The Likelihood of Extreme Events is Increasing. Time for a Carbon Tax!

Whew, what a scorcher! I saw reports of 113 degrees in Weaverville, but I estimate a bit of that comes from the hot asphalt absorbing the sun. Our own minuscule urban heat island effect. Overall air temperatures were probably around 111, but that’s still a significant increase from Heat Dome 2021. I can’t help but wonder what bleak record we’ll break next year, or perhaps even this year yet. I hope it’s not drought-related. I hope we get abundant cold precipitation this winter. It’s a fool’s hope, but perhaps we’ll be pleasantly surprised.

            Exponential change and probability. Non-linear relationships. Time seems to speed up as we age, yes? A smaller fraction of our overall lives, whipping by with accelerating haste. Carbon emissions and heating have quickened in an exponential manner, increasing orders of magnitude in geologic leaps and bounds. When we consider the likelihood of climate records being broken year after year, we must envision a normal curve (aka bell curve) with a “fat tail” on the right. The impact of events not yet witnessed and utterly unimaginable in our stable Holocene climate is greater than our previously used statistical models had assumed. Extreme outlier events will become the new “normal”. If you’d like to read a super cerebral article on the topic of climate risks and the social cost of carbon, here’s a link to a paper written by Martin Weitzman of Harvard, Department of Economics: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/weitzman/files/fattaileduncertaintyeconomics.pdf. If you would like a simpler explanation, here’s an article explaining Weitzman’s findings in plain speak: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-fat-tail-of-climate-change-risk_b_8116264.

            There’s an elegant solution at our fingertips: a carbon tax. I understand everyone hates taxes, but hear me out! It feels ridiculous for us to be discussing plastic straws when celebrities and politicians take trips in personal jets less than an hour’s drive, emitting literal tons of CO2. Call it a carbon tax, a tax on over-consumption, on greed, on excessive wealth, but this tax could be used to invest in a decarbonized electrical grid and in local transportation services. Electric shuttles! Mopeds! Bike share programs! Solutions vary in cost, but these are achievable goals. Ideally the costs would be targeted only toward the people who consume the most, who spend the most money and emit the most carbon, sparing middle class and low-income Americans from having to foot the bill. The benefits would be distributed toward the majority of Americans, combatting the widening wealth gap. If not a tax, call it an insurance policy for Earth: We invest today to prevent continuous catastrophes from unfolding right now into the foreseeable future.

            We still have time to act. The window is closing but there’s still time. We have financial tools to use. We have technologies to scale up and adopt extensively, including carbon capture and sequestration and desalinization. There are cultural practices we can adopt, like working together at every organizational level to mechanically thin and control burn our forests to maximize carbon retention in the era of mega-fires. We have options!

            I often wonder what it will take, what facts I could present, what heartfelt plea I could make that would be powerful enough to tip the scales toward mitigation on a large scale. What emotional connection could I ever make that struck a chord so deep we all decided, simultaneously, to steward this miraculous planet with the shared goal of maximizing life, human and non-human alike, and improving individual and collective well-being?

            I certainly will never know the answer, but it’s helpful to remind myself I’m less than a blink of a blip in deep time and space.

This is the nature of democracy: it moves painfully slowly because everyone gets to speak their piece. It takes years or tens of years to implement policy changes because they must be debated and clarified a thousand times over. All the same, despite the downward trends into ecological collapse, fascist tyranny, and looming civil war, I firmly believe democracy is the best model to maximize freedom and opportunity, and that free speech is the best possible mechanism to drive change.

We will survive this wildfire season, and we will live to thrive another day!

Fact: CO2 is Rising Exponentially. And, New Beginnings for the Climate Corner.

            Welcome back, readers!

            Atmospheric CO2 has increased exponentially. This is a provable fact.

            The reason for this exponential growth is multi-faceted. First and foremost, we are emitting more CO2 today than we were one hundred twenty years ago. In 1900 global emissions were only 5 x 10^8 (five hundred million) metric tons. In 2015, global emissions were 1 x 10^10 (ten billion) metric tons (https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data). The global output of CO2 has increased by two orders of magnitude, a 100-fold increase! This is exponential growth. If you need a refresher on scientific notation and orders of magnitude, watch this helpful study video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXTuYjPDjqQ.

As our economies have grown, so has our global consumption of fossil fuels. Humans cannot produce goods and services without energy, and we have chosen to use energy that takes tens of MILLIONS of YEARS to form through geologic processes, but only a matter of DAYS for us to extract it from the ground and burn it.

Second, I mentioned the importance of lag times and feedback loops in my Systems Thinking article. Carbon dioxide stays present in the atmosphere for a whopping 100 years! As far as the atmosphere is concerned, it’s only 1921 and we are feeling the residual warming from CO2 emmitted by our ancestors with the advent of the Model T. This also means that our great grand babies will be feeling the effects of warming caused by OUR emissions today all the way in 2121! If you build upon something in an increasing fashion, the rate of change accelerates. This lag time in CO2breakdown has allowed it to accumulate to extraordinary levels, levels this planet has not seen for the last 3 million years. And again, to reiterate, bipedal hominids (our evolutionary ancestors) have only existed for 2 million years.

            Regarding feedback loops, we’ve already begun tipping key Earth systems into new equilibriums. For example, permafrost in the arctic tundra is melting at an increasing rate which releases methane, a GHG 30 times more powerful than CO2. This accelerates warming even more! Mass coral bleaching events are another example of a system reaching its breaking point. Corals are habitat for many species, and according to the geologic record, the oceans die first in extinction events.

Compare the Vostok ice core graph of atmospheric CO2 (https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Graph-from-the-Vostok-Ice-Core-for-the-past-800-000-Years_fig5_339130657) to the graph of human population throughout history(https://www.science.org.au/curious/earth-environment/population-environment). There is a sharp increase in one variable over very little time. If we continue on “business as usual” meaning “growing and emitting at the same increasing rate” we will warm six degrees Celsius. This will sterilize ninety percent of life on Earth. We cannot in good conscience keep emitting as we have been. This is why climate scientists urge us to cut emissions so that we warm fewer than two degrees Celsius: our species (and others) will have a better chance of surviving. We are pressed for time because there is already warming “baked into” the atmosphere from our past and current emissions. This is why I stick my neck out and write. Catastrophic climate change is an issue much bigger than my personal safety or the hurt feelings of letter writers who viciously and repeatedly lie about this topic. Carbon dioxide has increased exponentially and this is not up for debate. One can either accept the reality of atmospheric chemistry and its consequences, or one cannot.

Alas, dear readers, this is the final edition of Megan's Climate Corner. Thank you to the Trinity Journal for the opportunity to share information about Earth with all of Trinity County. They took a gamble on me and gave my first column a home. I am very grateful. Thank you, Mr. Wagner, and thank you to the entire Trinity Journal team.

The next edition will appear the second Wednesday of January 2022 with a new name and email address for the New Year (for copyright purposes), but the same complex, quality climate content presented in an approachable manner. We will continue to explore environmental topics in depth while marveling at the majesty of our unique, one-in-a-million home planet and its place in the universe. See you next year!

It’s Still a Wonderful World

Greetings, readers! I hope this week’s article brings a bit less brain and a little more heart.

            I hope I don’t appear as though I don’t care about the Monument Fire and River Complex by writing this science column in a somewhat “ostrich with her head in the sand” manner. I care very much about the current events unfolding in these mountains. It’s all I think about, why I decided to speak up and write in the first place. My heart breaks for all those displaced, who have lost homes and are surviving the chaos of destruction and evacuation as best they can.

There is little more I can say beyond what has been written in the feature fire articles and the informative pieces offered by longstanding TC columnists. All I can add is that I am so sorry this is our shared reality and that there is been so much suffering. I’m inspired to see the way helpers spring forth from this community to care for their own. The fires of this season will not burn for eternity. The firefighters and residents of this county will do everything they can to see that these fires go cold. I hope this short article is a brief reprieve from pain.

            Today we’ll review and recollect. We know Earth is a round planet, spinning on its axis, orbiting the sun. This means that sunlight reaches Earth’s surface at different angles: the equator receives direct sunlight over a smaller, more concentrated area, and the latitudes and poles receive light at lower angles that are less direct and allow the beams to spread over a larger geographic area. Here’s a helpful refresher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_Sun_angle_on_climate. We have climate zones (tropical rainforests, mid-latitude deserts and grasslands, arctic tundra, polar ice caps) because of these variations in solar energy striking Earth’s surface.

            We also know that materials can move from place to place (sphere to sphere) through chemical reactions or phase changes. Just as water moves between the sky and water bodies (atmosphere and hydrosphere), carbon moves between the atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere by taking the form of CO2, methane, hydrocarbons, and carbonate rocks (limestone and marble). A tree or brick of coal becomes atmospheric CO2 through the chemical reaction of combustion, and CO2 becomes biomass (trees, calcium carbonate planktonic shells) via photosynthesis. In summary, energy and materials are constantly flowing from place to place around the planet in perpetuity, and at varying rates (days to hundreds of millions of years).

            We also know Earth is a complex system with time lags (processes don’t happen instantaneously), non-linear (mostly exponential) relationships, and built-in feedback loops that can either amplify (increase) a change in the system, or dampen (decrease) a change in the system. We know from direct observation and from ancient climate records that Earth doesn’t usually react in a predictable, linear way. There are numerous of examples of a forcing (a change in the system) going undetected for a good long while (the flat part of the exponential curve), but then suddenly manifesting in a rapid, lightning-fast flip into a new equilibrium (the steep, rocket-ship trajectory part of the exponential curve).

I grew up in New Hampshire. Before I was born, acid rain was falling from the sky and filling the lakes. Rather than having the fish die off in a gradual manner, with the death count increasing year after year, they survived for years with no apparent change in their population. Then, in the course of one summer, there was a massive fish die-off in the lakes that happened all at once, seemingly without warning. Once the waters were tested, scientists understood that the fish had been chronically poisoned, and then were pushed past the threshold of survival when the water became too acidic for sustained life and procreation.

            We live on a miraculous, one-of-a-kind planet that is awesome and fearful in its complexity and interconnectedness. As John Muir once wrote, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” If we can better understand these nuances and intricate relationships, we can better care for and nurture this spectacular Earth. Agapé.

Systems Thinking: Unlocking A Complex Earth

July 28th, 2021

Earth is a complex, multi-system wonder! Just as the human body consists of multiple systems that all work in tandem to sustain human life, the Earth System is composed of multiple systems that sustain a vast quantity and variety of life forms. These subsystems are: the lithosphere, also called the geosphere (rocks, soil, molten rock, fossil fuels), the hydrosphere (oceans, rivers, lakes, groundwater, etc.), the atmosphere (tropo-, strato-, meso-, thermo-, magneto-, and exo-sphere), the biosphere (oceanic and terrestrial plants and animals), and some climatological conventions separate out the cryosphere (ice and snow).

To understand how the Earth System operates, we need to understand “systems thinking”. It helps to break Earth down into “stocks” (nouns) and “flows” (verbs). A stock/reservoir is any entity that can be filled or depleted, like a bathtub filling or draining. We just listed the Earth System stocks: the lithosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, atmosphere, and cryosphere. We concern ourselves with how materials and energy flow throughout the system, i.e. how water, nitrogen, carbon, phosphorous, and other elements of key interest move throughout the different spheres. This means that the flows/fluxes are actions, or processes through which materials can move from one sphere to another.

Most of us confidently understand the hydrological cycle. Evaporation is the flux that moves water from the hydrosphere and lithosphere (in the form of soil moisture) up into the atmosphere. Precipitation is the flux that moves water back down from the atmosphere to the hydrosphere and lithosphere. Condensation is another flux/process in the hydrological cycle, but in this example, it does not transfer water from one sphere to another, but occurs solely within the atmosphere.

Systems Thinking also requires us to understand residence times and time lags, nonlinear relationships, as well as feedback loops. Residence times refer to how long a material remains within a stock. Sticking to our hydrological cycle example, here’s how long a water molecule stays, on average, within a given stock: Oceans/Seas (at a depth of 2,500 m) 4,000 years, Lakes/Reservoirs 10 years, Swamps 1-10 years, Rivers 2 weeks, Soil Moisture 2 weeks-1 year, Groundwater (120 m) 2 weeks-10,000 years, Ice Caps/Glaciers 10-1,000 years, Atmospheric Water 10 days, Biospheric Water 1 week (https://www.spokaneaquifer.org/the-aquifer/what-is-an-aquifer/residence-time-of-groundwater/).

For each of the cycles we’ll cover (rock, carbon, nitrogen, etc.) there will be different residence times for the material of interest. I cannot over-emphasize how important it is to consider the residence time of a given material. For some cycles, the residence time is hundreds of millions of years!

            The lag time we experience every day is the diurnal (daily) temperature lag. Noon is when we receive the most sunlight, but peak daytime temperatures occur several hours after noon. That’s because air warms (and cools!) faster than water, dirt, and rock. The earth continues to radiate heat well past noon, maintaining warm temperatures. Another example is seasonal ocean temperatures: northern hemisphere oceans tend to reach their warmest temperature in August and September, 2-3 months after the summer solstice! (https://www.seatemperature.org/atlantic-ocean). This is due to the massive heat capacity of water: it takes 4,184 joules to warm 1 kilogram of water by 1°C (by comparison, it takes 385 joules to warm 1 kilogram of copper 1°C) (https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-school/science/specific-heat-capacity-and-water?qt-science_center_objects=0#qt-science_center_objects). Thus, the ocean continues to warm well beyond the longest day of the year.

Exponential growth is the most crucial nonlinear relationship to understand in the Earth system. Human population is one example: it took about 12,000 years to reach 1 billion people (in the year 1800), and then it only took 120 years to grow to 7.9 billion (https://ugc.berkeley.edu/background-content/population-growth/).

Lastly: feedback loops. Positive feedback loops amplify or increase the effect of a forcing, negative feedback loops dampen or decrease the effect of a forcing. A positive feedback: as sea ice melts, dark ocean water is revealed. Dark ocean water absorbs sunlight (as opposed to reflective white ice and snow), and so absorbs more heat, which melts more ice, on and on and on. Right now, permafrost in the arctic is melting and releasing methane, a greenhouse gas 30 times more powerful than CO2 but with 1/10th the atmospheric residence time (https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2014.0423).

This heats the planet, which melts more permafrost, which releases more methane, etc. Same with wildfires: combustion moves carbon from the biosphere to the atmosphere, and the train runs away.

Canary in the coal mine? Or arctic tern on the burning permafrost graveyard . . .?

Image sourced from: https://ugc.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Human-Pop-Growth-2019.jpg