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Memo By Steven H. Johnson
March 2024
We don't have a climate crisis because the sun has been getting hotter. It hasn't.
We have a climate crisis because the Earth's Natural Cooling System is getting weaker.
And why is it getting weaker?
The atmosphere's carbon dioxide obstacle course has been intensifying at increasing speeds with each passing decade. The Earth's Natural Cooling System shoots heat-carrying photons through the atmosphere and into space. Back when this process was working properly, total Heat OUT, via outbound photons, completely offset total Heat IN, from sunshine.
But now, with levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide far higher than they were historically, the Earth's Natural Cooling System is no longer as effective in getting heat-carrying photons through the atmosphere and out into space. It's a great system when it works. The Earth's Heat IN rate hasn't changed. That's not the problem. What haschanged is the Earth's Heat OUT rate. Too much new carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Not enough heat-carrying photons making it through the atmosphere and escaping into space.
Result? The Earth's climate is slowly but surely warming. And warming some more. And warming still more.
According to the internet, which is probably right, most scientists who study such matters have doubted that extinction through overheating is a serious threat.
And if those making such predictions are not as aware of how the Earth's Natural Cooling System functions as they ought to be, nor aware of its deterioration, nor aware of the ongoing heating-up of the Earth's climate being caused by that deterioration, then surely their "Extinction Unlikely" forecasts make perfect sense to all sorts of predictors.
But from the perspective I've just outlined, which has been shaped by the ongoing deterioration of the Earth's Natural Cooling System, those forecasts no longer make sense. A slow but steady - and seemingly irreversible rising temperature dynamic - eventually produces a global climate in which larger and larger areas of the Earth become unlivable. Not an All-At-Once Extinction, I'll grant you, but a creeping Extinction process, and to all intents and purposes, not a Creeping Extinction Process that - so far - has any visible OFF switch.
Beginning in the 1760's, when James Watt unintentionally inspired Industrial Revolution ONE by redesigning the Newcomen Steam Engine, the Meta-Lesson learned was that the marriage of machines to fossil fuel power sources (i.e. coal, oil, and naural gas) promised a nearly limitless potential for improvements in human well-being.
The opportunity message was obvious. It gave us railroads, steamships, automobiles, airplanes, home appliances, and so much more. Add fossil fuel energy to a machine, and, presto, miracles galore!
But the long-term downside? Not nearly so obvious.
Just as Industrial Revolution ONE had a highly visible civilization-wide upside, there was also a nearly invisible civilization-wide downside.
Oxidize any hydrocarbon fuel and you'll produce a whole lot of carbon dioxide. Where will it go? Into the Earth's atmosphere. Not surprisingly, the atmospheric load of carbon dioxide has been rising in tandem with the spreading popularity of Industrial Revolution ONE. For the first two hundred years, beginning with the 1760s and extending all the way to the 1960s, rising CO2 levels didn't appear to be an issue. But by the end of the 1960s, when the Parts Per Million measurement of atmospheric CO2 reached 325 PPM, the Earth's Natural Cooling System had begun to stumble.
One can see the first evidence of this newly-arrived reality in the "Degrees Celsius" graph below. The decade of the 1970s ended at a higher global temperature than the temperature at which it started. Not by much. Less than one-tenth of a degree Celsius.
The decade of the 1980s exhibited the same kind of increase, but with a bit more intensity - the End of the 1980s was nearly three-tenths of a degree Celsius warmer than the former average The 1990s ended with a temperature a shade more than four-tenths of a degree Celsius higher than the former average.
The decade of the 2000s ended with a temperature nearly six-tenths of a degree Celsius higher than the former average. And the decade of the 2010s ended with a temperature more than seven-tenths of a degree Celsius higher than the long-term average.
This is a slow but relentlessly intensifying global overheating dynamic that challenges our generation to sit up and take notice as we have never ever had to do before.
The second graph below, called "Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide," charts atmospheric carbon dioxide's rising presence in the atmosphere. In 1960, carbon dioxide molecules, as a gas, were present in the atmosphere at an intensity of ~315 Parts Per Million. By 1970, that intensity had risen to ~325 Parts Per Million. By 1980, it was up to ~345 Parts Per Million. By 1990, it was up to ~354 Parts Per Million. By 2000, it was up to ~368 Parts Per Million. By 2010, it was up to ~390 Parts Per Million. And by 2020, it was up to ~412 Parts Per Million.
In other words, in the decade of the 1960s, atmospheric carbon dioxide rose by about eight Parts Per Million. In the decade of the 2010s, atmospheric carbon dioxide shot up by more than twenty parts per million!
If you had gotten around to wondering why the Earth's Natural Cooling System might have been deteriorating, slowly but steadily, all along the way, this second graph shows you why. The more carbon dioxide the Earth's atmosphere accumulates, the more the Earth's Natural Cooling System deteriorates. Heat-bearing photons get intercepted by carbon dioxide molecules at ever increasing rates. As the interception rate goes up, well, surprise, the rate at which heat-carrying photons escape from the Earth's atmosphere inevitably deteriorates. The weaker the performance of the Earth's Natural Cooling System, the more heat the Earth's atmosphere retains, and the warmer the Earth's climate becomes.
Now to the Make-Or-Break Question. Do these trends - rising levels of atmospheric CO2, along with a deteriorating Natural Cooling System, and an ongoing increase in the Earth's average temperature - tell us that we are NOT on a slow but inexorable journey toward human extinction on a seriously overheated planet?
I know, from the internet, that there's a widespread feeling among scientists that we are not facing an extinction threat. I suspect that most of those forecasters haven't quite gotten to the bottom of the issue. I suspect they have universally failed to appreciate the link between the atmosphere's rising stock of carbon dioxide molecules and the deterioration of the Earth's Natural Cooling System.
A responsibly formed hypothesis would alert us to an ever-weakening Natural Cooling System inevitably producing an ever-increasing rise in the Earth's overall temperature.
Given that evident warning sign, if we humans don't respond, the odds of our finding ourselves in serious trouble just a few decades hence seem very, VERY high. The "Nothing to Worry About, No Extinction Risk" forecasts strike me as being quite carelessly developed.
The evidence I see gives me precisely the opposite message. And, wow, are we up against it!
If we humans (a) never stop relying on technologies that burn fossil fuels, and (b) do nothing to reduce the atmosphere's oversupply of carbon dioxide molecules, then (c) the Earth's rising temperature trend will eventually yield an Earth that on most of the planet's surface has become too hot to support human life.
I take no pleasure in saying this. I hope someone finds a way to prove me wrong. But if the logic I have just cited eventually gets sustained by all-sided analyses of the extinction threat, then we the Earth's current generations will find ourselves up against a couple of very difficult Human Survival Turnaround Assignments to undertake.
FIRST and foremost, we humans, on all continents, shall have to agree. Let's all get ourselves off fossil fuels at the earliest possible dates. Off fossil fuels for vehicles. For manufacturing companies. Off fossil fuels for all the technologies that serve our homes, apartments, office buildings, and stores.
A huge lift, to be sure, but absolutely essential as an Extinction Prevention safeguard.
And, SECOND, we shall have to solve the riddle of how to dispose of today's existing carbon dioxide overload. Do we just suck CO2 out of the air and bury it in airtight caves? A risky answer, given the seismic risks to which most caves are subject.
Or might there be a way of dis-assembling carbon dioxide molecules? This won't be a challenge that chemists can solve, I suspect, but it might be a challenge that the physics of chip-building, i.e. the physics of manipulating microscopically small pieces of matter, will surmount.
Should the world's physicists develop a workable solution, the next step would be somewhat obvious. Set up 2,000 Carbon Dioxide Disassembly Laboratories all over the world, sited both at major universities and at businesses. And bear down hard.
There is one more item to mention. I was listening quite recently to Neil DeGrasse Tyson, one of the world's more jovial astronomers, and two of his very smart and equally jovial friends. And what did they say about Carbon Dioxide? That for every PPM of Carbon Dioxide we have in the atmosphere, our oceans have a matching amount of CO2. In other words, if the network of CO2Dis-Assembly Labs I just hypothesized gets done removing, say, five hundred billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the world's oceans will cough up another five hundred billion tonnes of CO2, and CO2Disassembly Labs won't actually reach the finish line till they've polished off the ocean's store of CO2 as well.
OK, Steve, you might be wondering. "Just what do these atmospheric scientists mean when they refer to Carbon Dioxide in Parts Per Million?"
Are you ready? A single "Part Per Million" of carbon dioxide weighs nearly 5.3 billion metric tonnes. The scientists at Climate.gov have developed a chart that shows us just how fast the atmosphere's store of Carbon Dioxide has been rising, from the year 1960 forward. You'll find it two pages down. But first, take in the chart showing "Global Temperature Averages by Decade."
At this point, a couple of graphs (shown below) will help in illustrating why our worries are real. In this first graph, it plainly seems like the 1960s were our last "Normal" decade. From the 1970s forward, each successive decade has ended at a higher temperature than where it started. And that trend shows no signs yet of disappearing.
Now to the second graph, "Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide," which scientists are in the habit of measuring in "Parts Per Million." This is essentially a track record of the rate at which we humans, all across the Earth, have been burning fossil fuels for energy. In the 1960s, atmospheric carbon dioxide rose by ~ 8 Parts Per Million, beginning to end. By the 2010s, that rate had accelerated to ~ 22 Parts Per Million. Have we had the well-being of future generations in our mind as we did all this? Of course not. No one had explained to us, yet, why it mattered.
I believe we now have enough evidence in to acknowledge that today's trends are too dangerous to perpetuate. A change of course has become mandatory, but first we will all have to familiarize ourselves with this new and plainly unpleasant message. Do we have it within us to understand just why our Earth has been warming? And understand just how much of a role we and our fossil fuel addictions have played in all this? Denial will be tempting but it won't be wise.
Speaking for my wife and myself, we got our Annapolis home entirely off fossil fuels in about 2015. We bought a Tesla in 2018. We got our Ames, Iowa, home, almost completely off fossil fuels in 2021. We have yet to replace our Prius with an electric car. From experience we know well that the journey which frees the world from fossil fuels is a Technology Change-Out Journey. For homes, for apartment buildings, for businesses, for industrial establishments, for vehicles, for trains, for airplanes. Everything! Even if we tackle the challenge with the very best of intentions, the Heavy Lift that awaits us won't be finished for at least 30 years. And who knows how long it will take to strip the atmosphere of all its excess carbon dioxide?
But am I game? Of course. I have three grandsons. How can I betray their future by looking the other way? I can't. I simply can't. We're all in this together, for ourselves, for our grandkids, for our great grandkids, and for all future generations. I know the pain you'll feel; I've been through some of it myself. Let's acknowledge the risk we're in, let's acknowledge the change of course by which we rescue ourselves from that risk, and then let's work together to put yesterday's unwise choices behind us and build a long-term future everyone can have confidence in.
When we succeed, the Earth's Natural Cooling System will - I am sure - give us a wink and a silent vote of appreciation.
What is your favorite vehicle you have owned?
Hi Dan,
Great question. I’ve loved a lot of them, including the current Tesla Model Y, the ’74 Porsche 914, the ’92 Toyota Previa minivan, the ’62 VW microbus, the ’01 Smartcar convertible, the ’17 Ford C-Max plug-in hybrid and the ’71 VW Golf convertible. (There were a bunch of other less interesting and modest but good cars.) But I think the “best car I’ve ever owned” is the “82 Toyota minivan. It was the original minivan, 7-passenger, mid-engine, with a little refrigerator in front of the center console that would just hold a six-pack. There were so many great road trips when the kids were little -- skiing, camping, fishing resorts, reunions and on and on. It was nothing special for performance or handling, but the styling was distinctively modern in a “moonrover” kind of way. It was also cozy and had a sun roof that allowed one to stand up inside to change clothes. It also seemed – and was – such a good practical solution to the transportation needs of us at that time: room for a group but still a small car.
You’d have to go a long way to beat your XKE. I’ll never forget that. And the T-Bird was fun.
Tom
Thomas P. Solheim
428 S. Blount St.
Madison, WI 53703
608-516-1790
What skill did you/would you teach you grandchildren, nephews, and nieces?
Turn to the right to tighten and turn to the left to loosen. Your youngster will remember your advice each time he or she must deal with a screw, bolt, lid, or valve. It will be particularly useful when the novice plumber is sprawled on the kitchen floor attempting to tighten the leaky pipe fitting under the sink.
Some specialty items do not follow this Rule which activates the second Rule: No Rule is Absolute.
Dan Bell
My father taught me when tightening lug nuts on a car to always tighten across from the one you just did. Never side by side. And not always super tight the first time around. You should do at least 2 rotations of tightening
Terry Acome
JULY QUESTION
WHAT IS THE RECIPE FOR GRILLING YOUR FAVORITE DISH?
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