plant by eighty per cent. One often heard suggestion is to use more nuclear power. But, because so much of our energy is consumed by automobiles and the like, even if we mustered the political will and the economic resources to quickly replace each of our non-nuclear electric plants with nuclear ones our carbon-dioxide output would fall by only about thirty per cent. The same argument would apply, at least initially, to fusion or any other clean method of producing electricity.

Burning fossil fuels is not the only method human beings have devised to increase the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Burning down a forest also sends clouds of carbon dioxide into the air. Trees and shrubby forests still cover forty per cent of the land on earth, but the forests have shrunk by about a fifth since pre-agricultural times, and the shrinkage is accelerating. In the Brazilian state of Pará, for instance, nearly seventy thousand square miles were deforested between 1975 and 1986; in the hundred years preceding that decade, settlers had cleared about seven thousand square miles. The Brazilian government has tried to slow the burning, but it employs fewer than nine hundred forest wardens in an area larger than Europe.

This is not news; it is well known that the rain forests are disappearing, and are taking with them a majority of the world’s plant and animal species. But forget for a moment that we are losing a unique resource, a cradle of life, irreplaceable grandeur, and so forth. The dense, layered rain forest contains from three to five times as much carbon per acre as an open, dry forest—an acre of Brazil in flames equals between three and five acres of Yellowstone. Deforestation currently adds about a billion tons of carbon to the atmosphere annually, which is twenty per cent or more of the amount produced by the burning of fossil fuels. And that acre of rain forest, which has poor soil and can support crops for only a few years, soon turns to desert or to pastureland. And where there’s pasture there are cows. Cows support in their stomachs huge numbers of anaerobic bacteria, which break down the cellulose that cows chew. That is why cows, unlike people, can eat grass. The bugs that digest the cellulose excrete methane, the same natural gas we use as fuel. And unburned methane, like carbon dioxide, traps infrared radiation and warms the earth. In fact, methane is twenty times as efficient as carbon dioxide at warming the planet, so even though it makes up less than two parts per million of the atmosphere it can have a significant effect. Though it may come from seemingly “natural” sources—the methanogenic bacteria—the present huge numbers of these bacteria are man’s doing. Mankind owns well over a billion head of cattle, not to mention a large number of camels, horses, pigs, sheep, and goats; together, they belch about seventy-three million metric tons of methane into the air each year—a four-hundred-and-thirty-five-per-cent increase in the last century.

We have raised the number of termites, too. Like cows, termites harbor methanogenic bacteria, which is why they can diges...