With Speed and Violence Fred Pearce - Global Commons Institute

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Where to start? In my twenty years of reporting on climate change for New Scientist magazine and others, innumerable scientists (and not a few editors and fellow journalists) have helped me get things mostly right. To all of them, thanks. I hope this book brings their work together in a form that many of them will find enlightening. My greatest debt is to the synthesizers within the scientific community—the people who have tried to see the whole picture and to put their work into what seems to me an ever more frightening context. Their names recur throughout this book. But those who have specially helped me in person include Jim Hansen, Paul Crutzen, Jim Lovelock, Wally Broecker, Peter Cox, Peter Wadhams, Mike Mann, Richard Lindzen, Will Steffen, Richard Alley, Lonnie Thompson, Terry Hughes, Jack Rieley, Sergei Kirpotin, Euan Nisbet, Peter Liss, Torben Christensen, Crispin Tickell, Richard Betts, Myles Allen, Meinrat Andreae, Tim Lenton, Chris Rap-ley, Peter deMenocal, Joe Farman, Gavin Schmidt, Keith Briffa, John Houghton, Dan Schrag, Bert Bolin, Jesse Ausubel, Drew Shindell, Stefan Rahmstorf, Mark Cane, Arie Issar, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, and the late Charles Keeling and Gerard Bond. One always gets ideas from fellow writers. So thanks, too, to John Gribbin, Mark Lynas, Bill Burroughs, Doug Macdougall, Mark Bowen, Jeremy Leggett, Gabrielle Walker, and two historians of the climate change debate, Gale Chris tianson and Spencer Weart, whose books I have referred to in preparing this work. Thanks also to the organizers of the Dahlem conferences for making me welcome at an important event; to Carl Petter Niesen, in Ny-Alesund; and to the many people who have helped turn a germ of an idea into a completed book, including my agent, Jessica Woollard, and the editors Susanna Wadeson and Sarah Emsley.
NOTES ON THE REFERENCES This is a far from complete list of the sources used in writing this book. But it includes the main written sources as well as others, summarizing information that could be of use to readers. P REFACE Wadhams's work on chimneys appears at greatest length in "Convective Chimneys in the Greenland Sea: A Review of Recent Observations" ('Oceanography and Marine Biology: An Annual Review 2004, vol. 42, p. 29—56) and also in Geophysical Research Letters 2002 (vol. 29, no. 10, p. 76). Wadhams also spoke with me at length. For more on William Scoresby, see my article "Hell with a Harpoon" in New Scientist, 18 May 2002. I NTRODUCTION The proceedings of the British government's Dangerous Climate Change conference appear at www.stabilisation2005.c0m. The resulting book can also be found at www.defra.gov.uk/environment/climatechange/internat/dangerous-cc .htm. Hansen's address to the AGU in late 2005 is at: www.columbia.edu/~jehi/ keeling_talk_and_slides.pdf. Three overviews on abrupt climate change are: Richard Alley's Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises (National Academies Press, 2002), especially chapter four; "Abrupt Changes: The Achilles' Heels in the Earth System" by Steffen et al. in Environment (vol. 46, p. 9) and Rial et al., "Non- Linearities, Feedbacks and Critical Thresholds with the Earth's Climate System" {Climate Change, vol. 65, p. 1 1). 1. THE PIONEERS The journal Ambio had a special issue on Svante Arrhenius and his legacy in 1997 (vol. 26, no 1). I wrote about him in New Scientist in "Land of the Midnight Sums," 25 January 2003. Other sources include Gale E. Christianson's book Greenhouse: The 200-Year Story of Global Wanning (Constable, 1999), which is also good on Callendar and Keeling. Many useful obituaries of Keeling were posted on news Web sites following his death in June 2005—for instance in the Daily Telegraph (www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtmlpxmN/news/2005/06/24/db2402 .xml). And a good personal description of his early work appears at: www.mlo.noaa.gov/HISTORY/PUBLISH/20th%20anniv/co2.htm. 2. TURNING UP THE H EAT The British newspaper mentioned in the first paragraph is the Daily Mail. The column, by Melanie Phillips, "Global Warming Fraud," can be read at her Web site: www.melaniephillips.c0m/articles/archives/000255.html. Christianson covers much of the early history of researching greenhouse gases. Brindley's paper on the planet's radiation balance is in Nature, vol. 410, p. 355. See also: www .imperial.ac.uk/P2641.htm. The definitive consensus overview of the science of climate change in 2001 is provided by the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Cliniate Change (www.ipcc.ch), which will be
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WITH SPEED AND VIOLENCE
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We are on the precipice of climate
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CHRONOLOGY OF CLIMATE CHANGE 5 bill
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1970s Beginning of strong global wa
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James Croll, a nineteenth-century S
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PREFACE: THE CHIMNEY The Greenland
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But even as he gazed on these dynam
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INTRODUCTION Some environmental sto
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Type II climate change became, in t
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eally dire times ahead. Having a da
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with his wife gone, he had few dist
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more than 80 percent for dark ocean
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climates, especially as regards the
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y nature. By the late 1960s he had
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TURNING UP THE HEAT A skeptic's gui
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These findings alone should be enou
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1970s readings at night should be r
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ecause they can happen by chance; b
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The current climate models concur w
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early 2005: "By ignoring these outl
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whole communities. A thousand peopl
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drought regions and droughts to nor
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The big new discovery is that plane
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Similar switchback temperature chan
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fulfill the expectations of climate
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THE WATCHTOWER Keeping climate vigi
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etreated about 3 miles back up the
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for meat, but will sink their teeth
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and birds. But the very highest con
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on summer vacation from chairing an
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There is another driver for the mel
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ON THE SLIPPERY SLOPE Greenland is
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For many centuries these great ice
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lasted for a decade or more now," h
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esults of a detailed satellite rada
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things go wrong, it could just be d
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The demise of the Larsen B ice shel
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slab of ice the size of Spain at th
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At a time when everyone else saw An
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glaciers were responding to a rapid
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The East Antarctic ice sheet is the
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RISING TIDES Saying "toodle-oo" to
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a lagoon, with the open ocean on th
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How could such a thing have happene
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III. RIDING THE CARBON CYCLE IN THE
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some extent, adapted to drought. Bu
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ains returned. The forest may recov
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process ultimately drives winter st
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vegetation that had fallen into the
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Every year, farmers continue burnin
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annual emissions from power plants,
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escaped from western European fores
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many anticipated. And many believe
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Perhaps understandably, such studie
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The entire western Siberian peat bo
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freezing over in winter. And Euan N
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character: it has passed to the pla
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movements of the tree line; examini
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There is nothing unusual about Stor
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along the melting-point isotherm is
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carbon dioxide seems to seesaw betw
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"Corals could be rare on the tropic
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THE WINDS OF CHANGE Tsunamis, megaf
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ut even so, they could not have del
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cattle—and primates. And among th
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Meanwhile, pockmarks are turning up
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een enough, he said, to melt clathr
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The prognosis, Mienert says, is wor
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also releases more energy, so event
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absorbed. But that is just an avera
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darker landscape will be more than
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the temperature range. It showed a
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absence—are most pronounced in de
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Murphy took a standard climate mode
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We can see evidence of this already
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more sober colleagues registered ag
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though, have some scattering effect
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A BILLION FIRES How brown haze coul
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now refuse to discuss the subject w
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importance for a country entirely d
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amounts of heat into the upper atmo
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called oxidation. To take one examp
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ecause the smog itself prevents ult
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ICE AGES AND SOLAR PULSES: GOLDILOC
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enough to freeze the carbon dioxide
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system called Gaia. It may also exp
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in ice sheets forming in the Northe
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enormous hippopotami and gigantic c
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Astronomical forces, he discovered,
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In fact it turned out that Croll wa
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exactly what limited it. Why, after
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There may have been other feedbacks
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gradually raising temperatures. The
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collaborator Gerard Bond, a man a d
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had done the same thing around Anta
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feature in keeping the region warm,
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But all this is models. What eviden
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modelers feared. But there did seem
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Then the unthinkable happened: the
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Richard Alley, who was there handli
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The vast inrush of cold freshwater
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It took about 1,300 years before th
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THE PULSE How the sun makes climate
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If the Viking settlers had followed
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period than it was in the early twe
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perplexing that such a widespread e
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What climatic events would send vas
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event, followed by five less and le
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Bond came up trumps again. The evid
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TROPICAL HEAT THE FALL The end of A
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filled mostly by leaking wadis in t
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sun sufficient to reduce temperatur
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idea, with plenty of adherents. Rei
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Dust Bowl years. In 2002, it fell t
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some places. But the rain-bearing w
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University, two fifths of the dust
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TROPICAL HIGH Why an ice man is rew
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horseback onto the high slopes of t
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ago and then moved north, becoming
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in ice in Alaska. It is already pro
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Mesopotamia. Its rule extended all
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monsoon region of the Himalayas, to
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A CHUNK OF CORAL Probing the hidden
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heat energy than the entire atmosph
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Through isotopic analysis, Schrag e
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Nina events will still happen occas
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how they possibly worked it out." P
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famine has fallen. There are many r
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snow on the Tibetan plateau in spri
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AT THE MILLENNIUM: THE HEAT WAVE Th
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temperatures and the start of the h
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THE HOCKEY STICK Why now really is
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dismissing Inhofe as "the single la
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twentieth-century levels, and this
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HURRICANE SEASON Raising the storm
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account an increasing coastal popul
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analysis, Gray argues, the hurrican
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that "the contention that hurricane
Page 278 and 279: But even if we don't yet see "super
Page 280 and 281: OZONE HOLES IN THE GREENHOUSE Why m
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Page 286 and 287: INEVITABLE SURPRISES: THE DANCE The
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Page 292 and 293: NEW HORIZONS Feedbacks from the str
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Page 300 and 301: The stratosphere and its influence
Page 302 and 303: CONCLUSION: ANOTHER PLANET Over the
Page 304 and 305: ocean floor. Until it stops. Who kn
Page 306 and 307: In the past, if we got things wrong
Page 308 and 309: consensus, especially in Europe, th
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Page 312 and 313: view. "It makes a lot of sense to t
Page 314 and 315: While the U.S. and Australia emit a
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Page 320 and 321: economist William Nordhaus suggests
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Page 324 and 325: Carbon cycle The natural exchange o
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Page 332 and 333: 12. WILD FIRES OF B ORNEO I visited
Page 334 and 335: 22. THE BIG FREEZE The best read on
Page 336: 34. H URRICANE SEASON I spoke to Co
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With Speed and Violence Fred Pearce - Global Commons Institute

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