Stop global warming with Molten Salt Reactors

By Zeeshan Hasan. 

First published in Dhaka Tribune on 16 November 2021 at https://www.dhakatribune.com/opinion/op-ed/2021/11/16/op-ed-stop-global-warming-with-molten-salt-reactors

Decades of UN climate negotiations have yielded few results; our use of fossil fuels is still increasing, producing carbon dioxide emissions which are heating up our planet to dangerous levels. And yet, things didn’t have to be this way. Decades ago, visionary nuclear scientists like Dr. Alvin Weinberg, author of “The First Nuclear Era” (published 1994), proposed that fossil fuels could be eliminated and global warming solved by widespread adoption of nuclear power. Dr. Weinberg was formerly head of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, one of the primary sites of nuclear reactor research in the USA, and co-inventor of the “light water reactor” design which has become the mainstay of nuclear power all over the world. However, he also foresaw that the risk of serious nuclear accidents which could occur at light water reactors (such as Chernobyl and Fukushima) would turn the public against nuclear power, and limit its promise of supplying fossil-fuel free energy to the world. Thus he designed a safer nuclear reactor called the Molten Salt Reactor, which still promises to be a safer and virtually limitless source of zero-carbon power. The climate crisis and the urgency of replacing fossil fuels makes this a critical discovery which everyone should know about.

Dr. Weinberg first points out that his design of the light water reactor (also called the pressurised water reactor) was adopted not due to either safety or economy; but simply because Admiral Hyman Rickover of the US Navy, found it most appropriate for the Nautilus nuclear submarine program.

“The coolant for the nuclear submarine reactor had yet to be determined. Rickover himself seemed to favour high-temperature sodium… I naturally called to their attention the ideas we had developed on the use of pressurised water. For a submarine reactor, pressurised water had two main advantages; first, a reactor based on it would be small enough to fit comfortably in a submarine… second, water, unlike sodium, was something the Navy ought to know about… Thus was born the pressurised water reactor… not because it was cheap or inherently safer than other reactors, but rather because it was compact and simple and lent itself to naval propulsion. But once pressurised water was developed by the Navy, this system achieved dominance.” (page 59)

However, the pressurised water reactor was not the only alternative for nuclear power. Dr. Weinberg also also developed the Molten Salt Reactor, which was designed to be inherently safe as it could not overheat and experience “meltdown”. This was recognised as a risk for pressurised water reactors if their nuclear control rod systems were defective (as at Chernobyl) or if their water-based pumping and cooling systems were stopped (as at Fukushima). The Molten Salt Reactor was successfully tested over 3 years at Oak Ridge:

“The molten-salt reactor began operation early in 1966 and achieved its maximum power… in March of that year. It continued to operate remarkably smoothly, though with interruptions for maintenance, until December 1969, when its operation was terminated so that funds could be diverted to the development of more advanced molten-salt systems. We were delighted with the MSRE (molten-salt reactor experiment)” (page 126)

Unfortunately, the Molten Salt Reactor was too late to influence commercial reactor design, which had already established an unstoppable momentum around the light water reactor:

“By 1953, the main line of reactor development in the United States was pretty well established; it was the light water reactor (LWR)… the LWR… had one overwhelming advantage; it had already proven itself as a reliable power plant in the Nautilus” (page 133)

The selection of the light water reactor by the commercial nuclear industry left it open to the possibility of catastrophic failures, against which the first generation designs of light water reactor did not have adequate safety measures.

“Even before Three Mile Island… I tried to convince the nuclear industry people that drastic action was needed if nuclear was to survive… on the basis of Norman Rasmussen’s estimates of the likelihood of a reactor accident, a reactor meltdown was all but certain within a few decades... the reactor would be destroyed, and this would bankrupt the utility that owned and operated the reactor, as well as greatly compromising the future of nuclear energy.” (pages 227-8)

Dr. Weinberg’s repeated warnings regarding the possibility of nuclear accidents in light water reactors cost him dearly; ultimately he was fired from his job as director of Oak Ridge National Laboratories. Unfortunately, Weinberg’s worst fears came true when the Chernobyl disaster occurred:

“Then came Chernobyl in April 1986. The nuclear enterprise throughout the world had to face the real possibility that the first nuclear era would be aborted.” (page 232)

Weinberg passed away in 2006, but his prediction of nuclear disaster in light water reactors was further reinforced after the 2011 Fukushima accident, which effectively ended public support of nuclear power in most Western countries. Weinberg’s prediction of the demise of the light water reactor industry led him to call this initial phase of nuclear power “the first nuclear era” (hence the title of his book). He foresaw the safer Molten Salt Reactor design taking over the nuclear industry afterwards:

“I visualised a second nuclear era based on an inherently safe reactor… Once the public realised that a meltproof reactor had been developed, its objections to nuclear energy would disappear. ” (page 231)

Unfortunately, Dr. Weinberg never lived to see his dream of the Molten Salt Reactor commercialised, largely due to the protests against nuclear power by anti-nuclear environmentalists who favoured solar and wind over nuclear energy. This was a tragic development, as nuclear has long been the only zero-carbon large scale source of continuous energy capable of replacing fossil fuels and stopping global warming.

“Carbon dioxide poses a dilemma for the radical environmentalist. Since nuclear reactors emit almost no carbon dioxide, how can one be against nuclear energy if one is concerned about carbon dioxide?… To my dismay… this is exactly the position of some of the environmentalists. Their argument is that extreme conservation, and a shift to renewables – that is, solar energy – is the only environmentally correct approach to reducing carbon dioxide. When I point out to them that conservation may be feasible in industrialized countries, but that it is hardly a choice for India and China, they seem to ignore the point.” (page 237)

Fortunately, a number of companies and government agencies around the world have taken up Weinberg’s Molten Salt Reactor design and are currently trying to commercialize it. The first proof-of-concept Molten Salt Reactor is about to be completed in Wuwei, China. Hopefully, within a few years, Weinberg’s dream of a second nuclear era powered by inherently safe Molten Salt Reactors will become a reality. One hopes that this will be in time to save the world from climate castastrophe.

Solving climate change with Thorium Molten Salt Reactors (MSRs)

First published on 22nd June 2020 in the Dhaka Tribune.

The daily headlines make it clear that the world is headed for climate catastrophe, with record heat and wildfires burning much of Australia in the past year. Climate scientists warn that only a decade or two is left to avoid catastrophic global warming of over 2C, which would submerge all low-lying areas under rising seas, creating millions of climate refugees, and endanger global food production, potentially causing huge famines. 

Obviously, the world has to stop using fossil fuels, which are the root cause of climate change; Super Fuel: Thorium, The Green Energy Source for the Future by Richard Martin shows a path forward. We might have been already living in an alternate world powered by cheap, safe, and zero-carbon nuclear power if civilian nuclear energy had been allowed to develop freely without military interference. 

The terrible accidents of Chernobyl and Fukushima could have been avoided if the safer alternative of thorium-based molten salt reactors had been chosen as the basis of civilian nuclear power. Instead, we still use fossil fuels as our main energy source, and the world remains at dire risk of extreme global warming.

Martin’s book outlines the development of the “light water reactor” design which dominates the world’s nuclear industry, and how this design was driven by military concerns rather than the need for safe nuclear power. The light water reactor was used for the first commercial nuclear reactor at Shippingport, Pennsylvania in 1957, as well as the first Nautilus nuclear submarine of the US Navy in 1958. 

The common reactor design was no accident, but the result of development decisions by Admiral Hyman Rickover: In the 1950s, he headed the US naval nuclear submarine research team and also decided as a member of the US Atomic Energy Commission what shape civilian nuclear power would take. 

The advantage of the light water reactor was obvious from Rickover’s naval perspective: “The Navy had the best plumbers in the world. They knew how to design and operate pumps, bearings and valves to transport water, including water at the high pressure required for a nuclear reactor inside a submarine” (page 106). 

The selection of water as reactor coolant was dangerous, however; it created the possibility of water escaping as high-temperature, high-pressure steam, or even worse reacting with metals in the reactor to release hydrogen gas, which could then cause an explosion. So light water reactors needed large, expensive “containment vessels” to prevent steam or hydrogen explosions from releasing radioactivity into the surroundings. Thus a factor as arbitrary as the US Navy’s comfort with water-based plumbing was decisive in giving the world the inherently unsafe, yet expensive and difficult to build, light water reactor which dominates nuclear power today.

Alvin Weinberg, the head of Oak Ridge National Laboratories in the US and one of the original designers of the light water reactor, identified further safety problems; these reactors were built around a solid core containing uranium “fuel rods” which host the nuclear reactions. Slowing down the nuclear reaction requires a mechanical control system to physically move “control rods” in between the fuel rods. In a light-water reactor, any problem with the mechanical control system can cause the core to overheat and catastrophically melt down. 

To solve these issues, Weinberg and his team designed the “molten salt reactor.” As Martin says: “The only truly inherently safe reactor is a liquid-core reactor, like the molten salt reactor that was created at Oak Ridge in the 1960s. For the purposes of a reactor designer, liquid -- whether it’s water, liquid metal, or some type of liquid fluoride [salt] -- has a marvelous characteristic; it expands rapidly when it gets hot … In a liquid core reactor, as the energy of the liquid rises, it expands and naturally slows down the reaction, making a runaway accident nearly impossible … When the reactivity goes down, the reactor is essentially turning itself off”(page 73). 

This sort of passive safety (which does not require human or mechanical intervention to slow down the reaction) is missing from the light water reactors which now provide most of the world’s nuclear power.

While thermal expansion of the liquid core of Weinberg’s molten salt reactor provides passive cooling to slow the nuclear reaction, it’s still conceivable for an accident to happen due to unforeseen natural disasters such as earthquakes. However, even in the event of an earthquake or other accidents at a molten-salt reactor, the release of radioactive material into the environment and consequent damage to life and health is almost zero. 

“Fluoride [salt]-based liquid fuels have one other characteristic that makes them ideal for reactor cores: They flow. Gravity, not elaborate control systems or so-called passive safety systems, gives liquid fluoride thorium reactors their ultimate protection against a serious nuclear accident. In a power outage or mishap, a specially designed freeze plug in the reactor vessel melts and the liquid core simply drains out of the reactor into an underground shielded container, like a bathtub when the drain plug is pulled. The fission reactions quickly cease, and the fluid cools rapidly … Meltdown is impossible”(page 74).

Again, earlier generations of light water reactors lacked such a passive safety measure to limit the release of radioactivity from nuclear accidents.

Weinberg’s molten salt reactor design had another innovation; it could be run on thorium-based nuclear fuel, which is not as rare as uranium, and consequently promises to be an affordable fuel source for much longer. This is important, as nuclear fuel has to be inexpensive and readily available in the long-term for developing countries which consume increasing amounts of power.

A thorium-based molten salt reactor (also known as Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, or LFTR for short) is also much more efficient with its nuclear fuel, in that it converts almost all of its thorium fuel to uranium-233 and then burns almost all of it. By comparison, a light water reactor utilizes only a tiny percentage of its uranium-235/238 nuclear fuel and so produces many times the volume of nuclear waste. 

The nuclear waste produced by thorium molten salt reactors is also much less long-lived. “While LFTRs, like every other nuclear reactor, generate fission products that are highly radioactive, their half-lives tend to be measured in dozens of years, not thousands.” (page 77). 

This means thorium-based molten salt reactors will not present the problems of storing radioactive waste for thousands of years that conventional nuclear plants face. In fact, new designs of molten salt reactors are now being researched which could consume existing stocks of radioactive nuclear waste as fuel, thus permanently removing the need for long-term storage of nuclear waste (pages 78-79).

Unfortunately, the US Navy invested heavily in light water reactors for its nuclear submarine programs; big corporations like GE and Westinghouse likewise invested heavily in marketing and constructing light water reactors around the world. 

Both these powerful groups opposed further research into alternatives like the safer molten salt reactor. The US government under Nixon short-sightedly terminated funding for Weinberg’s molten salt reactor research. Weinberg’s outspoken criticism of the dangers of the light water reactor design ultimately led him to be fired from his job as head of Oak Ridge National Laboratories. However, disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima have shown that Weinberg was correct to be apprehensive about the safety of light water reactors.

Disasters at Fukushima and Chernobyl created panic, and have resulted in much public opposition to nuclear energy. This was a colossal mistake in environmental terms, as it has meant that countries like Germany and Japan have been replacing carbon-free nuclear power with yet more fossil fuels. 

Many environmentalists also reject nuclear power in favour of wind and solar power; however, these renewable sources are intermittent, and can’t replace continuous fossil fuel-based power without colossal investments in electrical storage batteries which are both commercially and technologically infeasible. Thorium-based molten salt reactors in every country (in fact, in every city) are thus a much more realistic solution to the climate crisis.

The good news is that in the last decade, around a dozen nuclear start-up companies in various countries have emerged, developing new designs based on the thorium molten salt reactor, with considerable research taking place at the government level in India and China as well. Hopefully, thorium molten salt reactors will soon be available to be built in countries like Bangladesh which are acutely vulnerable to global warming and sea-level rise, and desperately need greener, cheaper, and safer alternatives to both fossil fuels and conventional uranium reactors. 

One can only hope this happens before our dependence on coal, oil, and gas damages the earth’s climate beyond the capacity for human survival.

Saving the world with carbon taxes

This article was published in Dhaka Tribune on 25th August, 2019.

Every day, the news brings fresh stories about the urgency of stopping climate breakdown. The number of record hot years over the past decade keeps climbing, along with reports of severe storms, summer heat waves and melting polar ice. And yet we continue burning coal, oil and gas every day, generating more carbon dioxide emissions and making the planet hotter. Sometimes the scale of the climate problem seems overwhelming. But the fact remains that stopping global warming is simple; it only requires implementing a policy of global carbon taxes.

Economist have acknowledged for decades that global warming is essentially a failure of the market to price fossil fuels correctly. The abundance of coal, oil and gas means their minimum price is largely determined by extraction costs from the earth, which generally results in a low price (particularly for coal, which is cheap to mine). Unfortunately, the low prices of fossil fuels don’t reflect their true cost to society: if global warming is allowed to raise the Earth’s temperature by 4 or 5 degrees Celsius over the next century as projected by scientists, it could mean the end of much of the world’s population through droughts, crop failure, famines and ultimately warfare over food and water (a pattern already seen in Syria). The long-term cost of unmitigated climate change would be almost incalculable.

The rational, economic solution is to tax fossil fuels at point of extraction or import by coal, oil and gas companies. This would increase prices of coal, oil and gas and reduce their use, and thus slow down carbon emissions and global warming. However, governments have been wary of carbon taxes as a political liability which could create both unemployment and public dissatisfaction. In France, Macron’s attempt to impose a carbon tax at the beginning of 2019 sparked the violent ‘yellow vest’ protests among low-paid workers who could not afford higher transport and heating bills.

However, there is a refinement of carbon tax policy which can solve the problem of imposing any tax burden on the poor, namely 'carbon dividends'. This is the subject of economist James Boyce’s excellent new book, ‘The case for carbon dividends’. A ‘carbon dividend’ simply returns carbon tax revenue to the public as a flat payment per taxpayer. If all carbon tax revenue is returned this way, the net economic burden of the carbon tax will be zero, and it will not create unemployment. An example is helpful here; consider a simplified population of 100 people consisting of 5 wealthy people and 95 lower-income people. As wealthy people buy more carbon-intensive goods like cars and aeroplane flights, the wealthiest 5% may have 100 times the carbon footprint and thus might each pay $1000 carbon tax (as opposed to $10 for a lower-income person who doesn't fly or drive). Total carbon tax revenue for a sample population of 100 people would be (5 wealthy people x $1000 per person carbon tax) + (95 lower-income people x $10 per person carbon tax) = $5,950. However, all taxpayers would receive an averaged equal carbon dividend of $5950/100 or $59.50 each. That means that the wealthiest 5% of people would pay a net tax of ($1000 carbon tax - $59.50 carbon dividend) = $940.50 each, which gives them a powerful incentive to reduce their fossil fuel consumption. On the other hand, the lower-income 95% would receive a net benefit of ($59.50 carbon dividend - $10 carbon tax = $49.50). This net benefit will help low-income people to pay for higher costs of fossil fuels (due to carbon taxes) without falling further into poverty, and thus help prevent political backlash against the carbon tax. Even though it doesn’t cause any net tax burden, the carbon tax will make all use of fossil fuels more expensive and speed up the transition to renewable energy. The higher the carbon tax, the faster the transition will be.

This carbon dividend policy is not invented by Boyce; he has just written the first book devoted to it. In fact, carbon dividends are the policy advocated by Citizens’ Climate Lobby (www.citizensclimatelobby.org) a worldwide group of volunteers dedicated to educating the public and politicians about how to stop climate breakdown by implementing carbon taxes and dividends. The imposition of a carbon tax and dividend policy in Canada at the beginning of 2019 was largely the outcome of years lobbying by this group. This initial success in Canada needs to be replicated in every country if climate breakdown is to be prevented. Since Bangladesh is one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change, and there is now a large expatriate Bangladeshi population around the globe, one hopes that Bangladeshis wherever they are will join the campaign to stop global warming through carbon taxes and dividends.

Climate Changed: A graphic novel by Philippe Squarzoni

This article was published in Dhaka Tribune on February 9th, 2019.

French cartoonist Philippe Squarzoni has taken on the huge task of trying to convey the complex science of climate science and the global emergency that it implies in the form of his autobiographical/documentary graphic novel, Climate Changed. Hopefully this will enable the general public, which does not always seem inclined to wade through dense texts on scientific topics, to get a better appreciation of the challenges of global warming.
The book starts with the author contemplating the difficulties of tackling the subject of global warming in comic book form; unlike most comic book stories, it’s a scientific phenomenon without the conventional beginning and end of most stories. His solution is to place a fairly detailed exposition of climate science in the context of an autobiography. The end result is illuminating. It serves to remind the reader that climate change is not just happening to the globe. It’s happening to all of us, since we all live on this planet that is rapidly heating up, and is already presenting us with real consequences in the form of record high temperatures, droughts and deadlier storms. His visit to his childhood home and his observation of how much smaller and how different it seems as an adult illustrates that the comfortable planet we knew even a few decades ago is gone forever; the climate has changed, and it’s a now a new, more dangerous world that we live in.
As a low-lying country which is both densely populated and incredibly vulnerable to sea level rise, Bangladesh gets two mentions in the book. Squarzoni quotes climatologist and World Bank economist Stephane Hallegatte: with ‘a rise in sea level of a little over 3 feet (1 metre)… numerous densely populated coastal regions such as the Ganges and Nile deltas could be flooded. Millions of people will be driven out, and agricultural production will be severely affected. 20% of Bangladesh could be flooded.’ Bangladesh comes up again when Hallegatte discusses the potential effect of millions of climate refugees on the international arena: ‘If 20 million people leave Bangladesh and head for India, what do we do?… What will the India and Bangladesh of 2060 be like? Will tensions between them have eased? Or will they be at war?’. Even in Bangladesh, such long-terms concerns are rarely addressed in the short-term new cycle.
Unfortunately, the effects of climate change will be felt disproportionately by the poor; this is made clear by Squarzoni’s account of the severe flooding caused by Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans in 2005. The wealthier sections of the populace all evacuated upon hearing storm warnings a day in advance. The poor had no means to escape, and had to survive for days on the roofs of their submerged houses with most of the city being flooded with up to 23 feet of water. 30,000 people took shelter above the flood waters in the city stadium, until being finally evacuated by the government to the surrounding states. Desperate people started looting shops for supplies, with the result that a curfew was imposed; US soldiers freshly returned from Iraq were called in with orders from the state governor to shoot to kill. Total deaths numbered 1293, and 2 million were displaced; hundreds of thousands for over a year. Immense numbers were left in financial ruin with no means of rebuilding their ruined homes. All this in the richest country in the world. The question arises as to how poorer countries would deal with similar storms and floods, which will grow more common everywhere as global warming adds heat and power to storm systems. Will wealthy countries treat poor countries any better than they treat the poorest of their own citizens?
‘So, how to end this book?’ Squarzoni asks as he draws to a close. He observes that so far humanity has failed to deal with the existential threat of climate change by curbing fossil fuel use, and thus nearly closes on a pessimistic note; but as he says, ‘The story isn't over’. Everything depends on how successfully we the public are able to lobby governments of the world to act over the next decade (which according to the 2018 International Panel on Climate Change report is all the time we have left to make severe cuts to fossil fuel use and thus prevent catastrophic climate change of over 1.5C).

How 'Merchants of Doubt' convinced the US to ignore climate change

In 1988, Dr. James Hansen, senior climate scientist at NASA, testified to the US Senate that global warming caused by burning fossil fuels was a serious threat. Yet for 28 years the world did practically nothing, and both greenhouse gas emissions and global warming continued. Global inactivity was largely due to successive US governments pretending that the science of global warming was still uncertain and not worth the expense of reducing coal, oil and gas use. The willful ignorance of climate science on the part of the American politicians was encouraged by a small group of right-wing scientists who were not specialists in climate change, but were rather driven by ideological opposition to the increased government regulation that would obviously be required to tackle issues such as global warming. Reluctance of US authorities to consider reducing fossil fuel use resulted in all other countries refusing to to act as well. How this happened is the subject of Merchants of Doubt: How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway.

Oreskes, a professor of history of science at Harvard University, points out that a number of the prominent scientific advisors of the US government (recurring names are Fred Seitz, Fred Singer, Robert Jastrow and Bill Nierenberg) started their careers in nuclear weapons and missile research in the midst of Cold War conflicts with Russia. Thus these scientists were reflexively anti-Communist and inclined to oppose any scientific research that made a case for more government regulation; they saw such regulations as a sign of the socialism which they had opposed all their careers growing within the US. Hence this small but influential group of senior scientific advisors continuously opposed emerging scientific findings that tobacco caused cancer, that industrial pollution caused acid rain, and finally that dangerous climate change would be caused by burning coal, oil and gas. Unfortunately, these anti-regulation/pro-market scientists found support in the fossil fuel industry, various pro-market media and think tanks, and various US politicians whose political campaigns received money from coal/oil/gas companies. The result was that the science of global warming and climate change was perceived by the media, the government and the public as contested for decades after a scientific consensus on these issues was in fact established. Due to these manufactured doubts, government policy was slow to accept the scientific evidence on the danger of man-made global warming.

Of the various scientific issues discussed by Oreskes, climate change has by far the biggest impact on humanity as a whole and thus also created the most resistance amongst anti-regulation scientists, corporate lobby groups and politicians. Reading Oreskes' book, one sees how naïve it is to expect that worldwide government policies regarding global warming would be simply be decided based on scientific evidence. The fact is that the political systems which have been established to govern democratic countries are not set up to make decisions based on science. Rather they are set up to encourage politicians to make decisions based on the likelihood of winning the next election. Multinational coal, oil and gas companies have more than enough money to make political donations big enough to legally “buy” political support for their industries in spite of dire scientific warnings. The public has largely been deceived by fake science produced by non-specialists in climate change presenting themselves as 'experts' and muddying up the waters with doubt.

The past 30 years has shown that voters around the world, and especially in the US, have not been sufficiently informed of the dangers of catastrophic global warming which could cause worldwide water shortage, crop failures and famines resulting in hundreds of millions of deaths if left unchecked. Fossil fuel companies and anti-regulation scientists and politicians have taken advantage of the lack of knowledge of climate science among the public to deceive and endanger us all. Hopefully this will change as the media and the public wake up to the threat of global warming. Otherwise the world will continue getting hotter, and our children might grow up to inherit a climate running amok.

Copyright 2016 by Zeeshan Hasan. First published in Bangladesh on June 1, 2016 in Dhaka Tribune.

Global warming may cause "Climate Wars"

“Climate Wars: The Fight For Survival As The World Heats Up” by Gwynne Dyer investigates the worst case scenarios of global warming, via studies done by and interviews of risk-assessment professionals at the Pentagon and defense-related think tanks. Unfortunately, it does not make for reassuring reading. As the world heats up, the tropical and sub-tropical regions of Asia, Africa, Central America and South America are likely to become hotter and more arid; this is likely to decrease agricultural productivity and food production in these densely populated regions. The outcome could be a new age of warfare.
One possible location for conflict identified by Dyer is South Asia. Many of Pakistan’s rivers are reliant on sources in the Indian Himalayas. Due to global warming, the overall climate of the region is likely to become more dry and arid. This could spark increasing tension between India and Pakistan over the water in their shared rivers, possibly ultimately resulting in warfare between these two nuclear-armed states. This analysis also holds true for India and Bangladesh; however, since Bangladesh is not a nuclear power, the prospect of meaningful warfare between these two countries is not seen as a realistic or large threat by Pentagon planners, and not discussed in Dyer’s book.
As frightening as the possibility of an India-Pakistan war is the possibility of a Russia-China war. China is likely to become hotter and drier as global warming progresses. This is likely to affect water availability and agriculture, a major concern for a country of over a billion people. This may fuel expansionism on the part of China with the goal of controlling more land for food production. Any such expansionism might result in warfare with Russia, the dominant power among the ex-Soviet republics in the region.
These concerns seem remote in today’s world, where the worst case scenario for a bad crop in any country is increased food imports. However, the worst case scenarios of global warming inevitably involve a hotter, drier globe with less productive agriculture closer to the equator. In this scenario, it is not clear where the required shortfall in food will be produced, and whether there will be enough to go around. It seems that we may be living in an age of plenty which will be cut short by climate change. Life on a warmed globe means an age of scarcity, and increased risks of conflict.
By far the best outcome for everyone would be if governments around the world prevented global warming by real measures to cut carbon dioxide emissions. This requires taxes on fossil fuel use, and reinvesting the tax proceeds in renewable energy such as solar and wind power. Unfortunately, the governments of the world are still dragging their feet rather than taking real action. Further delay could well doom us to a future of climate warfare.
 
Copyright 2015 by Zeeshan Hasan. First published in Bangladesh on February 16, 2015 in the Dhaka Tribune.

The real threat of global warming

by Zeeshan Hasan

Many people have a false perception of an ongoing 'debate' regarding the dangers of global warming and climate change. In particular, elected politicians intent on avoiding unpopular carbon taxes and higher fuel prices continue to assert that the relevant scientific issues are doubtful. Unfortunately, until now the non-scientist public has been deceived by a large number of books and newspaper articles by misinformed 'skeptics' of climate science who themselves have no understanding of the science involved. Fortunately, a glimpse into the real world of climate science is available through Global Warming: Understanding The Forecast by David Archer, an ocean chemistry professor at the University of Chicago. Archer's book is an introductory climate science text which aims to make the basics of climate science comprehensible to any one with a high school background in science.

The basic science of how carbon dioxide emissions raise global temperatures is outlined by Archer. On the one hand, the earth is constantly being heated by sunlight. On the other hand, the Earth is also cooled by loss of heat into space as infrared radiation. These two continuous mechanisms of heat gain and heat loss by the Earth result in a thermal equilibrium at the average global temperatures which we experience.

Heat gain from the sun is relatively constant, varying only slowly over time; however, heat loss into space has been reduced significantly by humans over the last century. Atmospheric 'greenhouse gases' such as carbon dioxide have the property of absorbing the infrared radiation which carries heat from the earth into space, and thus reduce the cooling of the earth. This effect of carbon dioxide is called the Greenhouse effect; it was discovered over a century ago and is undisputed. Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have been continuously burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas, and thus adding huge amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. This has resulted in an increase of the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere from 320 parts per million in 1960 to about 400 parts per million today, or about 20%. This additional carbon dioxide functions like a blanket or greenhouse around the planet, slowing down loss of heat into space. If the same amount of solar heat comes into the Earth, while simultaneously heat loss from the Earth to space is reduced by additional carbon dioxide, then the Earth has to get warmer. At a higher temperature the Earth's heat loss by radiation into space increases, because hotter objects lose more heat through infrared radiation than cooler ones; and the planet once more reaches a stable temperature.

A good analogy to the above is a pot of food simmering on an oven above a low flame; putting the lid on the pot does not change heat gain from the oven, but reduces heat loss through evaporation from the open pot and thus makes the food cook at a higher temperature. Our carbon dioxide emissions are effectively putting a lid on the earth, making heat from the sun 'cook' the planet at a higher temperature.

The question is whether a hotter stable temperature of the globe would be one capable of sustaining human life as we know it. Climate scientists have evidence from ancient ocean sediments that increasing the level of greenhouses gases in the atmosphere can cause temperatures to rise. Such an event took place 55 million years ago, when thousands of billions of tons of greenhouses gases were released into the atmosphere (probably because of a peak in volcanic activity). This event is known as the Permian Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). During the PETM, global average temperature rose by about 5 degrees C and 90% of life on the planet perished. Such an increase in global average temperature today would have terrible consequences, rendering much of tropical and sub-tropical Asia, Africa, central America and southern Europe too hot and dry for agriculture. The consequences would be famine on a scale never seen before, and billions of deaths.

Dangerous global heating events like the PETM may seem distant and irrelevant. But as a comparison, burning all world's known reserves of coal would release about 5000 billion tons of carbon dioxide, comparable to the surge in greenhouse gases which caused the PETM. Our current course is to exploit not only existing coal reserves but also oil and gas. So it is entirely within our power to destroy our planet.

Continuing our current policies of exploiting all fossil fuels available will literally ensure the end of the Earth as we know it. The only way to stop it is to keep fossil fuels in the ground and switch to solar, wind or nuclear power, none of which emit carbon dioxide. This will require worldwide imposition of carbon taxes to raise fuel prices and make investment in alternative energy feasible. The leaders of all countries need to make some hard decisions, which they have failed to do in 20 years of climate negotiations. They will only do so now if the public demands it of them. The public needs to make their voices heard.

 (Printed in Bangladesh on Nov. 30, 2014 by the Dhaka Tribune.)

Global warming will change the world by 2100

by Zeeshan Hasan

What will the world look like in the year 2100? Climate scientists are now able to answer a substantial part of this question, and the projections they have for us are unsettling. Yet few people are aware of the findings of climate science due to an immense smokescreen of doubt which the fossil fuel lobby has raised around global warming research. These issues are dealt with in Global Warming and Political Intimidation: How Politicians Cracked Down on Scientists as The Earth Heated Up by Raymond S. Bradley (published by University of Massachusetts Press in 2010). Bradley is Distinguished Professor of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in the United States.

Our modern world runs mainly on fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas; burning these produces carbon dioxide, which traps heat from the sun and causes global warming. But whether or not human carbon dioxide emissions had actually produced real man-made global warming was a matter of debate among scientists for decades. In 1998, Bradley and his co-researchers published their 'hockey-stick graph' which depicted a 1,000-year decrease in average world temperatures, which was suddenly reversed in the 20th century. The only explanation for the sudden warming shown in the hockey stick was post-Industrial Revolution global warming. The 'hockey-stick graph' effectively proved that burning of coal, oil and gas has already changed the planet, and is changing it further as you read this article.

The publication of the 'hockey-stick graph' set off a tsunami of activity among the lobbyists of the fossil fuel industry. In the US, Congressman Joe Barton of Texas, who was on record as having received over half a million dollars from the fossil fuel industry during his 2004 Congressional race, launched a government-led witch-hunt, accusing Bradley and his co-researchers of fraud. Fortunately, other members of the US Congress opposed this blatantly political attack on science. However, attempts to discredit Bradley and his research continued; in 2009, hackers stole e-mails from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in the UK in an incident dubbed 'Climate-gate' by the press. An army of right-wing bloggers, journalists and other supporters of the fossil-fuel industry claimed that in one of the emails, another climate scientist had admitted that Bradley and his co-researchers had used a 'trick' to 'hide the decline' in world temperature, and that the research was therefore false. Numerous academic enquiries were launched against Bradley and his co-researchers; ultimately none found any wrongdoing on their part or mistakes in their work. However, widespread coverage of the Climate-gate email hacking had already served to discredit climate science and global warming in the public eye. Though based entirely on false accusations, Climate-gate contributed to the failure of international climate talks on carbon emissions.

What are the findings of climate scientists that the fossil fuel industry has tried so hard to discredit? The original 1997 'hockey-stick graph' only analysed historical temperatures over the previous 1000 years. In his book, Bradley gives an extended 'hockey-stick graph' to predict world temperatures until the year 2100, given below.

As visible from the graph, at projected carbon dioxide emissions, the world can be expected to heat up by about 3.0 degrees C by 2100. This is probably enough to melt the Greenland ice cap, raising sea levels by about 80 feet (25 metres). Such sea level rise would submerge Bangladesh and most coastal cities in the world, including New York, Los Angeles, London, Sydney, Mumbai, Kolkata and Shanghai. Food will be more expensive and famines more common as parts of Asia and Africa will become too hot for farming.

How likely is this quantity of carbon dioxide to be emitted? Bradley gives details:
"The projected temperatures are from the future scenario... which envisions carbon dioxide emissions rising to 16 billion metric tons by 2050... then declining to 13 billion by 2100... This is a ¨middle of the road¨ estimate compared to the range of scenarios considered by the IPCC." — Global Warming and Political Intimidation: How Politicians Cracked Down on Scientists as The Earth Heated Up (Page 139)
'Middle of the road' actually means that the above is an optimistic projection; it assumes that sizable reductions will be made in carbon dioxide emissions over the next few decades. So far, none of these reductions has been made, and emissions are still going up. Unless real action is taken quickly, the above projection may well be a best-case scenario. The only way to improve on this outcome is to quickly replace coal, oil and gas with solar, wind and nuclear power. Anyone who wishes to see a better future for his/her children and grandchildren needs to pressure the government to that end.

(First published on 7th April 2013 in the Financial Express in Bangladesh)

Burning coal, oil and gas may cause sudden, extreme climate change

It is scientifically established that our burning of fossil fuels and the resultant carbon dioxide emissions will result in global warming, and ultimately may cause dangerous climate change. But how fast can that happen? 'The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change And Our Future' (published by Princeton University Press in 2000) by climatologist Richard B. Alley, explores climate scientists' answers to these questions. The author is Professor of Geo-sciences at the Pennsylvania State University in the USA.

Alley is one of the climate scientists who has spent years collecting and analysing ice cores; these are long samples of ancient ice which have been extracted from the two mile thick Greenland ice cap. This massive layer of ice has been forming for over 100,000 years, and is an repository of historical evidence to climate scientists. The snow deposited each year is still visible as layers in the ice, and these annual layers preserve much chemical information from which scientists can extract a record of past snowfall and temperature. Of particular importance is what the ice cores have revealed of the end of the “Younger Dryas” ice age.

'At the beginning of this book, we met the Younger Dryas, the last cold gasp of the ice age between about 12,800 and 11,500 years ago... Standing in the science trench in Greenland, I measured how thick the annual layers were in the [ice] core across the end of the Younger Dryas. I found that... many thick layers were followed by one slightly thinner layer, one scarcely more than half as thick, one scarcely more than half as thick, another slightly thinner than that, then a lot of similarly thin ones grouped around a spike of thicker ones. This is most directly explained as a twofold change in three years, with most of that change in one year... So I cannot insist that the climate changed in one year, but it certainly looks that way.' (pages 110-111).

So science tells us that very significant climate change can occur in just a handful of years. Similar warming may well be in store for us, given that our carbon emissions are changing the atmosphere far more rapidly than any natural process has in the past. Alley proceeds to give details of the sudden, extreme temperature change that occurred at the end of Younger Dryas ice age:

The most direct interpretation... is that the surface of Greenland warmed by about 15 F (8 degrees Celsius) in a decade or less. (page 112)

This should frighten us. This sort of warming today would mean the end of the world as we know it. Climatologists estimate global warming of 5 to 6 degrees Celsius today would render most of the world too hot for agriculture (except a narrow northern band comprising Canada, northern Europe, Russia and Siberia). Widespread famine, starvation and war would be the norm. The vast majority of humanity would almost certainly perish.

Alley's conclusions regarding the climate change which ended the Younger Dryas ice age should serve as a wake-up call. The reason that no action has been taken by governments to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and stop global warming is that climate change is assumed to be something that will happen very slowly, and thus only impact the distant future. However, this assumption is questionable given the findings of climate science. The scientific record of the Greenland ice cores shows that when climate change does occur, it can be both quick and extreme. In that case it is not just nameless future generations that our carbon emissions endanger. Rather, our addiction to fossil fuels like oil, coal and gas may well sacrifice the lives of our own children and grandchildren. All of us who wish for a better future than this need to start lobbying our governments to quickly replace fossil fuels with solar, wind and nuclear power.

(Copyright by Zeeshan Hasan. First published in Bangladesh in the Daily Star on March 19th, 2013).

Disrupting Earth's climate is to awaken a sleeping beast

Fixing Climate; The Story of Climate Science and How to Stop Global Warming by eminent climate scientist Wallace Broecker and his co-writer Robert Kunzig is an informative look at the science of global warming as well as a summary of the options for solving it. Wallace Broecker is a professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, and through his research first discovered one of the primary regulators of the planet's climate; namely the “thermo-haline conveyor,” the network of ocean currents which circulates hot and cold water over much of the Earth's surface.

A recurrent theme in Broecker's writing is his view of Earth's climate as a sleeping beast which we awaken at our peril. The relative stability of climate for the past ten thousand years (since the end of the last ice age) is exactly what allowed humans to develop agriculture and create civilisation. Thus, we have greatly benefited from the long sleep of the climate beast. However, the carbon dioxide emissions created by our modern society's dependence on fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas risk disrupting the climate and waking the climate beast. The consequences could be sudden and drastic.

Whereas we may think of climate change as being gradual and taking place over centuries or millennia, climate science has shown that drastic changes have happened very quickly in the past. A prime example is the end of the “Younger Dryas” ice age, a cold period which lasted from 12,800 to 11,500 years ago.

“The [ice] measurements ... had shown that the warming at the end of the Younger Dryas had been abrupt ... the ice layers were suddenly half as thick ... most of that change had taken place in just a few years” (page 141).

So the scientific evidence is that climate change of sufficient magnitude to end an ice age can occur naturally in “just a few years,” not centuries or even decades. This bodes ill for our future, as our burning of coal, oil and gas is now changing the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere faster than any time in history. If a similarly quick global warming were to happen now, humanity would have little time or ability to adapt to it. The results would be catastrophic in terms of increased desertification, reduced food production and famine.

Aside from temperature rise, the biggest threat to Bangladesh in particular is from sea level rise. This is another area where research in climate science has made it clear that big changes can happen at a frightening pace.

In the 1980's a colleague of Broecker's, Richard Fairbanks, thought he could pinpoint a time when sea level rose twenty metres in a single century (page 171).

The above is indeed a stark contrast with the scientific conservatism of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) assessment of sea likely sea level rise being 59 centimetres by 2100.

The IPCC scientists specifically did not take into account the recent observations of accelerated ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica -- essentially because they didn't know what to make of them (page 183).

The problem is that scientists are generally cautious by nature, and unwilling to talk about possible worst case scenarios until that outcome is virtually certain. Unfortunately, if we wait until the worst case global warming scenario is inevitable before we start doing anything, it will be too late; the climate will have already changed, and humanity will have to suffer the awful consequences. Scientific conservatism in this case is lulling the public and world governments into a misplaced sense of security. So what is to be done? The answer is clear.

Which brings us to the one absolute certainty; no significant solution to the [carbon dioxide] problem can emerge until governments worldwide, and especially that of the United States, follow the lead of Norway and the European Union and impose either an emissions cap or a direct tax on [carbon dioxide] (page 266).

Broecker's conclusion is shared by most climate scientists. To prevent dangerous climate change, carbon dioxide emissions must be reduced by replacing fossil fuels rapidly with nuclear, wind and solar energy. This will require huge investments, and the only way the money can be raised is through a carbon tax. Those of us who care about what the future holds for our children need to start thinking about how to bring about this colossal change in the world economy.

(First published in Bangladesh in The Daily Star on 11th February 2013.)

Will we collapse like Easter Island?

The spectacular statues of Easter Island, a sparsely populated Pacific isle which is seemingly so desolate that there are not even any large trees on it, have been a mystery for centuries. How could an island of a few thousand people produce hundreds of such statues, the largest of which are 33 feet tall and weigh 82 tons? This question inspired Erich Von Daniken, a best-selling author of the 1970s, to speculate that the statues were erected by aliens from outer space. The real story of the statues and the people who carved them are the subject of the first chapter of Jared Diamond's book, 'Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail Or Survive' (published by Penguin in 2006). Diamond is professor of Geography at the University of California at Los Angeles and author of several award-winning books on the impact of the physical world on human history. His Easter Island history turns out to have profound environmental lessons for us even today.

Diamond points out that archaeologists have proved that Easter Island was once very different from today; before being colonised by people, it was covered with forest typical of other sub-tropical Pacific islands. Once settled by explorers who arrived by canoe from other islands, it seemed to present itself as a hospitable place, and the human population expanded rapidly. Incidentally, this solves the mystery of the statues; a population several times bigger could more reasonably be expected to erect such monuments. However, unknown to the new settlers, the soil of Easter Island was much less fertile than that of other islands that they had lived on. This infertility manifested itself in slower tree growth. Thus when the Easter Islanders cut down trees for firewood, houses and deep-sea canoes, they did this at a rate which may have been sustainable on other islands that their ancestors had lived on; but on Easter Island it brought disaster.

As the population grew, people cut down more trees for firewood and canoes. Canoes were necessary as dolphin-hunting provided a large portion of the animal protein in the diet (along with wild birds and other small animals from the forest). But once the forest cover was removed, the exposed land eroded quickly in the rain and wind. Crop yields decreased, and the islanders' solution was apparently to cut down more trees to plant more crops and build more canoes for dolphin-hunting. As a result, within a few centuries the island was completely deforested. Without trees, there were no more wild birds or animals to hunt, except rats. With no more wood available for canoes, dolphin meat was also no longer available. The islanders descended into famine, war and cannibalism (unfortunately, human meat was one of few remaining sources of animal protein). Two-thirds of the population perished in this terrible manner.

Diamond describes other societies that collapsed primarily due to environmental difficulties, including several more Pacific islands, the Norse colony in Greenland, the native Anasazi culture of the southwestern US, the central American Maya civilisation and modern Rwanda. He also presents the case of Japan, which came close to such a fate but managed to avoid it thanks to intelligent decisions and good leadership.

There is a lesson for us here: in these times of global warming, it may be comforting to believe that our leaders can be trusted to sort everything out, and that humanity would never allow itself to be destroyed. But such a faith would be unfounded; many previous societies have thought this way, and failed. Long-term survival requires a real understanding of the limitations of our environment and a strong political will to live within those limits.

Like the first settlers of Easter Island, we find ourselves in a new, unknown environment; namely an industrialised 21st century world with greenhouse gas levels higher than they have ever been in human history. We no longer need to colonise a new island to experience unfamiliar environmental conditions; our carbon dioxide emissions are altering the climate of our whole planet, which will bring unpredictable new risks for everyone. The lesson of Easter Island should make us think on the failure of our own leaders to come to an agreement to prevent catastrophic climate change even after 20 years of fruitless negotiations.

 Copyright 2012 by Zeeshan Hasan. First published in Bangladesh on 22nd December 2012 in the Financial Express.

How the fossil fuel industry deceives us and endangers our future

For the past 15 years a largely invisible struggle, critical to the future of the planet, has been fought between the global community of climate scientists on one hand and the think-tanks and politicians funded by fossil fuel companies, on the other. During this time, climate scientists have reached an overwhelming scientific consensus that the carbon dioxide emissions caused by our reliance on coal, oil and gas have already caused significant global warming, and will ultimately endanger our planet unless all fossil fuels are rapidly phased out. Simultaneously, the fossil fuel industry has run a huge misinformation campaign to keep the public in the dark about climate change. Ground-breaking scientist Michael Mann writes about this struggle in his new book, The hockey stick and the climate wars; dispatches from the front lines (published 2012 by Columbia University Press).

The critical study which solidified scientific opinion about the truth of global warming was the "hockey stick graph" discovered by author Michael Mann himself in 1998, and highlighted in Al Gore's documentary on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth. Mann's graph showed global average temperatures slowly decreasing towards a distant new ice age for most of the past 1000 years, only to spike sharply upwards in the 20th century (like the end of a hockey stick). The 'hockey stick graph' showed that man-made global warming was real, and was already happening. The 'hockey stick graph' was confirmed by many subsequent scientific studies; the handful of studies which contradicted it were found to have critical errors. Among climate scientists, there was no longer any doubt about the reality and seriousness of global warming.

The fossil-fuel industry, composed of multinational coal and oil companies, sought to protect their business interests by sowing public doubt in global warming, and was quick to strike back at climate scientists. They funded think-tanks and web-sites propagating reports by their own "experts" who cast doubts on the 'hockey stick'. These experts were usually economists and meteorologists/TV weathermen who knew little of climate science, as well as an ever-shrinking minority of climate scientists. The misinformation campaign took advantage of a public and media largely ignorant of science, and unable to appreciate that the real scientific debate on climate change was over. US Congressmen in the thrall of oil and coal lobbyists undertook an official witch-hunt of climate scientists in 2005. The US Congress was, however, unable to find any problems with the climate scientists' views; but the damage was done. Widespread media coverage of politicians like Senator James Inhofe saying that climate change was "the single greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American public" ensured that doubts about global warming continued in the public mind. The anti-climate science campaign ultimately descended to criminal acts of hacking and baseless accusations of fraud directed at Mann and his fellow scientists. In the 'Climate-gate' incident in 2009, unknown hackers stole thousands of e-mail messages from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in the UK. One particular e-mail from another climate scientist to Mann was repeatedly used as evidence to claim that Mann had used a "trick" to falsify his 'hockey stick' data and was thus able to "hide the decline" in global temperature.

Climate change denialists had a field day. In actual fact, the word "trick" is commonly used among mathematicians and scientists to describe a clever means of solving a difficult problem, seemingly by magic; it did not imply any wrongdoing. Likewise, the "decline" in that was being hidden was a series of temperature measurements from one particular study acknowledged by the original author to be doubtful due to pollution. A number of subsequent inquiries were conducted, and none found any wrongdoing on the part of climate scientists. Again, the damage was already done; public belief in global warming and political will to tackle it both fell dramatically.

The fog of public doubt created over global warming had long-term consequences. Firstly, President Barack Obama's attempts at regulating carbon emissions were rejected by the US Congress. Secondly, the 'Climate-gate' hacking had been timed to occur just before the Copenhagen summit on global warming in December 2009. Due to doubts raised by the 'Climate-gate' as well as Obama's failure to pass any carbon dioxide emissions legislation in the US, Copenhagen failed to produce any meaningful international agreement to prevent global warming. This failure has left the planet in continued peril of global warming and consequent sea level rise, cyclones and drought. Hurricane Sandy, US/Russian crop failures and high food prices in 2012 are the beginnings of what is in store for us unless the public and politicians start taking real action to replace fossil fuels with nuclear, solar and wind power.

First published on November 30th, 2012 by the Financial Express in Bangladesh. Copyright 2012 by Zeeshan Hasan.

Global warming and mass extinction of life on Earth

By Zeeshan Hasan

Climate change is usually thought of as a threat in terms of rising sea levels and increased drought; but science has revealed that it bears further threats. These previously unknown dangers of climate change are the focus of Peter D. Ward's book, "Under a Green Sky: Global warming, the mass extinctions of the past, and what they can tell us about our future" (published 2006 by Harper Collins). Ward is a professor of biology and earth and space sciences at the University of Washington at Seattle, and also works at Nasa. He is one of the biologists whose analysis of the fossil record has helped scientists understand what caused the numerous mass extinctions that have occurred during the history of life on earth.

The most famous of earlier mass extinctions was the one which wiped out the dinosaurs; thirty years ago, scientists confirmed it was the result of an asteroid hitting the earth. Following that great discovery, scientists for years assumed that all the other mass extinctions were similarly the result of asteroid impacts. However, geologists were ultimately unable to find any evidence for those supposed asteroids. Apparently, the extinction of the dinosaurs was unique, and a different explanation was necessary for the remaining mass extinctions. This was ultimately found to be global warming due to excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It turns out that large quantities of carbon dioxide can be released by volcanic activity; this is especially likely in major tectonic events such as when the Indian subcontinent collided with Eurasia (creating the Himalayas).
Ward's book investigates the mechanism by which global warming caused mass extinctions such as the end-Permian extinction event, which destroyed 95% of life on earth 250 million years ago. Scientists have found that most mass extinctions were marked by huge amounts of hydrogen sulphide, which is the smelly, poisonous gas released by rotten eggs. The hydrogen sulphide was created by an oxygen-free "Canfield ocean" (named after the scientist who discovered it), a condition similar to that which now exists in the Black Sea. Canfield oceans occur when global warming melts too much polar ice, releasing so much cold water that the normal ocean currents which circulate water from deep to shallow and keep the oceans oxygen-rich are disrupted. Once this happens, the oxygen-breathing fish and other sea creatures quickly consume all the oxygen left in the water and then suffocate. The remaining oxygen-free water can sustain only anaerobic purple bacteria which require no oxygen to live; by filling up the ocean, these bacteria would also turn the ocean purple.

Anaerobic purple bacteria in a Canfield ocean produce massive quantities of hydrogen sulphide gas, which then bubbles to the surface and poisons animals on land. Hydrogen sulphide also damages the ozone layer, exposing the remaining animals and plants to deadly levels of ultraviolet rays from the sun (as a minor side effect, hydrogen sulphide from a Canfield ocean would also turn the sky green; hence the title of the book). Thus global warming has caused mass extinctions on both land and sea which can only be described as apocalyptic.

How far away is this? We don't know exactly how much polar ice has to melt to create a Canfield ocean and another mass extinction, but we do know the following:
Using [current carbon dioxide emission] rates, which work out to about 120 parts per million per century, we might expect carbon dioxide levels to hit 500 to 600 parts per million by the year 2100. That would be the same carbon dioxide levels that were most recently present sometime in the past 40 million years -- or more relevant, it would be equivalent to times when there was little or no ice even at the poles. (Pages 164-5)

In other words, by the year 2100, within two or three generations, carbon dioxide levels will be high enough to virtually ensure another polar melt. This will likely set into motion a Canfield ocean and mass extinction which humanity may not survive.

Our only chance to avoid this apocalyptic future is to stop using fossil fuels like coal, petroleum and gas, and replace them completely within a few decades with nuclear, wind and solar. This is the only way to prevent further polar ice melting and a Canfield ocean-created mass extinction. Unfortunately politicians and the public are in a state of scientific ignorance and denial of climate change. Anyone who cares about the survival of humanity beyond the next century needs to try to remedy that.

First published in Bangladesh in the Daily Star on 7th October, 2012.

60-90% chance of Bangladesh sinking under rising sea levels

This article was published in the Financial Express in Bangladesh.

“Science as a Contact Sport; inside the battle to save Earth's climate” by Stephen Schneider is an illuminating book by a world renowned climate scientist and professor at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. In 2007, Schneider received the Nobel Peace Price on behalf of the International Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), along with Al Gore. His book is a recounting of his efforts over three decades to get the US government and the rest of the world to pay attention to climate change science.

The basic question which climate science has tried to answer is: how serious is climate change? But communicating a scientific answer to this question has been impossible, Schneider says, as politicians, journalists and the average person on the street does not understand that scientific predictions and models of climate change can only predict probabilities of particular outcomes. Unfortunately, the public and the politicians have shown little desire to understand the significance of these scientific probabilities. Instead, they are generally interested in climate science only the extent that it supports their own pre-conceived political beliefs that climate change is insignificant.

If the above sounds familiar, a particular example for which Schneider presents some numbers should frighten all of us. For low-lying countries like Bangladesh, one of the critical questions of climate change is how high sea level rise will be. The answer to this actually depends on whether or not the Greenland ice cap melts; this event would release enough water to raise global sea levels about 25 metres (about 80 feet). This would be the end for Bangladesh, sinking perhaps 75% of the country. It would also be the end of most of the world’s coastal cities like New York, Los Angeles, Washington DC and London. Here are Schneider’s estimates of how likely this is:

“For Greenland to irreversibly melt, my own [estimate] would be roughly a 2 to 5 percent chance that it is already too late and it will happen over the long run. At 1 degree Celsius more warming, I’d raise the odds to 25 percent..." (page 274)

So this is the problem of climate science in a nutshell; the likelihood of a major catastrophe like 25 meter sea level rise could be theoretically be as low as 2 to 5 percent. So in the US, Republican politicians like George W. Bush as well as numerous Democrats whose political campaigns rely on donations from oil and coal companies will always focus on the 2 percent probability and dismiss climate change a waste of time. However, for those of us who have not been paid off and can think for ourselves, the rest of the sentence should be shocking:

"...and at 2 degrees Celsius to 60 percent, at 3 degrees Celsius to 90 percent, and so on.” (page 274 continued).

Critically, the basis for all international climate negotiations is to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (as most governments in the world have already decided that it would be too expensive to do anything more than that). This international consensus means that 2 degrees of warming is inevitable, as everyone has accepted that it will happen and will not even try to prevent it. Given that fact, Schneider’s odds for a 25 metre sea level rise and the destruction of Bangladesh becomes 60% to 90% (the 90% figure is still relevant, as it is always possible for countries to fail to cut carbon dioxide emissions enough to limit global warming to 2 degrees).

What to do now? The only people who care about Bangladesh and have the capacity to change anything are Bangladeshis living in Western countries. If they really care about Bangladesh, they should all become climate activists and pressure their governments to do something to prevent this. People in Bangladesh have only two options; firstly, invest vastly more in education and hope people can emigrate before the country sinks. Secondly, invest vastly more in birth control, targeting a 22nd century population of only the 25 million people, which would be the maximum number that the country could support if it was reduced to pockets of high land in Rajshahi division and Chittagong Hill Tracts. Unfortunately, Professor Schneider died from cancer in 2010, and now there is one fewer climate scientist to tell us how we can save ourselves from catastrophic global warming.

Has Bangladesh already been doomed by climate change?

The Daily Star, Bangladesh's largest circulating English newspaper, just printed my article. Unfortunately they didn't publish the map showing how much of Bangladesh will go underwater, but here it is.

Reading James Hansen's book, Storms of my grandchildren; the truth about the coming climate catastrophe and our last chance to save humanity (published by Bloomsbury, 2009) is quite an experience. Dr Hansen is no scaremongering quack, but one of the world's most respected climate scientists and former director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. His book predicts the end of Bangladesh through global warming.
The average educated citizen could perhaps be forgiven for thinking that global warming is a relatively minor problem; how can individuals take it seriously when the media and the world's governments ignore it? As Dr. Hansen elaborates, that is because the supposedly democratic systems of government now commonplace have simply resulted in the best governments that money can buy. It turns out that the oil, gas and coal industries have more than enough money to bend practically any government to their will with promises of cheap energy, industrial growth and jobs. This is particularly true in the US, where George W. Bush's refusal to ratify the Kyoto protocol on reducing greenhouse gases led to the collapse of international climate change talks and endangered all of our futures. Dr. Hansen gives a personal account of how the same Bush administration tried to silence him as well as the rest of NASA on the issue of global warming, going so far as to remove any responsibility to study and protect the Earth from NASA's vision statement. The truth is that every day we continue to burn fossil fuels, the likelihood of catastrophic climate change increases.
Perhaps many people have heard and shrugged off the findings of the International Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) which forecasts a likely sea level rise of only a metre or two in the next century. However, Dr. Hansen points out that the IPCC estimate is most likely drastically underestimated, as geological records tell us that sea level rise is likely to be much higher. As he mentions on page 13, “Global warming of 2 degrees Celsius or more would make Earth as warm as it had been in the Pliocene, three million years ago. Pliocene warmth caused sea levels to be about twenty five metres (eighty feet) higher than they are today”. Even a 20 metre warming is enough to submerge all of Bangladesh except North Bengal and Chittagong Hill Tracts
It should be mentioned that the focus of all international climate change negotiations is to limit global warming to 2 degrees. This is because 2 degrees warming is the threshold that will cause severe consequences for much of the world, not just low-lying areas like Bangladesh. In effect, this makes 2 degrees of warming the global target; most countries see no benefit from the expensive and politically inconvenient cutting of carbon emissions necessary to keep global warming less than 2 degrees. This logic virtually ensures that actual warming will be 2 degrees, since that is by definition what all countries will find it rational to aim for in terms of their carbon dioxide emissions reductions. In that case, Bangladesh has effectively been doomed by the global community, which shows no sign so far of even ensuring that global warming is bound to the 2 degree target. Current levels of carbon emissions could easily cause 3 or more degrees of global warming and even more catastrophic effects; not that it would matter for Bangladesh. We'd already be underwater at 2 degrees.
In that case, what are the options for Bangladesh's 150 million people? The wealthy and educated will always find some new country to migrate to. The lower 95% of the population will face a grim end, though it may take a century or so for the full effects of global warming to kick in. If climate change really becomes as bad as Hansen says it will, then the only real way for Bangladesh to adapt is to drastically reduce the population in a controlled way for the next century. This could be done through a draconian one-child policy, similar to China, but that would be extremely unpopular and politically difficult. However, global warming may leave us with no agreeable alternatives.
It is astonishing that major scientists like Hansen can seriously discuss scenarios such as the above in books, and our policy-makers seem to care little about climate change other than getting their fair share of climate change adaptation funds which various donors are handing out. The idea of adaptation to 80% of Bangladesh going underwater is simply absurd. If the rest of the world had any real concern for Bangladesh's survival, it would admit that adaptation to such drastic change is impossible, and try to limit global warming to a level that would ensure our existence. This would need to be considerably less than 1 degree Celsius, requiring almost completely stopping burning of most fossil fuels very quickly. This is the only happy solution; all fossil fuels, especially coal, need to be phased out within the next decade. They need to be replaced by renewable energy such as as solar or wind, as well as nuclear power; the latter is the only immediately available non-fossil fuel based electrical source for large industrial power requirements. Dr. Hansen's book is uniquely personal, narrating how the birth of his grandchildren forced him to accept responsibility for trying to safeguard their future by becoming a anti-global-warming activist. Bangladeshis similarly need to start worrying more about the world in which their future children and grandchildren may be born into.

The Revenge of Gaia: how climate change will punish us

Imagine Asia without south Asia, the Middle East, Turkey, China or south-east Asia. Imagine Europe without the southern Mediterranean countries of Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Italy. Now imagine North America without most of the USA except the northern states. On top of all this, think of the world without any South America, Australia and Africa.  Essentially all that would be left is Canada, Alaska, the UK, Scandinavia, Russia, the Korean peninsula, Sri Lanka, New Zealand and Japan. This is the mental exercise that the eminent British climatologist James Lovelock forces the reader to undertake when reading his book on catastrophic climate change, The Revenge of Gaia: why the Earth is fighting back, and how we can still save humanity. James Lovelock is the creator of Daisyworld, an early computerised climate model, and one of the world’s leading climate scientists. There is a world map on page 81 of his book which illustrates the above scenario.

Impossible? Not according to the International Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) and the majority of the world’s climatologists. The above describes a world which has warmed by about 5 degrees Celsius on average compared to today. The land masses will still largely be there, except for some unfortunately low-lying countries like Bangladesh and the Maldives, which would vanish. However, at 5 degrees warming, countries outside the most northern latitudes would simply be too hot and dry to sustain any agriculture or food production.The IPCC has predicted that at current rates of carbon dioxide emissions, global warming will be somewhere between 1 and 6 degrees Celsius. So 5 degrees is not science fiction. It could easily happen, unless the governments of the world start taking climate change seriously.

How close are we to 5 degrees warming and the end of perhaps 90% of the earth’s population? Many current climate models say that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today virtually guarantees at least 2 degrees of warming. All bets are now off, as 2 degrees is the only “safe” temperature rise. More than 2 degrees can start a runaway global warming effects; at any point beyond 2 degrees, huge quantities of methane gas could be released from under the Arctic snow and the ocean floor, places it was previously trapped by ice and cold. Since methane has a greenhouse effect many times greater than carbon dioxide, this would rapidly lead to 5 or even 6 degrees warming and the end of the world as we know it.

What can we do to prevent this? The rapidity with which the world needs to reduce carbon emissions is frightening. All fossil fuels essentially have to be abandoned, as they all create carbon dioxide emissions. Lovelock makes the point that all renewable energy such as solar, wind and tidal power is now still at an immature stage, and not capable of providing the bulk of the world’s power needs. The only proven technology which can immediately be implemented to replace most of the world’s coal and petroleum based power is nuclear. Unfortunately, nuclear power has become unpopular because of disasters at Chernobyl and now Fukushima; a pity, since both these reactors were built with decades-old technology. Modern reactor designs provide for far greater safety. Even without newer safety measures, nuclear is still safer than coal; the UN estimate of 15,000 deaths due to the once-in-decades accident at Chernobyl roughly equates to Chinese coal mining deaths every 4 years.

Essentially the world needs to stop thinking about economic growth, and start thinking about survival. The money that governments spend subsidizing industry and building coal and diesel power plants would be better spent on new nuclear plants. Climate change is the elephant in the room that our leaders pretend doesn’t exist because they can’t think of any quick fix; a most unwise course of action, since if the elephant actually moves, it will squash all of us under its feet. 

(This was published in the New Age newspaper in Bangladesh on 26th September, 2011)