Climate Change Update – Probability Not Certainty is the Cautionary Conclusion of European Climatologists Studying Recent Weather History

Does the recent warm spell over the eastern half of North America reflect climate change induced by increased greenhouse gases? When Europe experienced an extreme heat wave in 2003, two scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research began a study to see if that event could be related to global warming. Dim Coumou and Stefan Rahmstorf have published an article entitled, A Decade of Weather Extremes, published in Nature Climate Change, cataloguing extreme weather events since the year 2000 including the European heat wave, the drought and heat wave that hit the American Mid-West and Southern Plain States in 2011, the rain and flooding events that struck Pakistan and Thailand in 2010, the tropical cyclone of 2007 in Oman and others.

In their conclusions the scientists stated that no single weather event proves that we are experiencing human-induced global climate change. But the frequency of unusual weather events may be an indicator of a shift away from normal climate patterns. In their cataloguing of extreme weather events one thing became exceedingly clear. The Earth is experiencing more extreme weather events than at any time in recorded history and that the events are more extreme – heavier rain and flooding, more violent storms, larger and more frequent tornadoes, and more prolonged droughts and heatwaves.

The graph above shows the increasing frequency and cost of extreme weather events in the United States from 1980 to 2011. Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Coumou and Rahmstorf’s data shows that globally we are experiencing three times higher monthly heat records in the 21st century than at anytime in our past. Like other climate scientists they recognize that local weather variation is not proof of global warming, but the pattern that is emerging suggests something is happening with the most likely variable in the climate model being us. We are the influence that is causing global temperatures to rise. And when the atmosphere gets warmer, weather gets more active and weather events become more extreme. So although we cannot unequivocally state that extreme weather reflects climate disruption, we can see cause…not certainty….but high probability.

 

Geoengineering Update – Proposals for Dealing with Arctic Methane Permafrost Release

For the last two weeks here in Toronto the temperature has been abnormally warm. Today, March 19, 2012, we will see late May, early June daytime high temperatures. This is the second winter in the last three to produce a winter that by Toronto standards can only be called balmy. Which brings me to the topic at hand – the warming of our northerly extremes and the potential release of methane bound up in permafrost.

In a proposal to British parliamentarians in the last week, Stephen Salter, an engineer at Edinburgh University, proposed constructing 100 towers for pumping seawater into the atmosphere to create clouds to reflect solar energy into space and cool the Arctic.

Artificially inducing cloud cover is one proposal being suggested by engineers to deal with a warming Arctic. In this picture the towers installed on ships moored in Arctic waters spray seawater into the upper atmosphere.

With Arctic Sea ice melts increasing each year saltwater temperatures in the north are rising rapidly. Dr. Slater noted that in 2007 the water off the northern Siberian coast warmed to 5 degrees Celsius (41 Fahrenheit). The warming at sea is impacting permafrost in the seabed and in the adjacent land. Permafrost contains methane and methane is more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Climatologists believe that abrupt methane releases 55 and 251 million years ago played a significant role in mass extinctions. A large methane release from the permafrost in Siberia, northern Canada and the Arctic sea bed could lead to an average temperature rise between 5 and 9 degrees Celsius (9 to 16 Fahrenheit) in Arctic regions.

Geoengineering is often not considered seriously when talking about climate change. Governments look at policies related to reducing carbon emissions as the primary way to mitigate global warming. But we may have to do a combination of both or learn to live with a radically altered North.

Identifying the Problems of the 21st Century – A Commentary on James Martin’s 16 Challenges

When I was a younger man working in the world of information technology I was an avid reader of James Martin’s books on computers and telecommunications. Recently I came across one of his books of which a part is published online. Entitled, “The Meaning of the 21st Century,”  it outlines 16 challenges that humanity faces in the coming century. I’ve added comments of my own in Italics.

1. GLOBAL WARMING Global warming will lead to severe climate change. Unless stopped, it will upset the basic control mechanisms of planet Earth.
2. EXCESSIVE POPULATION GROWTH World population may grow to 8.9 billion people, with a growing demand for consumer goods and carbon-based energy, far exceeding what the planet can handle. Forecasts of population growth indicate human population will start to peak around mid-century, level out and then slowly decline. Peak variable projections indicate a population as little as 9 billion or as high as 12 billion.
3. WATER SHORTAGES Rivers and aquifers are drying up. Many farmers will not have the water essential for food growing. There will be wars over water. Freshwater is one of the most challenging issues we face.
4. DESTRUCTION OF LIFE IN THE OCEANS Only 10% of edible fish remain in the oceans, and this percentage is rapidly declining. Aquaculture is only a partial solution to the problem of the collapse of fish stocks. Climate change influencers like CO2 are acidifying the ocean changing impacting krill, coral and shellfish, principal food sources for most marine life.
5. MASS FAMINE IN ILL-ORGANIZED COUNTRIES Farm productivity is declining. Grain will rise in cost. This will harm the poorest countries. Agricultural production in the Developing World needs to reach the same yield levels as in the factory farms of the Developed World replacing subsistence agriculture.
6. THE SPREAD OF DESERTS Soil is being eroded. Deserts are spreading in areas that used to have good soil and grassland. Grazing and improper land use including deforestation continue to impact soils in the Developing World contributing to desertification.
7. PANDEMICS AIDS is continuing to spread. Infectious pandemics could spread at unstoppable rates, as they have in the past, but now with the capability to kill enormous numbers of people. Although pandemics will always put humans at risk we have the means today to contain outbreaks and develop rapid response to them when they occur.
8. EXTREME POVERTY 2 to 3 billion people live in conditions of extreme poverty, with lack of sanitation. The difference between rich and poor is becoming ever more extreme. This is even a problem in the Developed World as indicated by the recent Wall Street protest movement and Arab Spring.
9. GROWTH OF SHANTYCITIES Shantytowns (shantycities) with extreme violence and poverty are growing in many parts of the world. Youth there have no hope. We need a global commitment to addressing informal urban environments and the poverty and despair associated with these areas.
10. UNSTOPPABLE GLOBAL MIGRATIONS Large numbers of people are leaving the poorest countries and shantycities, wanting to find a life in countries with opportunity. Migration from rural to urban is happening today at the rate of 80,000 per day. Migration from the Developing World to the Developed is increasingly more difficult although illegal immigration continues at a steady if not increasing pace.
11. NON-STATE ACTORS WITH EXTREME WEAPONS Nuclear or biological weapons are becoming easier to build by terrorist organizations, political groups or individuals, who are not acting for a given state. The evidence of this development frames the beginning of the 21st century and may be with us for a long time to come.
12. VIOLENT RELIGIOUS EXTREMISM Religious extremism and jihad may become widespread, leading to large numbers of suicide terrorists, and religious war between Muslims and Christians. This is nothing new. Religion, nationalism, and tribalism have been a part of the human condition and will continue. The real challenge will be to overcome our baser nature.
13. RUNAWAY COMPUTER INTELLIGENCE Computers will acquire the capability to increase their own intelligence until a chain reaction happens of machines becoming more intelligent at electronic speed. Artificial intelligence and humanity will experience convergence throughout the century. The question will become can we distinguish one from the other?
14. WAR THAT COULD END CIVILIZATION A global war like World War I or II, conducted with today’s vast number of nuclear weapons and new biological weapons, could end civilization. War in the 21st century will be fought in entirely new ways. Cyberattacks, militarization of space and new weapon technology (robotics, lasers) will change war just as the first atomic bomb altered the rules of warfare in the 20th century leading to the disappearance of global conflicts only to be replaced by regional wars.
15. RISKS TO HOMO SAPIEN’S EXISTENCE We are heading in the direction of scientific experiments (described by Lord Martin Rees) that have a low probability of wiping out Homo sapiens. The combination of risks gives a relatively high probability of not surviving the century. Humanity will survive the century. This is just too pessimistic.
16. A NEW DARK AGE A global cocktail of intolerable poverty and outrageous wealth, starvation, mass terrorism with nuclear/biological weapons, world war, deliberate pandemics and religious insanity, might plunge humanity into a worldwide pattern of unending hatred and violence – a new Dark Age. We are just as likely to emerge at the end of the 21st century with entirely new purpose as we look outward bound beyond our planet while using technology to restore much of what the Industrial Age has wrought.

In my blog I don’t just point out the problems but show how our human inventiveness is finding solutions. Nonetheless, James Martin has pointed out challenges we must face and overcome for humanity and the other travellers on our planet.

Geoengineering — Part 2: Climate Science and Climate Change

In a blog devoted to 21st century technology why are we discussing climate change? Because if climate is changing, and the evidence strongly suggests that, it will impact the planet in this century and beyond. Our response to climate change will play a critical role in determining new technologies that we apply to counter changing sea levels, altered precipitation patterns, melting polar and mountain glaciers, and rising temperatures.

For those reading this blog who are skeptical about the science of global warming let’s quickly review what we know from history and what evidence we have today to support the conclusions that climatically we are dealing with the global impact of our technical society on our planet.

Taking the Planet’s Temperature

Humans have been recording earth’s atmospheric temperature only recently. The first temperature recordings date to the 17th century in Europe. By the mid-19th century with colonial expansion, European scientists were faithfully keeping temperature records all across the planet. Prior to the recording of daily temperatures we have no direct statistical evidence of temperature variation on Earth. But we do have lots of historical records mentioning weather phenomenon dating back several thousand years as well as physical evidence drawn from a variety of sources including: tree rings (hundreds to thousands of years), ice cores from glaciers and the poles (thousands to hundreds of thousands of years), sampling of soil cores, rock and fossil records (hundreds to hundreds of millions of years). We also have observations from astronomy to help us “acclimatize.”

Celestial Impacts on Climate

From astronomers we have learned about the Earth’s wobble. If this is not familiar to you let me explain. Our planet tilts on an angle as it orbits the Sun. Sometimes it tilts more and sometimes it tilts less. Each wobble cycle takes 20,000 years.  The tilt variable is 22 to 25 degrees. Today we are around 23.5 degrees. When the tilt is less it changes the amount of solar energy that hits each hemisphere as the planet orbits the Sun. The greater the tilt the higher the amount of solar energy absorbed by whichever hemisphere is in its summer phase. The less the tilt the opposite.

In addition our orbit around the Sun is not circular. It is elliptical. Sometimes, therefore, we are closer than the 149,600,000 kilometers (93 million miles). The distance varies by about 5 million kilometers. When the northern hemisphere tilts toward the Sun and we are closest to the Sun, about 147,166,000 kilometers, solar radiation in the hemisphere is more intense. The opposite is true when we are further away at 152,173,000 kilometers.

Scientists have also studied the Sun and been able to determine that its output varies over time. There is a correlation between the solar radiation output and sunspots that cyclically appear on the Sun’s surface. More sunspots means a more active and warmer Sun. Fewer sunspots, a less active and cooler Sun.  When the Sun is cooler global temperatures drop.

What the Geological Record Shows Us

Our current continental configuration, that has the bulk of our continental masses in the northern hemisphere, also impacts climate. With large land masses in the north and ocean in the south, the climate in these areas reflects the different energy absorption levels of land versus water. Of course we are talking about continents that move between 1 and 10 centimeters per year and it’s hard to think about any immediate impact from plate tectonics on 21st century climate change. But in terms of geological time the position of continental plates has changed weather.

Our geological and geomorphological science has convincingly shown us that the recent history of our planet has included extensive periods of glaciation with much of the northern and southern extremes of the planet covered in continental glaciers and sea ice. This Ice Age has been cyclical in nature with extensive ice sheets appearing over land areas far more extensive than the remnant ice we see in Greenland and Antarctica today. The cycles of the Ice Age seem to coincide with the planet’s proximity to the Sun and the wobble.

Glacial growth and melting has interesting impacts on the most visible feature of our planet, our oceans. I’ll give you an example. When the last major advance of ice occurred in North America it peaked around 21,000 years ago and as it began to melt it formed an enormous freshwater lake where the current Great Lakes exist. Called Lake Agassiz, this lake’s main outlet was south through the Mississippi river system. An ice sheet dammed up the St. Lawrence River valley so the water couldn’t flow into the Atlantic. When that dam melted and broke Lake Agassiz emptied northeastward into the Atlantic flooding it with fresh water on a colossal scale. What did this do to the Gulf Stream and its companion North Atlantic Drift? The cold fresh water being lighter than the salt water of the Ocean formed a surface layer and completely disrupted the flow of warmer water from the south impacting Europe’s climate. That extra water also raised sea levels by 1.5 meters submerging coastlines and altering plant and animal habitats. You can imagine how disruptive these catastrophic changes could be to weather patterns, precipitation, and habitability.

What Historical Clues Tell Us

For Europeans there is a more recent historic example of climate change. We know that climate from 800 to 1300 A.D. was largely benign compared to a period that followed from 1300 to 1800 A.D. The former has been labelled by climatologists as the Medieval Optimum. Temperatures in Northern Europe appear to have been warmer with feudal Europe enjoying population growth, the emergence of cities, bumper harvests and much more physical evidence pointing to a fairly benign climate. The Vikings of Scandinavia flourished in this period and expanded their range from Northern Europe to Greenland, Iceland and Vinland (Newfoundland and Labrador). While Europe enjoyed a relatively warm and benign climate, evidence from North America shows persistent drought leading to the collapse of the Anasazi and Mayan civilizations in the Southwestern United States and Central America. We know about the drought conditions in North and Central America through tree rings and ocean sediments.

But something happened to the climate starting around 1300 A.D. and we can turn to historical written records to begin to understand what this period, known as the Little Ice Age, was like. We are fortunate that the science of astronomy arose during the period in question. Both in Europe and China solar observations indicated no or little sunspot activity throughout the period.  We also have hard science to support these historic observations because we can track the absence of radioactive elements that are byproducts of solar radiation through ice cores where bubbles give us samples of what the air was like when the ice was laid down. The absence of these radioactive elements confirms a cooler Sun.

Since 1800 we have seen a rise in global temperatures generally. Those who are skeptical about global warming often point to the historic evidence that warming and cooling seem to be cyclical and that the 500 years of warming followed by cooling is the norm. That means we are in the natural warming period that will end by 2300 before we plunge back into another little Ice Age. But unlike any earlier period of warming and cooling we now have the rise of our technical society, the Industrial Revolution, and the exploitation of fossil fuel energy and its atmospheric output. This is so recent a phenomenon that we cannot look to historic and geological records to easily find answers. What makes those records valuable to us is that they show that climate is a variable, not a constant and that the physical world impacts climate in a big way.

Burning Fossil Fuels Creates Disequilibrium

In David Archer’s “The Long Thaw” he describes the science behind global warming. Whereas weather beyond a few days is very unpredictable, Archer states that climate is not. Climate science on the other hand is tough work. Archer states, “The state of the warming forecast for the entire globe encompasses so much information that no one human mind could hold it all at one time.” Because of this scientists who study the atmosphere, ocean, biology, forestry, soils, and other disciplines formed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC’s latest conclusions are unanimous.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide measured over the past 50 years has steadily climbed from 310 parts per million (PPM) to 380 PPM. Much of that increase is coming from human activity – burning of fossil fuels and deforestation. Fossil fuels contribute 7 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide annually. That represents 1% of the biomass of the planet and is 20 times greater than the carbon represented in all human life on this planet. How does that number compare to the natural carbon cycle within the atmosphere? It is about 1/20th of the total amount of carbon cycled in the normal exchange between atmosphere, ocean and land annually. And while the Earth has found a balance in handling natural exchanges of carbon it is this injection of carbon from fossil fuels, carbon buried in the past, that is upsetting atmospheric equilibrium.

Soaking up this extra carbon is something that the natural world may not be able to do. There is only so much capacity to handle carbon and since the Earth has been doing it without human intervention up until now, through human intervention we will have to try to deal with the difference.

Consequences of  Climate Change

1. Local weather will change.

I live in Toronto, a relatively benign climate by Canadian standards. What will happen in Toronto over the next century may make the city more temperate. Our summers will be longer and warmer. We will hit 40 degrees Celsius on many summer days. We’ll run more air conditioning for longer. We’ll probably be able to grow plants we once thought of as exotic and they will survive our winter hibernation period. We’ll see some of our native wildlife vanish and new species from farther south arrive on our doorsteps. We’ll see the spread of insects that normally would have died because of our winters. We may experience variable precipitation and certainly atmospheric disturbances more akin to those that now happen in the U.S. Gulf and Mid-Atlantic states. That will mean greater incidents of tornadoes and severe weather.

That’s the picture of the local weather in Toronto. What will it be like in Greenland? Back in the time of the Viking colonization during the warming period between 800 and 1300 A.D., Greenland could support herds and crops. Today it has only limited capacity to support agriculture. But within this century agriculture on a larger scale will be possible on Greenland.

There is a greater problem with rising temperatures over Greenland and that is the melting of its glaciers. If summertime temperatures rise by 3 degrees Celsius Greenland will melt and we have no climate models to go on today that can predict what that will mean in terms of loss of ice mass. Will it be all of the ice or just some? What we do have right now is the evidence that the ice is melting faster than any of our previous predictions.

2. Polar and mountain glaciers will melt.

In Toronto we will be “getting off easy” compared to Northern Canada where the sea ice is shrinking with longer melts each summer. Greenland’s ice sheets will shed more icebergs as the melt increases glacial fluidity. The added fresh water to the North Atlantic will affect shore currents, fish stocks and the ocean flora and fauna. The permafrost, a contraction that means permanently frozen ground, will no longer exist.

In places like the Andes Mountains of Peru the mountain glaciers that feed the Amazon will vanish changing the dynamics of that river system dramatically. Similarly, the Himalayan glacial water sources for the great rivers of Asia will disappear with the same results as in the Amazon.

Antarctica will see a dramatic decrease in the thickness of its glacial cover. Today Antarctica is less impacted by the warming atmosphere than the Arctic largely because it is surrounded by water with the water acting as a heat sink reducing atmospheric warming. But nonetheless, Antarctica will warm up.

Our current climate models are based on observations of the behaviour of ice in stable climatic periods. We have never witnessed the end of an Ice Age. We may not be able to anticipate just how quickly glaciers can melt.

3. The seas will warm, sea levels will rise and the chemical composition of oceans will alter.

How much warmer? How much higher? How chemically altered?

By 2100 scientists predict a rise of between a half and one meter with the greatest impact on low-lying coastal areas. What is interesting is that not all the rise will be because of meltwater. The ocean is a heat sink and when the air above it warms the surface ocean picks up that heat. Warm water has greater volume than cold water so the increased warmth will contribute to rising sea levels as well.

Who will be impacted? The majority of humanity lives within 160 kilometers (100 miles) of seacoasts. So that means almost all of us but you can quickly name a number of countries and locations where sea levels will have dramatic impact: Bangladesh will virtually disappear, as will Florida, many island nations in the Pacific and Indian Ocean, and Holland. If New Orleans experienced the flood post-Katrina, imagine the consequence of a storm surge accompanied by rising sea levels on that City.

Warming will not stop in 2100 and sea levels, therefore, will continue to rise. So this is just the beginning of a much bigger problem.

In addition to the rise in sea levels, the chemistry of the ocean will change. The ocean is a carbon sink today but increase the amount of carbon and you acidify the ocean impacting life that uses calcium carbonate. All shelled creatures will be affected.

Add to this the potential for methane upwelling from “permanently” stored methyl hydrates that found in ocean sediments. Methane releases into the atmosphere represent another greenhouse gas to add to a warming atmosphere.

4. Permafrost will melt.

The Canadian and Siberian tundra has thousands of square kilometers of permanently frozen ground. This permafrost is not so permanent. We know that permafrost contains quantities of methane and should it melt even more methane will enter the atmosphere further exacerbating the warming.

Why are we concerned about methane? Because there is geological evidence of methane spikes in the atmosphere going back 55 million years when there was a significant change in the Earth’s flora and fauna resulting from a rather rapid warming of the atmosphere.

Are We Doomed?

Sounds hopeless doesn’t it. But it’s not. We are a technical society. We understand the scientific method and how to interpret results of scientific investigations. We have the means to communicate the challenge of a warming planet to all humanity. We may lack the political will at present but as our planet warms we will increasingly recognize the peril we face and implement policy and technologies that can limit the impact. Of course we could be like the frog sitting in a glass pot unaware that he is being boiled to death slowly. But let’s not go there. So in subsequent blogs we’ll look at solutions to climate change.

Geoengineering – Part 1: Reworking Our Planet’s Atmosphere in the 21st Century

Climate change as a result of human activity on Earth is a science that has more and more taken on credibility as we track rising global temperatures, ozone depletion, vanishing polar ice, shrinking alpine glaciers, and extreme weather systems that are a departure from recorded meteorological history. Humanity has several choices. We can stay the course continuing to pump out atmospheric-warming pollution and see what happens, or we can try and change humanity’s consumption of fossil fuels, or we can look at ways of re-engineering our environment to mitigate the greenhouse effect. Never before has humanity had to experiment on a global scale to address such a far reaching problem. In 2009, Douglas Fisher wrote an article that appeared in Scientific American, entitled, “Engineering the Planet to Dodge Global Warming.” In it he wrote “The idea of tinkering with planetary controls is not for the faint of heart. Even advocates acknowledge that any attempt to set the Earth’s thermostat is full of hubris and laden with risk.”

Hubris and risk….absolutely. But humans have been tinkering with climate for years. In 1946, an American, Dr. Vincent Schaefer, tried to create artificial clouds by seeding them with silver iodide crystals. There is no certainty that cloud seeding actually works but enough anecdotal evidence has accumulated to make many people around the world attempt cloud seeding. Probably the most famous recent experiment occurred at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, China where the government deployed 32,000 people working with light aircraft, rockets and shells to spread silver iodide crystals or dry ice in clouds 50 km upwind of Beijing. The goal was to prevent rain from interrupting the August 8 opening ceremonies because historical records indicated a 41% chance of precipitation on that date. China spent a lot of money in this effort setting up 26 control stations reporting every 10 minutes on the status of local weather after each seeding event.  According to the Beijing Municipal Meterological Bureau 1,104 rain dispersal rockets were fired from 21 sites in the city between 4 p.m. and 11:39 p.m. on the day of the opening ceremonies, successfully intercepting a stretch of rain clouds from moving towards the stadium. Heavy rains were record around Beijing but not during the time of the opening ceremonies.

In 1990, John Firor wrote “The Changing Atmosphere,” a book that described what we were doing to the atmosphere through our own neglect. He described acid rain, ozone depletion, increases in greenhouse gases, and other atmospheric pollutants and what they were doing to degrade the atmosphere. Firor foresaw the need for a coordinated strategy among all nations to tackle this problem. In his book he stated that it was almost impossible to halt the continued pollution of our atmosphere but suggested steps to slow the process.

For Firor one of the most important steps in changing the atmospheric equation was stabilizing human population growth. We, however, continue to propagate the species at an alarming rate. In 2011 the world’s human population will surpass 7 billion. By mid-century it is projected that we will surpass 9.2 billion. If we as a species can slow the current birth rate to zero growth then the population should stabilize at around that number throughout the balance of the century. If we don’t, however, at present growth rates human population could exceed 14 billion according to a recent U.N. study. Part of this sustained population surge will be due in part to longer lifespans with life expectancy of 97 by 2100 and 106 by 2300. Human population growth will change our atmosphere but that is not the re-engineering that is the topic we want to describe here. We’ll deal with human population and the planet’s carrying capacity in a future blog. Short of all members of the human species stopping breathing there are many ways we can begin to re-engineer the atmosphere.

So let’s begin by describing the current atmospheric challenges we face and the technologies that we need to deploy to reverse the effects of fossil fuel addiction and industrial resource consumption.

What gases and pollutants are we talking about?

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the primary gas that climatologists point to when talking about atmospheric temperature changes. Carbon dioxide concentrations today are higher than at any time in the last half-million years. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution carbon dioxide has been growing from 280 parts per million (ppm) to 382 ppm in 2006, a rise of 36 percent. Since 2006 CO2 continues to rise at a rate of about 1.9 ppmv/year.

Methane (CH4) is the second greenhouse gas that has seen a sharp increase of 148% from pre-industrial levels to today.

Nitrous oxide (N2O) had shown little variance over 11,500 years before the Industrial Revolution but recently in the last few decades of the 20th century it has increased by 18%.

Aerosols can effect cloud formation as well as the amount of solar radiation that strikes the earth’s surface. Aerosols can also impact atmospheric temperature. Typical aerosols come from the burning of fossil fuels. Coal-fired power plants produce sulfates that reflect solar radiation and cool the atmosphere. By reducing coal-fired plants suflates in the atmosphere have started to decrease. Another aerosol is soot, again a byproduct of fossil fuel burning as well as the burning of forests for land clearance. Soot, also known as black carbon, tends to be a local atmospheric phenomenon effecting atmospheric temperature and cloud formation. Open pit mining, salt pans and mineral precipitate operations can also contribute organic carbon aerosols into the atmosphere. These precipitates affect air quality quite dramatically and can contribute to global atmospheric changes including cooling and increased cloud formation.

Airborne precipitates and gases are not the only contributors to atmospheric alterations. Land use plays a significant part in changing the reflective capability of our planet and as a result the concentration of radiation-generated heat that gets trapped in the atmosphere. The fraction of solar radiation reflected by a surface or object, often expressed as a percentage is called albedo. Snow has a high albedo. Forests have a low albedo. The oceans have a low albedo. The growth of cities, deforestation and desertification are playing an increasing role in changing our atmosphere.

How can we rework the atmosphere to stabilize it and reverse the impact that greenhouse gases, aerosols, and land-use changes have wrought?

1. The first and foremost is ending our dependence on fossil fuels and immediately reducing the burning of these fuels. One third of our fossil fuel consumption comes from burning oil, natural gas, and coal to generate electricity.  Every power plant has the capability to disperse millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually. Stop the burning of forests to clear them from agricultural use.

2. Decrease carbon emissions from other industrial processes. In the process of creating cement, refining metals, chemicals and fossil fuels we generate many more millions of tons of carbon dioxide. Carbon capture and the reuse of it as an industrial resource can even play a profitable part in the manufacturing process.

3. There are an increasing number of carbon capture and storage technologies being demonstrated today. The most commonly used is deployed at power plant and manufacturing facilities where the flue gas stream is captured. This is a post-combustion process. Two other processes capture carbon dioxide at the pre-combustion and combustion phases within power plants. These current deployed technologies either only capture a fraction of the carbon dioxide stream eminating from plants or cannot be deployed because the retrofits would be prohibitively expensive. This makes reducing carbon dioxide emissions in an economically sustainable way a significant industry problem that governments, through subsidies and tax incentives, may be able to address.

4. Carbon sequestration poses a variety of challenges. Nature’s way of capturing carbon is through photosynthesis. Plants are natural carbon sinks. They take in carbon dioxide and expel oxygen. If only sequestration could be so kind. Through sequestration we capture carbon dioxide either by putting in the ground or in water.

Today, underground sequestration is used by oil companies today as a means of getting additional oil from depleted fields. Pumping carbon dioxide under pressure into oil reservoirs is good business. Because oil reservoirs are porous rock formations overlayed by harder capstones we can find similar geological characteristics in sandstone, shale and other sedimentary rock as well as volcanic rock such as basalt and use these porous formations for sequestration. An interesting consequence of injecting carbon dioxide into basalt formations is the alteration of the rock which turns into limestone.

Sequestering carbon dioxide in water has potential ecological implications. The deep ocean has been considered the ideal place for carbon storage. Liquefied carbon dioxide when injected into the deep ocean (below 3,500 meters) in theory should keep the carbon dioxide permanently trapped. Carbon dioxide in liquid form and subjected to deep ocean pressures turns into clathrate hydrate, an icy substance that in theory cannot be absorbed by ocean water. Experiments in deep ocean carbon sequestration to date have shown mixed success. Sometimes the carbon dioxide stabilizes and sometimes it breaks up in the salt water with potential implications for ocean life. More recently it has been suggested that liquid carbon dioxide can be stored in large polymer containers that are placed in the bottom of the ocean. The target area is in the ocean depths of the Pacific, an area called the abyssal plain. The liquid carbon dioxide would be pumped through pipelines to polymer bags hoding up to 160 million metric tons, equivalent to two day’s of global human output.

Another solution for sequestration has a potential happy ending. Since fossil fuels are a byproduct of carbon sequestration over geological time, we may be able to synthesize fossil fuel production by injecting carbon dioxide deep into the earth’s crust and thereby reproduce the very forces that created fossil fuels naturally. Using gravity we could artificially create a carbon cycle that would give us a continuous supply of fossil fuels for as long as we needed them. Should we be able to develop such technical skill then all the sequestered carbon that we pump into the oceans and underground may prove to be a valuable resource.