Just Cool It!

The Climate Crisis and What We Can Do - A Post-Paris Agreement Game Plan

David Suzuki, Ian Hanington

• Publisher: Greystone Books
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781771642606
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

Climate change is the most important crisis humanity has faced, but we still confront huge barriers to resolving it. So, what do we do, and is there hope for humanity? The problem itself is complex, and there’s no single solution. But by understanding the barriers to resolving global warming and by employing a wide range of solutions—from shifting to clean energy to planting trees to reforming agricultural practices—we can get the world back on track.

Just Cool It is David Suzuki at his most passionate. In this book, he offers a comprehensive look at the current state of climate science and knowledge and the many ways to resolve the climate crisis, imploring us to do what’s necessary to live in a better, cleaner future. When enough people demand action, change starts happening—and this time, it could be monumental.

PART 1

The Crisis

Chapter 1

THE SCIENCE

CLIMATE SCIENCE HAS been around for a long time, and the physics behind phenomena such as natural feedback cycles and the greenhouse effect have been understood for close to two hundred years. The evidence that human activity—mainly burning fossil fuels but also agricultural and forestry practices—is contributing to rapid global warming that can’t be explained entirely by natural causes has been building steadily over many decades, to the point of certainty today.

The problem is that many people don’t understand the science; in fact, many don’t even understand how science itself operates. Those who make massive profits or who benefit in other ways from maintaining the status quo often exploit this lack of understanding to convince people that climate change either isn’t an issue or isn’t one worth worrying about. This can be dangerous in an era when everyone with a computer has a public platform.

A common argument is that global warming is just a theory, not a fact—but this arises from a misunderstanding of scientific method. Science is based largely on hypotheses, theories, and laws. A hypothesis is an idea that has yet to be tested. A scientist may speculate on why something occurs or happens in a particular way. The scientist, or scientists, will then develop experiments and observations to test the hypothesis. If those experiments don’t confirm the hypothesis, it’s back to the drawing board. If they do, then the hypothesis could become a theory, or further experiments could be conducted to ensure that all factors have been taken into account.

A theory is based on a tested hypothesis or, more often than not, many hypotheses. Once experiments confirm that the hypotheses accurately describe and predict real-world occurrences, a theory is developed. Because science, understanding, and technology evolve, theories are often revised and occasionally, if rarely, disproven and discarded.

A scientific law describes a natural phenomenon and is often based on a mathematical formula. It doesn’t explain how or why the phenomenon occurs. Like theories, laws can also be revised or overturned as new knowledge becomes available.

Because science is often about trying to disprove theories, our understanding of natural phenomena is constantly being tested. As the great physicist Albert Einstein pointed out, “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.”

This is especially true of a complex field like climate science. With so many variables, conditions, effects, hypotheses, and predictions, it is impossible to be 100 percent certain about any of it. But scientists are now about as certain as they ever get that the earth is warming at an unusually rapid pace and that humans are largely responsible. For the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, released in four chapters in 2013–14, hundreds of scientists and experts worldwide combed through the most up-to-date peer-reviewed scientific literature and other relevant materials to assess “the state of scientific, technical and socio-economic knowledge on climate change, its causes, potential impacts and response strategies.”

They determined that it is “extremely likely,” or 95 percent certain, that humans are a major factor in rapid global warming and that evidence for climate change itself is “unequivocal.” Science rarely gets more certain than that, and the uncertainty only lies in the understanding that there may be undetermined factors or that natural factors could play a larger or smaller role than experiments and observation have illuminated. And, because a large part of climate science is predictive, there is room for variation. But all of the theories surrounding climate change have been and are being constantly tested, with scientists looking for flaws as well as ways that the theories can be confirmed. The overwhelming evidence shows that although the earth’s climate constantly changes, it is now changing, warming, more rapidly than ever, and although natural phenomena such as solar and volcanic activity play a role in climatic changes, this rapid warming can only be explained by considering the major contribution of human activity. Increasingly sophisticated predictive models and observation also show that the extreme weather and other consequences we’re experiencing now will only get worse if we continue to emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and damage or destroy the natural systems that absorb and store carbon.

As I’ll show in the next section, this evidence has been building for much longer than many people realize.

Ice Age Studies, Feedback Loops, and the Greenhouse Effect

SCIENTIFIC UNDERSTANDING OF the greenhouse effect isn’t new. French mathematician and natural philosopher Joseph Fourier discovered in 1824 that the earth’s atmosphere retains heat that would otherwise be emitted back into space by infrared radiation. Although he didn’t call it the greenhouse effect, he explained his concept by comparing the earth and its atmosphere to a box with a glass cover. It’s a simplistic comparison, and as the American Institute of Physics points out in an excellent summary of the history on its website (from which some of this section is drawn), a glass box or greenhouse does not function in entirely the same way as the earth and its atmosphere.¹

Fourier’s research inspired other scientists to consider the phenomenon. In 1859, Irish-English scientist John Tyndall began studying the ability of gases such as water vapor, carbon dioxide (then known as carbonic acid), ozone, and hydrocarbons to absorb and transmit radiant heat.² On finding that water vapor, ozone, and carbon dioxide, or CO₂, absorbed heat radiation better than gases such as oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen, he theorized that fluctuations in water vapor and carbon dioxide could affect global climate. He also discovered the idea of heat islands, by noting that the city of London was warmer than its surroundings.

Some years later, self-taught British scientist James Croll observed that dark surfaces such as soil, rock, and trees hold heat from the sun, whereas snow and ice remain cool, and that as a region cools, wind patterns change, which could affect ocean currents.

Much of the research to this time was aimed at understanding the causes of ice ages. A major breakthrough in our understanding of the effect of greenhouse gases occurred in 1896. Croll’s ideas led Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius to surmise that a drop in Arctic temperatures could cause land that had been bare in summer to remain covered in ice year round.³ This ice would reflect more of the sun’s heat back into space, lowering the temperature even more, thus creating a positive feedback cycle. He then observed that water vapor could also cause a feedback loop, as warmer air puts more water vapor into the atmosphere, and because water vapor holds heat in, more warm air is created. Because CO₂ also absorbs heat radiation, Arrhenius concluded that adding CO₂ to the atmosphere would contribute to this feedback cycle. Thus, burning fossil fuels and increasing CO₂ emissions into the atmosphere could increase water vapor, causing global average temperatures to rise.

Arrhenius wanted to understand what could cause an ice age, and his studies led him to conclude that cutting CO₂ in the atmosphere by half could cause one. But he also calculated what would happen if the amount was doubled by burning fossil fuels, and concluded that this would cause a 5-or-6-degree-Celsius (9-or-10.8-degree-Fahrenheit) increase in global average temperatures—an estimate surprisingly close to the one climate scientists came up with using much better computer models one hundred years later.

A year after Arrhenius published his findings, American geologist Thomas Chamberlin examined the earth’s carbon cycles more deeply, and according to the American Institute of Physics, wrote that ice ages are “intimately associated with a long chain of other phenomena to which at first they appeared to have no relationship.” It’s a concept that indigenous peoples have taught me, and one that I often talk and write about: Everything is interconnected.

In his “very speculative” paper, published in 1897, Chamberlin hypothesized that CO₂ could affect feedback cycles that bring about ice ages. The complexity of his ideas involved looking at the effect of volcanoes as they spew CO₂ into the air, and what happens when volcanic activity is lower and carbon is absorbed and stored by minerals, plants, and oceans, called carbon sinks. Because the atmosphere contains only a small fraction of the earth’s carbon compared to these carbon sinks, and carbon cycles through the atmosphere every few thousand years, Chamberlin proposed that climate conditions “congenial to life” are in a delicate balance.

At the time, however, it was believed that natural forces, such as solar activity and the ability of oceans to absorb and store carbon, were far more important factors and that CO₂ had an insignificant influence compared to water vapor. Many scientists believed climate was self-regulating and that small changes to atmospheric composition could not alter climate over brief time periods. Any CO₂ that human activity did emit into the air would be absorbed quickly by oceans (and, to some extent, forests and peat bogs)—which was mostly true at the time, when far smaller amounts of fossil fuels were being burned. Some also argued that excess atmospheric CO₂ would fertilize plants and create more lush life—which is also true, to a point. Although the notion that human activity, such as burning ever-increasing amounts of fossil fuels, could not affect a self-regulating climate has been thoroughly disproven by modern science, many people still make the same outdated arguments today.

As with earlier scientific investigations, most climate science in the first half of the twentieth century was driven by a desire to explain the causes of ice ages. In the 1950s, scientists started to get an idea of the bigger picture. In 1956, Maurice Ewing and William Donn, at New York’s Lamont Geological Observatory, were also trying to explain ice ages, in particular the abrupt end of the most recent one. In looking at feedback cycles in the Arctic, they speculated that a complex set of circumstances could lead to rapid climate change over the next few hundred or thousand years. But the change they saw was the coming of another ice age.

Their theories were controversial and often criticized, but they did serve to spark a renewed interest in climate science, more testing of theories, and wider acceptance of the idea that changes in Arctic ice sheets and snow cover could cause rapid changes in planetary surface conditions.

By the 1950s, researchers in the Soviet Union were using this growing scientific knowledge to consider ways to deliberately alter local climatic conditions, by “making Siberia bloom by damming the Bering Straits, or by spreading soot across the Arctic snows to absorb sunlight,” according to the American Institute of Physics. This led Leningrad climatologist Mikhail Budyko to examine the ways in which human influences could be amplified by feedback loops. As a result of his studies, he was one of the first scientists to raise concerns about the potential major effects of burning fossil fuels and other human activities. In 1961 and 1962, he published two books warning that growing energy use will warm the planet and cause the Arctic ice pack to quickly disappear, contributing to further feedback cycles.

In the mid-1960s, Budyko developed models that showed relatively small changes in global average temperatures and polar snow cover could cause feedbacks that would cause dramatic increases in temperature and sea levels. Researchers in Sweden, New Zealand, and the U.S. were arriving at similar conclusions. Although many of the studies pointed to a warming planet, some speculated that changes in solar activity or dust in the atmosphere could cause another ice age.

Over the next few decades, climate scientists developed increasingly sophisticated computer models to examine the effects of greenhouse gases on climate—especially as computer technology improved along with scientific knowledge. It also became easier to study other planets, such as Venus, which was covered in an atmospheric blanket of water vapor and CO₂, producing a massive greenhouse effect, and to examine past climatic events.

In 1973, a U.S. probe to Mars led the famous astronomer Carl Sagan and others to conclude that the red planet had undergone major shifts between cold and hot. Around the same time, analyses of seabed clay layers showed that Earth’s ice ages had occurred in roughly 100,000-year cycles. Although these roughly matched calculations by Serbian scientist Milutin Milankovitch in the early twentieth century, research also demonstrated that Milankovitch’s theories about the effects of subtle shifts in the earth’s orbit were not sufficient to explain the massive changes. However, natural cycles including ice buildup and flow, warping of the earth’s crust and sea level changes, combined with orbital shifts, could explain the ice age cycles.

Scientists also started looking into the effects of clouds, volcanic dust, smoke, and other aerosols on climate. Some initial studies led researchers such as NASA’s James Hansen to speculate that the world could be headed ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Beyond Paris 2015
• Part 1: The Crisis
• Part 2: The Solutions
• Epilogue: Where Do We Go from Here?
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright Page