Lessons from the Worst of Times

A sermon I gave at the Unitarian Universalist Congregational Society of Westborough on April 14th, 2019.

First off, I am not going to repeat your 10th grade English class on “A Tale of Two Cities”. 

Rev Bev told me that one of the benefits of having the pulpit is, well, having a captive audience.

So, Instead, you are going to get a bit of a geology lesson. You’ve been warned. 

The inspiration for my talk today is a book I recently read called “The Worst of Times.” 

Before I get started, it should not be a surprise that I like to read books about science. Some of them are out of my educational background, such as a book I read by a molecular biologist about the origin of life. It’s hard to get away from the verbiage of one’s chosen field of study, so I found it tough sledding. I do remember the take away from that book – evolution is guided by a select small group of organic molecules, like Lego blocks, which can be re-arranged and re-purposed to build just about anything.

“The Worst of Times”, despite its short length of 180 pages, is written by an academic geologist, whose target audience is not the same as Carl Sagan’s or Neil De Grasse Tyson’s. It’s a book only a geologist or determined layman can get through, but it held a powerful message for me, that I will share with you today.

One of my goals here is that I want to expand your perspective on the history of the Earth.

The best estimate of the Earth’s age is 4.54 billion years, give or take 4 million years, which, believe it or not, is only 8 one-hundredths of a percent uncertainty.

To give you some perspective on how we fit into that four and a half billion-year time span, I am going to compare the Earth’s age to a 24-hour clock.

This is something I do when I lead geology walks for the students at Mill Pond School.

So, some select events of Earth’s history clock in like this:

• The first evidence of life is found at about 4:30 AM
• The first fish appeared around 9:30 PM
• The first land plants appeared around 9:42 PM.
• The first Dinosaurs appeared around 10:49 PM.
• The first mammals appeared around 11:06 PM.
• The Dinosaurs went extinct at 11:39 PM.
• The first of our hominid ancestors arrived around 11:58 PM.
• The first anatomically modern humans appeared around 11:59 and 56 seconds PM.

Wrap your head around this - human civilization from earliest Mesopotamia to today, started at 11:59 and 59.9 seconds PM. 

An eye blink is a 10th of a second, so all of recorded human history is little more than the geologic eye blink in comparison to the age of the Earth.

What’s my point here?  The Earth is vastly old compared to humanity’s brief existence on it. It’s a perspective that’s hard for almost anyone to envision unless you are a geology nerd like me. It’s a perspective that us geo-nerds call Deep Time.

Thinking this way is a hard thing for us humans to do. Up until the beginning of the 20th century, world-wide average life expectancy was 31, not a whole lot different than it was for our Paleolithic ancestors.  Even though it is now about 75, our ability to look ahead or behind for that matter, is very limited. We just aren’t wired that way.

For cryin’ out loud - deep time for the average person is the end of the last season of Game of Thrones (which starts again tonight!!!).

Life has existed on Earth in one form or another for the last 3.7 billion years. Over that vast span, life has colonized every nook and cranny of the Earth’s surface and every environment imaginable, from boiling hydrothermal vents at crushing depths in the ocean to the desolate and bitterly cold coasts of Antarctica. 

The range of life on Earth goes from 400 nano-meter-sized bacteria to 25-meter-long Blue Whales. Blue green algae to towering redwoods.

Something that most of the lifeforms that ever existed on Earth have in common is that most of them are extinct.

This brings me to “The Worst of Times”. It is about a period in Earth’s history from 260 to 180 million years ago where life suffered a series of mass extinctions, two of which were among the most devastating ones found in the geologic record. I will not bore you with the nitty gritty details of how scientists think all these extinctions occurred, but each of them coincided with the rapid increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. My main point, though, is that they did happen.

What is a “mass extinction”? 

A mass extinction is where many forms of life, as recorded in the fossil record, suddenly disappear. Some species slowly disappear from successively younger rock layers, but in some cases, their disappearance is abrupt and coincides with the disappearance of untold numbers of other species. Their fossils appear in one layer of rocks all over the world and are gone in the next, never to be found again, anywhere.

At such layers, it becomes clear that the earth’s environment changed radically. The lower layers may show evidence of forests, to be replaced by ferns further up. It can be millions of years before the remains of trees are again found in the rocks and they are of completely different division in the Kingdom of plants than before the extinction event.

One such major event was at the end of the Permian Period, 252 million years ago. 96% of marine species and 70% of land species died out in what has been described as a “global annihilation” or the “Great Dying.” The extinction event took place over about 20,000 years, 4 eyeblinks of the 24-hour geologic clock. It took 10 million years for life on Earth to recover. The point is – it did recover. 

Life recovered after every mass extinction.

So, what’s the lesson? The lesson is that life goes on, the planet goes on. 
To quote Dr. Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park (a fictional character by the way): “If there is one thing the history of evolution has taught us it's that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, it expands to new territories and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously, but there it is. Life finds a way.”

Over much of the last 500 million years, the Earth has been much warmer than it is today, with the exception of three ice age intervals, one of which we are in right now. 20,000 years ago, this church would have been under an ice sheet a mile thick.

Which brings me to today.

Why do we care that the planet is warming now? It’s the rapidity of this warming that should scare the heck out of everyone.

The planet is changing and changing rapidly. We have what scientists consider radical changes in the Earth’s atmosphere which are happening at a rate unfathomable to anyone who studies the history of the Earth. The temperature of the ocean is rapidly increasing and the climate is shifting, becoming more unstable. 

We don’t know where it will end up, but most likely, the climate will end up in a place less hospitable to us, let alone ever other plant or animal. Change the environment too rapidly – and you get a mass extinction.

That is exactly what is happening right now. 

The extinction rates of life on land and in the water are accelerating. It is entirely possible that the biggest mammals on land within the next couple of centuries will be domestic cattle. Insects and amphibians are disappearing all over the world. The list goes on and on.

The reason for these changes is us. Period. End of story. 

But geological history says that despite anything we can do; the planet will not die. Life will not disappear. The kind of life – well that’s a different story. It doesn’t have to include us. 

We cannot kill the planet.

That being said, the planet doesn’t need us. Rather, and it should be obvious – we need the planet. 

The question on your mind right now may be – Are we about to join the Permian therapsids, the Cretaceous ammonites, the Carboniferous cycads, Mesozoic dinosaurs ad infinitum, buried in the rock record of geologic history?

I don’t think so.

We humans are incredibly adaptable animals.  In less than 100,000 years, humans spread to the far reaches of the planet, with the exception of Antarctica. We did so without airplanes, ships, cars, GPS or even something as simple as a compass. We survived the last Ice Age using nothing more than stone and bone tools and spears. 

But think of our impact on the planet over the last few centuries. Heck, think of what we have done in the last 100 years, the last 50.

The same adaptability that allowed us to colonize the whole planet has also gotten us where we are today, unfortunately.

I think we will survive the oncoming self-inflicted changes to our world. I personally think that the way things are going, there will probably be a lot less of us when the dust settles, but we, as a species, will still be here. Sadly, many others will not.

We were warned about this oncoming problem, but we were incapable of understanding what these warnings really meant because, in my opinion, we cannot think beyond the myopically short perspective of our own lifetimes or even the next few months.

The first US report to the President regarding climate change was put on Lyndon Johnson’s desk in 1965 and projected probabilities about what would happen at the beginning of the 21st century, but, as we all know, he did not act on it. 35 years was a long time down the road after all and Johnson was in the midst of personally directing the dropping of bombs all over Southeast Asia.

But something happened just 5 years later – the first Earth Day. 

What inspired Earth Day? 

In 1968, a professor of Public Health named Morton Hilbert sponsored a student/scientist conference to discuss the impacts of environmental damage both to people and the planet. They started planning for an Earth Day.
Then there was an environmental disaster – the Santa Barbara Oil Blow Out of 1969. Three million gallons of oil were released, killing thousands of birds, dolphins, seals and sea lions, and soiling hundreds of miles of coast line. This disaster was the first to really shock people into focusing on what we were doing to the planet.

In 1969, peace Activist John McConnell proposed Earth Day to the UN. Senator Gaylord Nelson founded the US version of Earth Day on April 22, 1970.

There is no doubt that, at least in developed countries, the environment is much, much cleaner than it was in 1970, although we still have a long way to go. 50 years later, we still celebrate Earth Day. As a people, we are far more environmentally conscious than any generation before 1970. 

Clearly though, it is not enough. The dynamics have changed – especially since what we now consider pollution includes Carbon Dioxide, which is always been a part of the air we breathe.

In fact, most of the CO2 we put into the air was added in just the last 30 years, just 2 years after NASA climate scientist James Hansen testified before Congress about what was going to happen if we did not decrease those emissions.

We are in a hole. What do we do about this hole into which we have dug ourselves?

First rule of holes. When you are in one - stop digging.

We cannot stop what changes that are happening now. That ship has sailed. 

The impacts of climate change are already devastatingly clear and even if we stopped all carbon emissions tomorrow, the impacts will last centuries. Rare flooding events will continue to become common place. Hurricanes will continue to get stronger; Heatwaves will continue to become frequent and intense. Many tropic regions of the planet will become literally uninhabitable for humans in the summer. The seas will rise, coastal cities will drown, millions of people will be displaced, even here in the US. That is a given.

Many of those impacts will come at us in the next few decades, in the lifetimes of most people sitting in the pews.

This really, really sucks.

So, what can we do? 

We must stop it from getting worse. We owe that to our children. 

Stop. Making. It. Worse.

How do we do that?

We need to look at policies at every level – first and foremost, in our homes, our town, our state and our country.

We need to think in terms of sustainability. Sustainability is not a concept that fits well in the capitalist economic model, which is always about growth and externalizing of costs in order to maximize profits.

At home, sustainability in our lives means rethinking how we live. Start to minimize our meat, especially beef consumption. Choose to get our produce from local sources. Choose foods whose production has less impact on the environment. Buy our electricity from renewable sources. Drive higher mileage cars. 

Find better ways to deal with our waste, such as composting. Some of us do all these things already, but not nearly enough of us do that to make a dent. We need to make sustainability attractive, not a chore or a sacrifice. How we do that is a big question.

At the Town level, we need push for policies that encourage recycling and reuse. We need to make buying renewable energy the first choice. We need to preserve and expand open space. We need to make pedestrian and bicycling options accessible throughout the entire town. Push to get more buildings to become more energy efficient. Partner with local businesses to encourage them to install solar arrays. 

At the state level, it’s a matter of pushing what I have just said upward. Especially energy purchasing. Mass transit is a joke in Massachusetts. Yet mass transit is major way to reduce our carbon footprint. 

We need to push the state to make alternative energy a larger and larger portion of the energy mix.

We need to make energy efficiency a major part of our building codes. In Boston, almost all the new high-rise buildings are not at all energy efficient. This is lunacy.

We need a program of reforestation. An article in last month’s Scientific American described how reforestation can suck huge amounts of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.  I file that one under low hanging fruit. Planting forests to suck CO2 out of the air is a lot simpler and cheaper than engineering machines to take on that task.

We need to elect people who will take big steps at all levels of government – local, state and federal. 

The biggest impediment to addressing climate change is leadership. 

Not the science, not the technology. The science is clear. 

The technology is available - the knowledge to implement the technology, whether it be energy, food, transportation, or conservation. It’s all there. 

What is lacking is leadership.

I truly believe we can innovate our way out of it with the right incentives AND by electing politicians with the guts to make it happen.

Put a price on carbon, and keep increasing it. Turn the proceeds right back to the people. Think about it. If everyone got the same “dividend” back every year, who will it benefit the most? The least among us. Who will benefit the least? The most well off, who are probably the people who generate the most greenhouse gases. Lower income people will put that money right back into the economy.

An increasing price on carbon will incentivize innovation in energy generation and use. The technologies are already there. They just cannot compete with fossil fuels in many sectors of the economy, such as transportation. That is changing, but it is not changing quickly enough.

How do we know this will work? Because it already has. The Clean Air Act and its amendments required power plants to decrease the emissions of sulfur dioxide, which causes acid rain. The law required implementation of a pollution trading scheme that put an ever-increasing price on the sulfur emissions. It did not tell power companies how to do it. Low and behold, sulfur emissions fell, and fell rapidly. Forests and lakes recovered from decades of degradation.

There was an unintended consequence. Sulfur pollution creates particles that reflect sunlight, which has the effect of cooling the earth. If you look at a graph of global temperatures going back to the beginning of the 20th century, you will see that temperatures started increasing, then fell as industrialization increased, with the concomitant increase in coal burning. Temperatures increased during the Great Depression as the economy contracted and decreased after World War II when industrial production increased again. As a child, I remember how cold winters in the 1970s were. But they started to warm up in the 80s as sulfur pollution started to abate.

In other words, sulfur pollution that WE made, masked global warming. 
So, don’t let anyone tell you that humans have not changed the climate. We have and we are.

Before you get any ideas, we cannot pollute our way out of global warming by burning more coal, so don’t even think about it.

We can tell power companies that they need to increase the proportion of clean energy required for electricity generation. Don’t tell them how to do it, just say they need to. 

Texas is already doing this and they are one of the largest producers of alternative energy in the country, surpassing California. Granted, they are blessed with a huge amount of available wind, but in Texas, wind is going to outpace coal for electricity soon, if it hasn’t already. They are already putting to rest the argument that alternative energy’s intermittency will destabilize the electric grid. Texas has already shown that it can be managed. 

Even the U.S. Department of Energy says the grid can handle up to 30% alternative energy input if just change operating procedures. No new technology required, just new thinking.

Other states, including Massachusetts, are already doing this, but not doing it fast enough.

Making these changes will not be easy to do. The special interests are entrenched. The transportation, agriculture, and energy infrastructure are all built around the use of fossil fuels. Most people do not have the interest, or in the case of the poor, the ability, to think in terms of sustainability.

But we must.

The Words of John F. Kennedy, in his 1962 speech laying out goal of going to the moon by the end of that decade, ring true in this time as well. In regard to that goal, Kennedy said:

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

Substitute the words “go to the moon” with “fight climate change” 

“We choose to fight climate change in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

Indeed, the journey to the moon in the late 1960s pales in comparison to our existential challenges today, in my opinion.

As I said before, the impediment to addressing human-caused climate change is not a lack of technical know-how. It is a lack of will.  


It is tempting to look at what is before us and quail at the immensity of the problem. Say it cannot be done. Shrug our shoulders and take it as given that we will have to leave a rapidly diminishing planet to our heirs, but we will never know if we don’t even make the attempt.

There is not a Great Future in Plastics

“Plastics - There’s a great future in plastics”

This famous line from the 1967 movie “The Graduate” was meant as advice to a clueless college graduate.

It’s apparent now that we were all clueless about the future of plastics 42 years ago. The future of plastics is here and it ain’t great.

Plastics are ubiquitous. Everything comes in plastic: wraps, containers, jars, bottles, packaging.  Plastics are light weight, moldable into almost any shape and size and made into just about any product – cat toys to car bumpers, and zillions of other things.

Plastics are cheap to synthesize, especially today with the price of oil still low by historic standards.

Many types of plastic are almost indestructible. Oh, you can break them down into tiny pieces, but they never, ever go away.

Discarded plastics are found all over the world. Recently, researchers found microscopic plastic fibers in sea creatures living at the bottom of the Mariana Trench 36,000 feet below the ocean’s surface. Plastic debris are found on even the most isolated deserted islands throughout the world.

I suspect that a million years from now, humanity’s presence on Earth will be defined by plastic residue encased in a layer of sedimentary rock.

Recycling was supposed to be the answer to plastic pollution, but that is easier said than done. As I said, plastics are very cheap to make, far cheaper than the cost to recycle them. The reasons that make plastics tough are the very reasons they are hard to reprocess.

Until recently, when we threw our plastic into the recycling bin, it would end up in giant bales shipped to China. Now China isn’t taking the stuff and there is little market for it domestically. Many municipalities cannot afford the increasing costs to get recyclers to accept their plastic, so an increasing volume is now going to landfills. On top of that, most of us don’t recycle. Too “inconvenient.”

We are also seeing the same thing with glass, paper and other materials by the way.

In the overall scheme of things, I’d rather have plastic in landfills than in the bellies and bloodstreams of life all over the planet (including us), but that’s not a solution either.

Reusable grocery bags and refillable water bottles are good individual practices, but they do not even begin to make a dent in the plastic waste problem. 

It’s easy to say we should do our best not to use it, but a quick trip to the supermarket makes that idea laughable. You name it – juice, eggs, milk, cold cuts, cakes, bread, salad dressing – they all are either wrapped or contained in plastic.

But is the problem really plastic itself? Or is it a symptom of our culture and our economic policies?

Our capitalist economic system requires that businesses make a profit, which requires costs to be kept low. Plastic containers are cheap, light and durable, saving transport costs and increasing the amount of product that makes it to market. But once the product is sold, the business is no longer responsible for the packaging. It’s our problem to get rid of the packaging, not theirs.  What if it wasn’t?

If businesses were responsible for their packaging, cradle to grave, that could incentivize them to switch to other materials. Of course, going this route would be a logistical nightmare. But it’s a thought.

Consider that even though alternative energy industry subsidies are being phased out, alternative energy is now economically self-sustaining.

Maybe we should be incentivizing startups to find new ways to reprocess plastics with tax breaks and subsidies. There are all sorts of successful experimental processes to break down plastics into raw manufacturing materials or even fuel.

These processes just need to be scaled up, which takes investment.

Maybe we should lobby retailers and manufacturers to move to different modes of packaging. Imagine if Walmart told all its suppliers to switch to non-plastic or biodegradable containers.

Imagine if everyone in Westborough wrote to the CEOs of Stop and Shop and Roche Brothers demanding they sell products which minimize plastic containers.

Imagine if Westborough, which implemented a regulation banning plastic bags, did the same with plastic containers and soda cups (and straws).

We are way past the point where we can afford to be clueless about the myriad impacts of plastic on the planet.

We need to incentivize solutions. It’s time we, as a community, started to think bigger than reusable shopping bags.

Lost in the Chaos

With all the chaos that passes for headline news these days, including the deadly cold snap which defined the last week of January, there were several news items over just the last month which probably escaped your notice, but to me, are far more consequential in the long run than the current scandal de jour.

President Trump scoffed at the lately departed cold snap and tweeted that we sure could use “a little of that good old-fashioned Global Warming”.

Actually, no, we don’t.

Let’s talk about that “polar vortex” cold snap. What news outlets did not tell you is that while the US dealt with record cold temperatures, vast areas of the planet recorded temperatures up to 18 degrees ABOVE normal, including Northern Alaska, Spitsbergen (at 78 degrees north latitude), Northern China, AND Antarctica. Wildfires are currently rampant in Australia, where temperatures are routinely over 110 degrees right now.

A paper in the journal Science found that the world’s oceans are heating up 40 percent faster than they thought just 5 years ago, based on a new evaluation of data collected over the last few decades. Shallower waters show an acceleration of warming, when comparing trends from before and after the turn of the 20^th century.

A study just released by NASA revealed that a huge cavity, 1000 feet thick and one third the area of Manhattan, has developed under the Thwaites Glacier, which itself is about the size of Florida. This glacier is already melting at an accelerated rate, so the existence of this cavity, which held about 14 billion tons of ice, is of great concern.

Newly published reports in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that Antarctica’s ice loss has risen from 40 billion tons per year in the 1980s to 250 billion tons per year now. The rate of loss has tripled just since 2007.

On the other side of the planet, the ice sheet that covers Greenland is losing ice at a rate of 400 billion tons per year, four times more than in 2003. Scientists are beginning to wonder if the melting of the Greenland ice cap is at a “tipping point.”

What is a tipping point?

A tipping point is when any system changes from one stable state to another. A good analogy is a glass half full of water. It is stable even if you push it around on the table. However, if you start to lift up one side of the bottom of the glass, it will eventually get to the point where it tips over completely. It enters a new stable state, on its side with the water probably running of the edge of the table. Maybe the glass rolls of the edge of the table and smashes to pieces on the floor. That’s what we call an irreversible change of state.

What is a climate tipping point? It is a point where the process Earth’s changing climate becomes irreversible. The Earth enters a new state. Tipping points include unstoppable melting of the Greenland Ice Cap, permanent ice-free summers in the Arctic ocean, or collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet to name but a few. Scientists used to think this process would take centuries. Not anymore.

The other take away from these articles is that researchers are no longer talking about taking action to reverse climate change, only slow it. What some of the authors are cautiously saying is that we might have already passed the point of no return.

When will we know for certain that the Earth has arrived at climate tipping point? When we get there.

Published in the Westborough News, February 15, 2019

From Storm Surge to Fire Storm

The other day, I was looking at an aerial photo of an entire neighborhood razed to the ground. My wife looked over my shoulder and asked if the picture was from the fires in California and I told her no, this was Mexico Beach, Florida, where Hurricane Michael came ashore last October.

It seems the disasters are occurring so frequently that it’s hard to tell the aftermath of one from another at first glance.

Part of allure of living on the coastline or in forested areas such as the foothills and mountains outside of major cities is the feeling that you are closer to nature and the wilderness. Being closer to nature can have a price though, especially when nature can exact that price quickly and without mercy.

Just ask the people of Mexico Beach, Florida or Paradise, California.

Hurricanes and forest fires have always been a fact of life on the Gulf of Mexico or the canyons and hills along the California coast. However, it is not your imagination if you think that the frequency and ferocity of these events are increasing. They are.

The number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes occurring in the North Atlantic has gone from 2 per decade in the 1900s to over 20 per decade in the 2000s. Climate scientists say that the evidence indicates that warming oceans are contributing to stronger hurricanes.

2005’s Hurricane Katrina rapidly grew to a Category 5 once it entered the Gulf of Mexico and this year’s Michael was almost a Cat 5 before it came ashore in the Florida Panhandle.

What will happen to Mexico Beach, Florida is anyone’s guess at this point. It was not a rich community to start with.

Last year’s Cat 4 Hurricane Harvey destroyed a major portion of Port Aransas, Texas and 18 months later, they are still figuring out how to rebuild.  The local government admits it may never be the same. Recovery won’t be easy.

Moving from storm surge to fire storms, the frequency and duration of western US wildfires has increased substantially since in the 1980s. 

Average annual temperatures in southern California have gone up by about 2.4 degrees F over the last 60 years alone. Like the rest of the southwest, the state is getting drier. Winter rains that end the fire season in early autumn are now not coming at all or coming so late that the fire “season” is pretty much year round. Currently, 75% of California is routinely in severe to extreme drought.

Combine this with people moving further into fire-prone regions and horrific disasters are now inevitable. This year’s fires spared no one, neither the very rich in the canyons above LA nor the middle class and retirees in towns like Paradise.

Can they rebuild?

The experience of Fort McMurray, Alberta is telling. 98% of it was destroyed by a wildfire that rapidly swept through the town in 2016, forcing the evacuation of 88,000 residents. As of last spring, only 20% of destroyed homes had been rebuilt.

Recovery won’t be easy.

California estimates that the frequency of extreme wildfires could increase 50% by the end of the century if temperatures continue to increase. The area burned will increase by 77%.

To be more resilient to such disasters means building to standards which would make homes and businesses more sound in the face of fire or flood, which means greater expense. Getting homeowners insurance for reconstruction will probably depend on how resilient new structures will be.

One of the only homes right on the water in Mexico Beach to survive Hurricane Michael was constructed by wealthy people would could afford such sturdy home. Similarly, I speculate that building a home that can survive a wind-driven wildfire will only be affordable by the wealthy.

California firefighters are right now battling to save homes at a cost of almost $700 million so far this year. You can’t even fight a hurricane, let alone one with sustained winds that rival an F-3 tornado.

Given the trends and recent experience, perhaps the better question is whether Mexico Beach or Paradise should be rebuilt at all. 

Maybe it’s time to rethink the allure of living close to nature’s wildlands and waters.

Published in the Westborough News, December, 2018

Fish Stories

The US is in the midst of a mass migration and it’s not hordes of Latinos storming the Texas border. Rather, it’s sea life – fish and shellfish along our eastern and western coasts.

Why? Because the oceans are getting warmer. As their habitats change, free swimming critters can move. The North Atlantic Ocean has warmed about a quarter of a degree C every decade since the early 1980s. The Gulf of Maine has warmed 3 to 5 times faster and is now 5 degree C warmer than in 1985, according to NASA.

We are witnessing this phenomenon right off the coast of New England. Shrimp have all but disappeared from the Gulf of Maine whereas lobsters are now flourishing there. Conversely, lobsters are rapidly disappearing from southern New England. Warmer waters have increased lobster disease and decreased fertility.

Cod are also moving north from the Gulf of Maine and by 2100, they will be making their home off Newfoundland and Labrador.

Warmer water species are also moving north. Striped and black sea bass are now moving in. They also like to munch on lobsters, furthering the latter’s decline.

A similar story is being told on the West Coast. Mackerel, rockfish, and pollock, are disappearing from the Pacific Northwest. By 2100, predictions are that they will live exclusively in the Aleutians or further north in Bristol Bay.

Why do fish migrate as the waters get warmer? According to an article I read in the New York Times, the reason is oxygen. Warmer waters hold less dissolved gases, including oxygen.

Think about it, when you engage in aerobic exercise, you start breathing harder and faster. Why? Because your body needs more oxygen. It’s also why if you go from sea level to Denver, you may feel dizzy. Your body is not getting as much oxygen in the thinner air.

It’s no different if you are a fish. Some fish, especially fast moving predator species like cod which are higher up the food chain, have naturally higher metabolism. The literally go where the oxygen is.

You may then ask why predator species in the tropics, like tarpon and barracuda exist there at all. Basically, they evolved in the tropics so they are used to it. In addition, at this time, the relative temperature increase in the tropics is currently not as great as it is in higher latitudes.

Warmer ocean temperatures off New England have been implicated as the reason cod populations did not recover even after commercial fishing practices were changed, according to a 2015 study published in the journal Science.

Now here is the interesting, or maybe frightening, thing about the NY Times article. It wasn’t about migrating fish populations.

It was about one of the most devastating mass extinction events of the last 500 million years, called the Great Dying. The geologic record shows that 252 million years ago, 96% of all marine species, and 70% of all terrestrial species died out over a span of a few thousand years, a blink of the eye in geologic terms.

Recent research also published in Science concludes that greenhouse-gas driven global warming during that extinction raised temperatures in the atmosphere and ocean by more than 10 degrees C and depleted global marine oxygen levels by almost 80%. Terrestrial life baked and ocean life suffocated.

Jump forward 252 million years to the 21st century. Worldwide ocean temperatures are increasing. We are already seeing a decrease in ocean oxygen levels. Average air temperatures have increased by 1 degree C and because we are doing just about nothing, they will go up by about 4 degrees by 2100.

The authors of the Science article concluded that current trends in ocean oxygen loss suggest we may already be at the beginning of another oceanic extinction event.

The story of the Earth’s history is found in its rocks. With a lot of hard work scientists have been reading that story for centuries. Today, the fish migrating north along our coasts are telling us a new story. We need to start listening.

Published in the Westborough News, January, 2019

Going to Hell in a Bucket

“I may be going to hell in a bucket babe, but at least I’m enjoying the ride.” – Grateful Dead, 1983

Since the beginning of the Trump Administration, information about climate change has slowly disappeared from the web sites of the EPA and other government agencies. Trump pulled us out of the Paris Agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Department of Interior has aggressively pursued a policy of opening up lands from the Alaska to the Rio Grande as well as our coasts to more oil and gas drilling. The Energy Department is doing everything it can to prop up the dying coal industry.

Now comes an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) regarding the proposed freezing of fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks as of 2020.

The EIS paints a damning picture of the impacts to the planet if we continue on our current course of not reigning in CO2, methane, and particulate aerosol emissions. As of today, the EIS states, impacts will be “irreversible on a multi-century to millennial time scale . . . Surface temperatures will remain approximately constant at elevated levels for many centuries after a complete cessation of net anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Because of the long time scales of heat transfer from the ocean surface to depth, ocean warming will continue for centuries.”

The report projects that surface temperatures are projected to rise about 4 degrees C by 2100, which would result in the drowning of coastal cities, the rendering of large portions of South Asia and the Middle East uninhabitable, drastically increasing the frequency of extreme weather events, and so on.

It’s a jaw-droppingly pessimistic analysis. What is even more jaw dropping is that the EIS then concludes that maintaining President Obama’s planned increased fuel standards will not make a significant dent to the basically dire forecast, so therefore there is no reason to implement them.

In other words – why bother?

As Bill McKibben of Middlebury College wrote the other day in the Guardian: “You might as well argue that because you’re going to die eventually, there’s no reason not to smoke a carton of cigarettes a day.”

This proposal dovetails nicely with the administration’s plans to abandon regulations to reign in methane leaks from oil and gas production and transport, to weaken emissions regulations on coal-fired power plants, and to drop rules to limit leaks and discharge of refrigerants, which are far more powerful greenhouse gases than CO2 or methane.

As an aside, weakening coal plant emissions standards will result in over 1000 increased deaths per year from respiratory illness, using EPA’s own estimates. Another aside - the number of extreme weather events causing $1 billion or more in economic losses has increased 400% in the last 40 years.

Why is the administration taking this course? Because regulations cost businesses money. 

What the administration willfully ignores are the mountains of financial data which clearly demonstrate that the economic damage from climate change will be measured in the trillions of dollars between now and the end of the century.

Why do you think most major insurance companies want to us to reign in emissions? Because it will cost them money. Funny how that works.

I have stated in this column several times over the last couple of years that many of the consequences of increased CO2 emissions are baked in, no matter what we do, because CO2’s residence time in the atmosphere is measured in centuries. I have also said that we owe it to our children to not make it worse.

The Trump administration thinks otherwise. Why bother?

The Wild Texas Wind

If you are like most people, as long as you can plug something into the wall and turn it on, you don’t care much where the power comes from. But getting that power to your home or business is a complex process, which consists of all the power plants, transmission lines, and substations that go right to your electric meter, and everything else in between, aka, “the grid.”

Power is transmitted through the grid via alternating current (AC). If you don’t remember (or never had) high school physics, AC power reverses direction many times a second. In our country, that’s a frequency of 60 times a second. If the frequency changes too often and quickly, the grid becomes unstable and could crash. It’s analogous to water sloshing in a bucket. Slosh too much and you can’t keep the water in place.

Unlike other commodities, electricity, for the time being, cannot be stored in the quantities needed to meet fluctuating grid demand, although that issue is being addressed with rapidly developing technology. Power generators and utilities have to make sure that supply and demand are in balance at all times.

The grid in our country is not one big electric distribution system, it is actually three. The Eastern, Western and Texas Interconnections. These systems operate independently from each other.

So where am I going with all this?

One criticism I have gotten about my advocacy of large scale solar and wind is that because the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine, large scale alternative energy is not practical. The grid cannot handle the fluctuations. Critics tell me that above 11%, the grid will crash.

Is that assertion true? Actually – no. One of our grids routinely gets about 20% of its power from alternative sources. Which one? Texas. Texas the oil state is also Texas the wind state.

During 2017, 18% of the electricity provided to the Texas grid came from wind power. At times, wind was providing up to 45% of the grid’s power for hours at a time - and surprise, the grid did not crash.

According to a former official at the Oversight & Enforcement Division of the Texas Public Utility Commission, with whom I spoke earlier in the year, Texas manages wind power contributions to the grid with no significant issues. Wind will contribute more to their grid than coal by 2019.

There are still challenges getting wind and solar power integrated into the grid on a sustained basis, including development of sophisticated weather forecasting tools which can be used to predict how much wind and solar energy will be available at a given location, but these tools are being developed and prototyped right now.

In addition, according to the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) the Eastern Interconnection could accommodate up to 30% renewable energy with appropriate operating procedures.

Scaling up the technologies to add even more alternative energy to the grid is going to take time and investment, but there is no reason the US cannot accomplish this task, as long as there is the will to do it.

We are already switching to other sources of energy. Natural gas is filling this gap right now, slowly replacing aging and expensive coal and nuclear power generation facilities with gas turbine generators that can quickly increase or decrease contributions to the grid as needed.

As grid-scale battery storage technology continues to scale up, wind and solar power will be able to charge storage systems, eventually replacing many gas-fired plants which now handle local or regional grid fluctuations. Because natural gas is currently very inexpensive, the switchover will probably be driven by state mandates to decrease emissions.

Many states, Massachusetts among them, are now mandating ever increasing amounts of renewable energy to their power portfolio. Boston’s goal is 100% clean-energy sourced electricity by 2050. These mandates themselves will drive utilities to come up with plans to manage integration of alternative energy. Texas has already been taking this path and its grid operators and generators have responded.

Keeping the grid in balance has always been a matter of monitoring constantly changing demand. If grid operators could not manage this process, we would have blackouts all the time. They handle sudden power losses – such as transmission line failure or a sudden power plant shut downs without missing a beat, so they already have the know how to handle varying supply.

The idea that it is impossible to integrate large-scale wind and solar into the grid does not pass the laugh test, because Texas already does it.

Fire or Flood

Last summer my wife and I were hiking in the Italian Alps near the French border where we met two scientists, an Irish biologist named Chris Allen and an American geologist Allen West, who were there for two very different reasons.

Chris Allen was looking for traces of dung left by Hannibal’s elephants, to prove that the Carthaginian conqueror had come this way in 202 BC on his way to Rome. Allen West was looking for traces of “cosmogenic dust” in an effort to prove that the Earth was thrown back into an ice age by a comet.

I thought their quests were esoteric to say the least (actually Allen West sounded a few cards shy of a full deck), but both were very serious. Sure enough, Chris Allen was the subject of an extensive article in the September 2017 issue of Smithsonian about Hannibal and Allen West was one of the an authors of a major paper about the comet hypothesis in the Journal of Geology.

I don’t know much about Hadrian’s elephants, but I am familiar with the sudden change in climate that occurred when the Earth was coming out of the last ice age 12,800 years ago. Temperatures were almost as warm as today, but in the space of less than 30 years, the Northern Hemisphere cooled by about 10 degrees F, enough to push it back to ice age conditions for about 1,200 years. Glaciologists call this interval the “Younger Dryas”.

But did a comet cause this event?

After overwhelming evidence indicated that an asteroid impact contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, scientists have wondered whether other major geologic events also had extraterrestrial causes. So far, the answer has been no, but it doesn’t stop some people from continuing the search.

An impact cause for the Younger Dryas has actually been kicking around for decades and was the subject of a PBS Nova episode back in 2009. Some researchers, like West, are convinced it happened. Most others aren’t.

We do know that when the continental ice sheets that covered North America 15,000 years ago started to melt, vast fresh water lakes formed, held in place by ice dams. In fact, such a lake once covered Westborough.

The “conventional” explanation is that as when the ice dams in northern and eastern Canada finally gave way, fresh water rapidly flowed into the Arctic and North Atlantic Oceans, eventually shutting down the Gulf Stream and the source of energy which kept the northern Atlantic warm. This idea was recently bolstered by evidence published last July, based on cores collected from the Arctic Ocean north of Canada.

The comet proponents think that the Earth was repeatedly bombarded with fragments of a large disintegrating comet over a short time period. These fragments exploded in the air, like the meteor over Russia in 2013, setting off massive wild fires throughout the northern hemisphere, creating enough dust and soot to cool the atmosphere, triggering the return to cold conditions.

The late Carl Sagan made popular the phrase “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Although West’s paper contain a substantial amount of data, the interpretation of that data still remains suspect and the thesis has major critics, according to a recent article in Science News.

Today, the Gulf Stream is again slowing down, as freshwater from the melting Greenland ice sheet flows into the Northern Atlantic. No one thinks we are about to retreat into another Ice Age given the level of CO2 in the atmosphere but the Arctic climate is clearly in a state of flux.

In fact, the summer Arctic ice pack volume is a whopping 75% lower than it was just 40 years ago. Current predictions are for the Arctic to be ice free in the summer by 2040.

The big lesson from the Younger Dryas is that the Earth’s climate is capable of tipping into a new state, warmer or colder, in a couple of decades if something throws it out of balance.

Given what is happening in the Arctic right now, things are clearly out of balance. Food for thought as record-setting heat waves and wildfires throughout the world are again in the news this summer.

Can 21 Children do What No One Else Can? Maybe

As the Federal Government dithers and ignores the overwhelming evidence and consensus that humans are altering the climate through the use of fossil fuels, municipalities and states throughout the US have taken to the courts, suing fossil fuel producers including Exxon, Shell, and Chevron, seeking damages to pay for mitigation they will be or are being burdened with as the impacts of climate change continue.

Coastal cities up and down the West Coast, from Seattle to San Francisco as well as Boulder, CO, New York City and the State of Rhode Island have filed lawsuits.

The basic arguments in all these filings is that the oil companies knew for decades that their products were causing climate change, yet they actively worked to obfuscate the issue by "orchestrat[ing] a campaign of deception and denial regarding climate change" and thus externalize the environmental costs of their products.

The problem is that several of these lawsuits have been dismissed including those filed by San Francisco, Oakland, and New York, not because the judges did not think the problem is real, but they reasoned that climate change mitigation is a problem to be addressed by Congress and the President, not the courts.

But there is one lawsuit, filed in 2015, that is still going on, and is going to go to trial this fall, despite the best efforts of the Trump Administration to quash it. The defendant is the Federal Government and the plaintiffs are 21 young people, ranging from 11 to 22, who are suing the Federal Government with the goal of forcing the government to address climate change, because they will be irrevocably harmed if nothing is done. The plaintiffs are represented by a non-profit called Our Children’s Trust.

I should note that the suit started under the Obama administration and they too, fought the suit. In fact, the fossil fuel industry, in the guise of the American Petroleum Institute (API) and National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), volunteered to become defendants, in order to bring their legal weight to bear against the plaintiffs.

On July 30^th, the US Supreme Court rejected the Administration’s last gasp request for a stay, and the trial will go forward.

The premise of the suit, Juliana v. US, is that the US Government knew for decades that “burning fossil fuels would destabilize the climate system” but continued to support the fossil fuel industry, ignoring recommended policies and plans of its own agencies and experts to address the issue. This assertion is not in doubt. Reports to the President going back as far as 1965 warned about impending global warming caused by fossil fuel use.

As a result of the failure to take action, the US Government has “. . . violated and continue to violate Plaintiffs’ fundamental constitutional rights to freedom from deprivation of life, liberty, and property; Plaintiffs’ constitutional rights to equal protection; Plaintiffs’ unenumerated inherent and inalienable natural rights; and Plaintiffs’ rights as beneficiaries of the federal public trust.”

In broad strokes, the Plaintiffs allege that their 5^th Amendment rights to due process and equal protection; as well as 9^th Amendment rights under the public trust doctrine are being violated by willful government inaction on a problem the US Government knew full well was happening.

What do the Plaintiffs hope to have happen should they win?

“Order Defendants to prepare and implement an enforceable national remedial plan to phase out fossil fuel emissions and draw down excess atmospheric CO2 so as to stabilize the climate system and protect the vital resources on which Plaintiffs now and in the future will depend.”

Wow.

Here is an interesting tidbit, a year ago, both the API and NAM requested, and were granted, permission to withdraw from the suit. They did not give reasons, but most observers think they did not want to be subject to discovery, which would surely provide damning evidence about their long history of purposely misleading the public regarding climate change. I also suspect they knew that if the case went forward, they were going to lose. I suspect the Trump Administration knows that as well.

“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” - John Adams, 2^nd President of the Unite States

Wise man, that Mr. Adams.

Resilience

Resilience: an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change – Merriam Webster Dictionary

Adaptation: the process of changing to suit different conditions – Oxford Dictionary

I hear the words resilience and adaptation bandied about a lot.  Along the coast, it can mean elevating homes and streets, upgrading coastal infrastructure, and building seawalls.

But what about Westborough? Do we need to be resilient?  We do. Fortunately, rising sea level isn’t an issue for us.

Let’s start with the early July heat wave, which affected a large portion of North America, caused by a large stagnant high pressure system. Temperature records were broken in many places.

Was THIS heat wave “caused” by global warming? No single weather event can be pinned on global warming. What scientists have been saying for many years is that our changing climate has made such events more likely, which is supported by weather records and charts freely available from NOAA. Bottom line – we will see more frequent heat waves.

During the last heat wave, residents received reverse 911 messages that the Senior Center was opened as a cooling center, a godsend for the great many of us who don’t have air conditioning in Westborough. In the 17 years I have lived here, I don’t recall the town having to take this measure until recently. Maybe someone can tell me if I am wrong.

As temperatures have increased, so have extreme weather events. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, so in the temperate Northeastern US, we can expect more intense storms (in summer AND winter). According to the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the amount of precipitation falling “as the heaviest of 1% of all daily events” has increased 71% in the Northeast since 1958.

The latest FEMA flood maps show that the impact of 100-year or 500-year flood events in Westborough would not be significant. Downtown Westborough is adjacent to Cedar Swamp, which has a huge capacity to store runoff. Since the town does a very good job of maintaining its drainage infrastructure, we have made ourselves more resilient to such storm events.

The town also manages its water system in the face of droughts, like we had in 2016. We do not over pump our wells and we take care of Sandra Pond. The town repaired the Sandra Pond dams so they better withstand major storms. The town took down a lot of trees, but state dam regulations required it. Again, foresight and good management make the town more resilient.

Another step would be to fix the culverts under the railroad that crosses Cedar Swamp, which were designed to allow water to drain south into the Sudbury River but they collapsed or were blocked decades ago. When one major culvert at the Transflow rail yard off Flanders Road was fixed a decade ago, water levels in the eastern portion of Cedar Swamp dropped several feet. If the culverts closer to town were fixed, downtown Westborough would be much better protected.

Of course getting the railroad to repair them is another matter. It’s expensive because the rails need to be kept open while the repairs are performed.

Insect-borne diseases are another issue we have now that we did not have to worry about when I was a kid in the 1970s. Anyone even spending time on their lawn in Westborough, let alone the woods, should routinely check for ticks.

Ticks are tough creatures and are surviving our warmer winters. According to the Tufts University Lahey Clinic, ticks are a major vector not only of Lyme disease, which is debilitating enough, but Babesiosis (causes anemia), Tularemia, and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, both of which can be fatal.

Massachusetts already deals with Mosquito-borne diseases such as West Nile virus and to a lesser extent, Eastern Equine Encephalitis. The Asian Tiger mosquito is a vector for Dengue and Chikungunya. This species is steadily migrating northward from the Deep South. It’s already found as far north as southeastern Connecticut.

I know this all sounds scary, but everything I discussed is a recognized issue documented in the Massachusetts State Hazard Mitigation and Climate Adaptation Plan (resilientma.com).

Regardless of whether you think humans are causing the climate to change, the fact is that it IS changing and quickly.

The trends are pretty clear, which is why we have to be resilient.

The Tide's They are a Changin'

(apologies to Bob Dylan)

Sea levels are rising. That’s nothing new.

They rose over 400 feet at the end of the last glacial epoch over 10,000 years ago. Over the last 2,000 years, sea levels increased about 1.5 feet, or about 0.00025 mm per year. A really small number. Over the last two decades though, the rate increased to 3.2 mm per year, about 1,300 times faster than it was just a century ago. 

Still these numbers seem really, really tiny and you are tempted to say, so what?

Well, overall, U.S. sea level has risen about 0.7 feet since 1920. During this same interval, coastal tidal flooding frequency has gone from 1 or 2 a year to 20 per year. It’s double what it was just 30 years ago. That’s what.

Sea levels are actually increasing faster along the east coast of the US than elsewhere. The reasons include a slowing Gulf Stream, which causes water to pile up along the eastern seaboard; thermal expansion of warming waters, and changes in the distribution of gravity around the planet due to melting ice sheets which alone may add about a foot to east coast sea level rise by 2100.

This information comes not from a science fiction movie, but from a detailed 2017 report produced by NOAA (NOAA Technical Report NOS CO-OPS 083).  It’s a no kidding, here’s what’s gonna happen folks, report.

An axiom of engineers is that any problem can be solved with the proper application of money. Of course, there’s the flip side. Is the solution worth the cost? Boston recently decided the answer is no.

A study released last month recommended that the city NOT build a flood protection barrier at the outer edge of Boston Harbor. The barrier, which would have been closed to protect the city from storm surges caused by Nor’easters or hurricanes, would have cost over $10 billion and taken about 30 years to build.

The reason for not building the barrier was not because the study’s authors thought sea levels are not rising - they do - but because they thought it wouldn’t be cost effective and not help with the sorts of day-to-day nuisance flooding that Boston and other cities are now coping with.

Another big issue with the barrier was that it could very well be obsolete by the time it was completed. If we could slow or reverse greenhouse gas emissions quickly, sea level rise may be limited, so the barrier would be a waste. On the other (and more likely) hand, if trends continue as they are, the barrier might be ineffective by the time it was completed.

Last, if Boston built a barrier, any deflected storm surge would just go somewhere else, like Beverly, Cohasset, Manchester, or Scituate, for example. I imagine that the legal battles alone could prevent the first load of concrete from even being poured for 30 years.

Instead of a barrier, Boston has decided to address this issue using strategies right along the coast line, detailed in a plan called Climate Ready Boston, which, if implemented, would protect critical infrastructure and housing in low lying areas using a variety of strategies, including local berms and floodwalls. In East Boston, protecting against a 100 year flood (1% chance in a given year) combined with 21 inches of sea level rise by 2050 would prevent $1.3 billion in losses . . . from just one flood.

Boston is taking the issue of sea level rise very seriously. In the year ending April 30th, the city experienced 22 days of tidal flooding, breaking the record set in 2009. During last January’s Nor’easter, the city had the highest tide ever recorded, which flooded downtown streets. The city expects these types of floods will be the norm in coming years.

Boston is not the only city trying to cope with this issue. In Miami, Florida, and Norfolk, Virginia (home to the US Navy’s largest base), residents now routinely wade through knee deep water during peak high tides. They weren’t 20 years ago.

NOAA is projecting that this year the frequency of such events will be even higher as we head into another El Nino year. The last one ended barely 2 years ago.

There is old saying which goes, you can’t hold back the tide. It’s truer than ever these days.

When the Volcano Blows

“I don’t know where I’m-a gonna go, when the volcano blows.” -Jimmy Buffet

You may have heard about the newest eruption of a volcano in Hawaii last week. Actually, that volcano, Kilauea, has been slowly oozing lava for the last 30 years, but lately, the crater has been throwing out fountains of lava, ash, and poisonous gases.

On any given day, almost two dozen volcanoes are actively erupting, but most don’t make the news.  Many of these are located along the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” which stretches from the tip of South America up through Alaska and down the eastern coast of the Pacific to New Zealand. These volcanoes are the result of ocean crust being recycled into the mantle where it melts into magma that rises to the surface.

Other volcanoes, like Hawaii, are the result of columns of magma which rise from deep in the Earth’s mantle, which erupt through the thin ocean crust, creating new islands.

But these are only the ones on land. There is a continuous chain of volcanoes, 40,000 miles long, that snakes through the deepest parts of all the oceans of the Earth, which creates new crust and pushes the continents around the planet at a rate equivalent to the speed of your fingernail growth.

Volcanic eruptions can have a profound affect o the Earth’s climate. In fact, at least 4 of the 5 mass extinctions of life during the last 550 million years can be traced to volcanism, but not like anything ever witnessed by humans. These eruptions lasted hundreds of thousands to a million years, covering millions of square miles in a thick layer of basalt, and discharging enough sulfur and carbon dioxide to really mess with climate. One such eruption, in Siberia about 250 million years ago, coincided with “The Great Dying”, when 95% of all life on Earth went extinct.

Much smaller eruptions can have a shorter, but noticeable effect on climate. In 1991, Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted explosively, sending 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the high atmosphere where it created a haze of sulfuric acid. This haze reflected sunlight and dropped global average temperatures by almost 1 degree F over the next two years.

Temperatures bounced back quickly as the haze dissipated and have continued their inexorable rise today’s record levels.

When one examines the temperature records since the late 1800's, the increase in global temperatures has not been consistent with the increase in atmospheric CO2. In fact, temperatures decreased significantly from the 1950's to the 1970's.

This decline coincides with overall post-war increases in industrial production and coal-fired power generation. A byproduct of burning coal was the release of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, which, no surprise, resulted in a lot of sulfuric acid haze in the stratosphere.

Then in 1970, President Nixon signed the Clean Air Act.

Before the Clean Air Act (and similar legislation in Europe) sulfur emissions from power plants and vehicles caused significant air pollution, leading to acid rain, which caused widespread damage to the environment too numerous to list here. One of the requirements of the act was to decrease power plant and vehicle sulfur dioxide emissions.

Once sulfur emissions started to decline, acid rain decreased sharply throughout the industrialized world.  In addition, temperatures again started to increase and did so quite rapidly, a purely unintended consequence of the act.

So what is the lesson here? If you don’t think humans can change the climate, you’d be wrong. The history of human sulfur dioxide emissions proves it.

One of the proposed “solutions” to global warming is injecting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. This proposal is being taken seriously, especially by conservative think tanks who call themselves climate change skeptics. Oh the irony.

History shows that we would have to continuously inject sulfur at high altitudes to cool the Earth and we would have to burn fuel to do so, adding CO2 to the air as well. The moment we stopped, temperatures would soar. Then there is acid rain and its devastating ecological impacts including ozone depletion. The uneven application of this “solution” could cause massive droughts in areas that depend on annual monsoons. Who would manage this process is another question fraught with geopolitical peril.

Seems to me that the better course is to decrease CO2 emissions, not add a different kind of pollution to the atmosphere. Decreasing emissions is something we already know how to do.

What is lacking is the political will to do so. That, we can change . . . at the ballot box.

Should We Stay or Should We Go?

“If there’s a third world war we want to make sure there’s enough of a seed of human civilization somewhere else to bring it back and shorten the length of the dark ages” 

–  Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, March 11, 2018, discussing the need to colonize Mars.

Let me start by saying that colonizing other planets has been a romantic staple of science fiction going back over a century, but it is still just that – fiction. I think the potential for an extraterrestrial colony to survive let alone become self-sustaining is very small, given the hazards. Putting a Tesla roadster into solar orbit is child’s play by comparison.

In the early 2000’s I read a book called “Rare Earth”, which argued that planets like ours were rare and that the circumstances which lead to the evolution of humans and the development of civilization were thus also rare. 

Then came the Kepler probe, launched in 2009, which subsequently discovered thousands of planets in a very small section of the sky. Astronomers now estimate that some 40 billion Earth-like planets may orbit the habitable zones of their stars, where water could exist as a liquid, 11 billion of which would be orbiting stars like our own. Our Earth may not be so rare.

Geologists have recently pushed back the origins of life on Earth to over 4 billion years ago, which would mean that life started on Earth very soon after the solar system formed and the planet cooled from its molten state. Although biologists have yet to create life de novo in the lab, they have determined that the biochemistry needed to form self-replicating organic molecules is pretty straightforward. Life may not be so rare.

Indeed, life may already exist elsewhere in our solar system, buried deep under the sands of Mars, which used to be an Earth-like planet, or in the vast oceans which underlie the ice-covered moons of Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus. 

But how about complex life and self-aware beings that create civilizations? Why has SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence not heard any radio signals from other civilizations, despite listening for the last 50 years or so? 

Which brings us to the “Fermi Paradox”. The famous physicist’s postulate that if there are so many stars and so many planets, “Where is everybody?” Recent UFO videos notwithstanding, there is really no conclusive evidence that we have been visited by extraterrestrials and we sure haven’t heard from any.

Life may not be rare, but life like us may be because planet-sterilizing cosmic events are common or civilizations destroy themselves through ecological mismanagement and/or war.

Back to Mr. Musk and his concern that we may send ourselves the way of the dinosaurs, so we should therefore not confine ourselves to one planet.  Note that dinosaurs existed over 100 million years. We have been around for only 160 thousand.

Musk’s goal is to save humanity, but what about everything between honey bees and humpback whales? Aren’t these lifeforms worth preserving? Musk ignores the fact that humans evolved in an interdependent ecological web within a very thin shell of a biosphere which would be almost impossible to artificially replicate. Stepping outside that shell anywhere else means stepping into an environment that is actively trying to kill you.

Colonizing the Moon or Mars means burrowing into the subsurface or building sealed domes. I ask, why go to Mars to do that when we can bury ourselves on Earth if things go south? Heck, let’s just avoid the need to do so in the first place. The cheaper alternative is to avoid nuclear war and to preserve our biosphere. 

I close with the sage words of the late Carl Sagan, from his 1994 book, “Pale Blue Dot”, inspired by a view of Earth from the Voyager Probe, then 6.4 billion miles from Earth:

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. . . There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Published in the Westborough News, March 30th, 2018

Sound and Fury

I have written a lot of columns about the consequences of human-caused climate change, describing those both current and projected. My wife tells me my columns are getting depressing.

So this column is about the energy policy of our current Federal Government. It should not be surprising that the Trump administration is basically attempting to implement whatever the fossil fuel industry wishes.

First off is the Department of Interior’s recent decision to open up the entire US east and west coast’s outer continental shelves to oil and gas exploration because the administration wants to make America “energy dominant”.

We already produce almost as much oil as Saudi Arabia, due to fracking and sophisticated drilling technology, which allows energy companies to extract oil and gas from shale formations that have been ignored since the first oil well was drilled back in 1859.

Kinda makes us energy dominant already and thus a big player in the world’s energy markets.

Last year, the USGS estimated that one shale formation in West Texas’ Permian Basin contains 20 billion barrels of oil and 16 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Not only that, but the 75,000 square mile Permian Basin already has the infrastructure in place to extract, transport, and refine these hydrocarbons.

In contrast, the USGS estimates that mostly likely the entire 1.56 MILLION square mile outer continental shelf from Canada to Florida contains only 1.4 billion barrels of oil. In addition, there is no infrastructure off the east coast. No pipelines, no platforms, no nothing.  In addition, wells might have to be drilled in waters up to 12,000 feet deep.

The Macondo well, you know, the one that blew out in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, was in waters 5,000 feet deep. Coupled with the recension of regulations to make such deep-water drilling safer – What could possibly go wrong? But I digress.

Offshore oil exploration and production is expensive and oil prices have to be very high to make it worthwhile, like north of $100 per barrel. The price of oil has been anything but for the last decade, because the US is energy dominant . . . already. It’s currently $64 per barrel.

Along with laughably bad economics is the laughably rapid reversal of the new policy that took Florida off the table almost immediately to placate Governor (soon to be Republican Senate candidate) Scott (former offshore drilling advocate) because “Florida is unique and its coasts are heavily reliant on tourism as an economic driver”.

I think every governor up and down the east and west coasts could make the same argument and most assuredly they will when (not if) they sue the Interior Department. #WhatAboutUs?

Thus, I doubt we will see any drilling platforms off our coasts for a very, very long time.

Then there is the Department of Energy Federal Energy Regulatory Commission or FERC. The Secretary of Energy asked FERC to institute a policy of supporting coal power plants under the guise of energy resilience, because they can stockpile their sources in the event of an emergency. This policy would slow the retirement of uneconomic coal power plants, prop up the price of coal power, and jack up consumer electricity prices by billions of dollars. So much for free markets.

This proposal was a sop to the coal industry, nothing more.

To everyone’s surprise, FERC, whose members are dominated by Trump appointees by the way, rejected the proposal.

Did I mention that Republicans made sure the Tax bill passed late last year preserves tax breaks for wind and solar, the two most rapidly growing sources of electricity in the US? Iowa gets a third of its electricity from wind and to no one’s surprise, Senator Chuck Grassley (R – Iowa) made sure the provisions remained.

Of course, the oil and gas industries have long benefited from all sorts of tax breaks.

Regardless of incentives, the price of alternative energy continues to drop, making it competitive with fossil fuels, even when wind and solar tax incentives end in 2022.

These are examples of Trump administration energy policy proposals that are running into the headwinds of reality, both economic and political. They will end up being, as the Bard put it “. . . full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Published in the Westborough News, January 19, 2018