66 Ways
to
absorb Carbon
and
Improve
the
earth’s
refleCtIvIty
– From Reasonable Options to Mad Scientist Solutions
Risto Isomäki
66 Ways
to
Absorb Carbon
and
Improve
the
Earth’s
Reflectivity
– From Reasonable Options to Mad Scientist Solutions
Risto Isomäki
Copyright © Risto Isomäki, 2009
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Last updated 24 April, 2011
Published in 2009 by
Into Publishing
Hämeentie 48, 00500 Helsinki
Finland
www.intokustannus.fi
Cover Eliza Karmasalo
Layout Ville Sutinen
Printed in Finland by Bookwell Oy, Vaajakoski.
ISBN: 978-952-264-102-1
E-kirja: 978-952-264-103-8
This volume is an updated and expanded edition of an earlier book
called “34 Ways to Prevent the Overheating of the Planet”, which
was first published in 2007 by SADED (South Asian Dialogues
for Ecological Democracy) in Delhi, India. Most parts of the text
are the same or roughly similar, but the list of possible solutions
has become more extensive. When people start thinking outside a
closed mindset, many new ideas tend to emerge.
The author’s royalties and a progressively growing percentage
of the main publisher’s profits from this volume will go to environmental organizations working to prevent a climate catastrophe.
Preface: Welcome to the World
of the Runaway Greenhouse Effect
During the last ten years or so, all kinds of ices that still remain
on our planet, have started to melt. We have suddenly lost many
mountain glaciers and ice shelves that had existed without interruption since the last Ice Age. Vast ancient permafrost areas in
Siberia and Alaska have started to melt, and all three ice sheets
- Greenland, West Antarctic and East Antarctic - are now losing more ice than what is being generated by snow fall. The average volume of floating ice in the Arctic Ocean has declined from
25,000 cubic kilometres in 1994 to less than 5,000 cubic kilometres. Even submarine permafrost areas and some of the offshore
methane clathrate fields have started to thaw and release methane
and carbon dioxide into the air.
It is now almost certain that these melting processes can no
longer stop by themselves. The extra greenhouse gases that have
already heated the planet by 0.8 degrees Celsius still remain in the
atmosphere, and their capacity to absorb heat has not diminished.
According to the current best estimate of climate scientists, our
planet would still keep on heating by a further 0.6 or 0.8 degrees,
even if we stabilized atmosphere’s greenhouse gas concentrations
at their present levels. Besides, the reflectivity of the Arctic regions,
including the Arctic Ocean and the permafrost areas, has already
been greatly reduced. This should accelerate the melting, because
while snow and ice reflect most of the solar radiation straight back
to space, open water and dark soil absorb sunlight like a sponge, or
like an efficient solar collector. The more melt water lakes there are
5
and the larger they become, the more heat the open water surfaces
will absorb. The Russian permafrost researcher Sergei Kirpotin has
commented that the thawing of the permafrost is like an “ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and that is undoubtedly
connected to climate warming”. According to another permafrost
expert, Katey Walter of the University of Alaska, we would need to
have “major cooling” for the melting of the permafrost to stop.
In other words: it may be that we are no longer dealing with
an ordinary, gradual and benign man-induced strengthening of
the greenhouse effect, but with the dreaded runaway greenhouse
effect. Global warming that has started to feed itself.
In October 2008 the most well-known climate scientist in the
world, Dr James Hansen of NASA, and his colleagues published
an updated analysis about what seems to be happening to our climate. According to the new calculations we should reduce the
atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content back to 350 parts per million, from the present level of 383 parts per million, if we want to
prevent a global warming amounting to six full degrees Celsius. In
summer 2009 Rajendra Pachauri, then still the chairman of IPCC
(Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change) admitted that
Hansen was probably right in what he had said.
For example the official climate policy of the European Union
has been based on the assumption, that if we can keep the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content below 560 parts per million, we
can limit global warming to two degrees.
We have thought that it is enough if we can cut the global carbon dioxide emissions by 60 per cent before 2050. In other words,
we have assumed that we can still keep on increasing the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content for forty more years.
According to Hansen’s updated calculations our climate
appears less stable than we assumed. It seems that we have already
pushed our climatic system over a limit, after which it can only
proceed towards a warmer state of equilibrium. Hansen and his
co-workers have proposed, that the new equilibrium might be
reached after the Earth has heated by six degrees, but in reality
there is no guarantee that the warming would halt at this point.
Various natural cleaning systems, especially oceans, still absorb
a couple of billion tons of carbon out of the atmosphere, every
6
year. However, even if we reduced, almost immediately, our carbon dioxide emissions below the level these cleaning systems can
currently manage, there is no certainty that the oceans would still
be able to absorb so much carbon that the atmospheric concentrations would begin to decline. Much smaller emissions in the 1800’s
already led to increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, so we do not know how the situation would develop. It
now seems that for instance the marine carbon sinks are becoming less effective. This means that they might soon reach their limits because of global warming and the acidification of the oceans.
Besides, we are not even close to achieving an immediate 60 or
80 per cent cut in the global emissions. Many Southern countries
think, with more than a little bit of legitimacy, that greenhouse
gas emissions should be calculated on a per capita basis. This is a
just and righteous point, but the contradiction between North and
South has blocked real progress in climate negotiations for two
decades and threatens to do so also in the near future.
Let’s face the facts. We obviously have to cut the emissions, but
in the present situation it is also imperative to absorb large quantities of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Otherwise we just
won’t make it. We might, soon, even be forced to do something to
improve the Earth’s reflectivity, its capacity to reflect sunlight back
to space.
There are numerous different ways to absorb carbon and to
improve the Earth’s reflectivity, but many of the methods that have
been proposed are dangerous and might actually lead to the end
of the world as we know it. This is why it is important to initiate a
serious discussion about the various possible emergency measures
or “geoengineering” solutions. The debate has to start now, so that
we can analyse the pros and cons of each alternative and experiment with the most promising options.
During the last fifteen years I have combed the Earth’s surface
and its various natural and artificial landscapes, both in the field
and through the literature, looking for ways to improve our planet’s reflectivity and for ways to remove carbon dioxide from the
air. In the following pages I have described what I have discovered,
this far: 26 ways to sequester carbon, and 40 ways to improve our
planet’s reflectivity.
7
I have included in my narrative all the proposals and logical
possibilities that might actually work. Some of the schemes are
utterly crazy, some are just slightly mad, others might or might
not be feasible and at least twenty make perfect sense. I have also
included a short list of ways to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, because this is still important, even though it is no longer
enough to solve the problem.
I have put all the reasonable and not-so-reasonable ideas into
the same bag of apples, and I have included both things that every
one of us can do and things that would require large, governmental or inter-governmental programs. This is deliberate. I have
aimed at a somewhat wild mixture of ideas to provoke a mental
prison break. Even the craziest ideas can be useful in breaking our
old and fixed patterns of thinking, and an absurd proposal can
prompt us to come up with something better. And the truly mad
ideas, of course, make my own proposals look more sensible!
It is crucial to acknowledge, that measures improving the
Earth’s reflectivity do not constitute a solution to the carbon dioxide problem. Increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere contribute to global warming, but they also threaten to
make oceans so acid that corals and the species of plankton with
calcium carbonate shells will be wiped out. Moreover, if we double
the amount of carbon dioxide in the air, cassava plants will produce smaller roots and more leaves, and their leaves become poisonous for humans. Increasing amounts of carbon dioxide would
also reduce the nutritional value (protein, fat, vitamin and trace
mineral contents) of most other food crops.
In other words, problems caused by carbon dioxide can only
be solved by reducing carbon emissions and by sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. However, we could counter the heating impacts of soot, jet plane condensation trails, man-made cirrus
clouds and short-living greenhouse gases like ozone and methane
by improving the reflectivity of our home planet. The same means
could also be used to combat the reduced reflectivity of northern
areas, caused by the loss of snow and ice cover, by soot and dust on
snow and by the extensive planting of coniferous forests.
I have systematically emphasized solutions that would make
sense and improve our lives even without any global warming. It is
8
of course better to solve a problem with means that produce positive side-effects than with solutions that produce negative sideeffects. Besides, we have a large number of people who still are in a
state of denial, and their number could increase when the threat of
global warming becomes more undeniable, more threatening and
more acute. When faced with something truly frightening, some
people will react rationally, but many others will do the opposite.
Many people will never admit that global warming has something
to do with the real world. The only way to convince them is to
emphasize the other benefits of the proposed measures.
If we only focus on limiting our emissions, nobody can do the
right thing, because it is next to impossible for any of us to lead
our lives without producing any greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, if we want to solve the problem by cutting emissions, only,
every government, company and individual has to participate. It is
next to impossible to achieve something like this, even if we had
more time. In other words, if we remain stuck with the notion that
the greenhouse problem can only be tackled by reducing emissions, we may become extinct, as a species.
But if we also think in terms of absorbing carbon from the
atmosphere, those of us who are aware of the problem, can do
much more than what would have been our own share of the burden. One seriously concerned person can eliminate the emissions of a hundred indifferent people. A rich person with a lot of
resources can easily absorb from the atmosphere as much carbon
dioxide as ten thousand middle-class people are currently producing.
This is not fair, but the world has never been fair. The ignorant, the arrogant and those who have given up will always be with
us. The important thing is to find out, how we can save the world
even if only a minority of the world’s people will participate in the
effort.
In Helsinki, 12th February, 2010
Risto Isomäki
9
The Contents
Preface: Welcome to the World
of the Runaway Greenhouse Effect....................................................... 4
The Melting of the Arctic......................................................................... 13
A Brief Introduction: What is Global Warming?.............................. 20
Why Global Warming and Carbon are Serious Issues.................... 23
Can the Atmosphere Become Poisonous for Humans?..................... 32
Removing the extra carbon from the atmosphere......................... 38
1. Storing Carbon in Old Oil and Gas Wells............................................................ 40
2. Storing Carbon in Seawater............................................................................. 41
3. Converting Carbon Dioxide to Solids................................................................. 43
4. Sequestering Carbon Dioxide in Geothermal Power Stations............................. 46
5. Converting Carbon Dioxide to Oil with Sunlight................................................. 47
6. Burying Wood or Other Biomass....................................................................... 49
7. Storing Carbon in Wooden Buildings................................................................. 50
8. Storing Carbon in Living Trees.......................................................................... 51
9. Sequestering Carbon with Artificial Trees
(Sodium Hydroxide)...................................................................................... 62
10. Storing Carbon in Piles of Wood and Branches................................................ 62
11. Storing Carbon in Anthills............................................................................... 63
12. Storing Carbon in Sea Salt............................................................................. 69
13. Storing Carbon in Peatlands........................................................................... 71
14. Storing Carbon in the Soil.............................................................................. 74
15. Storing Carbon in the Amazonian Way
– the Terra Preta System............................................................................... 76
16. Composting with Thermophilic Bacteria.......................................................... 79
17. Regenerating the Mangrove Forests............................................................... 84
18. Spreading Mangroves to New Areas............................................................... 86
19. Increasing the Amount of Coral Reefs............................................................. 86
20. Adding Limestone into the Oceans.................................................................. 88
21. Greening the Oceans....................................................................................... 88
22. Greening the Deserts...................................................................................... 90
10
23. Storing Carbon in Clay (“the Cat Litter Method”).......................................... 92
24. Storing Carbon in Ice..................................................................................... 92
25. Don’t be a Bio-Indicator – Stop Eating Meat!................................................. 94
26. Consuming Less Wood-Based Paper and Eating Less Rice............................. 102
Removing other greenhouse gases from the air.......................... 112
Halting the albedo changes.................................................................. 114
27. Adding Sulphur, Ash and Dust to the Air........................................................ 121
28. Controlling Wildfires.................................................................................... 127
29. Reducing Soot Emissions.............................................................................. 127
30. Making Clouds Whiter.................................................................................. 133
31. Spreading Out the Shipping Routes............................................................... 135
32. Reflecting Substances in Low-Earth Orbits................................................... 136
33. Moon Dust in Space..................................................................................... 137
34. Blowing a Comet (or an Asteroid) to Space Dust........................................... 138
35. A Giant Reflector in Space........................................................................... 138
36. Fifty Thousand Smaller Reflectors in Space.................................................. 138
37. Sixteen Billion Even Smaller Reflectors in Space......................................... 139
38. Favouring Broad-leaved Trees, Larches and Sparse Forests at High Latitudes.139
39. Stone Mulching with Highly Reflecting Materials......................................... 143
40. Mulching with Other Reflecting Materials..................................................... 144
41. Reflecting Plankton...................................................................................... 145
42. Highly Reflecting Films on Water Surfaces................................................... 146
43. Favouring Plants with Efficiently Reflecting Leaves...................................... 147
44. Giant Solar Chimneys as a Global Air-Conditioning System........................... 149
45. Creating New Salt Deserts –or “Washing” the Existing Ones......................... 152
46. Painting the Walls and Rooftops White......................................................... 153
47. Sending Messages to ETs............................................................................. 154
48. Wind-powered Ice Sprinklers........................................................................ 156
49. Gravity-powered Ice Sprinklers.................................................................... 161
50. Dropping Winter Clouds by Kites or Balloons................................................ 163
51. Dropping Winter Clouds with Rockets or Grenades........................................ 166
52. Rethinking the Jet Plane Routes,
Schedules and Flight Altitudes..................................................................... 167
53. Reducing Wintertime Cloud Cover
by Mountaintop Sprinklers.......................................................................... 172
54. Towing Icebergs to the Beaufort Gyre
– and Blowing them to Pieces...................................................................... 173
55. Blowing Icebergs to Pieces – without Towing them to the Beaufort Gyre....... 175
56. Catalyzing Ice Formation by Floating Booms................................................ 176
11
57. Using Shallow Bays as Ice Nurseries............................................................ 177
58. Providing Northern Lakes with Better and Higher Wind-Breaks.................... 178
59. Dropping Winter Clouds with Bacteria.......................................................... 178
60. Snow Cannons on Board!.............................................................................. 179
61. Long Lines of Strengthened Ice on the Sea.................................................. 180
62. Using Large Icebergs as Drift Anchors.......................................................... 182
63. Scattering the Drifts of Fresh Snow.............................................................. 183
64. Flooding the Northern Peatlands in Winter................................................... 183
65. Increasing the Amount of DMS-producing Plankton...................................... 184
66. Establishing Arctic Pleistocene Parks........................................................... 186
Reducing the greenhouse gas emissions......................................... 188
Passive solar energy........................................................................................... 189
Saving Energy: Houses....................................................................................... 189
Saving Energy: Washing..................................................................................... 192
Saving Energy: Lighting..................................................................................... 192
Saving Energy: Cars........................................................................................... 193
Saving Energy: Food.......................................................................................... 195
Saving Energy: Food Negawatts......................................................................... 197
Saving Energy: Reducing Food Waste................................................................. 197
Saving Energy: Cooking..................................................................................... 199
Saving Energy: Consumption.............................................................................. 199
Saving Energy: Recycling................................................................................... 199
Saving Energy: Children..................................................................................... 200
International Travel............................................................................................ 201
Halting Tropical Deforestation............................................................................ 208
Industrial Process Emissions: Cement and Steel................................................. 208
Solar Heat Collectors......................................................................................... 210
Thin-film Photovoltaics...................................................................................... 211
Concentrating Solar........................................................................................... 213
Concentrating Photovoltaics............................................................................... 214
Low-Concentration Photovoltaics....................................................................... 215
Solar CHP (Combined Heat and Power)
and solar CCP (Combined Cooling and Power)............................................. 215
Fuelwood........................................................................................................... 216
Other Biofuels.................................................................................................... 217
Ordinary Wind Power......................................................................................... 223
Kite Power........................................................................................................ 225
Hydroelectric Power.......................................................................................... 227
Modern Thermoelectric Cells.............................................................................. 228
12
Geothermal Energy............................................................................................ 229
Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC)......................................................... 229
The Problem with the Back-up........................................................................... 230
Saving the World by Burning the Peat?............................................................... 232
Nuclear Power and Global Warming................................................................... 236
Ordinary Nuclear Reactors................................................................................. 242
Pebble-Bed Modular Reactors (PBMRs)............................................................ 248
Fast Breeder Reactors....................................................................................... 249
Thorium reactors............................................................................................... 250
Deuterium-Tritium Fusion Power Plants............................................................. 251
Helium 3 Fusion Power Plants........................................................................... 253
Deuterium-Deuterium Fusion Power Plants........................................................ 253
The Hydrogen Economy..................................................................................... 254
The top ten ways to sterilize the planet:........................................ 256
The top ten ways to prevent
the overheating of the planet:........................................................... 258
The ten most important things everyone of us can do............... 260
13
The Melting of the Arctic
The world we are living in has changed profoundly in the last five
years. It is as if we had walked from our routine and relatively safe
world into a bad science fiction movie.
A little bit more than fifty years ago, on 3rd August, 1958, the
US nuclear submarine Nautilus became the first submarine to
reach North Pole. The captain of Nautilus, commander William
R. Anderson, wrote a book about the journey, called “Nautilus 90
North”. I read it when I was young, and I was fascinated by the fact
that according to the submarine’s sonar, Nautilus had been under
surprisingly sturdy polar ice throughout the journey. The thickness of the ice had varied between two and a half and twenty-five
metres. Here and there the keels of higher pressure ridges had
penetrated to the depth of forty or fifty metres.
In 1990’s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, USA
released, due to the influence of Vice-President Al Gore, data
which had been collected by military submarines about the average thickness of the Arctic marine ice. According to this assessment sea ice had thinned by 40 per cent or so, and it was predicted, that it might melt completely in summertime by about
2100.
However, the assessment did not really fit with Commander
Anderson’s description about the Arctic ice pack. I wondered
whether the later estimates had used a wrong baseline, and
ignored earlier data, because it had been too patchy. I was so worried about this possibility that I wrote a science fiction novel,
14
Herääminen (“The Awakening”), in which the Arctic Ocean lost
its whole summertime ice cap already by the year 2013. In the
book loss of sea ice led, by 2038, to rapid heating of seawater, so
that the submarine and terrestrial permafrost areas started to melt
and the so called methane clathrates, mysterious submarine sediments consisting of ice and methane gas trapped inside it, became
destabilized.
Unfortunately, what was science fiction at the late 1990’s, is
now quickly becoming science fact. In 2006 the official prediction was that summertime sea ice would not disappear from the
Arctic Ocean before 2070 or 2080, even if the climate were to continue to warm up in line with the predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But in summer 2007
the National Ice and Snow Data Center (NISDC) of the USA
announced, that the whole Arctic Ocean could actually become
ice-free in 2020 during the height of the melting season, fifty or
sixty years before the “official schedule”.
The reason for this drastic revision was simple: the extent of
the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean had diminished very rapidly in just
a few years. In 2007 the extent of the area covered by marine ice
was only half of what it had been in the 1950’s, and the remaining
ice masses were much thinner than before.
During 2008 the extent of the Arctic marine ice did not shrink
further, because the summer was cool and the skies cloudy. But the
amount of multi-year ice in the Arctic Ocean at the end of September 2008 was only half of what it had been a year earlier. The
average thickness of the ice pack was somewhere between a metre
and two metres, in stark contrast to the situation in August 1958.
Many scientists now predicted, that the Arctic Ocean might soon
lose the rest of its multi-year marine ice and become totally icefree already at the end of the summer by 2012 or 2013.
In September 2009 a team of Canadian researchers, led by
David Barber, no longer found any multi-year ice from the Arctic Ocean. They met none of it even at the Beaufort Sea, north of
Canada’s Arctic archipelago. The team only encountered thin and
fragile ice, with an average thickness of half a metre. Such a thin
membrane of ice could vanish in a few weeks, during the next
abnormally warm Arctic summer. According to satellite data the
15
amount of multi-year ice had again been halved during a single
melting season, but there was still some larger patches of it, left.
However, the field observations contradicted the satellite data. It
seemed that the half-melted ice landscape was producing forms
whose radiometric and scattering characteristics were almost identical to those of multi-year ice, so that satellites could no longer see
the difference.
In 1994 there had still been about 25,000 cubic kilometres of
floating ice in the Arctic Ocean, if we the annual average that takes
into account both the summer and winter months. At the moment
the average could be somewhere between 2,500 and 5,000 cubic
kilometres. In other words, we seem to have lost at least 80 per
cent or more of the Arctic pack ice in sixteen years, and a much
larger percentage after the year 1958.
In 2005, Russian scientists reported that the whole West Siberian permafrost region had suddenly started to melt. According to Sergei Kirpotin and his co-workers, the whole one million square kilometre permafrost area had abruptly become full
of small, round lakes which since then have grown a little bit
larger, every year. Many of the lakes no longer freeze during winter because methane bubbling from the permafrost keeps them
ice-free. According to Katey Walter, a researcher in the University of Alaska, the combined area covered by the meltwater lakes
increased five-fold during the years 2006–2009. In many areas
there is already much more water than frozen ground.
Winter 2007–2008 was also the first time in recorded history
when the Gulf of Finland and the Gulf of Bothnia did not freeze
at all during the winter, not even in February and March. There
was some ice in the northernmost part of the Gulf of Bothnia, but
it only stretched about 30 or 40 kilometres south from the town of
Kemi.
At the same time the forest line has been creeping further
North and higher up in the hills of the northern tundra. Billions of
small, young spruce and pine trees are raising their heads in once
barren cold deserts, in places that have had no coniferous trees for
eons. The snow line on land, meaning the edge of the area that is
under snow cover, has often been hundreds of kilometres further
north than what would have been the statistical average.
16
Shortening winters and melting ices mean that the snow and
ice cover on the northern land and water areas has drastically
diminished. Thousands of millions of hectares of land and water
have been covered by snow and ice for a much shorter period than
what used to be the case.
All this may have profound consequences for the climate of
our planet, because snow and ice are very good at reflecting sunlight back to outer space. They typically have a reflectivity (an
albedo) of 70 to 90 per cent. In extreme cases fresh-fallen, purewhite snow can reflect 98 per cent of solar radiation straight back
to space. Even melting snow and ice still have an albedo of 50–60
per cent.
Open water only reflects 4–10 per cent of the sunlight back,
depending on the angle of the coming solar radiation. In other
words, watery surfaces absorb 90–96 per cent of the solar energy
falling on them. Dark soils and dark coniferous forests also have a
very low albedo, typically less than 10 per cent.
The drastic reduction of snow and ice cover on the northern areas threatens to accelerate the overheating of our planet.
The Indian-American climate scientist Veerabhadran Ramanathan, who was the first to measure the radiative forcing of the new
greenhouse gases like freons, has calculated that a 3 percentage
point reduction in the Earth’s average reflectivity would heat the
planet as much as a five-fold increase in the atmosphere’s carbon
dioxide content.
The melting process now taking place in the world’s polar
regions might finally reduce the Earth’s reflectivity by more than
3 percentage points. If Ramanathan’s calculation is correct, these
changes in the planet’s reflectivity could be equivalent to adding
three or four thousand billion tons of extra carbon into the atmosphere – a few centuries worth of emissions.
During the early Eocene period, 55 million years ago, the
Earth was perhaps 13 degrees warmer than now. The average temperature at the North Pole, however, was a staggering 43 degrees
higher than at present, plus 20 Celsius instead of minus 23, largely
because the region had lost its entire, effectively reflecting snow
and ice cover.
During our own time, extreme heating of the Arctic would be
17
even more dangerous than 55 million years ago, because the present Arctic has literally thousands of millions of hectares of land
and water areas with huge frozen or semi-frozen reservoirs of
organic carbon and methane. Many of these greenhouse gas reservoirs have been frozen without interruption for a very long time,
sometimes for more than a million years.
Northern forest soils and the vast northern peatland areas contain huge amounts of organic matter, and new studies have estimated that there is at least 1,500 billion tons of carbon stored in
the terrestrial permafrost areas. Most of this has been frozen into
the so-called yedoma or wet permafrost. In yedoma the permafrost and its carbon become covered with water when the ground
starts to melt. Therefore, most of the carbon in the permafrost is
released as methane, and not as carbon dioxide. The difference is
important, because as long as methane stays in the atmosphere,
it is about one hundred times more effective as a greenhouse gas
than carbon dioxide.
Methane’s relative global warming potential becomes smaller
if we posit calculations on a longer perspective, because it breaks
down in the atmosphere relatively quickly. In other words, large
eruptions of methane are the more dangerous the faster they
occur. This is, admittedly, somewhat frightening, because we are
now heating the Arctic much more forcefully than it could ever
heat in any natural conditions. We are, at the same time, increasing
the concentrations of greenhouse gases, adding more cirrus clouds
on the sky and producing a lot of soot and dust that falls down on
the Arctic ices.
There is more methane under the permafrost, in sediments
known as methane clathrates or methane hydrates. In the clathrate
deposits methane gas has been trapped inside small molecularlevel cages of ordinary ice. The first methane clathrates were discovered by Russian scientists already in the 1960’s, but we still have
only a vague idea of the size of these reserves. According to one
regularly quoted estimate there could be at least 400 billion tons of
methane in the clathrate stores beneath the terrestrial permafrost.
The methane clathrate deposits on the continental slopes are
even larger. According to best current estimates they might contain about 10,000 billion tons of methane, part of this inside the
18
ice and the rest in gas pockets under the clathrate bed. These formations may be the greatest threat to our future survival, because
they are only stable under a high pressure and when the temperature of the surrounding water is close to the freezing point of
water. Clathrates in the Arctic Ocean can exist much closer to surface than in other oceans, because the water is very cold. Surface
water in the Arctic Ocean always stays between minus two and
zero degrees Celsius. The “warmest” water, more than 0.5 degrees
Celsius, can be found at depths of 200–500 metres.
Furthermore, roughly one half of the bottom of the Arctic
Ocean consists of submerged continental shelves, which are covered with permafrost. In other words there is many times more
yedoma under the water than above the water. There are not even
educated guesses on how much organic carbon these submarine
permafrost areas might contain. Even though we do not know
this for certain, it is likely that there are large amounts of methane clathrates also under the submarine permafrost and under the
continental glaciers (ice sheets).
The closer to North Pole a methane eruption takes place, the
more dangerous it is, especially if it happens during early autumn,
at the end of the melting season, just before Arctic winter.
Hydroxyl radicals, responsible for cleaning the atmosphere of
methane, are in short supply when there is very little sunlight. This
means that in the polar areas a larger percentage of the methane
can remain in the atmosphere for a long time.
Methane heats the planet by acting as a greenhouse gas in the
atmosphere. Moreover, methane molecules often break down only
when they have risen to relatively high altitudes in the atmosphere.
This produces cirrus clouds, tiny ice crystals floating high in the
air. Cirrus clouds have a weak cooling impact during the day and a
much stronger heating impact during the night.
It is thus very important that we halt the thawing of the Arctic before all these stores of organic carbon and methane begin to
erupt into the atmosphere. Clathrate deposits will become destabilized if the surrounding water heats too much, or if the melting of ice
reduces the weight of the various Arctic glaciers so much that violent
earthquakes are generated. Even a relatively small earthquake could
split a clathrate bed so that the underlying gas pockets are ruptured.
19
The Greenland ice sheet is, of course, by far the greatest glacier
in the Arctic region, but also the smaller glaciers on the Ellesmere
and Devon islands, on Franz Josef Land, on Novaja Zemlja and
Severnaja Zemlja, on Spitsbergen and on the Axel Heiberg’s island
might constitute a danger for the nearby clathrate fields.
In summer 2008 Canadian, Swedish and Russian scientists
reported, that on many sites large amounts of methane had started
to bubble to the surface from submarine permafrost. The Swedes
remarked, that practically all the methane seemed to be entering
the atmosphere, raising the local concentrations of the gas by one
hundred or, on some localities, by a thousand times. People living
at Greenland’s western coast told British and Canadian researchers about “large explosions” in the sea, and about dead whales that
had subsequently floated to the surface. It has not been possible to
confirm these reports, but a breakdown of a clathrate bed would
produce eruptions with a resemblance to depth charge (“water
bomb”) explosions.
And then, in August 2009 a team of the University of Southampton discovered, around the Arctic archipelago known as Spitzbergen, 250 sites on which the submarine methane clathrate fields
had started to melt and release methane. The melting clathrates
were at depths of 150–400 metres. All the methane released from
its icy prisons dissolved into sea water as carbonic acid before it
reached the surface, but this could change, very soon.
20
A Brief Introduction: What is Global Warming?
According to measurements conducted by NASA, planet Earth
now radiates back to space a little less energy than it receives from
the Sun. The result is a small imbalance, amounting to 0.85 watts,
plus or minus 0.15 watts, for every square metre of our planet’s
surface (all 500,000 billion of them).
In this book I have used the round figure of one watt per
square metre, Instead of 0.85 watts, for the sake of simplicity, in
order to make the related calculations easier to follow, and because
the situation is likely to keep on changing in the future. If the heat
imbalance has, after ten years, increased for instance to 1.4 watts
per square metre, you will get the new figures simply by multiplying my numbers by 1.4.
In any case the Earth is now like a house that is being heated
so efficiently that the production of new heat is more than the
amount escaping through the windows, walls and roof. Sooner or
later a new balance will be reached and the amount of escaping
energy will again equal the production of heat. But until this new
equilibrium is reached, our planet will keep on heating.
Where does this approximately 500,000-gigawatt imbalance in
our energy budget come from? One reason are the so called greenhouse gases, water vapour, methane, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide,
tropospheric ozone, freons (or chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs) and
some of the compounds which have now largely replaced them.
Greenhouse gases are gaseous substances whose molecules
consist of more than two atoms. Such molecules begin to shiver,
21
shake and wobble in a very complex way when they are hit by
infrared radiation coming from the ocean or from the ground.
Such a nervous shaking of molecules is called heat.
In other words greenhouse gases are able to catch infrared or
heat radiation before it escapes back to space from the surface of
our planet. Human activities are increasing the concentrations of
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and thus heating the planet.
The so called black aerosols, small soot particles and tar balls
that are produced when something is burned, also contribute to
the warming. They do not stay in the atmosphere for a very long
time, but they absorb sunlight efficiently as long as they remain in
the air.
Most scientists think that between 0.1 and 0.2 degrees of the
0.8 degree warming that has already taken place has probably been
due to small changes in the Sun’s activity. Sun’s output fluctuates
a little, and during the last millennium solar minimums and solar
maximums caused a number of warm periods and little ice ages.
However, we passed the highest peak of the present solar maximum already some time ago, so the Sun should no longer be contributing much to global warming. On the contrary, the slight
diminishing of the Sun’s activity should now help us a little in our
efforts to prevent the overheating of our home planet.
Our planet is now overheating also because its albedo – its
capacity to reflect sunlight directly back to space – is decreasing.
Open water surfaces, dark coniferous forests, asphalt and dark
soils absorb most of the sunlight falling on them like a sponge.
When the ice and snow cover retreats the surface of our planet
becomes darker. Condensation trails left behind by jet planes and
artificial cirrus clouds forming from them also have a heating
impact.
The combined heating impact of all these factors is currently
at least four watts for each square metre of our planet’s surface.
However, our sulphur and dust emissions and the land-use practises that increase the Earth’s reflectivity cool the planet. This probably compensates for three quarters of the warming. Because of
these cooling impacts our current planetary heat imbalance is only
one watt, or a little bit less than one watt, instead of four watts per
square metre.
22
The warming process, of course, does not proceed in a linear,
systematic and straightforward way. Exceptionally warm years
will, every now and then, be followed by much colder seasons.
When this happens, many people immediately start to think that
perhaps the global warming has stopped.
The problem is that we do not have a very long memory, and
the mental yardstick we are using to estimate what a certain winter was like changes very quickly, much faster than the climate. We
should keep in mind that during the coldest winters Europe has
seen during the last three hundred years temperatures in Paris
have sometimes dropped below minus fifteen Celsius for more
than ten days in a row. Nowadays a Parisian winter is cold, if the
temperature does drop below zero during the coldest day of the
year.
23
Why Global Warming and Carbon are Serious Issues
In this book I will repeat one point over and over again, because it
is almost always forgotten in the climate discussions.
Carbon dioxide does heat the planet and it does contribute to
global warming. There is absolutely no uncertainty about these
basic facts. The debate is only on how quickly and strongly our
weather systems will react to such impacts.
However, even if the connection of carbon dioxide and global
warming was a gigantic conspiracy between environmental organizations, governments, conscious objectors, feminists, transnational corporations, communists, rightist radicals, scientists, animal right activists and gays (as some people have imagined) it
would still be of utmost importance to limit the amount of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere.
Much of the carbon dioxide we are now producing dissolves
in sea water and makes carbonic acid. In other words, the more
carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere, the more acid the oceans
become. We have already made the surface layer of the oceans
about 30 per cent more acid, and if we double or triple the atmospheric carbon dioxide contents, coral and plankton animals can
no longer form their shells and the marine food chains probably
collapse. From the viewpoint of the whole biosphere this is an even
more serious issue than global warming. Actually, we should perhaps concentrate on this, and start talking about the acidification
of the oceans more than we talk about global warming.
Moreover, if the carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmo24
sphere double, our food crops can produce their carbohydrates
more easily. This sounds nice but it also means that our food
plants become less nutritious, in terms of fats, proteins, trace minerals and vitamins. In other words, we would have to eat more
carbohydrates and food fibres, in order to acquire everything we
need. World hunger no longer means calorific malnutrition, but
insufficient intake of certain key proteins and dietary fats. Besides
this, at least four billion people suffer from a lack of vitamins and
important trace minerals. If we add too much carbon dioxide into
the air, our food crops will no longer meet our real nutritional
needs and dietary requirements as well as now.
Cassava merits special attention. It is the most important food
crop to 600 million people, and an important crop to more than
one billion. Many of the cassava-dependent people belong to the
poorest of the poor. The importance of cassava is likely to increase
in the future, because most of the still expected population growth
will take place in the world’s cassava zone. For instance in many
parts of Central Africa, where cassava is especially important,
population might still double or triple. We should also keep in
mind that agricultural production has recently been increasing
in an extensive way, meaning that more food is produced simply because hundreds of millions of people have cleared new land
for farming. Because good farmland has already been taken, the
expansion of agriculture means cultivating poorer and drier soils,
which are not suitable for rice or wheat, but on which cassava can
be grown.
Without the carbon dioxide problem we might have two or
three billion people dependent on cassava by 2100. But according to laboratory studies the doubling of the atmosphere’s carbon
dioxide content would induce cassava plants to grow more leaves
and less roots, and double the hydrogen cyanide (glycoside) content of their leaves. In practise this would make cassava poisonous
to people, because even now for example 9 per cent of Nigerians
suffer some form of cyanide poisoning from eating cassava.
In the Indonesian province of Central Kalimantan, Kalimantan Tengah, the air contains an anomalous amount of carbon
dioxide, because the slow oxidation of peat on vast ditched peatland areas releases huge amounts of the gas. For instance in the
25
so called Mega-Rice Project area people say that cassava does not
produce any roots, even on good mineral soils. Even the production of leaves is often insignificant. The extra carbon seems to have
channeled the growth of the cassava plants into their stems. I have
never, In any other place, seen cassava grow like that, producing stems four or five metres high, each stem having only a small
round of leaves at the end.
It is important to realize, that these problems have nothing to
do with the warming. They are caused by increasing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. If we add more carbon into
the air, all this will happen even if the Earth cooled down by several centrigrades, at the same time. Which, of course, is not going
to happen.
However, if the climate does heat by a couple of degrees centigrade, what is more likely, the heating will most probably bring
with it a different but equally frightening set of problems. For
instance, the average strength of hurricanes and typhoons should
increase by 50 per cent or so. This would make them much more
destructive. If the warming skyrockets to 6 or 10 degrees, the fiercest cyclones will become almost unimaginably destructive.
The world’s rice crop is highly sensitive to rising temperatures. If temperature rises above 35 degrees Celsius for more than
an hour while rice is flowering, heat sterilizes the pollen so that
no rice grains can be produced. According to International Rice
Research Institute, we might lose 15 per cent of the world’s rice
crop with every degree of global warming.
It has been estimated that a 3 degree warming would increase
rainfall, because more water will evaporate from the oceans. However, the evaporation of water from soils, freshwater lakes and rivers would increase even more, so according to the climate models most of the tropical and subtropical regions would actually
become drier than now. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change has said that up to five billion people might soon suffer
from an acute lack of irrigation water.
Dr James Hansen, perhaps the leading climate scientist in the
USA, has said that sea level rise will most probably be the important issue of the 21st century. In the 19th century sea level was rising by only 0.1 millimetres per year. In 1950’s the speed started
26
to accelerate, and was estimated to be 2 millimetres in the 1990’s.
In 2007 the rate of sea level rise was probably somewhere around
3.7 millimetres per year, even though there is some variation in
the results. The present rate might be close to 5 millimetres a year,
which corresponds with 50 centimetres in a century.
A few years ago glaciologists still thought that even if the climate would become significantly warmer, it would take thousands
of years before this extra heat would reach the bottom of the glaciers. It was thought that two kilometres of ice would act like a
two-kilometre thick bed of effective insulation material.
The basis of these old models describing how continental glaciers melt has since then been completely debunked by empirical
evidence.
In the beginning of the new millennium it was still unclear,
whether the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets were in balance, or whether they were already losing more ice than what
was being created by snow fall. In any case it was clear, that the
huge East Antarctic ice sheet was still growing. However, during
the next few years both Greenland and West Antarctic suddenly
started to lose so much ice, that their ice budgets went, for the first
time, clearly on the minus, and the speed by which they were losing ice multiplied in an astonishingly short period of time. In the
East Antarctic snow fall was still able, until the year 2006, to produce more new ice than what was lost with the ice bergs. But in
2006 even the East Antarctic started to lose mass, according to
measurements made by two satellites, flying close to each other. In
other words: all the three ice sheets started to melt during the first
decade of the new millennium.
Surface melting on the Greenland ice sheet has, during the
warmest years, achieved unprecedented proportions. The number
of turquoise meltwater ponds and lakes (“glacier lakes”) forming
on the ice sheets has increased. Glacier lakes have started to form
even in the North, and the highest ones now form at 1,400 metres.
Because water has a higher density than ice, meltwater lakes
act as wedges that produce deep cracks into the ice sheet. Ice has
a relatively strong compressive strength but hardly any tensile
strength. Because of this a 10- or 15-metre-deep meltwater pond
can crack open a 1,500-metre-deep crevice that reaches through
27
the whole ice sheet, all the way to the bedrock. Whole small rivers
of melt-water have started to disappear inside the glaciers through
cracks in the ice. Water surging into a crevice eats deep and round
holes in the ice, known as moulins or glacier wells. The scientists
watching the process in awe suddenly realized, that heat can actually reach the bottom of a glacier in thirty seconds rather than
thousands of years, in the form of waterfalls created by the surface melting. The melt water pooling under the glaciers acts like
a lubricant which accelerates the speed by which the glaciers flow
towards the ocean.
At the same time sea water is gradually eating its way from the
edges deeper and deeper under certain sectors of the Antarctic
and Greenland ice sheets, including the huge Pine Island Glacier,
in the West Antarctic. According to many glaciologists the process
should be as irreversible as the thawing of the permafrost: it will
not stop unless climate becomes colder again.
The destruction of many ice shelves, floating tongues of ice that
stretch far into the ocean, has accelerated the melting of many glaciers. It seems that ice shelves act as barriers or like corks in a bottle that slow down the movement of the glaciers. They also seem
to insulate the actual ice sheets from the impact of the heating sea
water.
In 2002 an ice shelf known as Larsen B suddenly broke to
thousands of icebergs and floated away. Larsen B was about the
size of Luxembourg, and it had existed without interruption at
least for 12,000 years. After the ice shelf ’s demise, the glacier
behind Larsen B started streaming towards the sea eight times
faster than before.
The glaciers on the Antarctic Peninsula are relatively small, and
even if they would melt totally they would only raise the sea level
by half a metre. But glaciologists are now more than a little bit
afraid that Larsen C will be the next to go, and that even the massive Ronne ice shelf might soon be in danger. This would accelerate the melting of the whole West Antarctic ice sheet.
Some scientists have started to fear that the whole complex of
glaciers streaming to Pine Island Bay in the West Antarctic may
already be doomed for rapid destruction unless the climate cools
down. Pine Island Bay is the soft underbelly of the West Antarc28
tic. If the two gigantic glaciers streaming to the bay, the Pine Island
Glacier and the Thwaites Glacier, will melt, sea level will rise by
two metres.
Dr Hansen wrote in July 2007 that in the light of these recent
observations a five-metre raise in the sea level before 2007 is a
much more probable scenario than the official, much lower prediction of the IPCC. The well-known US glaciologist Richard Alley
has noted that we can no longer, after the observations made during the summer of 2005, exclude even the possibility that a large
chunk of the Greenland ice sheet would disintegrate in a couple of
decades.
14,500 years ago there was a period of 400 years during which
sea levels rose by 20 metres, and it is possible that 13.5 metres of
this 20-metre rise took place in a very short period of time, within
a few decades. The only plausible explanation for this is that some
large, continental ice sheets which were anchored below the sea
level suddenly broke to pieces and floated away.
Could something similar happen in our own time? Unfortunately the possibility cannot be excluded. Almost the entire West
Antarctic ice sheet is anchored 500-2,400 metres below the sea
level. Also a large part of the Greenland ice sheet lies on ground
that has been depressed below the current sea level, as well as
some relatively large chunks of the massive East Antarctic ice
sheet, especially the Cook and Totten Glaciers and parts of the so
called Ingrid Christensen Coast.
One further factor which has not yet been properly tabulated
into the models are the small soot particles, tar balls and dust from
Sahara that have been raining down on top of the continental glaciers for centuries. The algae growing on the surface of the ice have
also become buried under the snow.
When surface melting of a glacier reaches a certain rate, the
melting begins to uncover more and more solid particles, especially if a growing proportion of the ice starts to disappear through
sublimation, through a process in which ice Is transformed
directly to water vapour, without first melting to form water. This
should make the ice darker and decrease its albedo. If the ice is
able to reflect less sunlight back to space, melting will accelerate. This will again reduce the reflectivity because more soot, dust
29
and dead algae will emerge from the ice into the surface. Thus the
combined impact of water and “sand” on ice might one day lead to
very rapid destruction of some of our continental glaciers.
The melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet would add 5–6
metres and the melting of Greenland 7–8 metres to the sea level,
while heat expansion of the sea water would add a further 4 metres
for each 3-degree centigrade rise in global temperatures. Almost
three-quarters of the humanity live on coastal areas that may be in
danger, and most of our fertile farmlands are on the same coastal
lowlands.
Large tsunamis triggered by the warming may also become a
serious issue. There are at least five different mechanisms through
which global warming can cause giant tsunamis. The most immediate problem has to do with the melting of the continental glaciers, especially in Southern Greenland, where the speed of the
melting has increased at least threefold in ten years.
An ice sheet is so heavy that the Earth’s crust below it may be
depressed by almost a kilometre. As the glaciers melt their weight
is reduced and the crust starts to bounce back. This is already happening in Greenland, although still in a very minor way. When
a glacier surges, the weight on bedrock becomes less and the
rocks beneath have to shake a bit. During the years 1993 - 2005
the number of earthquakes larger than 4.6 on the Richter scale in
Greenland increased more than sixfold. There were, altogether,
136 of them during this period.
The melting of the Fennoscandian ice sheet, which lay over
Finland, Sweden and Norway during the last Ice Age, took thousands of years. In spite of this the melting created a few very strong
and innumerable smaller earthquakes. The largest earthquakes in
Sweden had a magnitude of at least 8.5 or 8.7 on the Richter scale,
and possibly more. They caused at least 13 large tsunamis at the
Baltic Sea, many of which were 20 metres high and some even
larger.
If an ice sheet loses much of its weight in for example two hundred years, the resulting earthquakes should be more violent than
when the same process takes place in 4,000 years. In the worst
case scenario a gigantic chunk of an ice sheet anchored below the
sea level might suddenly slide into the ocean and just float away.
30
This is the most serious possibility, because the weight depressing the crust would be lifted almost in an instant. This may sound
far-fetched but we actually know that something like this has happened, in several different occasions. In 1988 the German marine
scientist Hartmut Heinrich, then still a graduate student, discovered thick sediment layers which had been deposited at the bottom of the Atlantic by immense fleets of vast icebergs, which had
suddenly been launched by the ice sheets. Since then six or seven
separate “Heinrich events” have been identified.
In 2001 and 2002 Australian scientists found traces of huge
tsunami waves that had hit Australia’s coast roughly once in 1,000
or 500 years, and which had been strong enough to lift car-sized
boulders over 130-metre high cliffs. In Madagascar one of these
waves left behind a chevron, a wall of sediment, as tall as the
Chrysler Building. The Australians first assumed that the megatsunamis had been caused by asteroids or comet fragments hitting the
Earth. However, the estimated number of the megatsunami events
is at least one hundred times larger than the estimated frequency
of cosmic strikes large enough to cause a megatsunami. Therefore
it seems much more likely that the Australian megatsunamis, or at
least most of them, have been caused by major submarine earthquakes triggered by the melting of the Antarctic ice sheets at the
end of the Ice Age. During the Ice Age the Antarctic was surrounded by large marine ice sheets that were anchored below the
sea level. The demise of some of these marine ice sheets may have
been frighteningly rapid.
The future risks are aggravated by the fact, that on Greenland’s
continental shelves and slopes there are huge deposits of loose sediments that could be destabilized by even relatively small earthquakes. The risk could be the most imminent at Greenland’s East
Coast, where the edge of the ice sheet has remained remarkably
stable for tens of thousands of years.
In 1929 Newfoundland was hit by a tsunami created when a
Richter 7 earthquake triggered a 200-cubic-kilometre underwater
landslide. The tsunami was seven metres high on large stretches
of coastline and rose to 27 metres at bays which concentrated its
energy. The wave did not do any damage in Europe or further
South because its power was broken by shallow waters. But the
31
Southern tip of Greenland is actually relatively close to Europe,
and a slightly larger underwater landslide could cause a very dangerous tsunami surging towards Europe with the speed of a jet
plane. If melting accelerates further, so that hundreds of thousands
or millions of cubic kilometres of ice will melt, the process will,
sooner or later, produce truly major rebound earthquake tsunamis.
Another problem is that in many places the sediments on
continental slopes are kept together by methane clathrates. The
famous Geomar institute in Kiel, perhaps the world’s leading centre for methane hydrate studies, warned already a decade ago that
if the oceans heat too much some of the hydrate fields may become
more fragile. This could both release huge quantities of methane
into the atmosphere and cause giant tsunamis. 7,900 years ago,
between 4 and 8 billion tons of methane was suddenly released at
the coast of Norway, enough to heat the planet temporarily by several degrees. The destabilization of the hydrate field also triggered
a large submarine landslide known as Storegga, or the Great Wall.
The 1,700-cubic-kilometre slide did cause a big tsunami, and there
will be similar events in surprising places if we allow the global
warming to proceed too far.
It is urgent and of utmost importance to improve the sea
defences of the already existing coastal nuclear power plants,
nuclear fuel recycling facilities and the cooling ponds storing used
nuclear fuel before anything like this happens. The easiest and fastest way to do this may often be to use large blocks of concrete and
pile them on top of each other so that they make a high wall capable of breaking a tsunami. Moreover, there shouldn’t be any further construction of nuclear facilities on coastal areas. The so
called fourth-generation nuclear power plants (breeder reactors)
would be particularly vulnerable to floods, hurricane storm surges
and tsunamis.
32
Can the Atmosphere Become Poisonous for Humans?
In the science fiction novel Herääminen (“the Awakening”) I wrote
about people suffocating to death when methane clathrates started
to break down and erupt and the atmosphere became poisonous
for humans. At the time I thought that the idea was only science
fiction, and that it would have no relevance in the real world. But
now I am no longer so sure about this.
The present oxygen content of the atmosphere is 21 per cent,
which means roughly one and a half million gigatons (1 gigaton =
one thousand million tonnes) of free oxygen.
When methane (CH4) erupts into the atmosphere four tons of
oxygen are lost for each ton of methane, except when carbon monoxide is produced. This is very simple secondary school chemistry. Both the methane molecule’s carbon atom and its four hydrogen atoms react with oxygen. One oxygen atom and two hydrogen
atoms make water, and one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms
form a carbon dioxide molecule. The atomic weight of oxygen
is 16, the atomic weight of carbon 12 and the atomic weight of
hydrogen 1, so a methane molecule with an atomic weight of 16
consumes two O2 molecules with a combined atomic weight of
64. These reactions happen when methane is broken down in the
atmosphere by the hydroxyl radical (OH-). Similarly, when something containing carbon like oil or peat burns, each ton of carbon
consumes 2.7 tons of oxygen.
How much methane and carbon can be released into the
atmosphere before we start having serious problems with breath33
ing? Some of us get pulmonary embolism even below the altitude of 2,500 metres from the sea level, even though most humans
are capable of spending short times at an altitude of 7,000 metres
without any extra oxygen. But no known mammal is able to
reproduce above the altitude of 4,000 metres. The weak spot of
the mammals is the placental system. A human foetus also gets
its oxygen through the placenta, and placental blood is always a
mixture of the mother’s well-oxygenated and poorly-oxygenated
blood.
Does this mean that our practical survival level as a species
is the oxygen content currently existing at the altitude of 4,000
metres? Not quite. Scientists have exposed different mammal species for lowered contents of atmospheric oxygen in differing temperatures. These experiments have shown beyond any reasonable doubt that high temperatures greatly increase the stress level
caused for mammals by lowered oxygen concentrations. The phenomenon is poorly understood but it is very real. In other words,
some mammals are currently able to reproduce at 4,000 metres
partly because the temperatures at that height are about 20 degrees
centigrade lower than at the sea level.
55 million years ago most of the methane which was then
stored in the methane clathrate deposits, was probably released
into the atmosphere. Global temperatures increased by 8 degrees
Celsius and the oxygen content of the atmosphere dropped by 2
percentage points, according to the best estimates currently available. This seems to have been enough to kill off many, if not the
majority of all larger mammal species. This is a sobering scenario
because it might mean that even for us the extinction level could
be around the same 2 percentage points, if such a drop in oxygen
concentrations were accompanied with significant global ­warming.
If 10,000 gigatons of methane were released from the clathrates 40,000 gigatons of oxygen would be consumed and the oxygen concentrations might drop by 0.5 percentage points. As a species, we should be able to survive this. But what if the methane
clathrate deposits are larger than the scientists’ most often cited
guess has led us to believe? If for example 40,000 gigatons of methane were released from the clathrates, atmospheric oxygen would
be reduced by 2 percentage points. It is more than likely that the
34
methane clathrate deposits are now significantly larger than 55
million years ago, when the world was 5 degrees warmer (before it
heated by a further 8 degrees and became 13 degrees warmer than
now).
We might or might not be able to survive a 2-percentage point
drop in the atmosphere’s oxygen levels. Unfortunately, the most
serious danger might consist of carbon monoxide, water vapour
and hydrogen sulphide.
When methane is broken down in the atmosphere it first reacts
with one hydroxyl radical, and becomes carbon monoxide. Then
the carbon monoxide molecule again reacts with another hydroxyl
radical, captures another oxygen atom and is thus transformed to
carbon dioxide. Carbon monoxide is much more eager to react
with a hydroxyl radical than a methane molecule. However, there
is only a limited amount of hydroxyl radicals in the atmosphere,
and they are not evenly distributed. The concentrations in the
tropics are the highest because of the intensive ultraviolet radiation, but in the Arctic the amount of hydroxyl radicals in the air
can be extremely small, especially during the late autumn and winter, when there is very little sunlight.
What if there were large and rapid eruptions of methane, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide from the permafrost or from
the offshore methane hydrates at high Arctic latitudes, just before
the winter?
When our air contains 1 per cent of carbon monoxide we die
in about one hour, after 50 per cent of the haemoglobin molecules
in our red blood cells have lost their ability to transport oxygen
inside our bodies. Even much smaller amounts of carbon monoxide in the air will be lethal, if we have the patience to wait for longer than one hour. A long exposure to a carbon monoxide concentration of only 75 parts per million will disable about 30 per cent
of our haemoglobin and cause serious and gradually accumulating
health problems for us. Roughly 600 gigatons of methane suddenly
breaking down to carbon monoxide would theoretically be enough
to raise the carbon monoxide content of the whole atmosphere
from the present average of 0.5 parts per million (ppm) to the
above mentioned level, 75 parts per million. If the carbon monoxide concentrates at the lowest layers of the atmosphere, much
35
smaller amounts would be needed to poison us.
These figures are more than a little disquieting, bearing in
mind that the overall quantity of methane in the offshore hydrate
deposits may well exceed the often quoted figure of 10,000 gigatons.
Another worrying possibility was, to my knowledge, first proposed by the Finnish science writer and journalist Pasi Toiviainen.
Toiviainen asked NASA’s James Kasting and the Hadley Center’s
Peter Cox to calculate, whether large eruptions of methane from
the clathrates could produce a moist greenhouse effect, a situation in which the oceans start releasing so much water vapour that
the Earth finally becomes a new Venus. Toiviainen pointed out,
that the so call tropical warm pool, lying east and north-east from
Indonesia, is already very close to the temperatures required for
such a vicious circle. At first Kasting and Cox did not take Toiviainen’s idea very seriously, but when they did the calculations, they
were shocked to realize, that even if the melting of the clathrates
would take thousands of years, the extra methane should be able
to produce a moist greenhouse effect. According to the maths, the
Earth was actually surprisingly close to becoming a new Venus.
However, we are still here. There have been vast methane eruptions from the clathrates, before, for instance at the end of the
Eocene period, 55 million years ago. At that time the world was
perhaps five degrees warmer than now, to begin with. So it seems
that there was a factor that prevented the moist greenhouse effect
or a runaway greenhouse effect of becoming the reality.
It now seems that the missing factor is the so-called Green Sky
scenario, or the hydrogen sulphide bacteria. They dominate the sea
bottom in places where the conditions are totally anoxic, meaning that there is almost no dissolved oxygen in the sea water. If the
temperatures rise significantly the oceans’ capacity to absorb oxygen from the atmosphere drops. At the same time, the warming
might shut off the so called global conveyor belt of ocean currents
and halt the efficient formation of cold, deep water in the Arctic and Antarctic waters. This should lead to a stronger stratification of the water masses, because there would be less richly-oxygenated, cold water sinking to the sea bottom. The depths would
become anoxic, like the bottom of the Black Sea today. Hydro36
gen sulphide is one of the most toxic substances that exist in the
nature, one full breath is enough to kill an adult human being. The
first whiff of hydrogen sulphide destroys the sense of smell, and its
toxicity increases steeply with the temperature.
It seems that the hydrogen sulphide bacteria are the biosphere’s
last defence line against a serious overheating of our planet. Peter
D. Ward has remarked, that Gaia seems to have an evil sister,
Medea. There is a growing amount of geological evidence to support the notion that every time our planet has been in danger of
becoming another Venus, hydrogen sulphide bacteria have saved
it, but with a great cost to other species and to the planet’s biodiversity. The poisonous hydrogen sulphide emissions from the
oceans to the atmosphere have occasionally risen to 2,000 times
their present levels, because of naturally occurring global warming. If the same happened again, sky would turn green and the
atmosphere would become poisonous for humans.
According to the worst-case scenario, runaway heating in the
Arctic might finally release so much methane and carbon dioxide,
and heat the planet so much, that Medea will be released. Therefore, we can no longer exclude the possibility that atmospheric
changes could lead to the extinction of Homo sapiens as a species. Actually, far more could be at stake. The Earth might lose the
whole magnificent diversity of fauna that has developed during the
last 65 million years.
Not just humans but also sperm whales, probably the largest predators which have ever existed. Blue whales, the largest and
most majestic animals our planet has ever seen. The gentle, curious and absolutely magnificent grey whales. Humpback whales
and pilot whales and belugas. Narwhals and spotted dolphins and
grey dolphins and orcas. Horses, dogs and wolves. Bushbucks and
greater kudus and impalas and white-tailed deer. Lions, tigers,
bears, jaguars. Indian elephants, African savannah elephants and
African forest elephants. Asian water buffaloes, the most gentle and endearing creatures on this planet. Southern black whales
and fin whales and sei whales. Fur seals, sea lions and leopard
seals. Botos and susus or the river dolphins of the Amazon and the
Indus. Manatees and dugongs. Rock hyraxes and waterbucks and
springboks and sable antilopes and mongooses. Foxes and badgers
37
and rabbits. Mice, moose and beavers.
The world would most probably be inherited by animals
equipped with a more efficient respiratory system: birds and
the cephalopods (squids, octopuses and nautiloids). In a way
this would, of course, be nothing new because in reality this is a
planet of the squids. 70 per cent of the Earth is covered by water
and cephalopods were, for 450 million years, the dominant predators in the oceans. Even in the era of the mammals they have never
been insignificant, and they will quickly regain their former status
if mammals decide to leave the scene.
However, I would personally like to vote against leaving the job
to hydrogen sulphide bacteria. This book is about finding out what
other options might still be available for us.
38
Removing the extra carbon from the atmosphere
To remove part of the carbon dioxide we have already released
into the atmosphere sounds very difficult. However, this is actually cheaper and simpler than reducing our carbon dioxide emissions. Besides, to reduce the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content
from the present 383 ppm to the level of 350 ppm Dr Hansen is
talking about, we only have to remove about 70 billion tons of carbon from the air.
The atmosphere may have originally contained about 300,000
times more carbon than the present 800 billion tons. In addition,
volcanic eruptions have occasionally added large quantities of carbon dioxide into the air. On the other hand, different chemical,
biochemical and biological processes have, during the history of
our planet, removed from the atmosphere roughly a million times
more carbon than its present quantity in the air.
We are now annually emitting about 8 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels and by producing cement and steel. If we also include the emissions from the
destruction of tropical rainforests, from decaying mangrove
swamps and from agricultural and forest soils, the total probably
exceeds 10 billion tons. The various natural cleaning mechanisms
are still able to handle a substantial part of this. Because oceans
still absorb two or three billion tons of carbon and forests, individual trees and peatlands a roughly equal amount, only about four
billion tons of carbon is annually added to the atmosphere, and the
carbon dioxide concentrations only increase by 2 ppm, each year.
39
But many scientists fear that a steadily growing percentage of our
carbon dioxide emissions might soon stay in the atmosphere.
About 200 billion tons of carbon is annually converted to carbohydrates by single- and multi-celled plants. Only a tiny fraction
of this is buried and taken permanently out from the atmosphere,
the rest is quickly released back through the plants’ own respiration or through the decomposition of organic matter.
If we can find a way to store three per cent of the present biological production of our planet in a more or less permanent way,
we will eliminate our annual carbon dioxide emissions and absorb
about two billion tons of carbon per year from the atmosphere.
This can be done in many different ways. All the possibilities
I have mentioned in this book are complementary. They do not
exclude each other. It is not necessary or desirable to remove all
the extra carbon by one method alone, even if it was theoretically
possible.
Moreover: we should remember that most of our ecosystems
are severely degraded and that their biological productivity is now
only a small fraction of what it once was and what it might once
again become. By regenerating and revitalizing the various key
ecosystems we can easily achieve a much higher biological carbon
flux than the mentioned 200 billion tons per year.
We only have to pick the methods that are the most beneficial,
which bring with them the largest economic savings and the greatest variety of differing fringe benefits for the people.
As mentioned above, carbon dioxide is only one of the reasons
for the overheating of our planet. The other greenhouse gases, artificial cirrus clouds and soot emissions also contribute to global
warming. However, it is easier to sequester carbon dioxide than to
absorb other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Therefore we
might want to consider reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere even below the pre-industrial levels, at least temporarily. If things get seriously out of hand, this might be the easiest, the safest and the most rapid way to eliminate also the heating impact of the other greenhouse gases, soot, condensation trails
and man-made cirrus clouds.
This may sound far-fetched, but the idea is not exactly new.
Already in 1896 two Swedish scientists, Svante Arrhenius and
40
Arvid Högbom, calculated that halving the atmosphere’s carbon
dioxide content should cool the planet by five degrees Celsius.
In 1896 there was about 600 billion tons of carbon in the atmosphere. After that we have added about 200 billion tons into this. If
it becomes necessary to do so, we could probably reduce the atmosphere’s carbon content to 300 billion tons, to the level that was
prevalent at the height of the last Ice Age, without endangering our
planet’s tree and plant life.
1. Storing Carbon in Old Oil and Gas Wells
The Norwegian environmental organization Bellona and many scientists working for oil and gas industries have proposed that carbon dioxide would be captured in thermal power plants when coal
is burned. It could then be transported and stored in empty oil
and gas wells or saline aquifers. The method is known as CCS, carbon capture and storage. It is quite unlikely that the carbon dioxide stored this way would be able to seep through into the atmosphere. If the soil layers have been so impenetrable that natural gas
has become trapped under them, it should be possible to trap and
store also carbon dioxide in the same way. Besides, under a high
pressure carbon dioxide becomes supercritical and starts to behave
more like a liquid than like a gas. With a carbon capture and storage system, a power station burning fossil fuels could produce
almost carbon-free energy.
Oras Tynkkynen, a Green member of the Finnish Parliament, has proposed an interesting further improvement into the
approach. Tynkkynen has suggested that if a power plant equipped
with a carbon capture and storage system were to use biomass
instead of fossil fuels, it would actually sequester a lot of carbon
dioxide from the atmosphere and provide carbon-negative energy.
The method can only be applied to carbon emissions from
large coal-fired or biomass-fired thermal power plants and to some
industrial facilities. It does not make sense to develop CCS systems
for cars or individual households. This limitation could be overcome by producing electricity with biomass and then using it to
power electric cars as well as heat pumps that can provide from
41
three to six times more heating energy for houses than the electricity that is needed for running them.
The potential of the CCS approach, however, is seriously
reduced by the fact that most large concentrations of thermal
power stations are a bit far from the nearest suitable saline aquifers
or oil and gas wells.
Also, the Department of Trade and Industry of the United
Kingdom has calculated, that by 2020 the method might cost
between 460 and 560 pounds sterling for each stored ton of carbon even when the aquifer would be relatively close to the thermal power plant, and the cost would rise as the distance becomes
­longer.
When the pumping of carbon dioxide into the oil wells is done
so that it brings some of the remaining heavy oil to surface, costs
can be covered by the value of the oil. The approach is known as
CCS enhanced oil recovery. However, when the oil is burned it of
course again produces carbon dioxide. When the oil coming up
contains more carbon than the carbon dioxide going down, the net
effect is less than zero.
Besides, it seems that carbon dioxide injected in aquifers can
reactivate faults and trigger earthquakes and tsunamis. Even storage sites far from human settlement could be dangerous.
Recommendation: Not really recommended. CCS is too expensive, and
it is not the safest way of storing carbon. More research is needed
about the earthquake and tsunami risks related to the method.
2. Storing Carbon in Seawater
Scientists working for oil and gas industries have suggested that
the flue gases of thermal power plants could just be pumped to
ocean depths. If the carbon dioxide were produced by burning
biomass, the method would reduce atmosphere’s carbon dioxide
content.
However, the amount of gases that can be absorbed by the
oceans depends on the temperature of the water. If oceans heat up,
their gas absorption capacity will be reduced and the carbon diox42
ide begins to bubble back to air.
Besides, carbon dioxide molecules have a nasty habit of reacting with a water molecule to form carbonic acid. Carbonic acid
then reacts with a carbonate ion (CO3), to form two bicarbonate ions (HCO3). The process removes carbon dioxide from surface water. In a way this is good, because when carbon dioxide
becomes converted to bicarbonate ions, oceans can again absorb
more carbon dioxide from the air.
Unfortunately, the more carbon is absorbed from the air, the
more acid the sea water becomes. The acidity, or the effective
concentration of active hydrogen ions in the water, has already
increased by more than 30 per cent in the mixed surface layer of
the oceans. On the pH scale this means that the pH of ocean water
(in the crucial surface layer) has dropped from 8.16 to 8.05. If the
pH drops further to 7.8, which might happen by 2100 if we keep
on burning fossil fuels with the present speed, the calcium carbonate shells of plankton and the corals begin to dissolve in seawater. In the Arctic and Southern Oceans the critical threshold
could be reached much sooner, perhaps already in 2050. This is
because these two oceans contain lower concentrations of aragonite, which is the crucial form of calcium carbonate, used by corals
and ­plankton.
If we keep on burning fossil fuels with the present rate, the
oceans’ pH could finally fall by 0.7 of a unit. This would be the
largest change of acidity the world ocean has seen during the last
55 million years, and it would take place, geologically speaking,
during a blink of an eye.
According to laboratory experiments and computer models based on them for example the populations of coccolithophorid plankton will crash if the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content
increases from 387 to 1,000 parts per million. Coccolithophorids
are responsible for most of the dimethyl sulphide (DMS) emissions of plankton. What we consider “the smell of the ocean”
comes from DMS, but the tiny DMS droplets also act as cloud
condensation nuclei. Most natural clouds over the oceans (clouds
which have not been produced by ships’ sulphur emissions) only
exist because of the DMS emitted by coccolithophorids and coral
polyps as a by-product of their metabolism. Because the low
43
clouds over the oceans cool the planet by 10 degrees Celsius, we
will be in a lot of trouble if we lose the corals and the coccolithophorids, even though most of us have probably never heard of the
latter.
Oceans still absorb up to 35 per cent of our carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels, but if plankton populations crash
and carbonate ion concentrations become seriously depleted,
they can no longer sequester such huge quantities of carbon. At
a later stage, the acidification of ocean depths would also reduce
the amount of carbon which can annually become sequestered in
the black oozes or mud (containing a lot of organic matter) on the
ocean floor.
According to one study, there may be 10-100 million different animal species living on the seabed, roughly equivalent to
the amount of biodiversity currently found in tropical rainforests. Another study has estimated, that 98 per cent of the world’s
coral reefs could die off before 2050 because of the combined effect
of ocean acidification and global warming. Coral reefs are very
important marine ecosystems and five hundred million people are
economically dependent on them, through fishing or tourism.
Recommendation: Please forget this one!
3. Converting Carbon Dioxide to Solids
The erosion of magnesium and calcium silicates and other minerals that tend to form carbonates, salts of carbonic acid, has
removed huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere
during the long history of our planet. The German physicist Klaus
Lackner has remarked, that if we expose a larger amount of such
minerals to air and to the carbon dioxide it contains, we could
sequester all the extra carbon out of the atmosphere. The weathering of all basaltic rocks removes some carbon dioxide from the air,
but according to Lackner it would be most convenient and effective to use the so called ultramafic rocks, peridotite and serpentinite. Peridotite and serpentinite are much richer with magnesium
silicates than basaltic rocks, and magnesium silicates react more
44
readily with carbon dioxide than calcium silicates.
The idea may sound crazy, but there is absolutely no doubt
that carbon dioxide can be removed from the atmosphere, this
way, and there is plenty of suitable rock. One exceptionally large
deposit of ultramafic rock in Oman could theoretically absorb all
the carbon dioxide we can ever produce by burning fossil fuels.
However, we should speed up the chemical reactions with suitable
acids. In practise the cost of mineral sequestration might amount,
according to the IPCC, to USD 320 for each ton of carbon, which
is, once again, a bit too much. Damned.
But could mineral sequestration be achieved in a way that
would simultaneously produce something useful, so that the costs
or at least part of them could be recovered by the value of the production?
The chemical reactions between carbon dioxide and calcium
silicate (or magnesium silicate) release heat. Would it be possible
to develop thermal power stations producing electricity and district heating by chemical reactions that convert carbon dioxide to
carbonates? Well… to be honest, this does not sound very practical to me.
At the moment most of the concrete produced on our planet
Is based on Portland cement. Portland cement is made of a mixture of clay and limestone (calcium carbonate) that is heated to
1,450 degrees Celsius. The heating of the mixture consumes a lot
of energy, produced by fossil fuels. The burning of these fossil fuels
emits about 300 kilograms of carbon dioxide for each ton of Portland cement. Moreover, the process converts limestone to chalk,
and this chemical reaction also produces a lot of carbon dioxide, 500 kilograms for each ton of cement. When both the emissions from the energy use and the process emissions (from chemical reactions) are counted, the production of Portland cement
is responsible for 7–10 per cent of all man-made carbon dioxide
emissions. This is a concern, because the production of Portland
cement is still expected to double in a decade.
If Portland cement was replaced by magnesium cements, the
making of concrete could actually absorb large amounts of carbon
dioxide from the atmosphere, instead of producing vast quantities
of the same stuff. However, this would only happen, if the magne45
sium carbonate in the cement was manufactured by mining magnesium silicates and by inducing them to react with atmospheric
carbon dioxide. In other words, the original chemical reactions,
the making of the magnesium carbonate, would absorb carbon
from the air. The manufacturing of the cement would the release
a large part of the same carbon back to air, after which some of
it would again become re-absorbed by the various concrete structures. Magnesium cements are more expensive than Portland
cement, but in the present situation they might still become an
important option.
We could also convert the chalk in Portland cement back to
calcium carbonate when concrete structures are demolished. In
most concrete structures the surface layer quickly absorbs some
carbon dioxide from the air and is thus re-carbonated back to
limestone. However, the process grinds to a halt when the small
holes inside the concrete become blocked. For this reason it could
take 30,000 years before a large slab of concrete has become fully
carbonated. Moreover, when blocks of flats and other structures
made of concrete are demolished, the old concrete is often buried under the ground in landfills or in garbage dumps, or used as
crushed stone in road construction. This can slow down the carbonating process.
It would be better to break the dismantled concrete blocks to
smaller pieces and to store them in large above-ground piles for
20–30 years before they are buried. This should absorb 500 kilograms of carbon dioxide for each ton of cement.
Or actually… could we start constructing our garbage dumps
so, that they would also act as important carbon sinks, instead of
being major sources of greenhouse gas emissions? At the moment
garbage dumps are a big problem, because food waste, paper and
on a long run even wood produce a lot of methane when they
decompose in airless, anaerobic conditions and in wet soil.
In aerobic conditions the decomposition of these materials
produces only carbon dioxide, and if there is not enough moisture,
paper and wood do not decompose at all.
What if we constructed much higher, better drained and better ventilated landfills? Would it be possible to construct artificial
mountains in which food waste only produced carbon dioxide and
46
in which paper and wood could not decompose at all, so that the
carbon in them would be stored for a prolonged period of time?
Landfills in which the blocks of concrete would become fully carbonated, relatively quickly?
In this kind of conditions also the carbon in the plastics made
of wood or other types of biomass would be safely stored. Above
all, there would be less long-term leakage of heavy metals and all
kinds of poisonous chemicals into the ground water.
recommendation: Recommended as a partial solution.
4. Sequestering Carbon Dioxide in Geothermal Power Stations
Donald Brown, a researcher at the USA’s Los Alamos National
Laboratory in New Mexico, proposed already in the 1990’s that
water vapour should be replaced with supercritical carbon dioxide
in geothermal power plants. This would increase the power production by about 50 per cent, because supercritical carbon dioxide
is more fluid and fast-moving than water vapour. The supercritical carbon dioxide would gradually be absorbed by the bedrock. It
would react with the minerals in the bedrock to make carbonates
(salts of carbonic acid).
According to calculations conducted in the Los Alamos
National Laboratory such a geothermal plant would sequester 900
kilograms of carbon for each megawatt-hour that it produces. A
modern coal-power plant produces around 200 kilograms of carbon for each megawatt-hour. In other words, 1,000 megawatts of
geothermal power using supercritical carbon dioxide could absorb
all the carbon from 4,500 megawatts of coal power.
If a geothermal power plant used carbon dioxide produced by
burning biomass, it would sequester a lot of carbon dioxide from
the atmosphere and produce highly carbon-negative electricity.
Buying such power would be a fantastic bargain for environmentally conscious consumers. Every kilowatt-hour of carbon-negative
geothermal power could remove 3.6 kilograms of carbon dioxide
from the atmosphere, instead of producing 0.8 kilograms of the
same stuff. The cost of carbon sequestration would most probably
47
be negative, meaning less than zero.
Carbon dioxide becomes a supercritical fluid in a temperature of 31.4 degrees Celsius and in the pressure of 72 atmospheres.
Water vapour reaches the same stage at 374 Celsius and 218 atmospheres. Therefore it is much easier to utilize supercritical carbon
dioxide than supercritical water in a geothermal power plant. Even
when the heat gradients (the speed by which the ground heats up
when we get down) are not sufficient for economically profitable
production of electricity, geothermal power plants can often produce large amounts of heat with a very affordable price.
According to a major new study by the Massachusetts Institute
for Technology (MIT) between 1,200 and 12,000 gigawatts of geothermal power could be produced by new, enhanced geothermal
systems, including the use of supercritical carbon dioxide. MIT
says that enhanced geothermal power systems should be able to
produce power with 3.9 US cents per kilowatt-hour, which is less
than the price of electricity from coal-fired power stations. This
means that it would be theoretically possible to sequester all the
carbon dioxide emissions from our biomass-fired and fossil fuelfired thermal power plants in geothermal power stations. However, because of the high transportation costs of carbon dioxide,
other methods are likely to be cheaper in areas that are not suitable
for the construction of geothermal power plants.
Strongly recommended as a partial solution. However, the possibility of triggering major earthquakes should be investigated, and large projects should be situated far from towns and villages. Sites where a possible earthquake could travel far along an
existing fault should be avoided.
Recommendation: 5. Converting Carbon Dioxide to Oil with Sunlight
During the Second World War, when there was an acute shortage
of oil, Germany produced petrol from gasified coal. The method
they used was invented already in 1920’s and it is known as the
Fischer-Tropsch process. In Fischer-Tropsch you first produce carbon monoxide and then convert it to more complex hydrocarbons,
48
or, in essence, to oil.
It is also possible to convert carbon dioxide produced in a factory or in a coal-fired power plant to carbon monoxide, and then
use the carbon monoxide to make hydrocarbons (oil). This sounds
weird but the process probably makes much more economic sense
than breaking water into hydrogen and oxygen with the help of
electricity.
Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico,
have developed a system known as CR5 (meaning: counter-rotating
ring receiver reactor recuperator), which uses solar heat to convert
carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide. The required temperature is
about 1,500 degrees Celsius. Sandia first wanted to use the method
to produce hydrogen, but they then realized that they were able to
convert a larger percentage (approximately 10 per cent) of the Sun’s
energy into a useful fuel by making carbon monoxide instead of
hydrogen. Sandia is currently constructing a prototype reactor that
should be able to produce 100 litres of carbon monoxide per hour.
This means that it would be theoretically possible to convert atmospheric carbon dioxide to oil and to pump this oil into
old oil and gas wells or into saline aquifers. If the carbon dioxide
would come from a biomass-powered plant, a lot of carbon would
be sequestered. But this is only a thought experiment. In practise
something like this will most probably never be done, because the
cost would be a bit high.
A more realistic approach would be to use the CR5 system
to produce fuel for aeroplanes and cars. Governments could also
establish large national safety stores of oil. Violent and unpredictable hikes and drops in oil prices cause much social instability and
are a problem for governments, companies and people.
If every government would use the CR5 method to produce
large national oil storages from biomass, sufficient to last for
twenty years or so, fuel prices could be stabilized and something
like 100 billion tons of carbon would be sequestered into these
stores. Even stores lasting for five years would play a part in preventing a greenhouse catastrophe.
Recommendation: The idea is worth investigating further.
49
6. Burying Wood or Other Biomass
Numerous different people have commented, that we could absorb
carbon simply by growing trees and then storing them in freshwater lakes, peatlands, mines or deserts. Wood is well preserved in
such conditions. About 50 per cent of the dry weight of wood is
carbon, so if we sink one cubic metre of wood into a freshwater
lake or into a peatland we have sequestered about 250 kilograms of
carbon out of the atmosphere.
The Baltic Sea could also be used as a carbon sink because it is
brackish, having such a low salt content that the shipworms (Tercedo navalis) cannot survive there. Wooden shipwrecks that sunk
in the Baltic a thousand years ago still exist, in the oceans most of
the wood will be eaten relatively quickly unless it becomes covered
by something which prevents the activities of the shipworms. The
Arctic Ocean and the Black Sea could also act as depositories, the
Arctic Ocean because it is very cold, and the Black Sea because it is
totally anoxic below the halocline (oxycline), at the depth of 150 to
200 metres.
Then we have hyperarid deserts and mines. Indian scientists discovered, in 1915, a huge wooden palisade that had surrounded the
ancient metropolis of Pataliputra. Pataliputra was, at the height of
the Mauryan dynasty, probably the largest city on Earth. When the
palisade was discovered it was 2,280 years old, but it had been perfectly preserved under the sand. For exmple in the Saharan desert the
wood would be even more safely stored. If we can produce the wood,
there is no practical limit to how much of it we can store in peatlands, deserts, mines, freshwater lakes or in the Baltic Sea, the Black
Sea and the Arctic Ocean.
In deserts we could even use other forms of biomass that normally decompose much faster than wood. In China most of the
ancient town walls are rammed earth walls, made of earth tamped
between wooden planks or other layered biomass. The biomass
inside such rammed earth walls is preserved surprisingly well, especially in dry conditions. The Chinese scholar Li Chi estimated, in
the 1920’s, that of the 748 town walls constructed this way in China
between 2,700 and 2,200 years ago, 84 were still in use. British writer
John Man has described 2,000-year-old rammed earth walls, inside
50
which the layers of straw have been perfectly preserved.
In other words for instance the older parts of China’s Great Wall
and China’s thousands of ancient town walls should also be seen as
a way of storing substantial amounts of organic carbon. During our
own day town walls are no longer useful or necessary for defense.
But rammed earth walls could be used for many other purposes. In
India tens of thousands of villages have already started to revitalize
old water harvesting and storing practices. Among the most popular methods are earth dams or embankments which facilitate the
recharge of groundwater reserves and reduce the percentage of water
running straight to rivers during the monsoon period. If the rammed
earth method would be used in such small dams, a lot of carbon
would be sequestered and the dams would last a longer time without any maintenance work. Rammed earth walls could also be constructed along highways to reduce traffic noise.
Recommendation: The described methods are technically easy to implement and quite safe. However, with the exception of the rammed earth
walls constructed for water harvesting or for some other useful purposes, they would be an expensive way to solve the problem. The costs
would be lower than with some other options, but still somewhat high.
7. Storing Carbon in Wooden Buildings
In areas where there are no wood-eating termites, it is easy to
sequester a lot of carbon dioxide out from the atmosphere simply by constructing wooden houses, or by using wood in at least
some of the structures of the concrete buildings. A middle-sized
wooden house can store at least 50 tons of carbon in wood. If it is
well-made, its roof maintained, and it does not burn down or get
demolished, the house and its carbon store can last for centuries
or for a millennium. One option is to construct a non-heated and
non-air-conditioned wooden annex or wing to an existing building. Such an annex can both store a significant amount of carbon
and provide a couple of new layers of extra insulation for the older
part of the house (from one side of it).
51
Recommendation: Recommended as a partial solution, but solving the
whole problem this way would require a lot of wood, and people would
have to build vast houses.
8. Storing Carbon in Living Trees
Road traffic is still increasing. The carbon emissions from air traffic threaten to double in fourteen years. The amount of carbon
dioxide entering into the atmosphere from cement factories is
likely to double in twenty years. The use of fossil fuels in energy
production and in manufacturing, as well as the methane, nitrous
oxide and carbon emissions from agricultural production, are still
climbing up. And so on.
During the last decades there has been a lot of talk about
reducing the production of carbon dioxide in all these areas, but
in reality the use of fossil fuels has been rising more rapidly than
before, in almost every sector we can think of.
In 1990’s the annual growth rate of the humanity’s carbon
dioxide emissions was 1.1 per cent. Between the years 2000 and
2004 it was more than 3 per cent, three times more, in spite of all
the climate negotiations. One of the main reasons for this has been
the economic globalization. A growing percentage of the world’s
industrial production has shifted to countries where manufacturing is less energy-efficient and largely based on coal, which produces larger carbon dioxide emissions than natural gas or oil.
There is only one exception from this main rule, one bright ray
of hope in the middle of a bleak sea of despair. There is one area of
human activity where we have actually made very major progress
in our fight against the global warming.
I am, of course, talking about the planting and growing of
trees. Trees and forests absorb staggering amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
The burning of fossil fuels or biomass consumes oxygen and
produces carbon dioxide. When carbon dioxide is absorbed by
vegetation, the oxygen is returned to the air. However, when carbon dioxide dissolves into the sea as carbonic acid, no oxygen is
fed back. Because we know how much carbon dioxide has been
52
added into the atmosphere and how much oxygen has been lost
from it, we also know, how much carbon has been absorbed by
trees and other plants, including plankton.
It seems that trees currently remove from the air all the carbon
dioxide produced by the destruction of tropical forests, peatlands
and mangrove forests, plus perhaps 15 per cent of the carbon coming from the fossil fuels. We can be relatively confident that this
calculation is roughly correct, because we know that 50 per cent of
our fossil fuel emissions currently enter the atmosphere, and that
about 35 per cent are absorbed by the oceans.
But how can the trees absorb so much carbon?
First, there is a growing amount of protected forests. The combined area of the world’s national parks, nature reserves and other
protected areas grew from 100,000,000 to 1,800,000,000 hectares
between 1948 and 2002, and this includes a lot of forest. In the
protected forests, even trees large enough to provide pulp or timber can keep on growing. The average age and girth of the trees
growing in a forest influences the size of the carbon store much
more than the combined area of land with some tree cover. For
instance, in Finland the forests contain on average 80 cubic metres
of roundwood per hectare, which is approximately one per cent of
the volume of wood in a single, very large sierra redwood or baobab tree.
Second, there are extensive areas of tropical rainforests that
have not been protected, but that the forest companies have not
been able to reach, yet. Most of these “virgin rainforests” are not
very old. For example the rainforests of Congo are mostly three
hundred and those of the Amazonas a little bit more than five hundred years old. This means that the long-living trees in these vast
rainforest areas are still growing and absorbing huge amounts of
carbon from the atmosphere.
Third, people in the different Asian, African and Latin American countries have planted tens of billions of trees on their own
lands or on communal lands during the last few decades. A significant part of all these trees have probably been fruit trees or
other food-producing species. This means that vast tracts of pasture and conventional farmlands are being transformed to multistorey home gardens, or garden forests, which already dominate
53
densely populated areas like Java and South-West Nigeria, and
which were the dominant form of agriculture in the Americas
before the arrival of the Europeans. According to the World Agroforestry Centre, in Nairobi, almost one half of the world’s 22 million square kilometres of farmed land now has at least 10 per cent
tree cover. About 7 per cent of the world’s fields have more than 50
per cent tree cover.
Fourth, the carbon stores in Europe’s and North America’s
commercial forests are regenerating. The consumption of paper
has declined in the North. There is less pressure on many forested
areas. Besides this, millions of forest-owners have become aware
of global warming and manage their forests differently, in order
to sequester carbon from the air. There is also a growing number
of trees in the residential areas, most of which are still relatively
young.
Fifth, while the world as a whole has heated by less than one
degree, the Arctic has heated much more than this average. The
extra warmth has already speeded up the growth of northern forests on vast tracts of land. In some regions the impact has been
dramatic.
Many scientists have speculated that there could also be a sixth
factor at work. It is possible, that the increasing carbon dioxide
concentrations in the air are “fertilizing” the forests. This is a logical possibility, and according to some laboratory and greenhouse
experiments it might be real. However, because the first five factors
are definitely real, the sixth one may not be needed to explain what
is happening around the world. The issue has more than an academic interest, because the sixth factor should be only temporary,
unlike the five first. Scientists that have studied the carbon fertilization effect by making computer models about it tend to say that
we should not try to absorb carbon in trees. The outdoor types, on
the other hand, emphasize the other factors because they see them
happening, every day, with their own eyes.
For instance in Finland the paper industries’ rapid decline has
had a most dramatic impact. Finnish forests are now producing
more than one hundred million cubic metres of roundwood a year,
but logging only amounts to about 60 million cubic metres. The
difference, 40 million cubic metres of roundwood, is equivalent to
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10 million tons of carbon, a little bit more than one half of Finland’s annual carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels. If also the
carbon that goes into the branches, crowns, stumps, roots, abovethe-ground litter and under-the-ground litter (fine roots) is taken
into account, the amount probably exceeds Finland’s fossil fuel
carbon emissions.
It is, of course, almost forbidden to say this in Finland, because
Finnish paper industries are still very influential, a state within
a state, and they still dream about using all this extra wood and
releasing all the carbon back to the atmosphere.
According to a recently published study, based on monitoring
the girth of 70,000 trees growing in different parts of Africa for a
decade, the intact African forests are still absorbing about 0.6 tons
of carbon per hectare per year. Scientists monitoring the air over
the Amazonas have estimated that Amazonian rainforests are taking in even more carbon, roughly one ton per hectare per year.
This would amount to 600 million tons for the whole of Amazonas.
According to one recent estimate tropical rainforests annually
absorb at least 1.2 billion tons of carbon. When we also count the
tens of billions of individual trees recently planted on farmlands
and pastures, the carbon absorbed by the soils on the pasture and
farmlands that have become forests or garden forests, and the 300
or 400 million tons of carbon annually absorbed by mangrove forests, the total figure becomes even larger. Nobody really knows,
but we might be talking about two or two and a half billion tons
per year. African farmers are probably making the most significant contribution, because they have really been planting a lot of
trees during the last thirty years, in different parts of the continent.
Besides this, the northern forests are probably absorbing between
0.8 and 1.2 billion tons of carbon a year.
But… we know exactly how much carbon dioxide is annually
added to the atmosphere, and we have a rather good idea of how
much carbon goes into the oceans. Thus the carbon sinks provided by the forests can only be substantially larger than we have
assumed, if there are also major carbon dioxide emissions that
have not yet been included in the official statistics. The sides of the
equation must be in balance. This, however, is not a complication,
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but actually solves another problem.
According to steadily accumulating research data and anecdotal evidence different agricultural and forestry practises do
influence the amount of carbon stored in the world’s soils. For
example the ditching and aggressive manipulation of forest soils
seem to have released huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. According to a number of studies the gradual break-down
of deforested mangrove swamps does the same, and the soils of
tropical, temperate and northern forests cleared for farmland or
pasture some time ago are still be losing large amounts of organic
carbon. In Britain land cleared for agriculture typically loses only
0.6 per cent of its carbon store during one year. In the subtropical and tropical regions the process should be more rapid, but even
the Brazilian cerrado has this far only lost between 30 and 50 per
cent of its underground store of organic carbon, so the cerrado
soils should still keep on producing large additional emissions for
at least a few more decades. The carbon dioxide coming from the
ground in different heavily managed agricultural and forestry ecosystems has, this far, been excluded from the official statistics. So
the equation of carbon sinks, sources of carbon and what remains
in the atmosphere actually balances itself neatly, even if we take all
the new research results at face value.
If we have been able to reduce the amount of carbon annually
accumulating in the atmosphere by billions of tons even with our
present, somewhat half-hearted tree-planting and forest conservation efforts, we should perhaps pay more attention to this sector.
We still have 1.1 billion hectares of farmland with no trees and the
almost one billion hectares which have at least 10 per cent but less
than 50 per cent tree cover. Not to say anything about the various
lands only used for grazing.
Our present commercial forests can easily burn in forest fires
because they typically contain a large number of small trees. The
best way to store large amounts of carbon in trees is to grow only
a relatively small number of very large trees on each hectare. In
other words, if we store more carbon in the trees we reduce the
risk that a forest’s carbon store would be released into the atmosphere in a major forest fire. Many tree species quickly become
resistant to fire. For example baobabs cannot burn in any kind of
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forest fires, even when surrounded by a thick growth of smaller
trees.
We should mainly use species that can also tolerate considerably hotter and drier conditions than those now prevailing. Forests
do not automatically die and release their carbon even if the world
would become a few degrees warmer. Much depends on the species we use and on how we manage the forests and their soils. Litter, humus layer and topsoil in many tropical forests contain large
amounts of organic carbon, in spite of the high temperatures.
It is imperative that the schemes are strongly supported by the
local people. If they are opposed by the people, carbon in the trees
will not be safely stored, because young trees are easy to kill or
burn. Programs must be beneficial to local people and they must
add to their resource base. Also, the existence of the benefits must
be perceived, acknowledged and appreciated by the people.
The species have to be chosen so that people consider the trees
useful and that they will have a very strong incentive not to cut
their main trunks, ever, for timber or firewood. In practise this
means trees that attain a large size and produce large quantities of
food or raw material for bioenergy as long as they remain standing.
There are numerous possible species and a myriad different ways to grow several species together. I have written two full
books about the subject, one alone and one together with Maneka
Gandhi, so I cannot list all the interesting possibilities, here. I will
mostly concentrate on one example, the African baobab (Adansonia digitata), the wooden elephant.
Please interrupt me if I start lecturing about baobabs in length.
And please stop me if I begin to talk about the evolutionary
impact of elephants, horses and dinosaurs on important fruit tree
species.
The African baobab could be the world’s supreme carbon storage tree. It is no ordinary tree. Baobabs cannot burn in any kind of
forest fires, they do not even notice them. Carbon stored in a baobab is, therefore, carbon safely stored. On dry and hot areas baobabs reach a much larger size than any other tree species. They are
able to become giants where nothing else grows well! Young baobabs grow much faster than any other trees that attain a substan57
tial size and have a long life-span. A 70-year-old baobab planted
on good soil may already be three metres in diameter. Baobabs
grow astonishingly fast for 270 years or so. Then the growth slows
down, but the trees can already be a bit large, at that time. The
largest specimen which has ever been measured had a diameter of
18 metres.
African baobabs are in many countries considered the most
useful of all trees. Fruits are large and the fruit flesh and seeds
highly nutritious. The fruit pulp makes a healthy and refreshing
drink when mixed with water. The numerous large seeds can be
eaten raw or roasted, or processed into flour or oil. Leaves are edible and have a nutritional value comparable to spinach. They contain large concentrations of vitamin A. This is important because it
seems that a sufficient amount of vitamin A significantly reduces
illness and mortality caused by diarrhoeal and respiratory diseases
as well as malaria among children. It also prevents xerophtalmia,
which used to blind half a million children a year.
The young roots are edible. The bark is an excellent raw material for mats, cloth fibres, water-proof roof tiles, water-proof hats,
ropes, nets, baskets, insulation material and paper. The bark grows
back quickly. The fruit shells are wooden and water-proof and are
often used as containers or to make cups, plates, saucers and other
utensils. During colonial times, when giant baobabs were much
more common, large trees were used as offices, restaurants, cafes
or bars. They would also make nice schools, libraries and book
shops!
African baobabs do not even compete with other land uses to
the extent most other trees do. They do not kill the undergrowth
under their canopies, their style is relaxed, African, live and let
live. Annual food crops, including maize, can be grown very close
to giant baobabs, so close that some of the plants touch the main
trunk. The partial shade provided by baobabs and the fertilizing
effect of their leaves may even be beneficial for surrounding crops.
The massive roots, of course, can destroy buildings that have been
constructed too close.
Baobabs could be planted on a vast range covering almost two
thirds of Africa, much of Australia, South India, Indonesia, tropical South and Central America, the Caribbean and even some
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parts of the United States (Florida).
Let’s assume, as a thought experiment, that we would plant
6.5 billion baobabs, one for every woman, man and child on
the planet. This would not take long if many people cooperated,
because baobabs grow easily from the large seeds. After planting
they need some protection against cattle and elephants, but will
soon be able to manage by themselves. 6.5 billion surviving baobabs should, in half a century, absorb from the atmosphere at
least 100 billion but possibly 200 billion tons of carbon, when also
the carbon in the roots, fine roots, litter and humus is taken into
account.
The idea is not to say that we should only plant baobabs, or
that we should plant exactly 6.5 billion of them. There are thousands of other beautiful and magnificent tree species, and many
different food-producing trees should definitely be planted. The
point of the example is to show that the often repeated claim that
it is not really possible to absorb much carbon dioxide from the
atmosphere by planting trees simply does not hold water. If we
think in terms of pulp plantations with a short rotating cycle, the
possibilities are limited. But if we take a closer look on the various
land-use systems and ecosystems and on all the tree species available, the picture changes, in a most dramatic way.
In the most densely populated areas of Nigeria field farming
has already been largely replaced with multi-storey home gardens
in which annual plants are being grown together with food-producing trees of differing sizes. Such tropical home gardens are typically five or ten times more productive (per hectare) than conventional farms. When field farming is replaced by multi-storey home
gardens a lot of carbon dioxide is always sequestered, because such
agroforestry systems produce a much larger store of organic carbon on each hectare than the lands used for “ordinary” farming
or pasture. Robert K. Dixon, the director of the US Support for
Country Studies to Address Climate Change, has estimated that
using sustainable forest and agroforestry management practises on
500–800 million hectares could annually sequester and conserve
0.5 – 1.5 billion tons of terrestrial carbon. If the same practises
were used on five or eight billion hectares, ten times more carbon
dioxide could be absorbed from the air.
59
Specific attention should perhaps be given to trees which attain
a large size and which are especially good producers of biofuels.
For example selected varieties of the African marula trees (Sclerocarya spp) could produce an annual hectare yield of 20 tons of
fruit flesh, 1–2 tons of highly nutritious, edible kernels and about
20 tons of very hard nut shells with an energy value closer to that
of coal than that of softwood. Marula shells are so hard that they
do not burn well in small stoves, but they could be burned in
somewhat larger local power plants. Individual marula trees can
produce hundreds of kilograms of fruit, and in the best specimens
half of this consists of edible fruit flesh and edible kernels. There is
a very large marula tree in Namibia that has been reported to produce eight and a half tons of fruit during the record year. I am not
certain whether this can be correct, but the tree has obviously produced quite many bucketfuls of fruit.
Actually, marula’s phenomenal food-producing capacity is
somewhat of a mystery. It is in a class of its own among the wild,
food-producing dryland trees. Selective breeding of more productive marula trees is difficult, because male and female flowers are
in different trees. However, people in South Africa, Botswana and
in other Southern African countries seem to be convinced, that elephants like to eat partially fermented marula fruits in order to get
drunk. If this is true, the present, surprisingly productive marula
trees may have been bred by African elephants during the last ten
million years or so, through their reckless consumption of psychoactive drugs. It is possible that elephants have memorized the trees
that produce the best fruits, and deliberately gone to them to get
wasted. We should perhaps be concerned. How can we warn elephants about the dangers of alcohol abuse?
Similarly, it is possible that the domestic apple was originally
created by a long-term selective breeding programme carried out
by horses and by European brown bears in Kazakhstan and in the
other Central Asian countries. People in Kazakhstan say that even
today mother bears often force their puppies to climb, whining
with fear, on the highest branches of the apple trees that bear the
largest and sweetest fruits, to drop the fruits down. Which clearly
amounts to illegal and inappropriate use of forced child labour.
The West African safou (Dacryoides edulis) is a relatively large
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tree that could become an even more productive oil tree than the
oil palms if some effort were devoted to its selective breeding.
Even with the commercial forests producing raw materials for
forest industries carbon-storing possibilities are more significant
than what is often admitted. In Finland the largest standing stocks
of wood found in natural reserves or other more or less untouched
natural forests are around 800 fast cubic metres of trunk wood per
hectare, even though these forests are only a couple of hundreds
of years old. However, planted and managed spruce forests can,
on good soils, reach a standing stock of 600 fast cubic metres per
hectare in 70 years. On the Punkaharju ridge a planted larch forest
reached 1,200 cubic metres per hectare in 110 years, and the bestgrowing part of another larch forest in Raivola (which is now on
the Russian side of the border) contained 2,000 fast cubic metres
of trunk wood per hectare when it was 257 years old.
In other words, planted commercial forests may be able to
grow even larger carbon storages than protected, natural forests,
if their growing cycles are lengthened so that a little bit less pulp
wood and a little bit more timber will be grown in them.
The average carbon store of the commercial forests in Finland is, of course, very low because the normal growing and cutting cycles are so short. On average there is less than 80 fast cubic
metres of standing roundwood in a Finnish forest, which is a very
low figure.
Besides carbon dioxide, trees also absorb nitrous oxide, ozone
and black aerosols from the air. According to recent research,
the six million trees growing in Sacramento County, in the USA,
annually remove 665 tons of ozone, 164 tons of nitrous oxide and
748 tons of small particulate matter from the air. Both nitrous
oxide and ozone are strong greenhouse gases. Above all, trees and
other vegetation annually produce about a billion tons of bioaerosols, tiny organic detritus, which reflects sunlight back to space,
contributes to cloud formation and increases the reflectivity of
clouds by making them whiter. According to latest estimates 25
per cent of all atmospheric particles consist of bioaerosols. However, trees that produce a lot of chemicals known as terpenes
should be avoided on heavily polluted areas, because terpenes can
catalyze the reactions that convert nitrogen oxides to ozone.
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In his old age, Mahatma Gandhi decided to start eating only
food that was produced by trees. Besides this, he also drank some
goat milk. Another giant of human history, the Buddha, also
emphasized the importance of food produced by trees. Buddha
instructed his followers to plant five trees every year and to ensure
that they remained alive.
In human history, the ordering of the construction of large palaces and cathedrals or pyramids that have sometimes been preserved for hundreds, if not thousands of years has been the privilege of a very small and select group of emperors, sultans and
kings. However, if we want to, every one of us can, on a personal
or community basis, plant forests that are much larger, tremendously more beautiful and much more useful than all the palaces
in the world put together.
Or we can contribute to the preservation and protection of the
already existing larger trees, and ensure that they will be given the
chance to die as slowly as they have lived. This way, we could make
the world a much more wonderful and beautiful place, a place
where every square kilometre would, after a few thousand years,
be full of great wonders and the splendour provided by the trunks,
branches and leaves of ancient giants.
Highly recommended, but only when the programmes are strongly supported by the majority of the local people, and when they are implemented so that they appropriate further
resources into the hands of local communities, instead of appropriating the resources of the local communities into the hands of large
companies or wealthy individuals. If this rule is not observed, the carbon will not be safely locked away, because young forests burn easily.
Food-producing tree species which attain a large scale and which can
easily survive forest fires should be preferred. When climate change
is combated by planting food-producing trees, the resulting fringe
benefits may be larger than with any other option mentioned in this
book. In arid regions and northern lands growing only a small number of very big trees on each hectare is also a good way to improve the
Earth’s reflectivity (see chapter 38). It might be possible to accelerate
the growth of trees by adding some fine-grained charcoal into the soil
(see chapter 15).
Recommendation: 62
9. Sequestering Carbon with Artificial Trees
(Sodium Hydroxide)
Professor Klaus Lackner of the University of Columbia, New
York, whom we have already met, has also proposed the construction of “artificial trees”, in which pumps draw air through
a sodium hydroxide (lye) solution. The process would remove
most of the carbon dioxide in the air passing through the solution. Carbon dioxide would react with the sodium hydroxide and
form a liquid sodium carbonate solution.
The original idea came from Lackner’s daughter, and was based
on a school project of hers. Lackner has calculated that each artificial tree could annually remove about 90,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. He says that the captured carbon dioxide
could then be sequestered for example in the deep rock layers at
the bottom of the sea.
The method would probably work, but it is far too
expensive to be recommended. Complex artificial trees are much more
expensive to “plant” than ordinary trees, and managing huge lakes of
lye, drilling holes at the sea bottom and transporting the captured carbon would not be cheap, either.
Recommendation: 10. Storing Carbon in Piles of Wood and Branches
In the northern areas, which have no termites or other insects that
consume dry wood, the carbon stored in wood or in other kinds of
biomass will not decompose as long as its moisture content is kept
below 15 per cent. In practise even keeping the moisture content
below 20 per cent is enough.
This means that in such northern, “non-termitic” climate zones
absorbing and storing carbon from the atmosphere is very easy,
indeed. Split logs or logs from which the bark has been removed,
tree branches and crowns, stumps or any other biomass just has
to be collected to large piles resembling huge anthills. The piles
have to be so large that the rain falling on them will not be able to
maintain a higher than 20 per cent moisture level. The piles have
63
to be established on rocks to prevent the wood from seeping moisture from the ground. And the piles must not be so large that they
become too compressed and the wind can no longer pass through
them and dry the wood. Any amount of wood and biomass can
be stored this way. It cannot be preserved for ever, but this does
not matter if new biomass is added in the same pile, every now
and then. The average store of carbon on each hectare will keep on
growing as long as the decomposition of the existing matter is less
than the addition of new material.
One option is to expand the households’ stores of firewood. If
each rural house increased its store of firewood so that it would
be enough to last for five or ten years, instead of the normal two
or three years, a lot of carbon could be taken out from the atmosphere.
Recommendation: Field trials conducted by the author in Tammisaari,
Asikkala and Pelkosenniemi (three municipalities of Finland) have
been promising. However, it may not be advisable to give a very prominent role for this method, because such piles of dry wood can easily
burn in a forest fire.
11. Storing Carbon in Anthills
But what if we want to preserve the carbon in very small pieces
of biomass? Like leaves, leafstalks, needles and tiny bits of small
branches?
Organizing such matter so that it will not decompose and
release its carbon content into the air as carbon dioxide requires a
lot of labour. And I mean REALLY a lot. This is clearly impossible
for us. We need help, here!
We have to turn to the ants.
There are a lot of ants in the world. Perhaps not a billion billion, as some people have claimed, but quite a few anyway. And the
ants are really tough guys, a fact that is self-evident for every child
who has watched them. If you do not believe me, just take a tree
trunk that has a diameter equivalent to your own body and which
is a couple of times longer than you, and then carry it for twenty
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kilometres before the sunset, without the assistance of any technical equipment like winches or trucks. If you cannot carry the
timber for this long, or if you will not be able to move it even a
tiny bit, you’ll understand what I mean when I say that it is worth
treating ants with some respect.
It seems that ants have been seriously concerned about the
possibility of a runaway greenhouse effect for at least ninety million years, because all this time they have been struggling to
reduce the methane and carbon dioxide concentrations in our
atmosphere. Without ants there might be a ten-fold number of
constantly flatulating (farting) termites, which really do produce
a lot of methane. For instance tropical rainforests would be filled
with termites. Ants have replaced the termites on vast tracts of
land, and they only produce carbon dioxide in their digestive systems, instead of methane. Unlike termites, ants cannot eat wood.
By eradicating termites from the northern areas and from the
high mountain ranges ants have essentially protected and preserved vast masses of carbon stored in dead wood and plant matter in these regions. At the same time, they have also protected our
wooden buildings and books from termites, and thus enabled the
development of our civilization. Moreover, many ant species spend
a major part of their time in a systematic effort to sequester more
carbon dioxide in their mounds.
If we compare the ants’ achievements with what our own governments have this far done in the fight against global warming, we soon realize that our importance in the struggle has been
minuscule. Our own programmes are totally dwarfed by what the
ants have done. Not to mention the teeny-tiny almost meaningless but still somewhat awkward fact that we have been the actual
cause of the present climatic crises.
From this perspective it is more than a little unfair that the currently existing research literature only remarks that the mounds of
northern red wood ants do not have much significance as carbon
stores.
What an outrage! All right, it is true that according to the few
studies which have been conducted about the subject, red wood
ant mounds typically contain less than one ton of carbon per hectare of forest. However, we should also ask why there are, nowa65
days, so few larger mounds in our forests.
The red wood ant societies are very impressive, they can consist of hundreds or even thousands of separate mounds linked to
each other by a network of highways, and the number of individuals belonging to the same empire can amount to hundreds of millions. Very large individual mounds can have a population of two
million. Because each large mound contains hundreds of different
queens, it can exist for hundreds or theoretically even thousands
of years. If the ant societies will be left in peace for hund-reds of
years the mounds can grow very large. In the Auttiköngäs forest
conservation area in Southern Lapland there is an old red wood
ant mound which is about three and a half metres high and six or
seven metres wide. Only the very top of the mound is alive with
ants but there is a giant pile of partly decomposed organic matter
under it.
Red wood ants can preserve in their mounds many kinds of
organic stuff which would otherwise decompose quickly, like pine
and spruce needles and tiny pieces of wood, moss and plant leaves.
This happens because ants regulate the humidity of the nest. They
keep the cover of the mound almost completely water-tight so that
the moisture content inside the mound is typically less than five
per cent, much lower than what the various organisms decomposing litter would require.
However, red wood ants have many dangerous enemies. Badgers, raccoon dogs, wild boars, domesticated dogs and several different woodpecker species often attack the mounds and
cause immense damage. A brown bear can sometimes destroy a
whole empire, strolling from one mound to the next, levelling the
mounds with its enormously powerful paws, like the horror film
monster Godzilla always does in Tokyo.
And then we have the ants’ worst enemy, a species known as
Homo non-sapiens, or as the non-thinking human. We tend to
manage most of our remaining forest lands as commercial forests, which means removing the trees immediately after they have
grown a little bit. When a forest is clear-cut the ants lose their most
important source of food, the excreta of the aphids – the cows of
the ants – living in the trees. Also, the soil often becomes too dry
during summer. Alternatively, water level in the ground can rise
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too much during autumn or winter. In any case: clear-cutting the
forest destroys the ant colonies. The very young forests, on the
other hand, are then a bit too thick for the ants, the mounds do
not get enough sunlight and warmth. The mounds really start to
grow well only after the forest has been thinned a couple of times,
but then they only have a few decades left before the rest of the
trees will be clear-cut and the mounds are once again destroyed.
For this reason there only is about one ton of carbon stored in
the red wood ant mounds on each hectare of forest, instead of fifty
tonnes or more.
It might be unrealistic to propose a total ban on all commercial logging to protect the red wood ants, but it would be possible to choose lets say ten anthills per hectare for protection, and
leave at least one spruce tree standing near each of them. The
shade and food (aphid herds) provided by even a single standing
tree might be sufficient to keep the mound alive over the most difficult period. Such an arrangement could finally produce a relatively large additional store of carbon, perhaps 50 tons per hectare. There are a few thousand million hectares of northern lands
with red wood ants that construct large mounds, so a lot could be
done just by enacting laws that required the forest owners and loggers to ensure the protection of a certain number of red wood ant
mounds for each forest hectare (when logging is done in an area
which belongs to a major ant colony).
I have personally initiated about a thousand field experiments
in which both large, coarse litter (stumps, large branches, small
branches, cones etc) and fine litter (needles, leaves etc) have been
deposited on top of red forest ant mounds by a human actor. A
human can make a big pile of loose branches in half an hour and
collect a substantial amount of pine or spruce needles with a rake
in a couple of minutes. The organizing and arranging of the millions of needles so that they will not decompose requires, from a
human viewpoint, too much labour, but ants are very good and
efficient in this kind of work.
According to these field trials the hundreds of thousands of
workers of a red wood ant colony are capable of organizing a surprisingly large amount of needles and integrating them into the
structures of their nest mound in a single day if the stuff is loaded
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on top of the nest or very close to it. This kind of human help can
be clearly beneficial for the colony, if too much stuff will not be
dumped at the southern side of the mound at once. One 30-centimeter-high and 60-centimeter-wide anthill became a 1.5-metrehigh and 2.5-metre-wide mound in two years when it got a little
bit help from human friends. The population of the mound grew
dramatically, the highways stretching out from the nest became
longer and the density of traffic was greatly increased. There were
also a number of new highways – intercity 1, intercity 2, intercity 3
and intercity 4 – linking the mound with other, nearby metropolitan areas.
I have been planning to expand this research programme still
a little bit more, because I have become intrigued by the notion
of having a thousand million small research assistants in a serious carbon sequestration research programme. At the moment I
still have somewhat less staff, but the project is already employing many more research assistants than the combined human staff
in all of the world’s universities. Also my wife has by now realized
that when I say that I am leaving for the construction site with the
boys, this is not a code for going out boozing.
The ant population of our planet weighs about as much as
humanity, and many of the red wood ant individuals spend most
of their lives in an effort to store organic matter (carbon) into their
mounds, away from the atmosphere. On a weight-by-weight basis
the ants are much more efficient than humans, as we cannot run
fast carrying thick ten-metre-long logs on our backs.
So perhaps we should pay some attention to whether it would
be possible to fight global warming through different types of
human-ant-partnerships. If there are, in any case, about one hundred million billion guys who are already doing their utmost to
sequester some carbon out of the atmosphere, why shouldn’t we
join our hands with them, even if they are a bit smaller than ourselves?
It is also possible to use a red wood ant mound as a dumping
ground for all kinds of organic stuff. What the ants will not eat
they will preserve and integrate into the structures of the nest, so
that the carbon stays out from the atmosphere.
There are important fringe benefits. A single red wood ant
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mound with half a million ants consumes about 100,000 caterpillars and other insects in a day. Because of this red wood ant colonies protect the forests, very efficiently, against damage done by
various insects. The effect has real economic significance, because
a surprisingly large percentage of the wood crop in a forest is often
destroyed by insects. For this reason German and Polish foresters have often protected large ant mounds from woodpeckers
and wild boars by placing wire meshes or wooden grids on top of
them.
The same result can be achieved also by placing a few large tree
branches on top of the mound. According to the experience of the
author, a few branches are normally enough to discourage badgers, racoon dogs and woodpeckers from doing any major damage. However, a badger only weighs about ten kilograms. To discourage a 200-kilogram bear it is necessary to use a much larger
amount of branches.
It seems that the red wood ants are also very effective in controlling ticks. The yard of our house belongs to a vast red wood
ant empire consisting of a few hundred mounds and perhaps a
few tens of millions of individuals. During some seasons the yard
is visited by roe deer, white-tailed deer, badgers, foxes and hare
almost every night and often even in full daylight. In Southern
Finland a deer typically carries between a few hundred and one
thousand adult ticks, each of which lays about 2,000 eggs. However, during the years 1993–2008 none of the children or domestic animals playing in the yard ever picked a tick from the grass.
I have not found any ticks even by dragging a white towel in the
hay. The only possible explanation I can think of is that the ants
are doing something for the ticks.
Books and articles say that the armour of the ticks is too much
for the ants, but I doubt whether this is true when the ants are
around in large enough numbers. Or it might be that the ants just
consume the eggs, larvae and the nymphs of the ticks. Anyway, the
effect seems to be the same: no ticks. This observation could be
more than a curiosity, because after mosquitoes ticks are the most
important vectors of human illness. They carry for example Lyme’s
disease, a serious illness caused by spirochetes (syphilis-related
cork-screw-shaped bacteria). According to new research Lyme’s
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disease probably is an important cause of schizophrenia, clinical
depression and bi-polar disorder.
The idea should be investigated further. It might
have real significance, if a few million people became excited about it.
The human-ant-partnership rules! Humans have so far only domesticated two insect species: the silkworm and the honey bee. Perhaps we
could also domesticate some of the red wood ant species, so that after
a thousand years some sub-species can only live in the carbon storage
mounds which have been co-constructed by humans and ants.
Recommendation: 12. Storing Carbon in Sea Salt
A small newspaper in Saltzburg, Austria, published the following
news report in 1666: “In the year 1573, on the 13th of the winter
month, a shocking comet-star appeared in the sky, and on the 26th
of this month a man, 9 hand spans in length, with flesh, legs, hair,
beard and clothing in a state of non-decay, although somewhat
flattened, the skin a smoky brown color, yellow and hard like codfish, was dug out of the Turemberg mountain 6,300 shoe lengths
deep and was laid out in front of the church for all to see. After a
while, however, the body began to rot and was laid to rest.”
The human body is largely made of carbon. Normally the carbon stored in our tissues will rapidly decompose after we die and
then becomes quickly released into the atmosphere as carbon
dioxide. But if you happen to die in a salt mine and remain there,
the carbon will not be released. The Celt salt miner mentioned by
the Saltzburg Chronicle story in 1666 had died about 2,400 years
earlier, but his body was perfectly preserved. I have personally
observed dead birds and insects that have become preserved as
stone-hard mummies at the surface of salt deserts.
This is not to say that we ought to start fighting global warming
by burying our dead in salt mines. However, we could store something else in salt. With salt, any kind of biomass can be preserved
practically for ever. If even meat, which normally does not keep
very well, can be stored for thousands of years, there is no reason to
believe that plant biomass could not be maintained in the same way.
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Perhaps the most convenient way to do this might be to grow
single-celled algae in a mixture of seawater and urban wastewater, and then store the algal growth in the salt that remains when
the seawater evaporates. This would be a very cheap way to sequester huge quantities of carbon from the atmosphere. Actually, the
costs could even be negative, much less than zero. If the method
replaced modern wastewater treatment facilities, which are
extremely expensive to build and maintain, it would save a lot of
money for governments and municipalities.
It would also be possible to produce brickets and biodiesel from the single-celled algae, in which case only the remnants
from the biodiesel production could be stored in salt. Algal biodiesel is the most complex proposition, because only some species of
algae have a high oil content, and it is somewhat difficult to maintain the purity of algal cultures. If you only want to grow something that can be dried and then burned instead of coal, it does not
really matter how many different species of algae the birds drop
into your ponds.
However, according to experiments which were conducted in
the US in the 1970’s it is possible to annually produce 70–200 tons
of biodiesel on a hectare of waste-water-fertilized algal ponds. At
that time the production was not yet economical, but the present oil prices are higher. Moreover, if the algal ponds replace an
expensive wastewater treatment facility, part of the savings could
be used to subsidize the biodiesel, biogas or bricket production.
For instance in India only an estimated 13 per cent of sewage is
currently treated. This is one of the main reasons for why approximately one thousand children die of diarrhoeal infections in India,
every day.
Water and shore birds would love these kinds of programmes!
At Lake Nakuru in Kenya there can often be more than two million flamingos and hundreds of thousands of other birds at the
same time. The spectacle is largely based on Nakuru city’s wastewater, running into the lake, and on single-celled algae feeding on
the nutrients it provides.
Recommendation: Highly recommended. Seawater ponds could sequester 100–200 tons of carbon per hectare per year in a way that would
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save a lot of money for governments, municipalities and individual
households. Improved waste-water management is also important to
protect the coral reefs and other marine and freshwater ecosystems.
13. Storing Carbon in Peatlands
The world’s peatlands have been estimated to contain between 500
and 1,000 billion tons of carbon.
This is probably more than the amount of carbon stored in the
world’s remaining oil reserves. The still existing northern peatlands still absorb 50-70 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere, every year, and the tropical peatlands, especially the peatland rainforests, probably more than this. But the overall amount
of carbon stored in peatlands has been greatly reduced, over the
centuries, because of the draining of peatlands for agriculture, forestry and peat production.
The greatest emissions come from Indonesia, where the slow
decomposition of peat and the large peat fires on ten million hectares of ditched and deforested peatlands release 500 or 800 million tons of carbon per year into the atmosphere. During the worst
year, 1997-1998, the emissions may have amounted to 2.8 billion
tons. It is often said that Indonesia’s peatlands might altogether
contain something like 50 or 54 billion tons of carbon, but these
figures seem to be serious underestimations. Tropical peat is made
by trees, and it contains tree branches and roots, as well as numerous whole tree trunks preserved inside the highly acidic peat.
When a core drill hit a tree trunk in the earlier mappings researchers often thought that they had reached the bottom of the peat
layer. Whenever more thorough investigations have been made,
figures have risen.
Earlier it was thought that for instance Merang Kepayang, the
last significant peatland rainforest in Southern Sumatra, might
contain 100 million or 200 million tons of carbon. However, when
the environmental foundation Wahana Bumi Hijau made a more
profound study, together with Indonesian and foreign researchers,
the estimate was raised to almost 600 million tons.
According to the pulp and paper company April the vast peat
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massive of the Kampar Peninsula would only contain 275 million
tons of carbon. A study made by the University of Delft concluded
that if the average depth of the peat was 10 metres and the average carbon content 60 kilograms per cubic metre, there would be
roughly 5 billion tons of carbon in Kampar. This was already much
more than April’s figure. However, in the relatively well-researched
Sebangau peat dome the average depth of peat is 7.8 metres and
the maximum depth 13 metres. In Kampar the maximum peat
depth is, according to unpublished coring experiments, at least
23 metres. When the depth of the peat increases, it becomes more
compressed and its carbon density tends to increase. If we assume
an average depth of 15 metres and an average carbon content of 90
kilograms per cubic metre, the assumed carbon store in the peat
massive on Kampar rises to 11.8 billion tons, 43 times more than
the figure used by April.
Kampar is an extreme case, but it seems reasonable to assume,
that peat fires and the slow oxidation of peat could, according to
worst-case-scenarios, release considerably more than the often
quoted 50 billion tons of carbon from the Indonesian peatlands
during the next 30 or 50 years.
The peatlands of my own country, Finland, contain an estimated 5.7 billion tons of carbon. More than one half of Finnish peatlands have been ditched for farming, forestry or for peat
production. Finland’s 700,000 hectares of peatland fields produce major greenhouse gas emissions (up to eight tons of carbon
per hectare per year, plus a lot of nitrous oxide). In the peatlands
drained for forestry the average net emissions have this far been
notably smaller, because part of the carbon dioxide produced by
the decomposition of peat has been absorbed by the improved
growth of trees. Unfortunately, if the climate heats up, also the forested peatlands of Finland should start producing very large and
steadily growing amounts of carbon.
However, it is also possible to increase the amount of carbon
stored in the world’s peatlands. My forest scientist uncle, Antti
Isomäki, first brought this possibility to my attention, already at
the beginning of 1990’s. In the northern areas there are innumerable sites where it would be easy to raise the surface of the peatlands, little by little, with the same speed as the sphagnum mosses
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can grow, by constructing small dams in strategic spots. When the
surface of the peatland has been raised by two metres, about 1,000
tons of carbon has been stored on each hectare.
Something similar could also be done in Indonesia and in
other tropical countries. If the recently drained peatland areas in
Indonesia, amounting to nine or ten million hectares, would be
restored to peatland rainforests, they would probably begin to
absorb something like 4-10 tons of carbon per hectare per year
from the atmosphere. This process of carbon sequestration could
be maintained for a very long time. Some of Indonesia’s peatland
rainforests have produced up to 23 metres of peat in 5,000 - 10,000
years. Even assuming that the peat in the deeper layers has a similar carbon density than the shallow peat, 23 metres of peat means
up to 20,000 tons of carbon per hectare. If the deeper layers have
been compressed so that their carbon density is higher, which
should be the case, the actual store could be still larger.
If the ditches and channels on peatlands were blocked and the
drained peatlands converted back to peatland rainforests, reforested areas could be used for hunting and fishing, as well as for
timber, small timber and fuelwood production on a sustainable
basis. There are a number of valuable dipterocarp trees that grow
well on deep tropical peatlands and produce highly priced timber. It would be easy to produce good crops valuable tropical hardwood in the regenerated peatland rainforests in an ecologically
sustainable way, without causing large carbon dioxide emissions.
The important things are to use selective logging, so that there will
always a good, protective tree cover, and to transport the logs away
by constructing wooden rails into the forest, instead of digging
channels for the same purpose. Besides the timber species, certain
indigenous fruit trees could be grown on the highly acidic and oligotrophic tropical peatlands.
The combined income from timber, small timber, fuelwood,
fruit, hunting and fishing should be enough to justify the regeneration of large areas of peatland rainforests, especially if people
also received some income from the carbon dioxide that would
be sequestered by the restored peatland rainforests. According to
World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Indonesia may originally
have had two times more tropical peatland rainforests than the
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present 22.5 million hectares, roughly half of which has recently
been ditched and deforested.
This may be a real possibility but especially the
northern programmes ought to be implemented very carefully and no
large projects should be initiated before a number of small-scale pilot
trials lasting at least for a few years have been carried out. If the dams
make the peatlands too wet there is a danger of increased methane
emissions. In tropical peatlands the production of methane and the
risks related to it seem to be much smaller.
Recommendation: 14. Storing Carbon in the Soil
The world’s soils contain a lot of carbon. It is possible to influence
the size of this sub-surface carbon store on all kinds of lands.
In the climate debate it has often been assumed, that the carbon store in the soil will diminish more or less automatically, if the
world becomes a few degrees warmer. The reality is much more
complex. For instance, the Amazonian rainforests stretch from the
Equator roughly ten degrees both to the North and to the South,
and most of the region is only a little bit above the sea level. It cannot get much hotter or more tropical than this, and the area is
not exactly dry, either. In spite of all this, even the Amazonas is
a patchwork of areas with 500 tons carbon per hectare in the soil
and areas with hardly any organic matter in the ground. These differences have been produced by different human management
practises (see chapter 15). This means that humans can, in a very
significant way, influence the amount of carbon stored in the soil,
from the northern areas to the tropics.
Deep ploughing of farmland tends to reduce the carbon content of the soil. The more often the soil is ploughed, the more
important the effect becomes. In Britain it has been estimated, that
farming and grazing lands lose about 0.6 per cent of their carbon,
every year. Especially fields that have been cleared on peatlands
can be significant sources of carbon dioxide emissions. In Southern United States a hectare of effectively drained peatland can produce 17 tons of carbon per year, in the tropics the emissions can be
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even larger.
On the other hand, if a field is not ploughed at all, the soil’s carbon content tends to increase with cultivation. According to some
studies, minimum-tillage or no-tillage cultivation methods can
absorb 500 - 700 kilograms of carbon per hectare per year.
Natural grasslands dominated by strong, perennial grasses
often produce deep black soils known as mollisols. It seems to
be possible to transform even an ordinary field growing annual
crops to a kind of artificial mollisol. The effect is probably the
most significant when strong perennial grasses like switchgrass
are grown.
The carbon content of the forest soils can also be manipulated by land-use practises. Old-growth forests tend to have very
large organic carbon stores in the coarse and small litter, humus
layer and topsoil. In younger forests the amount of carbon is much
smaller. Clear-cutting reduces the carbon stores In the ground
because the soil becomes exposed to direct sunlight. Warmer temperatures accelerate the decomposition of litter and humus, while
there are no longer trees producing new litter. The ploughing of
the forest soil probably has a very strong carbon-store-diminishing
impact, but there is very little research data about this.
Russian forest soils contain, on average, 127 tons of carbon per
hectare, but the current average for the more roughly treated and
generally younger Finnish forests is much smaller. In the United
States P.D. Turner and his co-workers have used a model, in which
topsoil, litter and humus consist 70 per cent of the carbon store of
the North American forests and living tree roots an additional 10
per cent. According to their opinion the above-the-ground biomass of living trees only makes about 20 per cent of a forest’s carbon store.
The only precise long-term study concerning the carbon store
in a forest soil which I have ever heard of has been carried out in
Broadbalk and Geescroft conservation forests in Britain, by the
Rothamstead Research Center. The initial soil carbon content in
these areas was 37 and 26 tons per hectare to a depth of 23 centimetres in the years 1881 and 1883, when the research was initiated. Following natural woodland regeneration, this rose to 81 and
82 tons per hectare in 1985, an average accumulation of 0.5 tons
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of organic carbon per hectare per year. The above-the-ground biomass grew even more, by 123 and 81 tons of carbon per hectare.
No-tillage or minimum-tillage farming might play
a role in removing carbon from the air. Even better results could be
achieved by creating artificial mollisols through cultivating strong
perennial grasses for energy or paper production or for animal feed. In
the long run it might even be a good idea to do some selective breeding
on promising perennial grass species and to develop them as new food
plants which might partially replace the presently cultivated, annual
grains. From the viewpoint of carbon sequestration the best option
might be to develop land-use systems in a sense resembling the West
African parklands, in which pastures and fields are dotted with useful
trees, including baobabs.
Recommendation: 15. Storing Carbon in the Amazonian Way
– the Terra Preta System
Everybody knows that it is impossible to cultivate the tropical
rainforests in a sustainable way. All the nutrients are tied in the
vegetation. If trees are removed and the land cleared for farming
or pasture, rain will soon wash nutrients into the deeper soil layers
where the roots of the plants can no longer reach them.
This has been the generally accepted wisdom endlessly
repeated in innumerable authoritative books and articles. However, there is a problem with this view. For example, in the Amazonas there are large areas which were successfully cultivated by the
Pre-Columbian peoples for thousands of years. The milpas of the
Mayas in the Central American rainforests also maintained their
fertility for prolonged periods of time. All this has been amply
documented, and the facts go against the conventional wisdom.
In the Amazonas there are patches of deep, dark, fertile lands
which can contain up to two metres of soil rich in nutrients,
humus and organic carbon. They are artificial creations known as
terra preta do Indio, the black soil of the Indians, or as the Amazonian dark earth. According to Brazilian, German, Japanese and US
scientists who have studied the terra preta soils, Amazonian peo77
ples used to mix charcoal and all kinds of waste matter into the
ground. Nutrients stuck to the small charcoal particles and were
not washed away or into the deeper soil layers by the heavy rains.
This resulted in enriched bacterial and fungal growth in the
soil and in a gradual accumulation of humus which, in turn,
increased the soil’s moisture-holding capacity.
According to studies carried out by Wenceslau Teixeira of the
Brazilian Agricultural Research Enterprise and by Bruno Glaser, Wolfgang Zech and Christoph Steiner of the University of
Bayreuth, Germany, terra preta is an efficient way to reduce the
need for chemical fertilizers. In the trials the plots that received
both fine-grained charcoal (or biochar) and fertilizer yielded nine
times larger crops than the patches which were only treated with a
similar dose of fertilizer. Such a difference is phenomenal and the
result only applies to tropical rainforest conditions in which there
is a lavish supply of rainwater and sunlight, and where the lack of
nutrients is the main factor inhibiting the growth of the crops. But
also in field trials conducted in China biochar reduced the need
for fertilizer two or three times.
This is a highly significant finding, because the production of
chemical fertilizers consumes a lot of energy and causes large carbon dioxide emissions. Above all, nitrogen fertilizers are responsible for at least 80 per cent of the anthropogenic nitrous oxide
emissions. Nitrous oxide is a very strong greenhouse gas, and
it might even become the most difficult part of the whole greenhouse problem (about the importance of nitrous oxide, see chapter 25).
According to Jim Amonette of the Pacific Northwest National
Laboratory (of the US), the application of biochar can cut nitrous
oxide emissions in several different ways. Biochar ties nitrogen in
a stable pool. When manure and other potential sources of nitrous
oxide emissions are converted to biochar, they will not produce
nitrous oxide. Increased air-filled porosity of the soil reduces both
methane and nitrous oxide emissions, and if plants are able to use
nitrogen and other nutrients more efficiently, less fertilizer will be
needed. According to yet unpublished and still ongoing studies of
other US scientists, it now looks that it might be possible to reduce
the nitrous oxide emissions from agricultural soils by up to 90 per
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cent by adding biochar on the fields.
Terra preta fields gradually accumulate a very large store of
organic carbon. According to studies conducted by Bruno Glaser,
the first metre of an Amazonian terra preta patch typically contains from 16 to 120 tons of black carbon (charcoal) per hectare.
The total carbon store is larger, because the humus also contains a
lot of carbon.
Many aspects of terra preta cultivation are still poorly understood, but it seems that the system could easily absorb at least
500 tons of carbon per hectare in the soil, in the long run probably even more. Only a fraction of the carbon needs to be charcoal.
It could be assumed that the finer the pieces of charcoal, the less
charcoal is needed to prevent the nutrients from escaping.
All these reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and the
sequestration of carbon would most probably come with significant negative costs. A small amount of charcoal costs much less
than a heavy dose of fertilizer, so terra preta cultivation can perhaps save the planet in a way that also saves a lot of money for
farmers and consumers.
The method should assist efforts to reduce nutrient loads and
other pollution entering lakes, rivers and seas. It might be useful
in both small- and large-scale wastewater treatment. It might convert many kinds of wastewater treatment facilities to new carbon
sinks. It might even be an important means to improve the quality
of water produced by different types of dugwells. Charcoal could
be buried in the soil near the wells so that it would sieve the various pathogens and pollutants off the drinking water.
Charcoal is, in practise, non-biodegradable so it will, in most
cases, stay in the soil almost forever. Also the carbon store In
humus seems to be rather permanent, because some of the Amazonian terra preta patches are at least 4,700 years old.
Each year the Earth produces hundreds of billions of tons of
organic biomass – straw, grass, leaves, needles, wood, cones, nutshells, single-celled algae – some of which could be converted to
charcoal. Anything biological can be used as a raw material for
charcoal (or biochar), wood is only one possibility. For instance in
India it has been estimated that between 80 and 250 million tons
of biomass is annually burned on the fields. The global estimate for
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annual biomass burning is at least 7,000 million tons, and possibly 12,000 million, much of which is just wasted. Why not burn
part of this biomass in a less complete way, so that it becomes finegrained charcoal that can be added to the soil?
In this context it is important to repeat, that the total amount
of long-term carbon sequestration in terra preta soils could be
from 5 to 30 times more than the amount of carbon added into
the soil in the from of charcoal. Of course, the carbon stored in the
earth as charcoal is more safely locked off than the carbon in the
thickening humus layer, in bacteria and in fungal roots.
Recommendation: Strongly
recommended. Terra preta is definitely one
of the most promising and exciting ways of absorbing carbon from
the atmosphere. About three billion people, half of humanity, still live
in small farmer families and every farmer would like to increase her
crops in a way that would simultaneously reduce the production costs.
If a kilogram of charcoal (which is cheap) can replace many kilograms
of chemical fertilizer (which is expensive), the method might become
very popular and spread like wildfire on billions of hectares of farmland, pasture and forest.
16. Composting with Thermophilic Bacteria
The Valley of Mexico is relatively dry. As agricultural land it is a
far cry from coastal plains or fertile river valleys. In spite of this,
it gave birth to Teotihuacan, which was one of the world’s largest
cities during the height of its power, 1,500 years ago. A thousand
years later Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Triple Alliance, may
have been the largest city on our planet. There were about 300,000
people living on small islands, in the middle of Lake Texcoco, and
more than a million people at the shores of the lake.
The people living in the Valley of Mexico constructed floating gardens known as Chinampas, meaning a garden of flowers.
They raised fertile mud from the bottom of the lake, and piled it
on top of floating reed beds. According to old eye-witness reports
the floating gardens produced from six to eight crops per year.
They were able to feed one and a half million local people and a
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vast imperial army with a very small area of “land”. Since then
Lake Texcoco has been drained, and only a small remnant of the
Chinampas gardens remains in Xochimilco, at the southern outskirts of Ciudad de Mexico.
The Mexican architect Josefina Mena Abraham wondered why
the chinampas did not spread dangerous diarrhoeal bacteria and
parasites more effectively, even though the channels between the
floating gardens were also used as sewers for toilet waste. She also
wondered why the channels did not seem to produce large quantities of methane and nitrous oxide. It was one of her students who
found the answer. There was a strange, thermophilic or heat-loving
bacterium that grew in the mud, at the bottom of the lake. It was
very aggressive in its prime temperature range, killing both the
methane-producing bacteria and human pathogens. Besides this,
it was very effective in binding nitrogen, which prevented the production of nitrous oxide.
Josefina Mena Abraham and her co-workers established an
organization called Grupo de Tecnologia Alternativa, which
started to develop composting equipment, dry toilets and wastewater treatment systems based on the Chinampas or Chinampera
(both names are used) bacterium. Their toilets and composters
provide obvious and important benefits over the older models.
The Chinampas bacterium makes it easier to recycle the nitrogen in human toilet waste, in cow dung and in other organic waste
matter. In normal composting most of the nitrogen is released into
the atmosphere. The nitrogen-fixing Chinampas bacterium largely
prevents this loss, which reduces the need for chemical fertilizer, if
the composted matter is spread on the fields. This, in turn, reduces
nitrous oxide emissions from the soil.
At the same time, the bacterium reduces the risk of diarrhoeal
diseases or parasite infections. This is a very important benefit,
because diarrhoeal diseases are still the main reason for at least
two million and a contributing reason for four million infant and
child deaths per year.
Composting with the Chinampas bacterium might also be a
new means of absorbing huge quantities of carbon from the atmosphere.
If you go to Xochimilco today, to see the remaining chinampas
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gardens, the first thing you will notice is that the floating gardens
are no longer floating. The small artificial islands have become
so thick and heavy that they have sunk deeper, and most of them
now touch the bottom of the lake. Moreover, the surface of the
islands is often two or three metres higher than the surface of the
lake, even though they are artificial creations that consist of halfdecomposed organic matter, only. In other words: it seems that
the islands have accumulated several metres of dense, black soil in
only a couple of centuries. The chinampas of Xochimilco obviously
contain a phenomenal amount of organic carbon on each hectare.
But…how is all this possible? How can a cultivated field accumulate organic matter with such a phenomenal speed?
We do not really know the answer, yet. But some of the people living in Xochimilco still use the traditional way of cultivating
the chinampas. They collect all kinds of crop waste like straw and
leaves and other organic matter, and then add some mud from the
bottom of the channels on top of the pile. Later they again add a
layer of crop waste, and then a new layer of mud.
It is possible that the thermophilic bacteria eat most of this
biomass and convert it to innumerable new copies of themselves.
The result should be a strange type of humus, much of which consists of living, hibernating or dead thermophilic bacteria. A bacterium that can survive 120 degrees Celsius must be a tough beast
with a rather hard cover. It cannot be expected to decompose
quickly in the soil.
Besides, the Chinampas bacterium goes to sleep when the temperature falls below the range that it favours. It becomes deactivated and begins to hibernate, but it does not necessarily die.
Experiments have shown that it can be dried and woken up even
after a long period of time.
Perhaps we should start using the same bacterium in composting toilets and composters all over the world, and not only in Mexico. This might lead to an accelerated build-up of organic matter in
the soils of our fields, gardens, pastures and forests. The half-decomposed matter from toilets or composters using the Chinampas bacterium is, according to the experiences from Mexico, an excellent
bio-fertilizer, so people would probably use it to fertilize their crops,
wherever this is not prevented by powerful cultural taboos.
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In the northern and mountain areas composters and dry toilets
could also provide a major part of the houses’ heating energy during the colder seasons.
We have been using fire for a million years or so. Because we
have been watching the flame for a very long time, we have perhaps become slightly hypnotized by it. We are very fixed with the
idea that we have to burn wood or other biomass with a flame, if
we want to produce heating energy. However, when we burn wood
or other biomass with a flame, most of the energy content is often
lost with the gases that evaporate from the biomass without burning, or with the hot air streaming out via the chimney. Burning
biomass with a flame also produces soot particles that contribute to global warming and other small particles that are very detrimental to our health. Besides this, wood needs to be split and
dried before it can be burned, and cutting and splitting and storing
wood is a lot of work.
Why couldn’t we heat our houses by burning biomass with
slow heat, with the help of bacteria, the same way our own bodies
produce their internal heating energy? The aggressive Chinampera
bacterium that loves high temperatures and burns all kinds of biomass quickly, would be an ideal component for such systems.
Even replacing wet toilets with composting dry toilets,
installed inside a house, would already provide some heating. But
we could also build much larger composters in the cellar, and use
them to burn both the household’s food waste and a much larger
quantity of other biomass like tree leaves, grass, hay or wood. Such
a system would also produce excellent bio-fertilizer for forests,
fields and gardens.
This may sound crazy, but think of all the benefits such a
change would bring!
In northern areas houses lose a lot of heat with the water used
to flush toilets. Toilets are in bathrooms, and in winter bathrooms
are often kept warmer than many other rooms, for obvious reasons. Therefore the water used to flush toilets is, even during winter, relatively warm, typically around 20 degrees Celsius.
Most of the water going down the drain in our cities has been
flushed into sewers from wet toilets. For example Helsinki, a city
of 500,000 people, produces 260,000 cubic metres of waste water
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in one day. This means that during winter the households in Helsinki might together lose something like 200 megawatts of their
heating energy, perhaps 20 per cent of the total, with the flush
water of their toilets! Another estimate has put the total to 26 per
cent, but this includes the water used for showers, baths and washing the dishes. Our present wastewater treatment facilities also
require a lot of power. In the United Kingdom, one quarter of the
electricity produced by the country’s largest coal power station is
used by wastewater treatment plants.
If we stick with our present approach, we soon need to invest a
lot of money to re-build our sewerage systems. The United States
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has estimated, that by
2020 one half of the sewer pipes in the USA will be crumbling
to pieces and dangerous, because investments in their maintenance have been seriously neglected for decades. This means that
for example the United States will soon have to spend at least ten
thousand billion dollars into the rebuilding of its sewerage systems, and at the time this money has to be invested, the federal
debt has already reached truly serious proportions. Why not avoid
most of this bill by doing things in a more intelligent way?
In any case, we have to replace our wet toilets with dry toilets,
sooner or later, because we are quickly running out of rich phosphorus deposits. Phosphorus is one of the three most important
plant nutrients, together with potassium and nitrogen. We could
soon be in trouble if we keep on wasting our phosphorus. The
most important culprit are wet toilets: after phosphorus in human
waste has been flushed down to a sewer, it can no longer be used
for agricultural purposes, because it has become part of a poisonous sludge that contains high concentrations of heavy metals and
other toxins.
There is one more issue that needs to be discussed. What if the
Chinampas bacterium eats the whole world if we spread it around,
like in those bad science fiction movies?
Luckily, we do not live in a bad science fiction movie. Even if
the reality now resembles science fiction, it only resembles “hard
science fiction”, meaning a sub-genre in which the Universe still
behaves and obeys the laws of physics.
We must remember that we are talking about a thermo84
philic bacterium. A thermophilic bacterium is not likely to cause
an environmental disaster even if we would spread it around the
globe, because it can only compete with other bacteria when the
temperatures are abnormally high, between 50 and 80 degrees Celsius. The Chinampas bacterium cannot spread easily without a lot
of help from humans.
The bacterium must have existed at the bottom of Lake Texcoco for thousands of years, possibly much longer. Before the
Spaniards dried most of the lake and before the American bird
populations were decimated, hundreds of millions of water and
shorebirds must have visited the lake every year, during their
annual migrations. Every single one of those birds must have carried a sample of the bacteria living in the mud in their feet and
feathers, and spread these samples around. So we really do know
that the Chinampas bacterium cannot eat the world.
However, we cannot fully exclude the possibility that the terra
preta/terra negra soils of the Amazonas, Yucatan and Chiapas (see
the preceding chapter) had something to do with all this. What
if these soils are, in essence, a mixture of charcoal and compost
treated with very tough thermophilic bacteria? The extent of the
terra preta soils roughly matches with the area that might have
been covered by the water and shore bird migrations via Lake Texcoco.
I admit this is a bit far-fetched, and I do not really believe in
this theory. But I do think that we absolutely must start experimenting with a mixture of biochar and biomass half-decomposed
by the Chinampas bacterium…
Recommendation: We urgently need more research on this! Many of the
above mentioned possibilities might or might not be wishful thinking.
We really cannot say without taking a closer look.
17. Regenerating the Mangrove Forests
The world still has about 24 million hectares of mangrove forests,
but there used to be much more of them. According to one estimate, Africa has lost at least 55 per cent and Asia at least 58 per
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cent of its mangroves. Many of the existing mangroves are seriously threatened. Mangroves are cut for charcoal and cleared for
prawn farming. This has had devastating consequences for the fish
catches because many commercially valuable fish species spend
one or more periods of their life cycles in the mangrove swamps
and are thus totally dependent on them.
In Thailand it has been estimated that the clearing of 100,000
hectares of mangrove forests for prawn farming has caused an
annual loss of 800,000 tons of fish. Mangroves also form very efficient natural breakers against hurricanes, typhoons and tsunamis.
Even more important is the fact that mangrove forests are very,
very efficient carbon sinks. The remaining mangroves may annually remove around 300 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere and store it on vast mud flats which may finally become
coastal peatlands.
According to one estimate each hectare of mangrove forests
removes, every day, about 110 kilograms of carbon from the atmosphere, roughly one third of which is quickly released back to the
air as carbon dioxide. One third becomes more or less permanently stored in the mud and the remaining one third is dissolved
into the ocean as relatively long-lived organic compounds which
might last in the sea for a couple of decades or for a century.
If this estimate is correct, the regeneration of the perhaps 30
million hectares of mangrove forests which once existed but which
have since then been destroyed might annually absorb something
like 400 million tons of carbon out from the atmosphere, even if
we only count the carbon stored in the mudflats and not the carbon compounds dissolved in the sea water.
The dominant plant in many natural mangrove forests of Asia
is a strange, ancient palm: the nipa (Nypa fruticans). The nipa
palm is a very productive biofuel species. It can annually yield
11,000 litres of alcohol per hectare, twice as much as sugar cane.
It can be cultivated on regenerated mangrove swamps without
changing the habitat in any major way. Cultivation is easy because
nipa grows like a weed and because it does not require chemical
fertilizers. Practically no nutrients are lost with the sap and a mangrove swamp is anyway richly fertilized by sea water. Thus a hectare of regenerated mangrove forest could both annually sequester
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13 tons of carbon and produce 11 tons of fuel alcohol, which could
prevent 7 tons of new fossil fuel carbon emissions.
Whole-heartedly and strongly recommended. This
would be a very cost-effective way to produce biofuels, sequester huge
amounts of carbon, increase the fish stocks, preserve marine biodiversity, protect many endangered bird, turtle and reptile species, reduce
the silt loads threatening coral reefs and provide protection against
tsunamis, hurricanes and typhoons; everything in the same package which comes with a very low cost. Absolutely one of the best deals
available.
Recommendation: 18. Spreading Mangroves to New Areas
Besides regenerating the mangrove forests that have been destroyed
we could perhaps also introduce mangroves to areas where they
have not grown before. Mangroves need tropical or subtropical temperatures and water, but the water can be salty seawater.
There are a lot of hot deserts in the world, so if we can find costeffective ways of transporting seawater to these areas, we could
transform them to artificial mangrove swamps. One option would
be to use gigantic, wind-powered seawater sprinklers (see chapter 22). Another would be to construct large pipelines or tunnels
to transport vast quantities of seawater to inland depressions, areas
that lie deeper than the present sea level. The largest depression in
the world is the Caspian Sea and its surrounding regions, but for
example the Qattara Depression in Egypt is also a major structure.
Recommendation: Not
really recommended. The situation is not quite
this desperate, yet.
19. Increasing the Amount of Coral Reefs
Some branched corals are very productive. They can grow sixteen
centimetres in a year and make six kilograms of limestone for each
square metre in the same time. And we still have about 250,000
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square kilometres or 250,000,000,000 square metres of coral reefs.
Even though most corals are less productive than the recordholders, nobody can deny that corals have created rather amazing structures. Some of the still growing coral reefs are millions
of years old and several kilometres thick. And then we have other,
fossilized reefs which have been lifted up by plate tectonic movements. For example, the three kilometres high limestone peak of El
Capitan in the Guadalupe Mountains of Texas is an ancient coral
reef.
All this limestone contains a vast amount of carbon. Therefore
it has always been assumed, that coral reefs are important carbon
sinks. However, more recently many scientists have claimed, that
coral reefs are, actually, significant sources of carbon dioxide. They
have even measured how much carbon the reefs in a certain area
are currently producing.
When the limestone in a coral reef is produced from bicarbonate ions, one bicarbonate molecule is converted to carbonic acid
and further to carbon dioxide for each bicarbonate molecule that
is converted to limestone (calcium carbonate). So the sea releases
as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as will be stored in
the limestone. In other words, the formation of the coral reefs does
release some of the carbon which had been stored in sea water in
the form of bicarbonate ions.
This part is undeniable, but we should also look at the wider
picture, and consider where has all the carbon in the bicarbonate ions originally come from. A large percentage of the bicarbonate ions have obviously come from carbon dioxide, water and carbonate ions. When a carbon dioxide molecule reacts with a water
molecule, it first forms carbonic acid, and then again reacts with a
carbonate ion, forming two bicarbonate ions. If the same reaction
then happens to the opposite direction, and bicarbonate ions are
converted to calcium carbonate and carbon dioxide, we are back to
zero. No carbon has been sequestered nor produced.
However, this is not the only way to make calcium carbonate
and carbonate ions. When calcium oxide is leached from the rocks
into the ocean, plankton, corals and other shell-forming organisms
can make calcium carbonate from calcium oxide and carbon dioxide. This chemical reaction consumes carbon dioxide. When we
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count all these reactions together, the end result is that plankton
blooms and coral reefs are, after all, a net sink of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
We should perhaps construct platforms that would be shallow enough for the corals to grow on them. This would be a way to
increase the combined area of coral reefs in the oceans.
Actually, it would be equally right to classify protecting and
cultivating corals as a way to improve the Earth’s reflectivity. Just
like plankton, corals produce huge amounts of dimethylsulphide
(DMS), which assists the formation of marine clouds that cool the
planet (see chapter 65).
Recommendation: Coral reefs are important for marine biodiversity, but
it is difficult to say whether making more of them could be a cost-effective way of absorbing carbon from the atmosphere.
20. Adding Limestone into the Oceans
Many scientists have noted that dissolving large amounts of pulverized limestone (calcium carbonate) in the sea water would
increase their ability to absorb carbon dioxide from the air. Limestone produces carbonate ions, and we already know that each carbonate ion can react with a carbon dioxide molecule and a water
molecule to make two bicarbonate ions. So in practise each calcium carbonate (CaCo3) molecule producing a carbonate ion can
remove one carbon dioxide molecule from the air.
Recommendation: The proposed scheme is theoretically possible, but it
would be a rather expensive way to deal with the problem.
21. Greening the Oceans
The US ocean scientist John Martin calculated in the 1980’s that
plankton uses at most one atom of iron for every 10,000 atoms
of carbon, 1,500 atoms of nitrogen and 100 atoms of phosphorus
when they assemble their cells.
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Martin claimed, that because even small particles containing
iron tend to sink quickly, iron probably is the factor limiting the
growth of marine plankton. Martin proposed, that it should therefore be possible to absorb large quantities of carbon dioxide from
the atmosphere just by fertilizing the oceans with iron.
Martin died in 1993, but later experiments conducted by his
successors Moss Landing, Kenneth Coale, Kenneth Johnson and
others seemed to prove that the idea might actually work. In one
experiment half a ton of iron increased the amount of plankton
so much, that about 3,000 tons of carbon was removed from the
atmosphere.
Other researchers have suggested that oceans should be fertilized with urea, because the nitrogen-deficient areas are much
larger than the iron-deficient regions.
Many oceanologists have been horrified by these ideas. They
have emphasized, that it is uncertain, how much carbon would be
removed from the atmosphere, this way. According to some recent
experiments, only a small percentage of the carbon falling down as
marine snow (dead plankton) will be safely stored. Another objection against urea fertilization is that it might increase the amount
of nitrous oxide produced by the plankton.
Personally, I believe that iron fertilization would probably work
relatively well, but nitrogen fertilization might be risky. My opinion is partly based on correspondence with professor Lars Franzen, working in the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Franzen
has taken core samples from ancient peatlands, and counted the
number of micrometeorites, small dust particles that have fallen
on the Earth from space, in each layer of peatland. According to
Franzen’s studies, a large amount of space dust seems to correlate
with abnormally cold temperatures.
Personally, I think that it might be a good idea to conduct
further trials with iron fertilization. If the amount of plankton
becomes larger, fish stocks and perhaps even whale and dolphin
populations might also increase. In numerous areas dolphins and
whales are already competing over the remaining squid and fish
with commercial fishing fleets or with traditional fishermen, and
the problem could become much worse in the future, because of
rampant overfishing.
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If we were successful in our iron fertilization programmes,
there might be both more fish and more whales in tomorrow’s
oceans.
Recommendation: Further trials should be conducted before any largescale programmes are implemented. The cheapest way to distribute the iron might be to produce pellets consisting of fine iron dust
and something organic which would make the pellets float for a couple of months, and to release the pellets in the ocean currents. The so
called Conveyor Belt of the ocean currents and its innumerable subgyres would then take care of the heavy distribution work. The method
might be the most effective in the Arctic Ocean, where there are large
nutrient-poor areas, but where the water is so cold that most of the carbon sequestered by the plankton is likely to become stored at the sea
bottom, instead of only a few per cent of it.
22. Greening the Deserts
In 1991, German professor Ludwig Elsbett, the inventor of turboDiesel and Elsbett engine, and two of his sons, Klaus and Gunther,
proposed an inventive new solution to global warming and to the
world’s water and energy problems. The Elsbetts suggested that
seawater could be sprayed into the air as fine mist in the fringes of
Sahara, with large sprinklers powered with vegetable oil. In 2002
Scottish engineer Stephen Salter, the inventor of the first modern
wave power station, revived Elsbetts’ idea and developed it further.
Salter’s proposal was based on vertical-axis windmills known as
Darrieus rotors, installed on floating platforms.
Perhaps 90 per cent of the water sprayed into the air would
evaporate. The salt in the sea water would be captured inside the
remaining 10 per cent of the water. If the sprinklers were situated
near the sea in a place where the coast is fringed with mountains,
the heavy, salty water droplets would fall down on the slopes, so
that the mountains would soon be covered with a thick layer of
salt.
The salt could then be collected and utilised for different purposes. A small part of it could be used as food salt for humans
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and animals: sea salt does not raise blood pressure quite as much
as the ordinary table salt partly because it is a more complex mixture of different salts but above all because it has a stronger flavour
and is therefore used in smaller quantities. The magnesium chloride could be used in de-icing the roads in the northern areas. This
would make car-owners happy because magnesium chloride is less
corrosive than the usual road salts. Some of the magnesium chloride could be used to make cars lighter, in order to save fuel: magnesium is eight times stronger than steel on a weight-by-weight
basis. Potassium chloride could be utilised as fertilizer.
But these are only the fringe benefits. The most important
thing is that the 90 per cent of the seawater that would be evaporated by the sprinklers would fall down as dew or rain on the other
side of the mountains. The price for each extra freshwater tonne
produced this way would be thousands of times lower than the
cost of freshwater from desalinating plants. Of course it would not
be possible to control exactly where the water would fall down as
rain.
Salter calculated, that if the droplets had an average size of 30
microns, the total amount of water surfaces would increase by a
factor of 200,000. This would greatly increase the evaporation of
water.
The Elsbetts said that the method would make it possible to
cultivate vegetable oil and other biofuels in the world’s deserts,
where nothing grows at the moment. This way it would be possible to replace fossil fuels with biofuels without any competition
with food production. At the same time massive amounts of carbon could be sequestered from the atmosphere in trees and other
plants grown in the desert, and in the desert soils that currently
contain almost no humus. Because there are about six billion hectares of hyper-arid, arid and semi-arid lands, the theoretical potential of the approach is immense.
Similar sprinklers might also be an efficient way to fight forest
and peat fires. Especially peat fires are very difficult to put down.
A large fire, however, causes a strong upward draught of warm air.
This, in turn, creates winds that blow towards the center of the fire.
Water sprayed into the air in the form of fine mist in the areas surrounding the fire would be carried towards the fire by these winds.
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Recommendation: These important ideas should be investigated further.
The proposals by the Elsbetts and by professor Salter are brilliant and
inspiring, and may constitute an important partial solution to the world’s
freshwater crises, which is a great threat for billions of people. However,
it may not be a good idea to install rain-producing sprinklers on floating platforms near the coastal areas because this would increase the salt
content of the surface waters so much that they would finally sink down,
through colder water. Such formation of deep, warm water can be dangerous because it can destabilize coastal methane hydrate deposits and
thus cause both tsunamis and large offshore methane emissions. The
greening of Sahara would have a very complex climatic impact. A lot
of carbon would be absorbed, but the reflectivity of the desert might be
reduced, at least to an extent. This would most probably be more than
compensated by the bioaerosol production of the plants, by the much
increased cloud cover over the desert and by the clouds drifting from the
desert over the ocean and over other land masses, but a better and more
detailed assessment of the overall impact would be useful.
23. Storing Carbon in Clay (“the Cat Litter Method”)
If we take a look at the long history of our planet and at the various mechanisms that have removed carbon from the atmosphere,
one of the most significant has been the formation of clay, meaning soil which consists of very small and fine particles. Clay can
preserve all kinds of organic matter in a way similar to cat litter.
Recommendation: I
am at a loss about what to say about this one. I am
terribly allergic to cats, so I do not really want to promote cat litter as
the main solution to the world’s carbon dioxide problem. But it might
be worth experimenting with clay and different types of biomass,
including poisonous algal blooms.
24. Storing Carbon in Ice
One possibility to preserve all kinds of biomass, from wood and
tree leaves to straw and single-celled algae, is to freeze it. Frozen
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biomass cannot decompose before it melts! In the northern areas
it would be technically simple to produce artificial permafrost, ice
containing a lot of organic carbon. The carbon content in natural permafrost is typically rather low, only a few per cent, but we
could easily make ice blocks which would contain 10 per cent
water (ice) and 90 per cent biomass. Anything biological can be
stored like this, for thousands and thousands of years.
There is, of course, a tiny little catch with this approach. It is so
insignificant, that I am almost inclined to think that it is not even
necessary to…Well, all right. If the ice melts, the biomass of course
begins to decompose. So this may not be the safest imaginable way
to store huge quantities of organic carbon.
On the other hand man-made ice blocks storing carbon could
also act as cheap reflectors sending a lot of sun-light back to space.
So this method is, in reality, also a means to improve the Earth’s
reflectivity.
Moreover, if we stored biomass in ice we would not be much
restricted by the lack of space. We could easily produce artificial
ice domes with the height of a few hundred metres or more. If we
would, as a thought experiment, level the mountain ranges and
liquefy all the gases in the atmosphere, we would get a lake covering the whole planet, but with an average depth of only ten metres.
Of the ten metres only 3 millimetres would be liquid carbon dioxide. The extra 200 billion tons of carbon that has, this far, accumulated in the atmosphere because of us would only amount to 0.75
millimetres or 400 grams for each square metre.
If we made an artificial ice sheet two kilometres high, and
stored 200 kilograms of carbon inside each cubic metre of ice,
we would have stored 400 tons of carbon on each square metre,
a million times more than the average amount we now need to
­sequester.
Recommendation: Not recommended as a method for storing carbon.
However, the approach might work as a way of increasing the Earth’s
reflectivity. In the northern and mountainous areas crops cannot be
grown during the winter, because it is too cold. This means that from
the viewpoint of agriculture all the water that runs down the rivers
during the winter is more or less wasted. It might make sense to divert
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some of this water away when the temperature is below zero, and produce millions of large artificial fields or blocks of ice. In spring and
early summer the artificial ice fields and glaciers would reflect a lot of
sunlight back to space. When the ice would slowly melt it would provide a lot of cheap irrigation water for the crops, and also feed a lot of
water into the ground, and further to wells and rivers.
25. Don’t be a Bio-Indicator – Stop Eating Meat!
Governments now talk about cutting the human-made greenhouse
gas emissions by 60 or 80 per cent before the year 2050. But they
are, at the same time, also talking about doubling the food production – including the production of meat.
It is not possible to fit these two goals together. If we double
our food production without simultaneously changing our eating
habits, we will increase our greenhouse gas emissions, even if we
were simultaneously able to eliminate 100 per cent of our greenhouse gas emissions in all other sectors, including air traffic, shipping, road traffic, construction, housing, retailing and chemical,
steel and cement industries.
We just have to change our eating habits. We have to consume less meat (including fish and prawns), and we might have to
reduce our consumption of rice and milk products, as well.
Many books and articles have said that domestic animals
might be responsible for 20 or 30 per cent of our greenhouse gas
emissions. These figures are, almost certainly, too low. I calculated already in 2008 that about 50 per cent might be closer to the
mark. In 2009 the Worldwatch Institute published an assessment
which supported this conclusion. According to the Worldwatch
study meat prouction might cause 51 per cent of all anthropogenic
greenhouse gas emissions.
Domestic animals, especially cattle, certainly account for most
of our nitrous oxide emissions. When manure drops in wet soil,
it produces nitrous oxide. Above all, a growing percentage of all
nitrogen fertilizers are used to produce fodder for animals that
are grown for meat. According to an often-quoted estimate nitrogen fertilizers are responsible for roughly 80 per cent of the nitrous
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oxide produced by humanity.
The Dutch atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen – the only climate scientist who has ever won a Nobel prize in science –
recently estimated that on average four per cent of the nitrogen
spread on the soils as chemical fertilizer or as manure will finally
be converted to nitrous oxide, instead of the one per cent which
has been presumed by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).
If Crutzen’s calculations are correct (they tend to be), a larger
than assumed percentage of the atmospheric nitrous oxide has
been produced by human activities. Above all, we should expect
even larger future emissions from our agricultural soils. It seems
possible that the nitrous oxide emissions caused by our present use
of nitrogen fertilizers might soon constitute more than 20 per cent
of our combined greenhouse gas emissions, instead of only 6 per
cent, which is the currently accepted figure.
If we keep on increasing our per capita meat consumption
while the world’s population rises to nine or ten billion, and if
we simultaneously start to grow a lot of biofuels and wood using
massive amounts of nitrogen fertilizers, our future production of
nitrous oxide (counted in carbon dioxide equivalents) might soon
approach the current sum total of all human-made greenhouse gas
emissions, including carbon dioxide and methane. The problem
can be reduced by using biochar, but the perspective still looks a
bit depressing if we insist on consuming large amounts of animal
meat.
The digestive tracts of cattle are directly responsible for 20 per
cent of man-made methane emissions, and another 10 per cent or
so comes from decomposing manure. Besides this a substantial
amount of methane is produced by termites which rapidly conquer
the areas cleared for cattle-raising. In tropical areas dense forests
are dominated by ants, while open savannah forests and pasture
lands belong to termites. Ants cannot digest cellulose or lignin and
they only make carbon dioxide, but termites emit large amounts of
methane, which is a much stronger greenhouse gas. Termite-dominated lands are often a by-product of cattle-raising, but the methane produced by these termites has not been taken into account
when the cattle’s greenhouse gas emissions have been calculated.
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Besides cattle, manure and termites, there are eight other, significant sources of man-made methane emissions: reservoirs, the
eutrophication of natural lakes, garbage dumps, rice fields, wastewater from water closets, leaks from gas pipes and leaks from gas
and oil fields.
A large percentage of the methane emissions from reservoirs and natural lakes has, without doubt, been caused by nutrients from fertilizers and manure, washed into the water by rains.
Besides, many reservoirs have been constructed to provide irrigation water for the fields. If we only ate vegetatrian food, we
wouldn’t need as many reservoirs. The remains of fish and meat
dishes are much more likely to end in tightly closed plastic bags
than plant matter, because they easily produce a horrible smell.
This is an efficient way to convert organic matter to biogas, but
the methane annually released straight into the air by all these
hundreds of billions of micro-biogas generators even before they
are dumped into a landfill, has not been included in our official
­statistics.
Then we have the nitrogen oxides. Nitrogen oxides can either
cool or heat our planet. When exposed to intensive sunlight, they
produce ozone. Ozone is a strong greenhouse gas, but it can also
cool the planet by destroying methane. In the mid-latitudes, like in
Central Europe, the cooling and heating impacts roughly compensate for each other, so the net effect is almost zero. In the tropics
sunlight is roughly five times more efficient in converting nitrogen
oxides to ozone, and the heating impact probably dominates.
Nitrogen oxides are produced when either biomass or fossil fuels are burned in relatively high temperatures. Because there
are still relatively few nitrogen oxide-producing cars in the South
– compared with the West – a substantial percentage of the world’s
ozone emissions must be produced when forests are cleared by
burning or when biomass is burned on the pasturelands and fields
in order to destroy weeds. Incomplete combustion of biomass also
produces soot, carbon monoxide and free hydrogen, which gives
birth to global warming cirrus clouds when it reacts with oxygen,
high in the atmosphere.
Meat production is directly responsible for most of the
destruction of tropical rainforests. Besides this, much of the land
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which is cleared for field farming is used to grow fodder for the
cattle and other domestic animals, or soon becomes pasture after
its initial fertility has been depleted.
According to official estimates, the destruction of tropical forests causes 20 or 25 per cent of the humanity’s carbon dioxide
emissions. However, a growing number of studies have pointed
out, that the world’s forests and forest soils seem to absorb from
the atmosphere much more carbon than we have thought (see
chapter 8).
If the carbon sinks are larger than we have assumed, there must
also be additional sources of carbon dioxide, which have not been
included in the statistics. Most of this “missing” carbon dioxide
probably comes from the decomposition of organic matter in fields
and pasture lands. When a forest is cleared for pasture or farmland
much of the carbon content of the trees will be released into the
atmosphere relatively quickly, but the decomposition of the carbon stored in the soil – including the stumps and roots and the
humus – should take much longer. For example in Britain it has
been estimated, that the soils of agricultural lands only lose about
0.6 per cent of their carbon in one year, but that many areas have
now cumulatively lost 50-70 per cent of their carbon store since
the Industrial Revolution. The vast Brazilian cerrado, mostly used
for grazing, has probably lost 30 or 50 per cent of the carbon in
its soils. In other words, it is likely that the forest lands cleared for
pasture or field farming keep on producing carbon dioxide for a
relatively long time even after the trees have been cut. These emissions have not been included in the official statistics, but they
should be of the same order of magnitude as the amount of carbon dioxide which is released relatively quickly when the forest is
cleared.
If we count prawns and fish as meat, we also have to include
most of the carbon dioxide emissions caused by the destruction
of mangrove forests, and the carbon dioxide emissions from the
world’s fishing fleets, amounting to a few per cent of the total.
Among the retail outlets, food shops are the most notorious
energy guzzlers. In the UK every square metre in a supermarket
annually consumes the average of 275 kilowatt-hours of electricity.
This is roughly one hundred times more than the normal power
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use of individual households for a square metre of living room.
The majority of all this electricity (about 64 per cent) is consumed
by refrigeration, which is mostly needed for fresh meat and fish
products. Bread, food grains, tins, fruits and vegetables can be kept
in store even without a fridge. The same applies to homes: individual households mainly need fridges and freezers to preserve meat,
fish and milk products.
Meat and fish have to be transported quickly or frozen, or frozen and transported quickly, which again produces more greenhouse gas emissions. The making of nitrogen fertilizers causes a
few per cent of our carbon dioxide emissions, the heating of cowsheds requires energy, tractors drink oil, and the pumping of water
to the surface in order to grow fodder often consumes a lot of
power.
Most of these emissions enter into the atmosphere because
people eat meat. The production of milk and cheese also causes
greenhouse gas emissions. These emissions, however, are already
significantly smaller, because the animals that are grown for meat
are much more numerous than milk cows, and the young, rapidly
growing animals require much more food than the milk-producing adults.
Thus, if we would get rid of the habit of eating meat we might
actually eliminate one half of our greenhouse gas emissions. This is
a surprising conclusion, but it must be close to the truth, when all
the relevant factors are taken into account.
If all the people living on Earth suddenly stopped eating meat,
literally thousands of millions of hectares of pasture and rangelands, now used for cattle raising, would suddenly be liberated for
other purposes. If for example one half of all this land was converted back to natural forests or to grasslands growing strong,
perennial grasses, or managed as multi-storey home gardens, a
huge amount of carbon dioxide could be absorbed from the air,
and the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere would start to
decline, instead of continuing to rise. Tropical rainforests and tens
of millions of species could be saved.
Besides, meat production is the most important single reason
for our present water crises. The UN organizations predict, that
two thirds of humanity – five billion people – will be faced with
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serious shortages of irrigation water already by the year 2025. The
production of one kilogram of beef consumes between 20,000 and
100,000 kilograms of water.
Many people still believe that meat is an essential requirement for a healthy and balanced diet for us, but this does not have
anything to do with the scientific facts. Only two persons, Paavo
Nurmi and Carl Lewis, have won nine gold medals in the Olympic
Games in athletics. Both of them only ate vegetarian food when
they were training.
Biologically, we are definitely not carnivores, we were originally supposed to eat mostly fruit, nuts and berries. If you do not
believe me, please try to kill a cow or even a lamb with your fingernails, toenails or with your teeth. An 80-kilogram-carnivore
should actually be capable of killing a Cape buffalo. But a carnivore needs some weaponry, something by which it can kill the animals it hunts. We do not have anything even remotely suitable.
Or look at a picture of a carnivore’s, any carnivore’s, mouth, and
then go to the mirror and look at your own face. Leopards, leopard seals and wolves have huge mouths, they are like great slits that
reach far towards the spine on both sides of the head. We have a
tiny mouth, more like a small hole than a slit. Our mouth is not
meant for biting or suffocating a Cape buffalo to death!
Meat is not essential for our health. On the contrary, eating
meat tends to have a cumulative lethal impact on us. According to
numerous different studies made in the West meat-eaters are two
times as likely to die prematurely of cardiovascular disease than
vegetarians. Meat-eaters also have 50 per cent higher cancer mortality. These are highly significant findings, because cardiovascular
disease and cancer have now become the most common causes of
death both in the South and in the North.
Meat contains large amounts of unhealthy fats which block our
arteries, thus exposing us to coronary heart attacks and strokes.
Meat always contains a significant quantity of salt, and more salt
needs to be added to preserve it.
Historically, we have acquired most of our infectious diseases
like AIDS, measles, tuberculosis, influenza, smallpox and polio by
hunting wildlife or by keeping domestic animals. Even toxoplasmosis, which might be responsible for a substantial fraction of
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schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, clinical depression and, by prolonging our reaction times, for a major part of traffic deaths and
other accidents, is most often acquired by eating semi-cooked or
raw meat.
Moreover, if we eat a lot of meat and fish, we will become
a kind of bio-indicators. We will accumulate in our bodies large
quantities of the toxins and poisons that exist in our environment.
As a general thumb rule an animal needs ten kilograms of food
to increase its own weight by one kilogram. Therefore, by eating a
kilogram of meat we will ourselves acquire, on average, ten times
more toxins than by eating a kilogram of plant food. If the animals
have been fed fish flour or pulverized animal carcasses, the density
of toxins can become hundreds of times more than the average in
plant food.
The so called adult onset diabetes (Diabetes 2) has recently
become the world’s most rapidly growing major public health
problem. Already 180 million people in the world have diabetes,
and the number could increase to 400 or 500 million by 2030. The
epidemic is threatening to overwhelm the health care systems of
even the rich, western countries. In the USA, alone, treating diabetes cost about USD 174 billion in the year 2007.
Adult onset diabetes is also becoming more common in the
South. Annual worldwide diabetes mortality, including the deaths
caused by the various side-effects of the disease, is now approaching four million, and it might still triple within a few decades.
It now seems that this massive increase of diabetes 2 mortality
has mainly been caused by environmental toxins known as POPs,
persistent organic pollutants. POPs are a varied group of nasty and
long-lasting organic compounds, including DDT, aldrin, dieldrin,
chlordane, endrin, mirex, heptachlor, toxophene, hexachlorobenzene, PCBs, dioxins and furans. Many POPs have been used or are
still used as pesticides or herbicides, others are created as by-products of different industrial production processes or in waste incineration.
According to studies first conducted by the Korean scientist
Duk-Hee Lee and her co-workers, and later confirmed by many
other groups, people who have a lot of DDT in their fat tissue are
roughly ten times more likely than the average person to get Dia101
betes 2. A high amount of six different POPs increases the risk of
diabetes by 38 times, which is truly a staggering figure and one of
the highest known correlations between a disease and an environmental factor.
Other researchers have claimed that the correlation could only
be an illusion, arising because the body of a diabetic person cannot remove POPs as effectively as the body of a healthy person.
However, according to already existing studies it seems that diabetes does not lessen the body’s ability to remove POPs. In other
words, it does seem that persistent organic pollutants could well be
the main cause of the whole diabetes 2 epidemic.
This is a strong further reason for not eating meat or fish that
has grown in polluted waters. You can, of course, also acquire
enough POPs to get diabetes by eating heavily polluted plant food,
but the risk is much smaller.
It seems that heavy doses of dioxins can also destroy the protective, hard cover of human teeth, exposing them to dental rot.
In Mexico and India regions that have been the heaviest users of
pesticides, have also become the most significant national cancer
hot spots. So we are already talking about a very large number of
human tragedies.
It is possible that the cancer epidemics in the birth places of the
Green Revolution, the global diabetes 2 pandemic and the dioxinrelated dental rot are still only the tip of an iceberg, and that other
health problems will soon emerge and accumulate if we keep on
concentrating even larger doses of environmental poisons into our
bodies. What comes to POPs the time of unpleasant surprises is
probably not over.
Strongly and warm-heartedly recommended. However, for many people eating meat is an integral part of an imaginary
carnivorous identity. Is there a realistic way to increase the popularity of vegetarism? Environmental groups should perhaps join their
forces with Monsanto and other giants of the chemical industry, in this
issue. What if the environmentalists stopped fighting waste incineration, plastic waste and the use of dangerous pesticides and herbicides,
PCBs and dioxins? Environmentalists should perhaps start praising
the merits of chemical fertilizers (other than those producing nitrous
Recommendation: 102
oxide) and support the legalization of DDT (why not?). They should
probably encourage the feeding of fish flour, smashed animal carcasses
and poison-rich fodder to cattle (to me that does sound like a reasonable idea). When it comes to controlling different old and new chemicals and the new nanotech materials, true environmentalists should
blindly and warm-heartedly support the industry line (surely the companies themselves know what is the best for us, we do not, after all,
have all the facts). The dumping of radioactive pollution into the environment should be encouraged, not criticized or opposed. We should
demand lead back to petrol. Conforming to the old industry viewpoints would probably be the fastest and the most convenient way to
ensure that almost nobody will soon have the courage to eat meat, and
to ensure the relatively rapid termination of the humans brave enough
to maintain their carnivorous habits. This is, of course, only a joke. You
wouldn’t think otherwise, would you?
26. Consuming Less Wood-Based Paper and Eating Less Rice
The whole carbon dioxide problem could also be solved by banning rice and paper. This is, of course, not going to happen,
because eating rice is a holy thing for hundreds of millions of people, and because paper is a very useful material for many different
purposes. But we might be able to solve a part of the problem by
consuming less paper, by shifting to ecologically more sustainable
forms of pulp and paper production, and by eating less rice.
Our whole civilization was, for a long time, based on paper,
and we are now producing a staggering amount of the white stuff.
In 2005 the world’s paper and cardboard consumption was 365
million tons. According to the Finnish forest consulting company
Jaakko Pöyry, this should be raised to 494 million tons by 2020.
The production of such enormous quantities of paper consumes a lot of wood. Five cubic metres (five wet tons) of soft
roundwood are needed for making one ton of chemical pulp or
two tons of mechanical pulp. The making of mechanical pulp,
while saving wood, requires huge amounts of electricity (roughly
2.5 kilowatt-hours per kilogram of paper), and the actual paper
mills consume even more.
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Most of this power is usually produced by either coal-fired
power plants or by nuclear power stations. For this reason pulp
and paper industries have become one of the, if not the most
important force pushing for the renewal of nuclear power, including breeder reactors, in the West. But even this is, unfortunately,
only the top of an iceberg.
When trees are grown to produce pulp, a short or relatively
short rotation period is used: the trees are cut and replaced with
new trees as soon as they reach a certain size. This means that pulp
and paper production reduces the amount of carbon stored in the
trees. The problem is relevant at all latitudes. For example in Finland the average standing stock of roundwood in the forests is 80
cubic metres per hectare, only, because of the influence of pulp
and paper industries.
When trees are grown for timber, much longer rotation periods make perfect economic sense, and the average standing stocks
can become vastly larger. According to the existing evidence, the
best Finnish forests grown for high-quality timber, only, could
finally achieve a standing stock of 2,000 cubic metres of round
wood per hectare. The difference is equivalent to 500 tons of carbon per hectare, and this is still only the trunk wood.
In Indonesia the establishment of pulp tree plantations on
peatlands has caused enormous carbon dioxide emissions. On
shallow peatlands pulp production has been one of the three
important factors, together with palm oil and shifting cultivation.
However, pulp and paper industries are the main threat for Indonesia’s really deep peatlands, containing the greatest stores of carbon. It is difficult to cultivate oil palms if the peat layer is very
deep, but certain pulp tree species can be grown succesfully even
on top of fifteen or twenty metres of peat.
The litter, the humus layer, the peat and the topsoil of the
northern forests also contain vast amounts of carbon. The average on natural forests might be somewhere around 200 or 300 tons
per hectare, if we also include the carbon in the stumps and roots.
Pulp and paper companies operating in the boreal forest zone
have coerced millions of forest-owners to concentrate on conifers, because they produce long-fibred cellulose, unlike the broadleaved trees, which produce short-fibred cellulose.
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This is a grave threat for the carbon stores in the forest soils,
because the farther North we get, the more difficult it is to establish a new growth of conifer seedlings without deep ploughing or
without burning the peat layer. Broad-leaved trees like aspens or
birches can produce a new growth of seedlings with ease, but the
battle chemicals produced by the perennial shrubs dominating the
undergrowth of the northern forests effectively inhibit the germination and growth of conifer seedlings. Unfortunately, the deep
ploughing releases most of the carbon in the soil into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.
When northern peatlands are drained to produce pulp and
paper, the damage for the climate is even larger. Northern peat is
not produced by trees but by sphagnum mosses. When a peatland
is drained, trees start to grow better, but the peat begins to decompose. Each metre of boreal peat contains approximately 500 tons of
carbon per hectare, and the oldest northern peatlands are almost
as thick as the deepest tropical peat domes. The decomposition of
the peat is, of course, slower than in the tropics, but it could accelerate rapidly if the northern areas keep on warming. In Scotland
peatlands drained for pulp and paper production can already produce eight tons of carbon per hectare per year, and in the continental USA emissions amounting to 10-15 tons (per hectare per
year) have been recorded.
If the northern forests would not be used for pulp and paper
production, the forest-owners could concentrate on growing
broad-leaved trees for energy or on establishing sparse stands of
coniferous trees grown for high-quality timber. No ploughing or
burning would be needed, and at least two times more wood could
be produced, because in the North broad-leaved trees, like aspens,
birches, poplars and willows, grow much faster than the coniferous
pines or spruces. The wood grown for energy would replace fossil fuels and reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the northern
industrialized countries.
By replacing broad-leaved trees and sparse old-growth forests
with dense conifer stands on hundreds of millions of hectares the
pulp and paper industries have also reduced the reflectivity of the
northern forests. In the North dense conifer plantations have a
much lower albedo than broad-leaved tree stands, natural mixed
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forests or sparse forests. The difference is significant even during
summer and autumn, and very dramatic during winter and spring
(see chapter 38). It probably has major global significance. This
is partly because the areas involved are almost mind-bogglingly
large, and partly because the heating impact of conifers is not distributed evenly over the whole planet.
The whole albedo-reducing impact of the pulp and paper
industry’s dark coniferous forests concentrates on the same Northern areas, where the heating threatens to launch a number of devastating positive feedback loops, by replacing areas covered with
snow and ice with areas covered by open water, dark soils or dark
conifers, and by releasing huge amounts of carbon dioxide and
methane from forest soils, peatlands, terrestrial permafrost, submarine permafrost and offshore clathrate fields.
Because the northern forests can only produce, as an average,
a few cubic metres of coniferous wood per hectare per year, it does
not really make any sense to use them for pulp and paper production. The damage incurred for the humanity via the destabilization
of the climate might exceed the economic benefits by several full
orders of magnitude.
Two more issues should still be mentioned, in this context. If
the tree stands are fertilized, serious quantities of nitrous oxide
will be produced, whenever the soil is wet. In the tropical and temperate regions these emissions can be reduced, by up to 90 per
cent, by adding fine-grained biochar in the soil (see chapter 15).
However, it now seems that biochar cannot really solve the problem in the northern areas, because there are no free, nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the ground. Last but not least, we should remember that paper produces methane in the wet and airless conditions
of carbage dumps. An estimated 30 - 70 million tons of methane annually enters the atmosphere from landfills. According to
numerous studies made in a large number of different countries,
more than one half of these emissions probably come from paper.
Recycling can reduce the need of virgin pulp, to an extent.
Libraries, second-hand bookshops and lending books and magazines to friends and relatives are also excellent partial solutions
to the problem. However, in 2005 for example the USA consumed
almost 300 kilograms of paper per citizen. If this became the
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norm for a future world with nine billion people, 2.7 billion tons
of paper and up to 13.5 billion tons of wood would be needed. In
practise this means that in order to survive we have to replace at
least part of our wood-based paper with other means.
The most important and realistic single solution to the problem is to use some of the crop residues of tropical oil palm plantations as raw material for pulp and paper. The African oil palm
(Elaies guinensis) has recently acquired a bad reputation because
Indonesian companies have established large oil palm plantations
in peatland rainforests. However, it is one of our most productive energy plants. New Malaysian varieties yield 12 tons of oil per
hectare per year, and this is only 10 per cent of the total production of biomass. It is possible to get a roughly equivalent amount
of biogas, as well, and the average production of palm fronds,
palm trunks and empty fruit shells amounts to 20 tons of dry matter per hectare per year.
In terms of cellulose, this is equivalent to 100 tons of wood,
because the woody oil palm biomass contains 80 per cent and
wood only 40 per cent cellulose. Palm fronds and trunks and the
empty fruit bunches are, as such, excellent raw material for most
kinds of paper and cardboard. If the paper or cardboard has to be
very strong, it is necessary to add a little bit of long natural fibre or
a tiny bit of some artificial fibre made of oil, like nylon, but this is
not a real problem.
In other words: if the oil palm plantations were established
outside peatland areas and natural rainforests, they would most
probably provide the best, the most sustainable and the most profitable way known to humanity to produce the raw material for all
kinds of paper and cardboard.
It is probable, that something like 10 per cent of the land area
in the humid tropics will, in any case, be converted to oil palm cultivations within a few decades, to replace mineral oil and natural
gas with palm oil and biogas. It is hard to see what could stop this
process, because millions of Asian peasants have already become
infected by the palm oil fever.
200 million hectares of well managed oil palm cultivations
would also provide, as an almost free by-product, a mind-boggling
amount of cellulose, equivalent to 20,000 million cubic metres of
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wood per year. The power needed for converting a part of this to
paper and cardboard could be produced by burning some of these
crop residues, or the biogas produced from palm oil effluent. If
this is not enough, more power can be produced by solar and geothermal power stations, so that no fossil fuels or nuclear power
will be needed.
Converting oil palm fronds, trunks and empty fruit shells to
paper and cardboard would go far to preserving both the deep
peatlands in Indonesia and the peatlands in the northern forest
zone from pulp tree plantations. It will no longer be economically
feasible to grow pulp trees on northern or tropical peatlands, if
even better raw materials will become available from the oil palm
cultivations, with a much lower price.
The publishers of books, newspapers and magazines, as well as
the retail sellers of food and different kinds of equipment should
gradually shift to buying environmentally friendly, non-woodbased paper and cardboard from such sources. They should, of
course, first ensure that Indonesia and the other tropical countries adopt a strict policy of not allowing the expansion of oil palm
plantations to peatlands or natural rainforests. It is also important
to influence the process so, that a major part of the cultivation will
be in the hands of small farmers, instead of huge corporations or
wealthy individuals.
Newspapers, magazines and books that are not printed on
paper but which can be read by a mobile phone, by an ordinary
computer or by a special reading machine like Kindle or Boox, are
quickly becoming another partial solution to the above outlined
problems.
For instance Boox’ peak requirement of power is approximately 1 watt, but when it is not loading new pages, it consumes
much less. One full charge, approximately equivalent to 8 watthours of electricity (I really mean 8 watt-hours, and not 8 kilowatt-hours), is enough for reading about 8,000 pages of text. If we
assume, that the average 400-page-book weighs 500 grams, eight
thousand pages in the paper form would mean 10 kilos of paper.
If we assume that all this paper were made from chemical pulp, we
could say that making the 10 kilograms of paper required something like 20 kilowatt-hours of electricity and wasted 125 kilo108
watt-hours of chemical energy (the energy content of 50 litres of
wood). If the paper were made of mechanical pulp, it would have
consumed 40 or 50 kilowatt-hours of electricity but only 60 kilowatt-hours worth of wood. In other words, e-books that are only
read once by a Boox, a Kindle or a mobile phone consume 10,000
- 20,000 times less energy than the making of an equivalent paper
book. In the real world the difference could be even more, because
many paper book copies will never read by anybody, and their reference and note sections are seldom looked at. On the other hand,
the manufacturing of the readers of course consumes some energy
and requires rare metals.
The difference with electric newspapers and printed newspapers is not as dramatic, but still major. Google says that one internet search now produces 50 milligrams of carbon. In other words,
you’d have to make 20,000 internet searches to produce a kilogram
of carbon and 20,000,000 to emit a ton. Moving bits through the
internet is more ecological than moving material stuff around the
globe!
The emissions caused by server banks are going to decline even
further, in the near future, because internet companies are developing passive cooling methods and investing in renewable energies. For instance IBM is developing carbon-neutral data centers
and Google has already invested large amounts of money in wind,
solar and kite power. 25 per cent of Nokia’s consumption is green
power. In other words: while the pulp and paper industries are
stubbornly committed to fossil fuels and nuclear power, the internet’s increasing power consumption is making a significant contribution to the renewable energy revolution. Shifting the servers to
colder locations and utilizing their waste heat for district heating
purposes or in greenhouses, might also be an interesting option.
Every magazine and newspaper editor in the world already
understands that the future is in the internet. Most people in the
younger generations no longer read newspapers printed on paper,
like their parents and grandparents did. Nobody knows exactly
when the economic base of a printed newspaper will collapse, but
everybody knows that this has to happen, sooner or later, because
a growing share of the advertising income is disappearing into the
internet.
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In the long run high-quality internet journals and magazines
are, of course, a tempting opportunity for publishers, because raw
material and distribution costs are zero and do not rise with the
number of subscribers. The only problem is that many newspapers originally introduced their internet versions to their readers as something that comes for free, so it is now more difficult for
them to persuade people to pay hard money for a subscription of
an electric journal.
Perhaps luckily, the same is now happening for books, as well.
This might well change the culture, again, and thus release the
newspaper publishers from their trap. In China and Japan the
greatest best-sellers are now mobile books, meaning novels or
graphic novels that people read with their mobile phones, typically
when traveling to work and back. According to one estimate, the
annual sales of different types of e-book readers might exceed 20
million around the year 2012.
Personally, I do not think that the printed book will disappear. But it is likely that bookshops will soon sell both e-books
and printed books. In the future it simply does not make sense
to print all the books on paper because most people live in cities,
in crowded conditions, and do not have the space for many more
printed books. In the future it is likely that people will buy only
their favourite novels and the non-fiction books they use a lot as
printed books. Besides this they will of course give printed books
to their friends as valued gifts.
In other words: printed books will not disappear but they
might gradually become luxury items that will be appreciated and
valued more than now.
Something similar should happen to rice, as well. At the
moment rice is the staple food for approximately two billion people. This is a serious problem, for a number of reasons.
Rice consumes a lot of water, more than most other crops. It
also produces approximately one fifth of the human-made methane emissions and a lot of carbon dioxide. For example most of the
carbon emissions from Indonesia’s peatlands during the last one
hundred years or so should probably be attributed to rice farming.
The Dutch started to move people from Java to Sumatra and Kalimantan already during the colonial period, and the Indonesian
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government later continued the process through its own transmigrasi programme. In the 1990’s perhaps one half of Indonesia’s
peat had already vanished. The last major project along these lines,
the so called Mega Rice Project in Central Kalimantan, destroyed a
further one million hectares of tropical peat.
Also in other countries many of the rice fields on coastal lowlands have almost certainly been established on ancient peatlands, thousands of years ago. We do not really know, but these
swamps may originally have been somewhat similar to the still
existing Indonesian peatlands. Like Indonesian peatlands, some of
them may originally have contained up to 20 metres of peat, thousands of tons of carbon per hectare. In most cases this carbon has
already been released into the atmosphere, through centuries or
millennia of farming.
If we ate a little bit less rice, we would need less rice fields, and
some of them could again be converted to tropical peatlands or
used to grow sago, moriche or nipa palms or the fruit trees that
can be grown on deep peatlands without ditching them. Very large
amounts of carbon could then be re-absorbed into these regenerated tropical wetlands.
Above all, on a heating planet rice will be one of our most vulnerable food crops. This is partly because of its high water requirement and partly because its flowers can be sterilized by night heat.
For this reason it does not really make sense to grow rice as people’s staple food in a greenhouse world, and base the food security
of whole nations on it. In the future this would be an almost certain recipe for widespread famine.
It would be brainless to demand that people in Asia should
not eat rice, at all. Rice is a holy plant and a very important cultural institution. But it would make perfect sense to aim at a more
diversified agricultural production and to develop the more reliable, more productive and less vulnerable crops as people’s real staple food.
Both rice and books, magazines and newspapers printed on
(wood-based) paper should become luxury products. We can still
have and enjoy them. But they should be respected and valued
more than now. They shouldn’t be something that can be bought
and consumed daily.
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Recommendation: The
production of paper and cardboard from palm
fronds and trunks and from other tropical crop residues should be
accelerated. It is not possible to produce 300 kilograms of woodbased paper for everybody, every year, without sterilizing the planet.
However, the recent developments in China and Japan have probably
already ensured, that nothing like this will ever happen. If the Chinese and Japanese consumers hadn’t adopted e-books read by mobile
phones and by other types of readers with such enthusiasm, pulp and
paper industries would already have destroyed Indonesia’s last peatlands, and released mind-boggling amounts of carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere. What comes to rice, there are other solutions to the problem of global warming (besides eating less rice), but it is important to
reduce our dependence on food plants that are the most vulnerable to
planetary overheating.
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Removing other greenhouse gases from the air
There are numerous different means of sequestering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But can the concentrations of other
greenhouse gases be similarly reduced?
Some of the nitrous oxide and ozone could be absorbed by
increasing the number and average size of trees growing around.
Certain new paints and films containing titanium dioxide can also
remove significant quantities of nitrous oxide, ozone and methane
from the air.
If we construct artificial trees to combat global warming, as
Klaus Lackner has proposed, we should perhaps concentrate on
the other greenhouse gases instead of carbon dioxide, because carbon can be removed from the air by cheaper biological means.
Artificial trees pumping vast amounts of polluted city air through
titanium dioxide-covered cell structures might be able to destroy a
major part of the ozone and methane created in large metropolitan areas.
The Finnish atmospheric physicist Theo Kurten has pointed
out, that methane concentrations in the air could also be reduced,
in an acute emergency, by producing large amounts of nitrogen oxides. Nitrogen oxides produce ozone, but they also destroy
methane. When there is a lot of methane in the air, the methanedestroying impact should dominate. Kurten and Zhou Luxi, a Chinese student of his, have already conducted preliminary investigations on the problem. They seem to think, that the approach might
be useful in emergency situations, for instance if the warming trig113
gers, one day, huge eruptions of methane from methane clathrates
and submarine permafrost.
There might also be ways to increase the methane sinks provided by forest and agricultural soils, but there is very little information about such possibilities.
So what comes to removing the other greenhouse gases from
the atmosphere, options seem to be more limited than with carbon
dioxide. Nitrous oxide could be the most difficult case. Because
most of our nitrous oxide emissions are produced by domestic
animals, special attention should be devoted to reducing the consumption of animal products.
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Halting the albedo changes
Taking into account nights and winters, every square metre of the
Earth’s surface receives on average 240 watts of solar radiation.
A square metre with a 90 per cent reflectivity sends about 215
watts of this straight back to space. A square metre with a reflectivity of 10 per cent can only radiate back about 25 watts of the solar
radiation, 190 watts less, before it becomes heat.
Our present planetary energy imbalance is now about 1 watt
per square metre.
This means that in theory we could balance the situation simply by increasing the reflectivity of large areas of land. If we
increased the reflectivity by 80 percentage points (let’s say from
10 per cent to 90 per cent), we’d only need about 0.5 per cent of
the Earth’s surface. If we improved the reflectivity by 20 percentage points (lets say from 20 to 40 per cent) we would need two per
cent of our planet.
0.5 per cent of the planet’s surface would mean about 2.5 million square kilometres, or a twenty-metre-long and twentymetre-wide square for every person on the planet. Covering a
400-square-metre patch of land for example with highly reflecting chalk or quartz stones or with white bark, or making a slightly
larger ice reflector with a garden hose when the temperatures are
below zero, would not require a very major effort, if all the people
on the planet participated.
This sounds very easy. Very easy indeed. Too easy to be true.
And, actually, it is. Changing the albedo of a whole planet is a
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highly risky business.
The main danger probably is that governments might well
attempt to solve our whole planetary overheating problem by
improving the Earth’s reflectivity. This would be, to use a bit too
moderate expression, absolutely irresponsible.
The extra carbon dioxide contributes to global warming, but it
also makes the oceans more acid and reduces the nutritional values (protein contents, trace mineral contents, vitamin contents) of
our food plants, not to say anything about the fate of the world’s
cassava crops. Therefore, the carbon dioxide problem must be
solved by reducing carbon emissions and by absorbing carbon
from the air. Full stop.
It would also be highly dangerous to cancel the impact of the
other long-lasting greenhouse gases by improving the planet’s
reflectivity.
Greenhouse gases do heat up the lower atmosphere, but at the
same time they cool the upper atmosphere, the stratosphere and
the mesosphere. If we keep on increasing tropospheric greenhouse gas concentrations and just counter their heating impact by
increasing the planet’s reflectivity, we may finally cool the stratosphere so much, that we will lose our protective ozone layer.
The chemical reactions that destroy stratospheric ozone only
take place in very rare conditions. There must be sunlight but the
temperature must be below minus 90 degrees centigrade. Because
such a combination is very rare, only a rather insignificant amount
of the ozone has been destroyed, this far, and the damage has been
limited near the polar regions. If the stratosphere cools too much,
this will change.
The most dangerous way of increasing the Earth’s reflectivity
would be to spread something reflective into the high stratosphere
or above it – into near-Earth orbits or further off into outer space.
Such proposals would cool the Earth by reflecting a portion of the
Sun’s rays back before they have traveled through the stratosphere
and penetrated the troposphere. In such schemes the stratosphere
would, in a way, cool from both sides. The increasing greenhouse
gas emissions would cool it from below, because a larger percentage of solar heat would be absorbed by oceans or by melting ice. At
the same time the reflecting substances in space would reduce the
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amount of radiation passing through the stratosphere.
A complete destruction of our ozone shield would mean that
the shortest wavelengths of the so called ultraviolet-B radiation
and the even more dangerous ultraviolet-C would suddenly get
through the atmosphere. The intensity of the ultraviolet radiation,
or, to be more precise, its ability to burn our skins, would incease
30-fold.
Some of us might survive such a scenario, but 30 times stronger doses of ultraviolet light would be very dangerous for the eyes
of everybody and for the skins of Caucasian and East Eurasian
people. Ultraviolet radiation would also destroy most of our food
crops. Marine food chains would collapse.
The third concern is that the heating impact of the long-lasting
greenhouse gases is cumulative. The extra carbon dioxide, nitrous
oxide and freons will keep on heating the planet for a very long
time.
What if we kept on increasing the greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere for two hundred years or so, and maintained the planet’s habitability by just reflecting some more solar
radiation to space? What if we then suddenly lost our ability to
maintain the sunshade, so that the planet would heat up by ten
degrees or more during a couple of decades? Could we survive
such a scenario, even as a species? I do not think so.
The fourth concern has to do with clouds.
Clouds and climate is a very complicated issue. All kinds of
clouds can either have a cooling or a heating impact, depending
on the circumstances. Both effects are familiar to us all. When a
cloud comes between us and the Sun, the weather becomes colder
because the cloud reflects part of the sunlight back to space. But
during the night, when the sun is not shining, clouds have a strong
heating impact, because they absorb infrared radiation rising from
the oceans and continents, and send much of it back to surface.
We all know that overcast nights are warmer than nights with a
clear sky.
This far everything is more or less clear. But things get complicated when we begin to analyze, how different types of clouds
at different altitudes affect the climate. High cirrus clouds that
consist of tiny ice flakes are not very effective sunshades, so they
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heat the planet more than they cool it. The impact of low clouds,
consisting of small water droplets, is predominantly cooling. The
whiter the clouds are the better they reflect sunlight back to space.
The impact of clouds also depends on the latitude. In the Antarctic even the low clouds always produce a heating impact, even
during midsummer. In the Arctic low clouds have a strong cooling impact in the summer, a mild heating impact in spring and
autumn, and a massive heating impact (perhaps 90 watts per
square metre) during the winter. Elsewhere on Earth low clouds
have a predominantly cooling impact.
The current guesstimate is that when all these cooling and
heating impacts are counted together, a rough global average might be that the Earth’s cloud cover has a cooling impact
amounting to 20 watts for each square metre of the planet’s
­surface.
Many of the proposals described below would cool the Earth
by increasing the amount of cloud cover, by making clouds
more reflective or/and by increasing the average life-time of
clouds. Unfortunately, we do not yet know exactly how the situation would be altered by some of the proposed geo-engineering
schemes. The problem will be discussed in a more detailed way in
some of the following chapters.
Then there is the chance that some of the geoengineering
methods and the technologies developed for them might some
day be used for military purposes. It would not be very difficult
to starve a few billion people to death for instance with systems
that can spread reflective materials on near-Earth orbits or into the
high stratosphere. Or if we drop a thousand tonnes of rock from
the space on Earth, it explodes with the power of 25,000 tonnes of
TNT. In other words: space technologies could easily be used to
vaporize nuclear power plant complexes – or cities.
If we become engaged in conscious geoengineering, we should
also try to design our programmes so that they do not increase the
regional imbalances in global warming. As mentioned above, the
humanity is now heating the planet by 4 watts per square metre
by extra greenhouse gases, black carbon, jet plane condensation
trails and artificial cirrus clouds, and cooling the planet with an
efficiency of 3 watts per square metre by producing sulphur and
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other aerosols that reflect sunlight well and act as a condensation nuclei for cloud droplets. These cooling and heating impacts
are not evenly distributed. Some parts of the Earth are heating up
faster than the others, and some regions might even be cooling
because of their large sulphur, organic carbon and dust emissions.
We are, in effect, tearing parts of the global weather system to different directions, which will probably land us in some major trouble, sooner or later. If we launch major geoengineering exercises
without a proper understanding on what we are doing, we might
end up doing something that makes the problem worse.
But I still haven’t mentioned the most frightening scenario.
Let’s assume that most of the floating ices in the Polar Regions
melt, winters are much shortened and surface melting of the ice
sheets leaves a lot of dust and soot particles and dead algae on
top of the glaciers, making them less reflective than before. Let’s
assume that there are also large eruptions of methane from the
permafrost areas and offshore methane hydrates. Let’s assume
that all these changes in the planet’s reflectivity and the accumulation of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere create an energy
imbalance of 18 watts per square metre, eighteen times more than
the present 1 watt, three times more than the energy imbalance
(approximately 6 watts) which created the last Ice Age.
What if, in our hypothetical scenario, governments would then
panic and eject highly reflecting substances to near-Earth orbits,
like Edward Teller has proposed (see chapter 32). In order to work
the programme would have to use so much highly reflecting stuff
that the average solar radiation would be reduced by 18 watts per
square metre. There is no reason to think that the effort would not
succeed, because the physics of the scheme is, in a way, rather simple. So the overheating of the planet would stop, the melting of the
continental ice sheets would halt, the permafrost regions would
freeze again, and the Arctic sea would regain its floating ice cover.
So, this far everything would be just fine. The vicious heating
cycle has been halted and reversed.
At some point, perhaps within a single winter, the length of the
winter in the northern areas and the area covered by the floating
ices becomes equivalent to what the situation was in the mid 20th
century. But… the reflective substances are still in the near-Earth
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orbits, innumerable quintillions of small reflective particles, and
it will take decades or centuries before they have all fallen down.
They keep on reducing the Sun’s radiation by 18 watts per square
metre and there is no way of collecting them back.
The feedback loops do not stop at what we considered as the
baseline but continue beyond that. Larger and larger areas are covered by snow and ice. Snow and ice reflect more sunlight and cool
the planet. When the planet cools the snow line extends further to
the south and to the north from the polar regions. The result is a
new ice age. Or perhaps even something worse than a normal ice
age.
The Soviet climate scientist and modeller M.I. Budyko noticed
already in the 1960s an interesting feature in his models: the ice
cover that spread too far from the poles finally triggered a runaway reaction. At some point ice started to reflect so much sunlight that the feedback loop became unstoppable and the whole
planet, the oceans and the continents, froze over, within a few
decades. We now know that the Earth has experienced, on several occasions, such Snowball Earth ice ages. It is not unthinkable,
that mingling with the planet’s reflectivity in a way that cannot
be quickly reversed might produce a Snowball Earth or at least a
Slushball Earth Ice Age.
Everyone who has lived at least part of her life in the northern areas knows that it is much easier to initiate a cooling feedback loop than a heating feedback loop. This is because of a combination of two important characteristics of snow and ice. First,
snow and ice are extremely efficient reflectors. Second, the melting of ice consumes a large amount of energy. This combination
can be devastating. In the autumn ten centimetres of snow brought
by a storm coming from the North can make the winter come
two months before normal schedule. On the other hand in spring
each square kilometre of land receives 1,000 megawatts of solar
radiation – equivalent to the power producing capacity of a large
nuclear power plant – during midday, but it can still take weeks
or months before the snow cover is at all affected. The snow really
begins to melt only after its reflectivity has been much reduced,
and then it goes quickly.
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THE SEVEN BASIC RULES OF GEO-ENGINEERING
Because of the slight minor dangers mentioned above, we should
keep in mind seven basic geo-engineering rules.
Rule number one : The carbon problem must only be dealt with by
means that reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
This means cutting the emissions and absorbing carbon from the air.
Rule number two :
To protect ozone layer and to ensure that problems are not only shifted for future generations, measures that
improve the Earth’s reflectivity should only be used to combat the
heating impact of jet plane condensation trails, artificial cirrus
clouds and short-living greenhouse gases like ozone and methane,
and the impact of factors that reduce the Earth’s reflectivity (like
black aerosols and conifer plantations). They should not be used
to counter the heating impact of long-lasting greenhouse gases like
carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide or freons.
Rule number three :
To protect the ozone layer, measures that
improve the planet’s reflectivity must take place in the troposphere, at the surface level or relatively close to it. They must not
take place in the stratosphere or above the stratosphere.
Rule number four : Only measures whose impact can be rapidly
reversed should be used.
Rule number five :
It is better to use measures that have positive
side-effects than measures that have negative side-effects.
RULE NUMBER SIX :
Methods and technologies that have obvious military applications should be avoided.
RULE NUMBER SEVEN :
Geoengineering programmes should be
designed so, that they do not further aggravate the imbalances in
the global weather system (the way the various parts of the atmosphere are being torn to differing directions by negative and positive radiative forcings).
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Many of the proposals. mentioned below violate all of these principles, and should therefore be discouraged.
27. Adding Sulphur, Ash and Dust to the Air
We are already using one geo-engineering method in a massive scale to fight global warming. We add large amounts of sulphur, dust and ash particles into the atmosphere. They reflect sunlight back to space and reduce the amount of solar radiation that
reaches the surface of our planet.
The idea of cooling the planet with sulphur was first proposed, already in the 1970’s, by the Russian climate scientist Mihail
Budyko. Budyko probably was the first person to suggest that it
might be possible to combat the strengthening of the greenhouse
effect by improving the Earth’s reflectivity. We know that his idea
would work, because the sulphur and ash ejected into the atmosphere by volcanic eruptions produces a temporary cooling of the
climate.
The standard estimate used to be, that sulphur and other aerosols may have cancelled roughly one quarter of the global warming. But in June 2003 Paul Crutzen, the only climate scientist who
has won a Nobel price in science, presented new and important
calculations about the subject in a workshop held in Dahlem, Germany. According to Crutzen’s new assessment sulphur and other
aerosols and the clouds produced by them might actually have
cancelled at least one half and possibly three quarters of the warming. In 2005 three prominent climate modellers, Meinrat Andreae,
Chris Jones and Peter Cox, refined Crutzen’s calculations. According to their assessment the amount of expected global warming by
the year 2100 could increase from the official prediction of 1.5 4.5 degrees to 6 - 10 degrees, if the cooling impact of man-made
aerosol emissions was removed at the same time. Most mainstream climate scientists now admit that the cooling impact of
aerosols is probably somewhere between one watt and three and a
half watts per square metre.
If Crutzen, Andreae, Jones and Cox are right, the extra greenhouse gases, condensation trails, cirrus clouds and soot particles
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in the atmosphere and the changes in our planet’s reflectivity now
heat the Earth with roughly four watts per square metre, but sulphur and other aerosols cancel most of this heating, so that in
practise the planet is only heating by one watt per square metre.
Without these effects we might already be in a lot of trouble.
Of course, our present geoengineering programmes using sulphur are not conscious nor based on careful planning. They are a
non-intentional by-product of burning a lot of sulphur-containing
coal and oil.
Theoretically, we could cancel, at least temporarily, also the
remaining part of global warming by adding more sulphur,
ash, dust and other bright particles into the atmosphere. At the
moment we produce between 80 and 100 million tons of sulphur
oxides per year. If the cooling impact of our present aerosol emissions amounts to three watts per square metre, we would not need
much more sulphur to counter all the currently existing radiative
forcings. If the lower estimates (concerning the aerosols’ cooling
impact) are correct, the necessary amounts would be considerably larger. In any case, the more greenhouse gases we add to the
atmosphere, the more sulphur is needed to counter their radiative
­forcings.
So adding sulphur to the atmosphere is a bit like pissing in
your pants during an Arctic winter in order to feel warm. In both
cases the relief is only temporary, and does not really solve the
problem. Sulphur emissions increase the risk of emphysema and
acute respiratory infections, and are at least partially responsible
for hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of premature
human deaths, every year. Sulphur also causes acid rain that damages forests, food crops, buildings and freshwater lakes and dissolves heavy metals into the groundwater.
We could of course spread the sulphur into the stratosphere
or even higher, so that it would come down very slowly. Then
much smaller amounts were needed to counter the various radiative forcings that are heating our planet. But in the stratosphere
sulphur could do a lot of damage for the ozone layer, because the
sulphur droplets would provide excellent platforms for the chemical reactions that destroy ozone. Also, it would not be possible to
reverse its impact, quickly, even if this would become necessary.
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Sulphur particles spread at high altitudes might even act as ice
crystallization nuclei and give birth to cirrus clouds that heat the
planet. Studies related to jet plane condensation trails have shown
that there is a lot of water vapour in the high troposphere but that
it can only produce relatively few cirrus clouds because there are
very few effective ice crystallization nuclei, around. It would be
important to assess these risks carefully before large amounts of
sulphur are spread into the atmosphere. This might also be a concern with the proposals presented in chapter 32.
Paul Crutzen has remarked, that if we decide to use sulphur as
an emergency measure, the best compromise might be to eject the
particles into the atmosphere at the height of 12-16 kilometres so
that they would drop down relatively quickly and not destroy too
much ozone. This could be done in numerous different ways. We
could use ships, rockets or aeroplanes. Even jump-starting volcanoes has been suggested. Adding for instance 0.1 per cent of sulphur in jet plane fuel, as suggested by James Lovelock, the father
of the Gaia Hypothesis, should be relatively effective, because even
the present, minuscule sulphate emissions from air traffic seem to
cool the planet with an efficiency of 0.017 watts per square metre,
according to a new NASA study (see chapter 52).
Because there are options which are safer and which produce
positive side effects instead of negative side effects, I do not think
that we should consider sulphur as the key solution to the climate
problem, with the exception of sulphur spread over the oceans by
ships.
Large freight ships burn heavy fuel oil (bunker oil) which contains, as a global average, about 2.7 per cent sulphur. This produces
15-20 per cent of our total sulphur emissions. However, the sulphur spread by the ships over the oceans probably provides at least
40 per cent and possibly even more of the total cooling impact of
anthropogenic aerosol emissions. The sulphur emitted by ships is
the most important part of our “particle parasol” because ships
often spread their emissions over marine regions where there is
otherwise very little air pollution or bioaerosols, and thus only a
very limited number of cloud condensation nuclei. The sulphur
from ships has a direct cooling impact, but it also assists cloud
formation and increases the number of cloud droplets inside a
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cloud, thus making it whiter and more reflective (see chapter 30).
It might even increase the life-span of clouds by reducing the average size of cloud droplets. The smaller the droplets, the longer it
should take before they can form raindrops and fall down as rain.
Carbon dioxide produced by ships of course has a cumulative heating impact, while sulphur does not stay up for a very
long time. But even assuming that aerosols only cool the planet by
one watt or so per square metre, it should take at least 500 years
before the cumulative heating impact of carbon dioxide from ships
exceeds the cooling impact of their sulphur emissions, assuming
that shipping companies can somehow find fossil fuel oil for five
hundred more years.
Ocean-going ships spread most of their sulphur over regions
where it cannot really hurt humans, crops or forests. Therefore it
might actually make a lot of sense to use ships to catalyze cloud
formation over the strategic marine regions and to halt the melting
of the Arctic. Spreading sulphur over the oceans is different from
spreading sulphur into the high atmosphere, because the impact
can be reversed very quickly If the situation changes again.
However, at the moment governments are moving to the opposite direction. In October 2008 the International Maritime Organization (IMO) decided, that the maximum allowable sulphur content in the fuel used by ships should be reduced to 0.5 per cent by
2020, and to 0.1 per cent in the more stringent Special Emission
Control Areas (SECAs).
It is of utmost importance to reverse this decision before it will
be implemented.
According to one calculation, the ships’ cooling impact would
be about 0.58 watt/m2 in 2012 with no reductions in the sulphur
content of their fuel, and 0.27 watt/m2, if the planned reductions
had been carried out, already at that time, eight years before the
real schedule. So the difference, 0.31 watt/m2, would increase
our planetary heat balance, or the so called global warming, by
approximately 30 per cent. However, this is based on the assumption that the cooling impact of aerosols (above all sulphur) would
currently be about 1 watt/m2, of which the ships would account
roughly one half. The calculation also assumes that almost one
half of the loss of sulphur aerosols would be compensated by the
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increased production of nitrate aerosols, which can also assist
cloud formation over the oceans and so cool the planet.
But if the overall cooling impact of aerosols is 3 or 3.5 watts
per square metre and the ships’ contribution somewhere between
1.2 and 1.4 watts, the planned emission cuts might actually double
the planetary heat imbalance. If the IMO Convention induces the
shipping companies to shift to liquefied natural gas (LNG), which
would probably be the cheapest alternative after sulphur-rich bunker oil, the situation could become even worse. In LNG ships sulphur emissions would not only be reduced to 0.5 per cent but
almost to zero, and the nitrogen emissions would also be 80 per
cent less than with bunker oil, because of the lower engine temperatures. This probably means that, in gas-powered ships, nitrate
aerosols cannot compensate for much of the loss of sulfur. Also the
greenhouse gas emissions would increase, because between 1 and
10 per cent of the natural gas would escape through the engines
into the air as methane. In other words: gas-powered ships might
be the ultimate global climate catastrophe.
Above all, the impact of a sudden removal of the sulphur and
cloud parasol provided by the ships would not be evenly distributed: it would concentrate over the heavily trafficked marine areas
like the North Atlantic. This could speed up the melting of the
Arctic in a catastrophic way.
In other words: a switch to the more expensive distillate fuels
could push us over the edge. It would also add an estimated USD
200 billion into the shipping industry’s annual fuel bills, and
increase the ships’ carbon dioxide emissions, if also the emissions
from oil refining are taken into account. It would be far better to
encourage shipping companies to invest on ducktails, air greasing,
sail kites and other fuel-saving possibilities.
If we want to slow down the overheating of the planet, the
best policy would probably be to keep on using sulphur-rich fuels
in the tropical and subtropical waters throughout the year and in
the North Atlantic, the North Pacific and the Arctic Ocean during
the summer. However, clean fuels should be used near the coastal
areas, as well as in the North Atlantic and other northern seas during late autumn, winter and early spring. Clouds forming over the
northern marine regions often drift farther north, where they can
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then produce a mild heating impact during the spring and autumn
and a massive heating impact during the winter.
The Finnish ship-owner Jussi Mälkiä has remarked, that nonprocessed, non-esterized vegetable oils (bio-oils) might constitute
an alternative solution to the dilemma, if they can be produced in
an ecologically and socially sustainable way. In purely economic
terms, bio-oils should be able to compete with liquefied natural
gas. Burning them would produce nitrogen-based aerosols, ash
particles and hundreds of different organic carbon compounds.
In other words, some bio-oils might produce as many or almost
as many cloud condensation nuclei as the burning of sulphurrich bunker oil, thus maintaining the anthropogenic cloud parasol over the oceans. Bio-oils do not have LNG’s methane emission
problem, and they can also be produced in various carbon-negative ways. The particles can be harmful to people’s health if they
are carried over densely populated land areas, but when they act as
cloud condensation nuclei over the oceans, they fall down with the
rain drops and cannot be inhaled in human lungs.
If the ships were equipped with taller chimneys or with other
devices lifting the exhaust gases to higher altitudes, sulphur particles could be spread still more widely and even more cloud
cover would probably be generated. Raising the sulphur particles
ten times higher would spread them over a hundred times larger
area, even ignoring the impact of the wind speeds, which tend to
increase with the height.
The sulphur content in ocean-going ships’ fuel
should not be reduced (except at the North Atlantic, the North Pacific,
the Baltic and the Arctic Ocean during late autumn, winter and early
spring) before we have once again stabilized the Earth’s climate, unless
it turns out that the same cooling impact can also be achieved by burning bio-oil. The possibilities to strengthen the cooling impact of the
ships’ aerosol emissions by spreading them over a wider area should
be investigated as a potential emergency measure. However, plans to
spread sulphur in the low stratosphere or high troposphere should be
abandoned.
Recommendation: 127
28. Controlling Wildfires
Every year hundreds if not thousands of millions of hectares of
fields, pastures, rangelands and open forest lands are burned accidentally or in order to control weeds or to kill pests and snakes.
Such wildfires sequester small amounts of organic carbon in the
form of biochar, but they reduce the amount of carbon stored in
vegetation, litter and humus. They have a detrimental impact on
soil fertility and thus reduce the future production of fine and
coarse litter, as well as underground litter (fine roots). Moreover,
the fires leave behind a thin but pitch-black layer of soot, which
absorbs almost 100 per cent of solar radiation and which often
covers the ground for months, until the soot disappears under
fresh vegetation.
Improved control of wildfires would increase our planet’s
reflectivity by reducing the land areas covered by a pitch-black
layer of soot. At the same time the store of organic carbon in the
soil would increase, soil fertility would improve and the soot emissions would decrease (look at the next chapter).
Recommendation: Recommended as a partial solution.
29. Reducing Soot Emissions
Most aerosols, like sulphur, ash and dust particles as well as the
various bioaerosols produced by trees, plankton and other living vegetation have a cooling impact on the climate because they
reflect sunlight back to space and assist cloud formation.
However, black aerosols, small soot particles and tar balls,
heat the planet. Even the black aerosols do provide some shading
which cools the Earth. But they also heat the atmosphere like the
greenhouse gases, because their surface is pitch black they absorb
sunlight efficiently. When soot particles fall on snow or ice, they
reduce its reflectivity. Even a tiny amount of soot on the snow can
reduce its albedo by one per cent.
According to some recent estimates the global heating impact
of soot might be about 0.9 watt/m2, which would be roughly one
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third of the radiative forcing caused by the extra carbon dioxide
and other man-made greenhouse gases. In areas where there is ice
even during the summer, when the days are long and the sun powerful, black carbon on snow can be a very important factor. The
extreme case is the high Arctic, with several months of continuous sunlight on glaciers and floating sea ice. According to a recent
study by the University of California, soot might already contribute more to the heating of the Arctic than the greenhouse gas
emissions. Mark Flanner and Charlie Zender claim that soot has
been responsible for 33 to 94 per cent of the warming of the Arctic. It is possible, that the climate forcing induced by black carbon
on snow is three times more efficient in melting the snow than an
equivalent climate forcing produced by the greenhouse gases.
In the Tibetan Plateau the soot on ice has a heating impact
amounting to 20 watts for each square metre during springtime.
On the southern slopes of the Himalayas there must be even more
soot coming from the innumerable small campfires, cooking
stoves, cars, factories and other sources. It is almost certain that
in the Himalayas soot is the most important factor contributing to
the melting of the glaciers.
One of the easiest ways to reduce black aerosol emissions
would be to spread solar cookers and other kinds of improved
cooking stove designs in the South, where about three billion people still cook their food with simple and highly polluting stoves
using small wood, cow dung or even straw and grass. Such cooking methods produce a large amount of soot particles, as well as
carbon monoxide and hydrogen, because the combined burning surface area of all the small branches can be very large and
because most of the cookers used in the Third World have not
been designed to minimise particle emissions and to achieve a
complete burning of the soot particles and the various combustible
gases released from the burning biomass. In many cases the small
branches have even not been properly dried before burning, which
can also multiply the soot emissions. According to one study one
third of the soot particles falling on the northern ices and snows
may have come from South Asia. Improved cooking technologies
would also save millions of lives, every year, because the climatewarming soot particles and tar balls are also dangerous for the
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health of the people who inhale them into their lungs.
Two problems have slowed down the spread of solar cookers
so that only a few million and not billions have been produced.
First, most women in the tropics like to cook inside the kitchen
and not outside, partly because of different cultural reasons and
partly because it is very hot outside, in direct sunlight. This problem could perhaps be solved by planning houses, kitchens and
yards so that they provide some shade for a person using a solar
cooker. The second problem is that solar cookers cannot be used
during evenings, nights or early mornings, when it rains or when
there are heavy clouds. Many women work during the day and the
working days can be long, so cooking is often done after sunset.
For all these reasons people realise that they can only do a part
of their cooking with solar cookers. If people think that they will
anyway have to acquire another kind of stove, as well, solar cookers are easily seen as a luxury. They are not seen as a good enough
investment by the poor and middle-income families.
We should perhaps stop talking about “solar cookers” and
instead call them “multi-purpose parabolic reflectors” or “multipurpose solar concentrators”, thus highlighting the point that they
can also be used for other purposes, with only marginal changes in
the design.
When a transparent bottle is put in the focal point of a parabolic reflector (instead of the cooking pot) the reflector becomes
a solar disinfection device, sterilizing the water and killing all
kinds of disease-causing viruses, bacteria, protozoa and parasite
eggs with concentrated ultraviolet light. This is a much cheaper,
safer and more effective way to sterilize drinking water than boiling it. When hot water is needed, a larger transparent water bottle (for example fifteen litres) can be placed at the focal point of
the reflector. During winter the same system can even be used to
warm houses during nights. If the water in the fifteen-litre bottle is
heated to 90 degrees Celsius during the day, and then taken inside
in the evening, the water will cool during the night and release
roughly as much heat as a 300-watt electric heater operating for
three or four hours. Parabolic reflectors can also strengthen the
signals coming from the nearest radio, television or mobile phone
link station. In the future the same parabolic reflectors could even
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make electricity, if the manufacturers of concentrator photovoltaic cells or thermoelectric cells can be persuaded to manufacture
small, hand-sized or stamp-sized units that can be placed at the
focal points of one or two square metre-sized parabolic reflectors.
A multi-purpose parabolic reflector that can sterilize water,
heat the house, produce warm water, cook, strengthen mobile
phone, radio or television signals and make electricity would be a
much more lucrative investment for the poor and middle-income
households than a similar reflector that is only seen as a solar
cooker.
Solar concentrators can only be used for cooking when the sun
is shining, but this is the time when they really should be used.
When it rains, rain drops wash the soot and other dangerous particles off the air. Moreover, the rising air currents are strong only
during the day. This means that soot produced during night can’t
normally rise very high in the atmosphere, and cannot fall down
over Arctic snow.
It is also important to lessen unnecessary burning of biomass
on the fields. The billions of tons of biomass annually burned produce very large amounts of soot. A much better option would be
to carbonize biomass to biochar, which can reduce the need for
chemical fertilizer (see chapter 15). This would cut the soot emissions in a very significant way.
Anila stoves, cheap household biomass gasifiers originally
developed in Mysore, India, should be spread as widely as possible. The original Anila stove produces a 30-litre cake of biochar as a by-product of cooking every time it is used. Almost any
kind of biomass can be utilised. The stove produces very little soot
and other particulate pollution, because fire is lit from the top
and because the stove is, most of the time, only burning the gases
released from the biomass.
An ideal solution might be to provide each poor household
with a solar cooker and an Anila stove. It is, however, not advisable
to use the stoves inside houses because they can produce carbon
monoxide if the biochar-making chamber is not properly closed.
A significant part of the soot falling on the Arctic ices comes
from Europe and Russia, from tall chimneys, from the cars of large
metropolitan areas, from forest and peat fires and from the fires
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that are lit in spring on the fields.
Soot emissions from cars are the most problematic issue,
because unless we can persuade the world’s upper and middle classes to abandon the idea of a private car (easier said than
done!), reducing the cars’ soot emissions quickly would require
vastly larger economic resources than providing poor families with
cleaner forms of cooking energy.
From an environmental viewpoint the electric car would be the
ideal solution. Electric cars do not produce soot, they do not produce nitrogen oxides that can be converted to ozone and they do
not even produce carbon dioxide if their batteries are loaded with
renewable energy. Besides, they are far more efficient than other
kinds of cars. 80 per cent of the power used to load their batteries
becomes mechanical energy moving the car.
This is much compared to gasoline-using internal combustion engines (20 per cent), diesel engines (30–35 per cent) or even
fuel cells burning hydrogen (40 per cent). Because electric cars are
much simpler and because they have very few moving parts, they
last longer than ordinary cars. Because they are so simple they can
be lighter, which further reduces the consumption of energy. In
Finland it is almost ten times cheaper to drive 100 kilometres with
an electric car than to cover the same distance with a similar gasoline car.
Another good option are the so called Elsbett engines. Elsbett engines have an efficiency rate comparable to present fuel
cell engines (around 40 per cent) and they can use non-processed (non-esterized, triglyseride-formed) vegetable oil as their
fuel. Esterization of vegetable oils consumes about 15 per cent of
the original energy content of the oil, and costs 50–100 euros per
tonne. Above all, when non-esterized vegetable oil is burned, the
soot particles tend to be, on average, very large.
Size matters. From the viewpoint of the climate the average size
of soot particles and tar balls is much more important than their
overall mass. One gram of 0.1 micron-wide particles has, in the
atmosphere, a hundred times larger combined surface area than
one gram of particles which are, on average, 10 microns by diameter. The smaller the particles the larger black, radiation-absorbing
surface area they have in relation to their combined weight, both
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in the air and after they have dropped down, on the snow, on the
floating ices of the Arctic or on continental glaciers. Besides this
small particles can stay up for a longer time than large ones. Large
soot particles fall down in a couple of hours or days, but the much
smaller ones can sometimes remain in the atmosphere for months.
The tiny and very light particles have a better chance of floating far
and falling down over the polar areas, where they can do the maximum damage.
Particle filters installed in cars and chimneys do reduce the
amount of soot emissions, counted in grams. However, according to some studies the number of black carbon particles increases
when filters are installed. In one study particle filters and other
improvements in the engines increased the number of particles
14,000 times, while greatly reducing the emissions counted in
grams. It seems that larger particles act a little bit like dust sweepers, smaller particles stick to them and are thus removed from the
air. Filters are only able to take out the relatively large particles
and when these are removed, the number of very small, micron
and nanoscale particles increases. It is very difficult to estimate,
whether particle filters are helping or whether they are actually
making the problem worse.
Trees planted in cities and on roadsides remove large quantities
of black aerosol particles and nitrous oxide from the air as long as
they keep on photosynthesising and respiring. Northern conifer
species, especially pines, can keep on respiring even when the temperatures are a couple of degrees below the freezing point of water.
Trees are especially effective in absorbing the nanoparticles which
are difficult for artificial particle filters.
It might be a good idea to develop breathing construction
materials that would also act as nanoparticle filters. If the in-coming air entered the buildings through such breathing elements,
both public health and climate would benefit.
Recommendation: We
should pay much more attention to reducing our
soot emissions.
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30. Making Clouds Whiter
The British scientist Sean Twomey showed in the late 1970’s that
the reflectivity of a cloud is influenced by the average size of cloud
droplets. Most clouds consist of minuscule droplets of water which
have condensed on even tinier particles floating in the air, on the
so called cloud condensation nuclei. If the water in the cloud is
divided between a very large number of very small cloud droplets,
the cloud is whiter and reflects sunlight better than if the average
size of the cloud droplets is larger and there is a lesser number of
them.
It has been estimated that in the clouds over the oceans the
average size of cloud droplets is 25 microns, while the average
over land is only 7 microns. This means that the clouds over the
continents are, on average, more reflective than the clouds over
the oceans. John Latham, a researcher at the National Center for
Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, proposed already in
1990 that the Twomey effect could perhaps be utilized in efforts to
prevent disastrous global warming. Latham said that it might be
possible to make certain types of clouds more reflective simply by
adding more cloud condensation nuclei to them, so that a larger
number of cloud droplets would be formed.
In 2006 Latham and the Scottish engineer Stephen Salter,
whom we have already met, developed the idea further. They proposed that the albedo of the marine stratocumulus clouds could
be increased by 1,500 special, unmanned ships that would use
large Flettner rotors – originally invented by the German engineer Anton Flettner – to spray seawater into the air in the form
of tiny, 0.8-1.0 micron-wide droplets. The salty seawater droplets
would act as cloud condensation nuclei, making marine clouds
whiter and more reflective. Even though Salter and Latham have
not claimed so, the extra condensation nuclei might also increase
the average life-span of clouds. The smaller the cloud droplets are,
the more difficult it should be for them to form raindrops, drops of
water large enough to fall down.
The idea might have real potential and should be investigated
further. However, we do not really know why cloud droplets over
the seas are, on average, larger than cloud droplets above the conti134
nents. It may be that this is because the cloud condensation nuclei
over the land are more numerous, or it may be because there are
more giant cloud condensation nuclei (salt particles) in the air
above the oceans. Large salt particles are superbly efficient cloud
condensation nuclei. So it is possible that they just capture moisture so efficiently, that they leave less of it for the smaller nuclei. If
this is the case, even adding a huge number of small nuclei into the
clouds might not change things in a significant way.
When 0.8-micron sea water droplets evaporate, the remaining salt particles become very small cloud condensation nuclei,
less than 0.4 microns in diameter. Such tiny particles are known as
Aitken nuclei. Aitken nuclei are not very efficient in making cloud
droplets. In many clouds they are one hundred times more numerous than cloud droplets. On the other hand, we do know that the
equally tiny sulphur particles in ships’ flue gases do give birth to
clouds.
Salter’s and Latham’s 1,500 unmanned Cloud Maiden ships
would probably cost between 2,500 and 4,500 million euros. It
would be much cheaper to install spray-generating units to all
kinds of existing freight, passenger, research and pleasure ships.
According to a very tentative calculation by the Atmosmare Foundation, a single spraying unit installed on an existing ship might
only cost between 50,000 and 150,000 euros. The only problem with this approach is that freight and passenger ships tend
to flock on densely populated shipping routes. There is often no
lack of condensation nuclei along such marine highways, because
ships produce a lot of sulphur dioxide. In other words the impact
of each spray-producing unit operating along the main shipping
routes would be relatively small.
What comes to spray-generators, it would probably be a good idea to organize a series of small trials to find out how
well the approach works in practise. The best option might be to concentrate on ships that often travel along less densely packed routes.
The more reflective and longer-lasting clouds would probably have the
greatest impact at the Arctic Ocean, because of two different reasons.
First, there is sunlight for 24 hours in the Arctic during the summer,
so the clouds only have a cooling impact. Outside the polar regions
Recommendation: 135
clouds heat the planet at night and cool it during daytime, and these
impacts often (almost) cancel each other. Besides this, the Arctic is the
strategic, key region where numerous different feedback loops (including the loss of ice and snow cover, the strengthening formation of winter-time clouds and the growing greenhouse gas emissions from seabed, peatlands, forest soils and permafrost) are already accelerating the
warming. However, it must be kept in mind that increasing the reflectivity or life-span of clouds in the northern areas during late autumn,
winter and early spring would produce a heating instead of a cooling impact. All these points are also important in relation to the ideas
introduced in chapters 27, 31 and 65.
31. Spreading Out the Shipping Routes
Maritime traffic concentrates on a small number of densely packed
shipping routes between the main harbours, because ships favour
the shortest routes. They want to deliver cargoes to their destinations as quickly as possible. Companies that own the cargoes have
invested capital in them, and they can get their money back and
make profit only after the containers have been delivered.
If the shipping routes and ships were dispersed more evenly
over the oceans, the sulphur dioxide produced by the ships would
most probably produce many times more marine stratocumulus
clouds. Outside the Arctic and Antarctic regions, and even in the
Arctic during the summer, this kind of clouds have a strong cooling impact on our planet.
The dispersed ships could also be equipped with devices lifting
the exhaust gases to higher altitudes (see chapter 27) and with Stephen Salter’s and John Latham’s spray-generators (see chapter 30).
If the freight ships of the future had both a diesel engine and
a wind propulsion system like a Flettner rotor or a sail kite, and
if they aimed at minimizing their oil consumption, they would
almost automatically become widely dispersed and scattered over
the oceans. When a ship is partially wind-powered, the most direct
route will no longer be the route that consumes the least fuel,
because wind conditions and the direction of the prevailing winds
also influence the calculations.
136
For a ship equipped both with an engine and with sails or a sail
kite it would often make sense to use a much longer route. This
means that even if the ship would consume 30 or even 50 per cent
less oil and produce 30 or 50 per cent less sulphur and carbon
dioxide, it could still produce (much) more cloud cover. Ships currently produce 1.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide (300 million tons
of carbon) in a year.
It seems that the International Maritime Organization will
force ocean-going ships to reduce the sulphur content in their
fuel to the maximum of 0.5 per cent (see chapter 27). It might be
a good idea to add a separate Climate Protocol, aiming at dispersing the shipping routes, into this IMO convention. The protocol
could give ocean-going ships a special permission to use ordinary
bunker oil, containing a lot of sulphur, whenever taking a lessused route that would carry the ship through a region with only a
limited amount of cloud condensation nuclei. In other words, the
costs of a longer route would be richly compensated by the possibility of using a cheaper fuel. In the northern waters such a possibility should only exist in summer, in the tropical and subtropical
waters it should be available throughout the year.
Recommendation: There should be more research on what would be the
most economical way to disperse the world’s shipping routes.
32. Reflecting Substances in Low-Earth Orbits
The Hungarian physicist Edward Teller, the original “Dr. Strangelove”, is best known as the person who discovered the key principle of the hydrogen bomb, together with the Polish-Ukrainian
physicist Stanislaw Ulam. Teller also suggested that the cheapest
and easiest way to halt global warming might be to release highly
reflecting particles to near-Earth orbits. According to Teller and
two US scientists, Lowell Wood and Roderick Hyde, suitable
materials would include small metal plates, organic dyes, tiny
helium-filled silver balloons and potassium-filled buckyballs.
Tiny particles on low orbits would reflect a lot of sunlight back to
space so that it would not reach the Earth. Teller, Wood and Hyde
137
said that only relatively small amounts of such substances would
be needed in order to counter the warming caused by the greenhouse gases.
If we eject quadrillions of small, reflecting particles on near-Earth orbits, we cannot collect them back before they fall
down on Earth by themselves, which might take anything from a few
decades to several millennia, depending on the nature of the orbit.
Besides, Teller’s method would almost certainly destroy the stratospheric ozone layer. Hydrogen bombs were not the most dangerous
idea invented by the late Dr. Teller!
Recommendation: 33. Moon Dust in Space
Curtis Struck of the Iowa State University in Ames, USA, has calculated that the Earth could be kept cool with Moon dust. Two
vast, permanent clouds of lunar dust particles could be ejected into
space so that they passed in front of the sun once a month, blocking sunlight for about 20 hours, twelve times in a year.
Recommendation: Not recommended. It is obvious that the Earth could
be chilled, this way, because approximately one half of the regolith,
the loose sediments covering the Moon’s surface, consist of fine particles less than 100 microns in diameter. Moreover, because of the continuous micro-meteorite bombardment a large percentage of the regolith dust particles have an alumina or silica glass coating, which makes
them highly reflective. Thus only a relatively small amount of Moon
dust would be required to create a protecting shadow over the Earth.
However, there would be no easy ways of cleaning the dust particles
from the space. They would simply be too many, they would disperse
and they would be in a very difficult place. Also, when reflective substances are put in space, we create a situation in which the stratosphere
would be cooling from both sides.
138
34. Blowing a Comet (or an Asteroid) to Space Dust
We could, of course, take a comet or an asteroid, direct it to a suitable orbit and then blow it to fine-grained ice-crystals and dust.
This would produce a similar, shading effect as the moon dust.
Not recommended, for reasons that have already
been mentioned, above.
Recommendation: 35. A Giant Reflector in Space
James Early of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory of the
USA proposed, in 1989, that global warming could be halted by
installing a 2,000-kilometre-wide solar shield in orbit 1.5 million
kilometres from the Earth. This giant reflector could be placed in
a Lagrange point (Lagrange 1) where the gravitational fields of the
Earth and the Sun cancel each other. In other words, the reflector
would remain in the same place, and it could be used to reduce the
amount of sunlight falling on Earth by two per cent or so. According to Early the project would only cost 1,000 or 10,000 billion
dollars.
Not recommended. The scheme would reflect sunlight back above the stratosphere. Also, the technologies required for
this solution do not exist and the final price level might be one or two
full orders of magnitude higher than the mentioned figures.
Recommendation: 36. Fifty Thousand Smaller Reflectors in Space
Other scientists have proposed that it might be easier and cheaper
to install 50,000 smaller mirrors on near-Earth orbits instead
of only one gigantic reflector. According to one calculation this
would only cost USD 120 billion.
Not recommended. The price estimate is ridiculously low, you cannot install 50,000 relatively large mirrors on near-
Recommendation: 139
Earth orbits with less money than what has already been sunk in the
construction and maintenance of only one relatively small International Space Station. Even though it is easier to remove 50,000 mirrors
than innumerable small particles from the near-Earth orbits, even this
would be a big job which could not be done even in a few decades without a large fleet of space shuttles, consisting of several hundred vehicles. The scheme would induce severe cooling of the stratosphere.
37. Sixteen Billion Even Smaller Reflectors in Space
Professor Roger Angel of the University of Arizona has calculated,
that the amount of solar energy falling on our planet could also
be reduced by two per cent with 16,000,000,000 ultra-light reflectors in the Lagrange 1. Each of the glassy reflectors would be 60
centimetres wide, but only a few micrometres thick. The reflectors
would have a combined area of three million square kilometres
and they would weigh, altogether, 20 million tons. They could be
transported to near-Earth orbits by 900,000 space shuttle flights,
but the cost of this would be 29 times more than the present gross
national product of the USA.
A somewhat cheaper way would be to use a gigantic electromagnetic gun, also known as a rail gun, a space gun or a mass
driver, meaning a device which can accelerate loads to escape
velocities with the help of a strong magnetic field. The concept was
originally developed for military purposes by the Norwegian professor Kristian Birkeland, but the science fiction writer Arthur C.
Clarke was the first to propose that a magnetic gun could be used
like Jules Verne had imagined, for shooting payloads to space.
Recommendation: Not
recommended, for reasons outlined in the pre-
ceding chapters.
38. Favouring Broad-leaved Trees, Larches and Sparse Forests
at High Latitudes
Snow and ice typically reflect between 70 and 90 per cent of the
140
solar radiation back to space. Trees have a much smaller albedo,
often less than 10 per cent.
During autumn, winter and spring when the ground is covered
by snow in the northern and high mountainous regions, sparse
forests have a higher reflectivity than dense forests. The denser
the forest, the larger percentage of the Sun’s radiation hits the trees
(patches of low reflectivity) and the less hits the snow (patches of
high reflectivity).
So it might make sense to plant a smaller number of trees per
hectare in the northern forests, 200–600 instead of the present recommendation of 2,500. This would increase the reflectivity of the
forests in a very significant way. Overall production of wood might
decrease a little bit, but the income of the forest-owners should
increase, because remaining trees would grow faster and a larger
percentage of the wood would become timber, which is more valuable than pulp wood. For instance, in Southern Lapland forest
owners get only 8 euros for a fast cubic metre of 16-centimetrethick birch trees meant for pulp production, while the best birch
timber fetches 110 euros for a fast cubic metre.
The reflectivity of the northern forests can also be increased
by replacing evergreen conifer stands by broad-leaved trees or
larches, or by mixed forests. Broad-leaved trees and larches drop
their leaves/needles for the winter, which of course increases the
winter- and springtime reflectivity of the forests. Birches, especially the young trees, even have a white bark which reflects sunlight well because this is their way to defend themselves against
the springtime temperature differences. Young birch trees have a
very thin bark which would easily split if it would first heat in the
spring sun and then cool during the night, when the temperatures
again drop far below the freezing point of water. Young birches
prevent this with a shiny white, reflective bark.
I have established, together with my father, a very sparse dotted
line of experimental plots related to the reflectivity of the northern forests, stretching a little bit more than one thousand kilometres from the Southern part of Finland up to Central Lapland
(in Northern Finland). Finland is a relatively small country, covering less than one per cent of the northern regions. However,
because it is, on the North-South-axis, a long and narrow country,
141
it stretches through most of the climatic zones where the ground is
covered by snow for a significant part of the year, but where trees
can still be grown.
Finnish forest officials, forest scientists and forestry associations have had a very strong bias for primitive, Triassic and Jurassic trees (conifers), against the modern, Cretaceous tree families.
This has been because the Finnish paper industries have been
mostly interested in the long-fibred spruces and pines.
This is a pity, because even in Southern Finland the most productive trees, in terms of fast cubic metres, are aspens, poplars,
willows and birches. Spruce and pine can also produce substantial
amounts of wood when they are at their prime age, but they do not
regenerate from the root system of the felled trees (unlike aspens,
poplars and willows), and unlike the broad-leaved trees they grow
very slowly during the first 5–10 years after planting. When the
whole growing cycle is taken into account, for example aspens
can produce a timber crop in 15–30 years while spruce and pine
require at least 50–60 years.
In the northern half of Finland birches and especially aspens
stand even more supreme over the conifers. In spite of this, broadleaved trees are still treated as weeds, which ought to be removed
from the forest as soon as possible.
Finnish paper industries really want their long-fibred conifers for pulp and paper production, but from the view-point of
global warming it would be better to replace some of the conifers by broad-leaved trees grown for certain types of pulp and
paper, wood-based heat and power co-generation, charcoal, wood
oil (pyrolysis oil), biochemicals and timber. Besides, a part of the
world’s sugar production could perhaps be shifted into the northern forest zone to combat global warming.
Of the dry weight of birch wood about 12 per cent is xylose
and 16 per cent sucrose. In other words, 150 million hectares of
highly reflecting birch forests could annually produce at least 750
million fast cubic metres of wood and 100,000,000 metric tons of
sugar for the world market.
40,000,000 tons of this sugar, six kilograms for each person living on Earth, would be xylose or xylitol. 10–15 grams of xylitol per
day (four to six kilograms a year) has been shown to prevent den142
tal caries, gingitivis and parodontitis, nasty chronic oral infections
which cause a lot of suffering for very many people, and which
also contribute to the development of cardiovascular disease. Xylitol also reduces respiratory and gastric infections.
All these health benefits are based on xylitol’s anti-adhesive
effect, which makes it more difficult for the pathogenic bacteria to stick on human tissues. Such anti-adhesive substances may
become very important in the future, because of the growing bacterial resistance to antibiotics.
We could also grow more apple trees. Apple is the queen of
northern fruit trees. The commercial world production of apples
is now about 70 million tons, about the same as the production
of grapes. Apple is one of the healthiest fruits available for human
consumption, because it contains large quantities of pectin. Pectin removes cholesterol from the blood, and in some studies eating
four apples a day has lowered the bad blood cholesterol as much as
taking statins, the most effective known cholesterol-reducing medication.
Because of their high tannin content, apples can also be used
for killing diarhoeal germs from the drinking water in areas where
such diseases are a major problem. If apples and water are mixed
together, mildly alcoholic or non-alcoholic ciders can be produced. In North America and Europe this used to be the traditional way to save the children and adults from the diseases which
were spread by dirty drinking water.
In theory we could increase the world’s production of apples
10-fold or so by planting 100 million hectares of new apple forests
in the northern regions and on high mountain ranges, to increase
the reflectivity of our planet.
Recommendation: Highly recommended. This might be the easiest and
safest way to restore the reflectivity of the northern areas, and to halt
the melting of the permafrost areas and floating ice masses. Moreover, it would probably be economically profitable to replace some of
the conifers with broad-leaved trees in many northern commercial forests. More field trials with different broad-leaved species in different
kinds of conditions are urgently needed, and can easily be conducted
by individual forest-owners, village communities, municipalities, gov-
143
ernments or companies. In the northern areas the forests on the Southfacing slopes are the most important, because they receive 12 times
more solar radiation than the North-facing slopes and 2.5 times more
than the western and eastern sides of the same hills. During spring, the
most crucial period, the difference is even more because the Sun still
shines from a very low angle. Mixed forests should, in any case, be the
best option in a global greenhouse, because they are more resistant to
storms, fires, pests and diseases than uniform conifer stands. A somewhat similar method might also make sense on the semi-arid and subhumid lands in the tropical and subtropical regions. Especially where
much of the land is covered by well-reflecting sand and stones, the
landscape becomes more reflective if there is only a relatively small
amount of very big, widely spaced trees, instead of a dense growth of
numerous small trees.
39. Stone Mulching with Highly Reflecting Materials
In some parts of the State of Uttarakhand of India there is a tradition of spreading stone mulch, a cover consisting of small stones,
on the fields and planting the cultivated crops in the middle of the
stones. The stone mulch prevents erosion by breaking raindrops
to a fine mist so that they will not explode against the soil surface, like minor bombs, washing nutrients and small soil particles away. Because of the stones a larger percentage of the rainwater seeps down into the soil and does not run away. Stones also
reduce evaporation from the ground by reducing soil temperatures. Because the stones lose their heat quickly after the sun has
set, their surfaces condense significant amounts of water from the
atmosphere when the temperature differences between the day
and night are large. Stone mulching can also reduce the growth of
weeds.
Stone mulching is normally done with all kinds of stones, some
of which are dark or even black. However, if only highly reflective or relatively reflective shiny, white or light-shaded stones were
used, the method could also increase the reflectivity of the farmlands in a very significant way. Limestone could be used as well
as quartz, or the stones could be painted white. Highly-reflecting
144
sea shells might also be an option where they are available in large
quantities.
Even relatively small areas of stone mulched fields can also act
as “aqueducts” or sewers, which drain seasonal ponds of water that
form during the rainy season or during storms. This converts surface water to shallow or deep groundwater. Such accelerated draining of seasonal ponds is beneficial, for four different reasons.
Shallow ponds often evaporate quickly, and most of the water
is lost, from an agricultural viewpoint. When water is deep underground, it can only evaporate after it has been lifted up by the
roots or by people. Shallow, seasonal ponds are important breeding sites for mosquitoes, which spread malaria, dengue fever and
filariasis. Shallow ponds of water also have a very low reflectivity:
they absorb up to 96 per cent of all solar radiation. The quicker
they are replaced by dry ground or by crops, the more sunlight will
be reflected back to space. Moreover, the method might reduce
methane emissions from many rice fields without compromising
their yields.
Highly recommended. All kinds of trials related to
these possibilities, conducted by people in their own gardens or official researchers in their field stations, should be organized, because
very little is known about the possibilities of this traditional technology. The crops should benefit even more than what has normally been
the case, if all the stones were light or otherwise well reflective, because
this would further reduce the soil temperatures and the evaporation of
water from the ground.
Recommendation: 40. Mulching with Other Reflecting Materials
We can, of course, also use other materials that reduce evaporation
of moisture from the soil and that are more reflective than bare
soil, instead of stones. Light-coloured tree bark, straw, reeds and
large leaves are among the most obvious possibilities. This kind
of methods provide an important extra benefit: they absorb large
amounts of carbon from the air. According to the Indian-American researcher Rattan Lal, at the University of Ohio, 1.5 billion
145
hectares of farmlands could annually absorb one billion tons of
carbon, if farmers adopted mulching based on organic matter, notill methods and the use of manure and cover crops.
Recommendation: Recommended as a partial solution.
41. Reflecting Plankton
350 million square kilometres of the Earth’s surface, 70 per cent of
the total, is covered by oceans, and watery surfaces absorb sunlight
very efficiently. We tend to assume, that there is nothing we can do
to alter the reflectivity of the oceans, with the exception of the high
southern and northern latitudes, where it is possible to make more
snow and ice just by spraying water into the air (see chapters 48-49
and 54-64).
But is this assumption correct? Why could we not produce
some kind of “reflecting plankton”, something small that floats on
the surface and has a high reflectivity?
One interesting option might be to grow diatoms, simple single-celled algae whose skeletons are made of natural glass. Diatoms are very small, often less than 100 nanometres in diameter, and many species have highly reflective skeletons (which is
not surprising, considering the material they are made of). If it
would be possible to treat the diatoms so that they would float on
a watery surface, one cubic metre of them could then be spread
over a wide area so that the floating diatoms would form a reflecting surface of ten million square metres. This reflecting surface, of
course, would consist of innumerable tiny reflectors. Or we might
use something else, instead of diatoms.
The idea might be worth further research, because
there is a chance that we might need to do something like this as an
emergency measure. However, this should not be one of the first
choices, and the method should not be used even as an emergency
measure before the potential negative side-effects have been carefully
assessed.
Recommendation: 146
42. Highly Reflecting Films on Water Surfaces
In August 2007 I discussed the ideas related to reflecting plankton
with Rajendra Rathore Singh, a young engineer from Gwalior, in
the state of Madhya Pradesh of India. Rajendra mentioned, that
the oily films that are sometimes used to reduce the evaporation of
water from reservoirs could also play a role, here.
If for instance suitable vegetable oil is spread over a water tank,
it both reduces evaporation and helps in controlling the mosquito
populations. Even if the film of oil is extremely thin, only a few
molecules thick, it still prevents mosquito larvae from breathing
with their snorkels (air tubes). A film of vegetable oil also reflects
light relatively well, while an ordinary water surface can absorb 96
per cent of all solar radiation when the sun is high.
I think Rajendra may have a point, here. There are 45,000 large
reservoirs in the world, and a very large number of smaller dams.
Their combined area is very substantial. Besides this we have a
vast amount of seasonal water surfaces, billions of shallow bodies
of water which only exist during the rainy season. This category
includes most of the world’s rice fields. If paddy rice fields were
equipped with a thin layer of non-poisonous and biodegradable
oil, they would probably provide better yields, because less water
would evaporate directly into the air, without being first used by
the rice plants. At the same time reflectivity could be improved on
hundreds of millions of hectares of land during the rainy season.
Seasonal ponds are important breeding grounds for mosquitoes,
which spread malaria, filariasis, dengue fever and a large number of
other diseases. According to some major new studies, the world’s
malaria mortality is still seriously underreported. Malaria also kills
in many undirect ways. Humans cannot really develop an immunity
against Plasmodium falciparum, the most lethal form of malaria.
“Immunity” to falciparum malaria only means that our immunity
system adjusts itself to a lower level, so that it does not kill us by
its desperate effort to destroy the malaria parasites. This, however,
means that we become more vulnerable to other diseases, including
bacterial and viral infections and cancer. In Nigeria and elsewhere in
West Africa it seems that the existence of endemic malaria roughly
doubles the clearly premature human mortality.
147
Recommendation: This could be an important idea, and pilot trials
should be conducted with it. Experiments should perhaps pursue three
parallel goals at the same time: improved rice crops with less irrigation
water, the control of malaria and the increased reflectivity of reservoirs
and seasonal water ponds.
43. Favouring Plants with Efficiently Reflecting Leaves
The leaves of some plants reflect sunlight more efficiently than the
leaves of other plants. I realized, for the first time, that this could
be important when I once spent a whole summer day on the balcony of my parents’ summer cottage in the village of Kalkkinen,
watching the Sun rise and fall, and following how well the leaves
and needles of different types of trees and plants reflected sunlight
coming from different angles.
When I started speaking and writing about this possibility a
few years later, in 2005, nobody was interested. Everybody I spoke
with thought, that solving even a small part of the problem would
require so large areas of land, that the method could not be very
practical.
However, since then at least many British and US researchers
have started to take the idea very seriously. They have realized, that
for instance the most reflective maize variety has a reflectivity of
24 per cent, while the darkest varieties only reflect 16 per cent of
the solar radiation back to space. Such a difference is not insignificant.
Especially the trees, shrubs and annual plants which have
developed in dry conditions tend to have wax-covered, highly
reflective leaves. Dryland plants do not suffer from a scarcity of
sunlight, for them the main problem is the lack of water. It makes
perfect sense for them to have leaves that reflect much of the sunlight back, because this reduces the temperature of the ground and
of the surrounding air, and thus lessens evaporation from the soil.
If such highly-reflective dryland trees, bushes and annual plants
could be indentified and favoured as sources of human food, animal fodder, cellulose, biofuels and biochemicals, the reflectivity of
148
tropical and sub-tropical fields, pasturelands and forests could be
increased, in a substantial way.
Black soil has a very low albedo, often only a few per cent.
Crops reflecting 24 per cent of sunlight back to space are much
more reflective. This means that we could also combat global
warming with mixed cropping systems, using several different species complementing each other’s growth cycles. If the field has a
permanent cover of green plants, it reflects more sunlight back to
space than if it grows crops only for a part of the year, and is otherwise covered with dark soil. Mulching or no-till farming methods
are another way of achieving the same result (see chapter 40).
Because tropical peat is often very dark, forested peatlands
have a higher albedo than tropical peatlands with no or very little
forest cover. Reforesting logged peatland rainforests is, of course,
also a very efficient way to absorb carbon from the atmosphere
(see chapter 13). In the North, where the ground is covered by
snow during the winter, the situation is different. In the North a
peatland with no trees reflects more solar radiation than a peatland with a dense coniferous tree cover.
Many lichens growing in the northern areas are white. They
often cover the ground on large areas like a layer of snow. In some
sites it might make sense to promote the growth of white lichens
by removing the darker forms of vegetation (mosses and shrubs)
which compete with the lichens. An improved control of reindeer
populations would often do the same. Reindeer eat lichens during
the winter, and many northern areas have a serious overgrazing
problem. In the northern areas there is often very little vegetation
and soil on top of the light-shaded bedrock. Sometimes the cheapest, the simplest, the most rapid and the most effective way to
increase the reflectivity of a certain landscape would be to remove
trees, other vegetation, litter and humus.
Recommendation: This should work, but only if the more reflective crops would be planted on wide areas. More research on the subject is needed, urgently. This could perhaps be done together with the
International Programme on Arid Land Crops (Ipalac), a programme
based in Niamey, Niger, under the auspices of the International Crop
Research Center for Semi-Arid Tropics (Icrisat). Ipalac has done much
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more work than any other international initiative to promote the growing and domestication of trees and plants that have evolved in dry conditions. It would richly deserve more support and attention from the
community of the development cooperation organizations. The possibilities related to mixed cropping should also be investigated.
44. Giant Solar Chimneys as a Global Air-Conditioning System
Most of our Universe is extremely cold. In places where the temperature is 0 degree Celsius or 273 degrees Kelvin, there is approximately one hundred million times more heat radiation than what
is the average for the Universe as a whole. So it could be said that
only a species with a rather limited intelligence should die because
its members are so helpless that they cannot prevent the overheating of their planet, or because they think that the only way to stop
the warming is to cover the whole planet with radioactive pollution.
The nearest extremely cold places are always very close to us.
When we go up, the air becomes an average half a degree centigrade colder for every one hundred metres. The freezing point of
water is reached after a few kilometres, and at ten kilometres it is
already very cold, indeed, not to say anything about twenty or fifty
kilometres.
Most of the energy coming from the Sun is not reflected back
to space in the same form as it came. It is first transformed to heat
at the ground level, after which it returns to space as infrared radiation and through the convective processes in the atmosphere.
Convection simply means that warm air rises up and cools, and
then drops down again. The atmosphere is full of convective cells,
vortices of rising and descending air. Some of them are gigantic
but most are very small, even tiny. Part of the heat transported to
upper parts of the atmosphere by these vortices becomes, literally,
lost in space, because the air that descends and returns to surface
is much cooler than the air which went up in the convective cell.
So one way to cool the planet would be to circulate a lot hot air
to greater heights, against gravity, so that it loses its heat to space
and drops back to Earth as heavy, supercooled air.
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One option might be to use a solar chimney for this purpose.
The solar chimney, or the solar windmill (Das Aufwindkraftwerk)
is a daring new energy concept developed by the well-known German structural engineer Jörg Schlaich and his associates.
A 200-megawatt solar power station like this would consist of a
large glass or plastic greenhouse, perhaps seven kilometres across,
and a kilometre-high, 300-metre-wide chimney at its center. The
greenhouse acts as a vast solar collector, heating the air below it.
Because the roof of the greenhouse yields slightly upwards, the
heated air has to stream towards the chimney and up to it. New
air flows inside the greenhouse from its edges. The pressure difference between the greenhouse and the chimney top creates a strong
updraught which runs a number of cased wind turbines placed at
the bottom of the chimney.
The design has a number of very important advantages. It
is very simple and it does not require much high technology, so
it could be widely replicated by most Southern countries. A solar
chimney can keep on producing electricity even during the night,
because of the large heat storage in the ground under the greenhouse.
Above all, a solar chimney does not need any fresh water,
unlike coal-fired and nuclear power plants and solar power plants
based on steam engines or steam turbines. This is a major benefit
because for example a 1,000-megawatt nuclear power plant annually consumes 20 or 30 million cubic metres of freshwater. Actually, if the greenhouses of five 200-megawatt solar chimneys are
used as water collectors, they could actually harvest about 100 million cubic metres of rainwater in a year, in an area with an annual
rainfall of 400 millimetres. So the solar chimneys could produce
100 million cubic metres of freshwater, instead of consuming 30
million cubic metres of it.
Governments and commercial companies have not become
excited about the idea because the required initial investments are
relatively high. As long there is no significant environmental taxation, the electricity produced by a solar chimney can only compete
with coal or nuclear power with subsidies, or if a much longer than
normal depreciation period for the original investments can be
used. If the interest rate is 8 per cent, a 40-year-long depreciation
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period (pay-back time) for the investment is required to make the
power produced by a solar chimney cheaper than nuclear energy.
But the operation of a solar chimney should also be analysed
from another perspective. Because warm air from a very large area
is collected into the chimney, an abnormally narrow and high convection cell will be created above it. In other words, a 200-megawatt solar chimney also circulates a few million cubic metres of
hot air per second into greater heights than it would normally
reach. This most probably means that the air masses lose more
heat and return to the ground level somewhat cooler than what
would have been achieved by normal convection cells.
Let’s make some back-of-the-envelope calculations, according
to the best Mad Scientist traditions! We know that the heat capacity of one cubic metre of air is about 1,000 joules/Kelvin (or Celsius). We do not have a precise figure for the average extra cooling
of the air, but let’s assume that it would be 30 degrees centigrade.
This is, admittedly, a shot in the dark but we have to use a number in order to go forward. With these figures the global cooling
efficiency of a 200-megawatt solar chimney would be… about 100
gigawatts, 500 times more than its power-producing capacity.
Does this have any real significance? It might, even though the
above outlined back-of-the-envelope-type calculations are on a
very uncertain basis and might be full of holes. Give me another
envelope!
If the order of magnitude is roughly correct, 5,000 solar chimneys producing 1,000 gigawatts of solar electricity would have a
500,000 gigawatt cooling impact, which would be roughly equivalent with the present imbalance in the Earth’s energy budget.
And now it is time to get greedy, again according to the best
Mad Scientist traditions. If the air going to the chimney would be
moist and warm air containing 20 grams of water vapour for each
cubic metre of air, the cooling efficiency of the chimney would
be 150 gigawatts larger. The cooling of the water vapour and the
cloud droplets would release into the high atmosphere 4 joules per
gram for each degree Celsius/Kelvin. The transformation of the
water vapour to cloud droplets would release 2260 joules per gram
and the freezing of the water 333 joules per gram. Thus the overall cooling impact would rise to very substantial 250 gigawatts. If
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some cloud condensation nuclei were added to the air going up
the chimney, the chimney might actually be capable of both cooling and irrigating the surrounding areas. This might increase agricultural crops in a very significant way in hot and dry regions. For
example in Abu Dhabi plants require eight times more water if the
temperature rises from 30 to 46 degrees Celsius.
Besides, the solar chimney might also be an efficient cloudmaking machine. If we added very many cloud condensation
nuclei into the air stream, cloud droplets would become so small
that the water would only drop down much later. A single solar
chimney might be able to create vast formations of shining white
cumulus and stratocumulus clouds. Such clouds would improve
the reflectivity of our planet and cool it.
But…what if the water vapour got so high, that it would produce extensive masses of cirrus clouds, with a huge global warming potential? Oops! Oh My God… if I am getting this right, this
might mean, that…
Recommendation: These possibilities should be investigated further.
The solar chimney is an interesting energy alternative for the future,
because it can produce solar electricity during the night and because
it can harvest water, instead of consuming it. The potential side effects
should of course be assessed carefully, especially the risk of ejecting large amounts of water vapour so high that it would give birth to
artificial cirrus clouds. In reality it is also possible that a solar chimney might actually reduce the amount of cirrus clouds, by heating the
upper troposphere and the stratosphere.
45. Creating New Salt Deserts –
or “Washing” the Existing Ones
Salt is white and reflects sunlight efficiently. For example in the
state of Gujarat, of India, the reflected glare of sunlight makes
many salt-workers permanently color-blind. What if we installed
large numbers of seawater sprinklers in selected deserts and placed
the sprinkler groups so that the salt fall would cover very large
areas? When the seawater would evaporate, the ground would
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quickly become covered with a thin layer of white, highly reflecting salt. It would not cost much to create millions of square kilometres of such new salt deserts. There are billions of hectares of
hyper-arid land on Earth, areas which cannot be used to growing
anything.
Besides deserts in the South, Arctic barrens could also be used.
In the North we have enormous areas of bare and hostile lands
covered with rock, sand or gravel, with no vegetation. If such lands
were covered by a white layer of sea salt, they would reflect sunlight efficiently during the summer. Salt, of course, can melt snow
and ice, but this would not be a problem from the viewpoint of
reflectivity, because white salt reflects almost as well as snow.
Besides, there is no sunlight in the High Arctic during winter, and
on vast areas snow melts in the spring, unlike salt.
Not recommended. Creating salt deserts is easier
than removing the salt, later. However, the possibility of improving the
reflectivity on some of the already existing salt deserts or other areas
already hopelessly devastated by salt might be a better option. We have
a lot of natural salt deserts and irrigated farmlands which have become
covered by salt, and salinization threatens to destroy a major part of
the currently irrigated farmland, as well. Some of the natural salt deserts are shining white, but many have a greyish, brownish or even black
cover of mud, dust or sand on top of the salt. It might sometimes be
easy and cost-effective to increase the reflectivity of such dimmed salt
deserts by adding a few millimetres of new salt on top of the dirty salt
layers.
Recommendation: 46. Painting the Walls and Rooftops White
Many people have proposed that the Earth’s reflectivity could be
changed if all the rooftops and the walls which receive a lot of sunlight would either be painted white or treated with some other,
highly reflecting substance. The white paint or the other reflecting
substances would also help in keeping the houses cool.
For instance in the region of Almeria, in Andalucia, Southern Spain, the impact of reflecting buildings can already be seen.
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In Almeria there are 26,000 hectares of greenhouses. In the greenhouse region the temperatures have cooled by 0.3 degrees Celsius
per decade since 1983. Elsewhere in Spain they have increased by
0.5 degrees during the same time.
Recommendation: Recommended as a partial solution. The habit of
painting houses white still exists in many hot countries. It is an easy,
cheap and efficient way to keep houses cooler during the hot seasons. Most urban poor in the South, however, do not legally own their
houses. Would they be interested in participating such a programme?
The Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto has proposed that the
informal dwellings of urban poor should be legalized. According to de
Soto, such an urban land reform would create, at the stroke of a pen,
about USD 7,000 billion worth of property for the poor. Perhaps these
two ideas could somehow be combined?
47. Sending Messages to ETs
It is possible, that most of the world’s electricity will soon be produced by thin-film and concentrator photovoltaic systems (see
the parts about reducing the greenhouse gas emissions). One of
the most promising solar technologies is a system in which a very
large parabolic reflector concentrates a lot of sunlight on a much
smaller photovoltaic panel. At the moment the most advanced systems can use concentrations of up to 2,500 suns, but in the future
it might be possible to concentrate the sunlight even 10,000 times.
If rows of trees planted at a suitable distance are used to provide an
efficient wind shade, the reflectors can be dirt-cheap because they
can then consist of ultra-light, metallized plastic. Even when the
reflectors are made of heavy steel a one-gigawatt solar power plant
constructed by this kind of technology would only cost about USD
850 million.
Let’s assume, as a thought experiment, that the world’s use of
energy will increase three-fold by the year 2100 and that all of this
will be in the form of electricity. Let’s also presume, that all of this
electricity will be produced by concentrator photovoltaic systems
with 25-metre-wide parabolic reflectors.
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The capacity of the system should be adjusted according to
the annual peak load, which would be reached during the height
of the winter in the northern hemisphere. At that time of the year
the northern areas need a lot of power for lighting and heating, but
receive very little sunlight. In the future the most economic way to
provide for this power is to construct some extra power-producing capacity in Sahara, in the Middle East, in the Arabian Peninsula, in India, in Pakistan and in Mexico, and to transmit power to
Europe, Russia, China and North America from these regions.
If the whole energy system was based on solar power, we might
need something like 90,000 gigawatts of solar power to produce
30,000 gigawatts of continuous power. This would mean 600 million 25-metre-wide parabolic reflectors, each producing 150 kilowatts of power when the sun is shining high, from a cloudless sky.
240,000 square kilometres of parabolic reflectors.
However, during summer most of the future households in the
northern hemisphere will probably make their own power by thinfilm solar cells. This means that there might be enormous amounts
of unnecessary summer-time power-producing capacity, electricity
that would not really be needed for anything.
One option would be to use the extra power for sending messages to outer space. 25-metre-wide parabolic reflectors could also
be used for other purposes, like searching for artificial radio signals from space and for transmitting focused radio beams to distant galaxies. In other words, some of our future solar power stations could double as radio telescopes. With the occasional
availability of 50,000 gigawatts of spare power (or something like
that) we could, at least in theory, send radio messages to millions
of galaxies. By utilizing the stars of our own galaxy as gravitational
lenses we could reach even farther with the same amount of power.
Sending 50,000 gigawatts of power to space would – during the
transmissions – cancel 10 per cent of our present 500,000-gigawatt
global overheating problem.
Let’s pick up the Mad Scientist hat again. What if we covered
lets say 5,000,000 square kilometres of deserts, instead of only
240,000 square kilometres, with our solar energy installations?
Then we could use up to 2,000,000 gigawatts to beam messages to
distant galaxies. If we also utilized the possibilities related to grav156
itational lenses, we could perhaps finally reach a hundred billion
different galaxies with our messages, and simultaneously get rid of
the extra heat now remaining on our planet! Hi ET, here we come!
To achieve this it would, of course, be necessary to use wide
band gap photovoltaic cells that reflect the non-productive, lowfrequency rays straight back to space. Otherwise our photovoltaic
installations might often absorb more solar radiation than the relatively well reflecting quartz sand that covers many of our deserts.
I am all for using the extra capacity of our future
solar energy systems for SETI and CETI. However, I might be more
than a little bit partial, here, because the possibility of discovering
extra-terrestrial intelligence in other solar systems would be the most
exciting thing I can think of.
Recommendation: 48. Wind-powered Ice Sprinklers
The following nineteen chapters – including this one – deal with
different ways to cool the Arctic and Antarctic regions and to stop
the melting of the methane clathrates, permafrost areas and floating pack-ice. The idea of wind-powered ice sprinklers, the subject
of this chapter, was the first in this line of thoughts and proposals.
It was based on the salt water sprinkler idea originally developed
by Ludwig, Gunther and Klaus Elsbett. I presented it first as a mere
thought experiment in a science fiction novel Sarasvatin hiekkaa
(The Sands of Sarasvati). Only much later did I realize that the idea
might actually be worth a closer look.
The other eighteen ideas were all born after that within the
framework of the Atmosmare Foundation, in a process of discussions originally initiated by the ice sprinkler idea. Many people,
including myself, Jussi Mälkiä, Jukka Salo, Esko Pettay, Juha Flinkman and John Webster have participated in these brain-storming sessions. Besides this representatives of the foundation have
requested many other scientists, both in Finland and in many
other countries, to consider the problem and to put forward their
own, best proposals.
Because of this history there is more than a little bit of overlap
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in the following chapters. However, the ideas all merit a separate
discussion in this volume, because the logic behind each approach
is somewhat different.
If we want to halt the depletion of Arctic sea ice, one of the key
dilemmas is, whether we should concentrate on cooling the region
during the summer or during the winter. Many scientists have
said, that the summer is the key period, because this is when the
ice melts. During the winter temperatures in the Arctic will anyway be below the freezing point of water, so the sea ice can in any
case regenerate itself. Needless to say, the conditions at the Arctic
Ocean are much nicer during the summer.
But if we look at the history of the Ice Ages, it is actually the
winters which would seem to be more important. An Ice Age
happens when the spin, tilt and ellipticity of the Earth’s rotation around the Sun reduce the percentage of solar radiation falling on the northernmost areas of the globe, and thus strengthen
the temperature differences between Arctic summers and winters.
In other words, even though the Earth does not receive less solar
radiation during an Ice Age, the planet cools because a little bit less
sunlight falls on the Arctic and a little bit more on the Southern
latitudes, and because the Arctic develops a stronger seasonality.
Similarly, an Ice Age ends, often very, very rapidly, in a few years
or in a few decades, when the Arctic again receives a bit more sunlight and the winter-time and summer-time temperature differences in the Arctic become less prominent.
To simplify the data a bit, it seems that an Ice Age is created
when the summers in the Arctic become colder and the winters
warmer.
These research results are counter-intuitive, and it is still a mystery how the process works and how the Arctic can convert such
minor changes to a full-fledged Ice Age. Why should the winter
temperatures be the important thing?
What if an Ice Age ends when the process that took place in
the Gulf of Bothnia, during the winter 2007-2008, happens in a
larger scale, over much of the Arctic Ocean?
The less sea ice there is, the more solar heat the sea can absorb,
and the farther to the North the warm water driven by the winds
can reach. The less ice, the more water vapour there can be in the
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air, during the winter. When the whole sea is frozen, the air above
it can be very dry because no moisture can evaporate through
the ice. Water vapour, of course, is a strong greenhouse gas. The
more water vapour evaporates from the sea, the more clouds can
be formed from it. In the Arctic all kinds of clouds have a strong
heating impact throughout the year, except in June and July. In the
Antarctic clouds heat up the climate even during midsummer. The
warmer the sea is, the stronger the winds can become, and the less
ice there is, the easier it is for the wind to raise waves. The higher
the waves, the more difficult it is for the sea to freeze.
In 2007-2008 it was the combination of all these factors, which
suddenly prevented the Gulf of Bothnia from freezing, for the first
time in recorded history. When something similar happens for a
large part of the Arctic Ocean, so that a major part of it will not
freeze at all, even during the height of the winter, the impact on
climate will of course be much more dramatic.
But let’s move to wind-powered sprinklers!
If freshwater is sprayed into the air as a fine mist when the temperatures are significantly below the freezing point of water, but
less than minus 40 degrees Celsius, very small water droplets do
not freeze in the air without ice crystallization nuclei. Contrary to
intuition, larger freshwater droplets freeze quickly in low temperatures, but the tiny droplets release their extra heat, become supercooled water and only freeze when they hit the ground or something else, or when many different droplets coalesce to make a
larger droplet. But if seawater, containing salt, is sprayed into the
air, or if salt or other crystallization nuclei are added in the freshwater, even the very small droplets quickly form ice crystals or
snow flakes.
When the sea is about to freeze, additional snowfall or undercooled water can assist the freezing process. When one gram of
snow melts, the process consumes 333 joules of energy, enough
to cool 167 grams of water by half a degree. Snow and ice falling
on open water create small pockets of undercooled water, which
become centers for the freezing process. When small patches of
surface water freeze, they catalyze the freezing of the surrounding
areas.
However, only a calm sea can freeze. When there are no waves,
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water can freeze quickly, even when the temperature is only
slightly below the freezing point of water. But even small waves
can prevent the freezing. If the water is moving, the formation of
supercooled spots, acting as centers for the freezing process, is prevented.
The height of the waves is defined by three factors: the
strength, the duration and the fetch of the wind. Duration means
how long the wind keeps on blowing, and the fetch refers to the
unobstructed distance the wind can blow over water.
Even tiny ice flakes, rising only one millimetre above the surface of the sea, can break the fetch of the wind. Masses of wet,
heavy snow wallowing on top of the water can do the same. If
there is enough wet snow, it can even kill the swell, meaning waves
that have been generated by the wind much farther away, sometimes on the other side of the ocean.
Let’s imagine that we erected small spray-producing windmills
on low-lying islands, on patches of strengthened ice (see chapter
61), or on other types of floating platforms at the Arctic Ocean.
Various vertical and horizontal windmill designs can be converted to giant sprinklers. Another possibility is to make electricity
with large windmills and to use the power to rotate conventional
sprinklers.
When the wind is blowing with the speed of eight metres a second, a 10-kilowatt Darrieus rotor can lift 50 kilograms of water
per second to a height of 10 metres. If the wind speed doubles,
Its energy content increases eight-fold. In other words: it would
be technically feasible to produce huge quantities of ice and snow
spray with relatively small windmills.
It may not even be necessary to lift the spray to the height of
10 metres. Even one metre would probably do, because the winds
would drive the small ice crystals along the icy plateau of the halffrozen sea for hundreds or even thousands of kilometres. Wherever there would be gaps between the floating ice masses the crystals would drop in the water and assist in freezing the gaps. It takes
ten times less power to pump water into the height of one metre
than to ten metres.
In mid-winter, when the sea has frozen, additional snow cover
can prevent or at least slow down the thickening of the ice. Snow
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is an effective insulating material. It reduces the amount of heat
escaping from the sea through the ice. So if we use sprinklers at
this time of the year, we must ensure that we only produce undercooled water (ice) and not snow.
The situation changes one more time after midwinter, when the
sun again rises above the horizon. At the North Pole there is only
one night and one day in a year. First the sun doesn’t rise up at all
for six months and then it does not fall below the horizon for six
months. But this is an extreme case that prevails only on the North
Pole or very close to it. In most of the Arctic both the nightless
and the dayless periods last for a couple of months. Between these
extremes the relative lengths of days and nights keep on changing,
all the time.
When the days become longer and the sun rises, each day, to
a higher position, reflectivity becomes the important issue. After
the snow has melted from the Arctic islands, their average daily
temperatures quickly rise to 10-20 degrees. The surface of the sea
remains at the freezing point of water until all the floating ice has
gone.
During this period extra snowfall or extra rain of undercooled
water would slow down the melting of sea ice. The extra snow and
ice would bury the soot and dust particles and dead algae, and
maintain a higher reflectivity. If we do not manage to reduce our
soot emissions quickly enough, we should perhaps bury the soot
under a shining white cover of fresh snow! Even when there is
no soot, one millimetre of white snow falling on a field of partly
melted ice can increase its albedo in a very significant way.
Besides this, there would be more snow and ice that would
have to melt before the sea can warm up. The production of ice or
snow spray would thus be a way to collect “cold” from a large area
and to deposit it where it is most needed.
When it comes to the permafrost regions some of the issues
are similar but some are different. In mid-winter the permafrost freezes better if it is not covered by thick snow. But when the
spring comes and the days become longer, an extra layer of ice and
snow would maintain a high reflectivity and thus slow down the
melting.
The Arctic Ocean receives 11 per cent of the combined flow
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of the world’s rivers. This means that there is a lot of freshwater at
least theoretically available in the areas surrounding the main permafrost regions.
Tiny water droplets fall slowly. A droplet with a 100-micron
radius falls, on average, 76 centimetres in one second. But if the
droplet has a radius of 10 microns, only, the speed of its fall is
reduced to one centimetre per second, because the droplet’s surface area and the air resistance in relation to its weight are much
larger.
So if we spray 10-micron droplets into the air at the height of
100 metres when the wind is blowing towards the permafrost areas
or towards the Arctic Ocean with the speed of 25 metres per second, the droplets should theoretically hit the ground only after 250
kilometres or so. Snow flakes fall even slower because they are very
light and have a larger surface area compared to their weight.
In reality tiny water droplets will not descend with an even and
steady speed. The stronger the wind, the more turbulence there
is in the air flow. Even in relatively light wind snow flakes and ice
crystals and small water droplets tend to have a bumpy ride, rising
and falling numerous times in the vortices of the air, before they
finally hit the ground.
If we have to do something dramatic to halt the melting of the
Arctic before it is too late, producing some extra snow and ice
would probably be a much safer option than ejecting sulphur into
the stratosphere.
Recommendation: The
idea should be investigated further, and proofof-concept-type field trials should be organized.
49. Gravity-powered Ice Sprinklers
Gravity-powered ice and snow sprinklers might be an even
cheaper solution than wind-powered ones. For example the West
Siberian permafrost region is situated between the Central Siberian Plateau and the Ural Mountains. There are, along a stretch of
roughly one thousand kilometres, hundreds of rivers and countless
smaller streams running from the Ural Mountains to the East, and
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from the Central Siberian Plateau to the West. In both cases the
streams run towards the vast lowland swamp also known as the
West Siberian permafrost area. Some of the water in all these rivers
and streams could be channelled to metal, concrete or plastic pipes
in places where the terrain falls down relatively steeply, which are
still relatively high over the permafrost area, and from where the
ice crystals or snow flakes would spread over vast stretches of the
permafrost. There is no shortage of suitable sites along the eastern
slopes of the Urals or along the western slopes of the edge of the
Central Siberian Plateau.
If the water surged down 40 metres inside the pipeline, a pressure of 4 bars or four atmospheres would be created at the end of
the pipe. If the end of the pipe had numerous tiny holes, the highpressurized water would push through as high fountains of fine
mist. Even better results could probably be achieved with slightly
higher pressures. The higher the pressure, the smaller the holes
can be, and the smaller water droplets can be produced. This is
important, because the very small droplets have the best chance of
being carried far by the wind.
Numerous different designs could be used. The cost for a billion tons of spray would probably be still much less than with the
wind-powered sprinklers. A pipe with a diameter of 10–15 metres
should be able to produce a few billion tons of ice spray in a year,
theoretically enough to cover the whole West Siberian permafrost
region, all one hundred million hectares of it, with a few extra centimetres of snow or ice. It might, however, be necessary to heat the
end of the pipe to prevent it from freezing when the temperatures
are seriously below zero.
Similarly, such gravity-powered sprinklers could be installed at
suitable sites on the northern shores of Russia, Greenland, Canada,
Alaska, Iceland and Norway, as well as on the larger Arctic islands,
which have mountains and streams running towards the sea. In
the areas surrounding the Antarctic the scope for this approach is,
unfortunately, much smaller.
When the pipes are not used to produce ice spray, they could
produce electricity with small hydro-turbines. Water gates could
direct the water either into a spray-producing tube, or into a
power-producing turbine.
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Recommendation: It would be important to conduct small-scale experiments with the idea.
50. Dropping Winter Clouds by Kites or Balloons
Low clouds like Cumulus, Stratus and Stratocumulus heat the
planet during the nights, but in most parts of the world their daytime cooling impact is more important. The Arctic and Antarctic
regions are an exception from this main rule.
In winter the heating impact of clouds in the Arctic and in
the Antarctic is very strong indeed, because there is no sunlight.
According to one study, winter-time cloud cover heats the Arctic by 90 watts per square metre. This is about one hundred times
more than our present average global heat imbalance.
In the Antarctic low clouds have a heating impact even during the height of the summer. Antarctic snows are so white that
they reflect sunlight back to space more effectively than even the
whitest Cumulus clouds. When a cloud comes between the Antarctic ice sheet and the Sun, the reflectivity of the area does not
increase but decreases. In the Arctic region the situation is not so
extreme, because there is more dark rock, dark coniferous forests,
open water and melting ice, as well as soot and dust on the snow.
But if we reduced the winter, autumn and springtime cloud
cover over the Arctic and Antarctic regions and the summertime
cloud cover over the Antarctic, these places would cool in a very
substantial way.
It is often possible to “seed” clouds so that they drop their
water content down and disappear from the sky. Clouds become
snowfall and the snowfall cools the surface of the sea and assists in
calming down the swell and the local, wind-generated waves.
Most low-level winter clouds in the Arctic consist of innumerable tiny droplets of severely undercooled water. Their temperatures are far below zero but they cannot freeze to ice crystals or
snow because there are too few ice crystallization nuclei in the air.
If the temperatures are cold enough, such supercooled droplets
freeze almost immediately when anything even remotely suitable is
sprayed in the air. Any kind of small dust or ash particles will do,
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as well as salt or even soot. A tiny piece of particulate matter can
become a nucleus for the freezing process and create a snow flake
weighing up to a billion times more than the original particle did.
When the temperatures are only slightly below zero, things
are more difficult. Dust and salt no longer work so well. We need
something that freezes in the air, forming innumerable small ice
particles that can act as ice crystallization nuclei. Possible substances include silver iodine, carbon dioxide ice, ordinary ice and
seawater.
The main challenge is how to deliver the small ice crystallization nuclei at the required heights, to the winter-time clouds above
the Arctic Sea. The Atmosmare Foundation has investigated a
large number of different ideas which seem to be at least theoretically feasible, including kites, hydrogen balloons and various kinds
of burners.
Winter-time clouds in the Arctic often lie at a very low altitude,
from a few hundred metres to a kilometre. However, the higher
the particles acting as ice crystallization nuclei would get, the farther away they would be transported before they hit the clouds.
For instance a ship capable of sowing ice crystallization nuclei into
srtious heights and moving side-winds, could seed the clouds in a
very, very large area, perhaps over millions of square kilometres.
Needless to say, there are some minor problems with this
approach. Seafaring conditions in the High Arctic are not exactly
pleasant during mid-winter. It is cold, wind speeds can be devastating and supercooled water droplets freeze on the ship’s structures – as well as on kites and hydrogen balloons.
Another option would be to operate at somewhat more southern latitudes, like between Norway and Iceland, where the conditions are not as rough. Most of the winter-time cloud cover at the
Arctic Ocean forms over the North Atlantic, the North Sea, the
Barents Sea and the Norwegian Sea. In other words, the clouds
form at the more Southern latitudes, over open sea, and are then
transported by winds to the North, because over the Arctic Ocean
there is not so much open water during the winter. In these latitudes a less heavy vessel would do, and there wouldn’t be serious
problems with supercooled water freezing on the ship’s structures
or on balloons and kites. However, because of the higher tempera165
tures, the choice of ice crystallization nuclei would be more limited.
One of the options would be to use seawater. Because seawater contains a lot of salt, small droplets would freeze quickly, and
become ice crystallization nuclei for supercooled freshwater droplets in the clouds.
There is a lot of seawater available in the sea, but how to get
it to the height of one kilometre or more, in the form of suitablysized droplets?
The ideal size of the droplets would probably be 1 - 10 microns.
Larger droplets, which freeze even faster, would also do, but they
do not travel as far with the wind and much larger quantities of
them would be needed to destroy an equivalent amount of cloud
cover.
One obvious possibility would be to use a large hydrogen balloon tied to the ship as an “air crane”. However, winching something into the height of one kilometre (or, alternatively, down from
that height if the whole balloon is taken down to fetch a new load)
takes a lot of time. This limits the amount of ice crystallization
nuclei that can be delivered to the strategic heights. One option
might be to draw the balloon down with a powerful motor-boat.
If the motor-boat and the ship would be moving to opposite directions, they would create a force vector forcing the balloon down.
This could be a relatively rapid way of “reloading”. The third alternative would be to use counter-weights, like in elevators.
In any case the amount of lift provided by a hydrogen or a
helium balloon is also very limited, unless the balloon is very
large, indeed.
How about a large kite? Very strong and durable kites have
been developed in order to reduce ships’ fuel needs and to produce
electric power. A powerful kite should be able to lift heavy loads,
significantly more than a much larger hydrogen balloon. There is
even some evidence to support the notion that ancient Egyptians
and Mesopotamians used kites for lifting large and heavy stony
elements to an upward position. Kites can both rise and descend
very fast, simply by altering their angle in relation to the wind. So
theoretically the most cost-efficient and productive delivery system might consist of a kite, if cargoes can be lifted to the sky with166
out destabilizing it.
It might even be possible to use a hydrogen balloon or a kite
to lift a very long but light tube to the sky and to use it as an ultralong chimney. The tube could perhaps channel hot air and small
particles, or warm air and tiny droplets of salt water spray, to the
height of five hundred metres or more. After getting out from the
tube the hot air would still keep on rising for some time, unless
there is an inversion layer that prevents this. In suitable circumstances it should be possible to deliver salt-water droplets or other
ice crystallization nuclei to the strategic altitudes by this method.
Even weak winds would, of course, quickly rip the structure to
shreds.
Recommendation: Atmosmare Foundation is trying to develop a technically feasible and cost-effective version of the idea, but it is still uncertain whether this will succeed. At the moment it seems that there is
nothing suitable that would be readily available “on the shelf ”. If you
can propose a technically feasible solution to some of the key problems
mentioned above, please get in touch.
51. Dropping Winter Clouds with Rockets or Grenades
When the supercooled water droplets are cold enough, wintertime clouds can also be dropped down as snowfall by shooting
large powder rockets or self-destructing anti-aircraft grenades to
the sky. Large powder rockets made by amateurs can often reach
the altitude of two kilometres. The burning of the powder would
anyway produce some ash and other suitable particles. Besides
this salt, dust or other materials could be mixed with the powder before the rocket is launched. Anti-aircraft shells reach even
higher altitudes before they explode. If the grenades were filled
with a mixture of explosives, dust or salt, a lot of fine particles
would be produced.
Other people in the Atmosmare Foundation have
been more interested in rockets than myself. However, this may be
because I am slightly afraid of the rockets exploding on board, instead
Recommendation: 167
of exploding at the sky. But there is no doubt that small particles can be
delivered at the desired altitudes, this way. What comes to anti-aircraft
grenades it must be said that military technologies are not famous for
their affordable price tags. On the other hand if for example the USA
anyway spends USD 1,000 billion per year on military expenditure,
it would of course be more constructive to use these funds to destroy
Arctic winter clouds than to blow innocent Third World women and
children to pieces.
52. Rethinking the Jet Plane Routes,
Schedules and Flight Altitudes
Flying causes only a little bit less or a little bit more than two per
cent of our carbon dioxide emissions, depending on how we calculate the land use emissions. In spite of this, environmental activists seem to hate jet planes more than anything else, except nuclear
power. There is a very good reason for this extreme antipathy. Jet
planes fly so high, that the water vapour their motors emit into the
air immediately freezes to tiny ice crystals which form white lines
known as contrails or exhaust trails. Contrails act like artificial cirrus clouds.
All kinds of clouds cool the planet during daytime and heat it
during the nights. However, most clouds tend to have a predominantly cooling impact, except in the Arctic and Antarctic regions.
The high cirrus clouds are an exception. They are a bit inefficient
in shading the sun during daytime, but very effective in radiating heat back to Earth during the night. The night-time heating
impact of contrails is so much more effective, that when the heating and cooling effects are counted together, the sum is clearly on
the warm side, in spite of the fact that there are three times more
contrails at the sky during the day than during the night.
The physics of the contrails and their impact on climate are
still poorly understood, and there are bound to be many more
surprises in store for us. But thanks to the terrorist strikes against
Washington DC and New York on 11th September, 2001, we now
have a much better general picture than before. After the strikes all
air traffic in the USA was halted for three days, and there were no
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condensation trails at the sky during this time. It was the first time
in half a century, and it was a precious opportunity for the climate
scientists to improve their understanding on how contrails influence the weather. When there were no contrails daytime temperatures went up but nights became colder.
Various studies have tried to estimate the heating Impact produced by the contrails. According to a study by the Royal Society
of Britain contrails might multiply the climatic impact of flying by
a factor of 2.7. The assessment of the IPCC in 1999 was roughly
similar. The IPCC experts concluded, that the carbon dioxide
which had been produced by air traffic was heating the planet by
0.02 and the contrails by 0.03 watts per square metre. Other studies have presented much higher figures, and claimed, that the earlier studies had only taken into account the straight, white lines
that are clearly identifiable as condensation trails in satellite pictures. Such research groups, assuming that condensation trails
disperse in the strong winds of the high atmosphere and become
scattered cirrus that can no longer be separated from natural cirrus cloud cover, have produced much higher estimates. According
to these extrapolations the extra cirrus cloud cover born from contrails might heat the planet at least ten and possibly thirty times
more effectively than the carbon dioxide produced by air traffic.
However, late 2009 a new NASA study concluded, that the cooling impact of nitrate and sulphate aerosols and nitrogen oxides
produced by the air traffic almost cancels the heating impact of
contrails, artificial cirrus clouds and soot from the same sources.
According to this new NASA study, coordinated by Nadine Unger,
the total heating impact of air traffic might currently only amount
to something like 0.028 watts per square metre.
For quite a long time now I have tried to get a better grasp of
the overall impact of air traffic on our climate. Every time I have
thought that now I understand how it goes, the picture has suddenly once again changed and become almost unrecognizable.
This must be the most complex issue related to global warming,
and I have started to feel more than a tiny bit of desperation in trying to figure it out.
However, some things are clear. Ideas related to future passenger jets flying a few kilometres higher than our present aeroplanes,
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and plans to replace kerosene with hydrogen, are extremely dangerous. The contrails produced by the hydrogen jets would most
probably heat the planet on average 13 times more than the contrails of our present jet planes. If the present heating impact of
contrails and the artificial cirrus clouds born from them is 0.03
watts per square metre, a shift to hydrogen jets would increase
this to 0.39 watts/m2. If we take the high end of the estimates
and assume that the present heating impact might be something like 0.3 watts/m2, moving to hydrogen-fuelled air traffic
would increase our planetary heat imbalance at least five-fold, to
4 or 5 watts per square metre. And this would be with the present amount of flying. If the number of flights increases three times,
while we move to hydrogen-powered jets…
A move from present jet planes to kerosene-fuelled jets flying
at Concorde heighs, in 15,000 to 18,000 metres, would “only” multiply the problem by 5.4 instead of 13. On the other hand, if the jet
planes moved to lower heights so that no contrails were produced,
the total heating impact of air traffic would drop to 0.002 watts/
m2, assuming that NASA has got it right.
Flights between China, Canada and USA using the so called
polar routes deserve particular attention. The highly stratified
part of the atmosphere, the stratosphere, starts from 15 kilometres in the tropics, but from five kilometres near the poles. Dust
or ice crystals in the stratosphere only come down slowly, because
the air becomes the warmer the higher you get: the layer below is
denser than the layer above. A jet plane flying over the North Pole
can blow the ice crystals of its condensation trail straight into the
stratosphere. This is highly dangerous, because these ice crystals
can then stay up for months instead of only for a couple of hours
or the maximum of a few days. What would a hydrogen jet flying
over the North Pole at 18,000 metres do for our climate? Frankly, I
do not even want to know.
At the moment there are only a few thousand flights that are
annually conducted along polar routes, but the ice crystals produced by these flights may already contribute to the melting of the
Arctic.
So the main issue is crystal-clear, not depending on the exact
size of the numbers you buy: we have to ban all flying in the strato170
sphere and the use of hydrogen as a jet fuel.
However, winter-time flights that use relatively northern routes
but stay in the troposphere might actually have a cooling impact
on our climate. The ice crystals in contrails must also act as ice
crystallization nuclei for the supercooled water droplets in lower
clouds, if temperatures are so low that the ice crystals will not
evaporate or melt before they reach the altitude of these low-level
clouds. The effect could sometimes be more significant than the
heating impact of the condensation trails.
Arctic sea and land areas typically have a 50 to 70 per cent
cloud cover during winter, and in the northern areas a thick, lowlevel cloud cover has a truly massive winter-time heating impact,
tremendously more significant than the comparable effect produced by condensation trails. Moreover, low clouds often reflect
back so much infrared that only a small amount of it gets through,
to be reflected by the contrails.
Ice crystals that form behind jet planes are typically very small,
with a mean radius of two microns or so. However, they quickly
grow larger. After one hour they typically have a radius of 30 to
100 microns, and when they reach the lower clouds they have
already reached the millimetre-category. Part of this growth takes
place because separate crystals merge and form larger ice flakes,
but the crystals also absorb a lot of water vapour from the atmosphere. A fully developed condensation trail can finally contain
one hundred or even several hundreds of times more ice than the
amount that was emitted into the air by the plane’s jet engines.
When the ice crystals drop through the lower clouds, all the
supercooled cloud droplets that touch them also freeze. This lowers the relative humidity of the air. The small water droplets in
the surrounding air vaporize, and the water vapour immediately
freezes and becomes a part of the ice crystals. Thus every ice crystal dropping through the clouds destroys a large number of cloud
droplets.
A single jet plane using an ideal, northern route during the
Arctic winter might deliver 50,000 or 100,000 tons of ice crystals into the lower clouds. The average diameter of the crystals,
of course, is relatively large, closer to one millimetre than one
micron.
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This means that it MIGHT be possible to halt the melting of
the Arctic, at least temporarily, simply by routing a somewhat
larger part of the air traffic between Europe, East Asia and North
America to more northern routes, during mid-winter.
Another possibility would be to request the air lines already
using such routes to reduce the wintertime flight altitudes of their
jet planes to the lowest height at which a condensation trail will
still be produced, whenever the sky is covered with thick clouds.
This would increase the planes’ fuel consumption, but the ice crystals would have less time to grow and there would thus be a vastly
larger number of much smaller ice flakes dropping through the
clouds. In other words the impact on the Arctic cloud cover might
become dramatically larger.
It might be worth finding out whether this hypothesis is correct. If the trials were successful, governments should perhaps
request airline companies to assist them in re-freezing the Arctic,
and compensate them for their extra costs.
The cooling impact could perhaps also be enhanced by routing wintertime flights so that they would fly over cloudy areas and
avoid clear skies, as much as possible. Summer flights over the
Arctic should, on the contrary, avoid cloudy areas and prefer clear
skies.
During the Arctic summer, when the permafrost, glaciers and
floating ices are melting, there is no night. The sun does not go
down at all, because the Arctic summer is a continuous day lasting
for several months (six months at the North Pole). Thus the contrails produced by summer flights over the Arctic should have a
cooling impact on the climate, unless they seed and destroy lower
clouds: in June and July the low clouds have a cooling impact even
over the Arctic Ocean!
Outside the northern regions governments and airlines should,
as the first step, lower the flight altitude of night, evening and late
afternoon flights so, that condensation trails will no longer be produced. Such a measure would increase the fuel consumption a bit,
but reduce contrail and artificial cirrus cloud cover at the night
sky.
An even better possibility would be to shift back to propeller
planes. Modern propeller planes are slightly slower than jet planes,
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but they do not produce contrails (outside the polar areas), and
they consume 50 per cent less fuel.
Recommendation: It
should be investigated, whether a suitable amount
of wintertime flights over the northern areas could actually cool the
Arctic by reducing the cloud cover. Wintertime flights over the Arctic should seek out dense cloud formations, whenever possible. They
should maximize flying over cloudy areas and minimize flying over
clear skies. In June and July the opposite should be done. All flying in
the stratosphere should be banned.
53. Reducing Wintertime Cloud Cover
by Mountaintop Sprinklers
In the earlier chapters we have discussed using gravity- or windpowered sprinklers to spray a lot of ice crystals over the Arctic Sea.
And we have wondered, whether ice crystals produced by aeroplanes could assist in destroying wintertime cloud formations.
But but but but… Would it not be possible to install large
wind-powered or gravity-powered sprinklers on Arctic mountaintops, on places where they could produce a lot of tiny ice crystals
and spray them directly into the wind, high above the clouds?
In other words, could our ice-spraying windmills or gravity
sprinklers blow their ice crystals straight into the clouds we want
to bring down?
The mountains in Northern Norway rise above two kilometres. The highest peak in Greenland reaches the altitude of 3,360
metres, the highest peak on Spitzbergen 1,717 metres, the highest
mountain in Alaska 6,194 metres and the highest peak in Iceland
1,491 metres. There are mountains on the Baffin Island, on Novaja
Zemlja and along the coast of Central and Eastern Siberia, as well
(not to say anything about the Antarctic). Even the Kola Peninsula
has fells rising to 1,200 metres.
The largest currently existing windmills raise their wing-tips to
130 metres, at the highest point of the orbit, but windmills reaching up to 250 metres are being developed. If we erected such a
monster on a two-kilometre-high mountain, it could spray super173
cooled water to the height of 2,250 metres. Ice crystals would have
a good chance of traveling far from such heights.
Even a small, one-hectare natural or artificial mountaintop reservoir with an average depth of ten metres could provide 100,000
tons of water for a sprinkler. Paradoxically, some salt should be
added into the water so that the tiny droplets would freeze even
when the temperatures are only a couple of degrees below zero.
Recommendation: I think this should be tried.
54. Towing Icebergs to the Beaufort Gyre
– and Blowing them to Pieces
There are two major systems of ocean currents in the Arctic Ocean. The other is the so called Transpolar Drift System or
TPDS. Because of TPDS a large percentage of all floating ice at
the Arctic Ocean annually drifts southwards between Greenland
and the Spitzbergen, and melts somewhere along Greenland’s East
Coast. There is a similar, southbound current also at Greenland’s
West Coast.
The other main system is a huge vortex known as the Beaufort
Gyre. Ice floes entering the Beaufort Gyre begin to float round the
North Pole, until they get to the TPDS stream and begin to float
towards the South. When the glaciers of Greenland produce icebergs, they do the same. One of these south-bound icebergs sunk
the Titanic, in 1912. Today the same phenomenon accelerates the
melting of the Arctic Ocean.
The melting of an iceberg cools the surface layer of the sea
and produces freshwater. The freezing point of freshwater is two
degrees higher than the freezing point of salty seawater, which
only freezes at minus two degrees Celsius. If the cooling impact
and the freshwater produced by the melting icebergs concentrated on high, northern latitudes, both effects could catalyze the
formation of new marine ice. However, because icebergs float to
the South, they now only cool regions which are, in any case, too
warm to freeze.
It is not possible to tow even a relatively small iceberg against
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an ocean current, not to say anything about the truly massive ones,
weighing billions of tons. Because an iceberg has a very deep keel
(most of it is under the water), even our strongest ships would not
be able to drag a big iceberg against a powerful current.
But North of Greenland the ocean current driving icebergs to
the East and towards the actual Transpolar Drift System is, at first,
rather weak. In this area it would be theoretically possible to create a force vector that would alter the route of an iceberg so that it
would not enter the current streaming towards the South, but end
in the Beaufort Gyre, instead. In other words, the iceberg would
not float towards Newfoundland, but start orbiting the North Pole.
When it would break to pieces and melt, both the cooling impact
and the impact of the freshwater would concentrate on the latitudes
where they might really assist the formation of new floating ice.
It might be a good idea to blow icebergs to small pieces after
they had reached the polar gyre. If a hundred-metre-wide and a
hundred-metre-thick iceberg was shattered to much smaller pieces
with the average diameter of only one metre, the combined surface
area of the smaller boulders would be a hundred times larger than
the original surface area of the iceberg. Shattering the icebergs
would thus increase the reflectivity of the sea.
Floating ice can also break the swell and the waves generated
by the wind, locally. Every person who has been in a ship in the
middle of an ice pack, during stormy weather, and then experienced what happens when the ship enters the open sea, leaving the
ice pack behind, knows what I am talking about.
Rafts of floating ice can act as wave-breakers. Besides this
they break the fetch of the wind. Wind cannot touch the surface
of the sea when there is floating ice. Therefore the water behind
a raft of floating ice becomes very calm. Farther away the waves
again become higher when the wind gains more room for moving
the surface water. But when there is a new raft of floating ice the
fetch of the wind – not the actual power of the wind – will again
be ­broken.
What comes to freezing of the surface water, wind can be a very
important factor. It was probably the most important reason why
the Baltic Sea suddenly did not freeze at all during the winter 2007–
2008. When the sun started shining for longer periods, each day,
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and there was no ice, the sea collected a lot of solar heat, which
produced winds. The wind conditions at the Bothnian Sea were
exceptional, there were hard winds throughout the winter. There
was no ice to reflect sunlight back to space and winds prevented
the sea from freezing even during the very cold nights. Some of the
small inland bays which were protected from winds froze, melted
and re-froze six or seven separate times during the winter.
Even a relatively small iceberg towed to the Beaufort Gyre and
then blown to pieces might actually catalyze ice formation in large
areas by releasing fresh water into the ocean, by cooling the surface water, by increasing the reflectivity of the area, by providing
floating wave-breakers and by providing floating ice that would
break the fetch of the wind.
Recommendation: The proposal sounds absolutely mad. In fact, as mad
as a hat. But it might actually work.
55. Blowing Icebergs to Pieces – without Towing them to the
Beaufort Gyre
It might sometimes be a good idea to blow to smithereens even
those icebergs that cannot be towed to the Beaufort Gyre as soon
as they become separated from a glacier.
A large iceberg has a deep, massive keel, with about seven
eights of the iceberg under the water. Therefore an iceberg travels
along the currents and does not pay much attention to the winds.
However, winds can decide where the smaller ice boulders and ice
floes go.
When an iceberg is produced in Northern Greenland, it will
start floating towards the Transpolar Drift System, and towards
the Atlantic. But if the iceberg is blown to pieces when the wind
is blowing towards the polar gyre, many of the ice boulders and
smaller fragments and perhaps even some of the bergy bits may
end up rotating around the North Pole.
Recommendation: Does
to pieces?
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anybody know exactly how you blow an iceberg
56. Catalyzing Ice Formation by Floating Booms
Theoretically we could also use floating booms to assist the freezing of the Arctic and Baltic Seas when the significant wave height
is less than half a metre, but still enough to prevent the sea from
freezing.
If we think of the space available in a ship’s cargo hold, plastic oil booms would be the best option. You can pack an enormous
quantity of them into a surprisingly small space. However, they
are expensive and they produce floating plastic rubbish when they
break to pieces.
Another possibility would be to use an ancient piece of technology: floating booms made of logs shackled to each other with
strong steel chains. Transportation costs would be higher but the
booms themselves would be cheap. And they would finally sink to
the bottom of the sea, without producing any nasty floating rubbish. So this would also be a way of storing carbon into the bottom
of the Arctic Ocean and the Baltic Sea!
The booms could either be long lines, like snakes, or they
could have the form of a circle. They might be able to catalyze
ice formation in large areas, if there were enough of them. Finnish forests annually produce approximately one hundred million
cubic metres of roundwood. What if we used one per cent of this
amount to save the Arctic sea ice?
A million cubic metres of timber would make roughly 120,000
kilometres of booms if the average diameter of the logs was 10
centimetres. What if we released 40,000 floating circles with a
diameter of one kilometre into the strategic parts of the Arctic
Ocean? The combined surface area inside the circles would only be
about 30,000 square kilometres, but they might be able to catalyze
ice formation on a vastly larger area.
Recommendation: I know this sounds even crazier than towing icebergs.
But it must be possible to assist the formation of sea ice, this way, in
suitable conditions. How about a small-scale proof-of-concept-trial?
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57. Using Shallow Bays as Ice Nurseries
When Esko Pettay, of the Atmosmare Foundation, enquired from
the British-Finnish researcher Veli Albert Kallio, what might be
the best way to artificially enhance formation of Arctic sea ice,
Albert proposed that we could use the relatively shallow and protected bays as nurseries for floating ice.
Albert suggested an experiment, in which the ice forming in
shallow and protected bays would be cut off from shores when wind
would be blowing towards the sea. The bay would quickly freeze
again, so the total area of floating ice would increase. Also, when a
bay freezes, the ice and snow cover insulates the water from the cold
air above. After the ice has reached a certain thickness, there is very
little further formation of new ice. Cutting the ice off the bays, every
now and then, would maximize both the volume and the acreage of
ice production.
Ice floes produced by the nursery bays would increase the
overall reflectivity of a certain marine region by increasing the
total area covered by floating ice. The extra ice would also calm the
sea, which might catalyze further freezing.
There are a large number of places that could be used as ice
nurseries for example in Greenland, in the Spitzbergen, in Northern Canada, in Northern Russia and on Alaska’s northern shores,
as well as on the shores of the Baltic Sea. A fleet of small icebreakers could probably produce a remarkable amount of extra floating
ice, this way! Each bay could produce dozens of large ice floes in
one winter, and one icebreaker could cover a few hundred kilometres a day.
When we discussed Albert’s idea in the board of the Atmosmare Foundation, we realized that this might also be a way to prevent the melting of the methane clathrate beds and permafrost
areas at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.
Because ice and snow are so effective insulators, the water in a
bay will no longer lose much heat after the ice cover has reached a
certain thickness. But if the ice will be cut off so that it drifts farther to the sea, there will be a new flux of heat from the shallow
waters. The whole bed of water will become cooler, and even the
bottom of the sea will lose some more heat. If we repeated the pro178
cess a number of times each winter, the water surrounding submarine clathrate beds should remain cool enough to prevent melting.
Recommendation: It would be useful and important to find out, whether
the stability of the submarine clathrate deposits and submarine permafrost areas could be maintained by the method suggested by Albert
Kallio.
58. Providing Northern Lakes with Better
and Higher Wind-Breaks
Wind also affects the freezing of the millions of lakes and ponds
scattered in the northern forest zone. The small or relatively small
lakes and ponds, and the narrow bays that have good protection
from the wind typically freeze for a longer part of the winter than
the water areas not similarly protected. The effect is especially
important where lakes tend to freeze, melt and re-freeze several
times during a winter.
The quality and quantity of protection is, in many cases,
decided by humans. In most cases the windbreaks consist of trees.
The higher the trees, the further away the wind shade provided by
them stretches. Even a narrow strip of forty-metre-high trees can
break the wind to a distance of 400 or 800 metres. A hectare of
trees can offer protection for hundreds of hectares of water!
If we banned the logging of lakeside forests and let the trees
grow tall, we would probably increase the average amount of
springtime ice cover on top of our lakes.
Warmly recommended. It would anyway be a good
idea to save the lakeside forests because this reduces the nutrient loads
leached into the lakes.
Recommendation: 59. Dropping Winter Clouds with Bacteria
According to new research one of the best methods of dropping
wintertime clouds from the sky might be to use bacteria. For
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example the bacterium Pseudomonas syringae produces a protein
that seems to bind water molecules together in a way that mimicks
the lattice structure of an ice crystal. This seems to catalyze the formation of ice in higher temperatures than what would otherwise
have been required. Brent Christner and his colleagues at the Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge have collected samples of
freshly fallen snow from 19 locations in France, the USA and the
Antarctic. They found proof of ice-nucleating proteins from all
these sites.
This far Christner’s group hasn’t proposed that Earth should
be kept cool with the help of bacteria, but they have spoken about
catalyzing precipitation over agricultural areas.
A typical bacterium is billions of times smaller than a snow
flake, so a kilogram of bacteria scattered over the Arctic or the
Antarctic might drop down millions of tons of clouds in the form
of snow.
Recommendation: It should be remembered that all kinds of equipment
able to produce bacterial sprays can also be used for spreading dangerous micro-organisms among a human population. It might be safer to
stick to seawater, salt, cement dust, ash, dry ice or silver iodine.
60. Snow Cannons on Board!
Esko Pettay, a marine biologist working for the Atmosmare Foundation, pointed out, in a brainstorming session, that we should
also investigate whether snow cannons on board large ships might
play a role in increasing the formation or reformation of floating
ice at the Arctic Ocean.
My first reaction was that snow cannons require far too much
electric power and produce too little snow. A single snow cannon consumes about 10 kilowatts of electricity and only produces
about 300 cubic metres or 30 tons of snow per hour, which is not
very much when we consider the size of the Arctic Ocean.
300 cubic metres of snow could of course cover 300,000
square metres of ice, if the snow was spread over a large area as
a very thin, one-millimetre-thick layer. So in theory a snow can180
non could in 24 hours cover 720 hectares or 7.2 million square
metres of poorly reflecting, tired and greyish ice with a new, shining white, extremely reflective cover. Actually… is this so bad a
figure?
A wind park with ten thousand three-megawatt windmills
could provide power for a million snow cannons, and a million
snow cannons could – at least in theory – keep 720 million hectares or 7.2 million square kilometres of melting ice covered with
fresh snow.
1,000,000 snow cannons and 10,000 large windmills installed
in the Arctic would probably cost between forty and sixty billion
dollars. This sounds a lot, but in reality it is only 3 - 6 per cent of
the annual defence budget of the United States.
And it might be possible to reduce the costs by concentrating
the impact on carefully chosen, “strategic” areas.
Recommendation: The idea is worth investigating further, but it would
probably cost much more than some of the other alternatives.
61. Long Lines of Strengthened Ice on the Sea
A single ship equipped with ten or twenty snow cannons could, in
a single day, produce a floating raft of slush and ice only twenty
metres wide but ten kilometres long. If the raft froze during the
night or during a cold period, it might calm down a somewhat
larger area of the sea, so that it would freeze, too.
The artificial ice floe thus created would start drifting towards
a certain direction, driven by the winds or along a sea current. The
same ship could then make another long but narrow raft behind
the first one. If there is no swell – waves coming from another,
distant part of the ocean – such artificial floating breakers of ice
might be able to break the fetch of the wind and thus calm and
freeze the sea between the rafts.
There is a problem with this approach, though. When the slush
rafts freeze, they become fragile and easily break to pieces. Ice
has a relatively high compressive strength, but a very poor tensile
strength. Even a huge, kilometre-thick iceberg can split, if a pool
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of melt water on top of it acts like a wedge.
But hang on. Couldn’t we do something to improve the ice’s
tensile strength? Could we, for example, make some kind of composite materials with ice and with…well… with something else?
Increasing the strength of ice sounds like a crazy idea, but we
actually know that it can be done, because there is a precedent.
When Richard Mountbatten, the last colonial viceroy of India, was
serving as the Chief for the Combined Operations of the allied
armies during the Second World War, he also investigated the possibility of making huge aircraft carriers from special, extra-strong
ice.
Mountbatten’s first supercarrier was tentatively called Habakkuk, and it would have been made of pykecrete, ice that formed
when a solution of sea water and paper pulp froze. Pykecrete was
named after the project’s chief scientist, Geoffrey Pyke, and it actually was rather amazing stuff. When Mountbatten tried to sell the
idea for the US Joint Chiefs of Staff in Quebec, Canada, he shot a
block of ordinary ice and a block of pykecrete with a revolver. The
ordinary ice shattered, completely. But when Mountbatten’s bullet hit the pykecrete block it glanced off and hit the US Chief for
Naval Operations in the leg. This, however, was probably only one
of the reasons why the Americans vetoed the project.
I do not believe in aircraft carriers made of ice, but Geoffrey
Pyke showed that making an ice-and-something-composite may
actually be a serious possibility.
What if a freight ship unloaded 10,000 tons of old newspapers
on a suitable area of the Arctic Ocean, at the right moment of the
year, and then cooled the pulped water with snow cannons? Would
the mixture of paper and sea water produce strengthened ice?
Would it be possible to make a floating barrier strong enough to
break the swell, this way? If we used one kilogram of newspapers
for each square metre, the whole cargo could produce a floating
wave-breaker 500 kilometres long and twenty metres wide. When
the barrier would melt in the summer, the paper would decompose very quickly, so the polluting effect of the project would be
very temporary.
It might, of course, be somewhat challenging to unload 10,000
tons of old newspapers at the Arctic Ocean. How about a tanker
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filled with a mixture of water and newspapers pulped into it? Such
a water-pulp-slush could just be pumped out.
Recommendation: Er…
62. Using Large Icebergs as Drift Anchors
Some of the preceding chapters have analysed, how we could make
the floating ice drift faster in a certain direction, so that it would
end up in the Beaufort Gyre. Could we instead somehow slow
down the ice drifting towards the South?
In the present conditions ice drifting southwards between
Greenland and the Spitzbergen soon becomes so scattered that it
can no longer break the swell and prevent the wind from generating new waves. Thus no new ice can form between the widely scattered ice floes even when the temperature is seriously below zero.
If we could somehow concentrate the ice at the Southern edge
of the pack ice, the situation might change. If there was enough
ice, swell would be broken, wind could not create proper waves
and the sea between ice floes would freeze.
Could we use the largest icebergs as drift anchors? The greatest
icebergs in Greenland weigh billions of tons, and often extend six
or seven hundred metres below the water. Because of their enormous size they drift slowly. Moreover, they can sometimes become
grounded on shallow banks for one or two years.
What would happen if we drew a steel cable around two very
large icebergs, and set a cable or a boom between them? What if
we strengthened the boom or cable with snow cannons, so that we
would have a much stronger barrier, consisting of ice and timber,
or ice and steel?
If a steel cable was strengthened with a couple of metres of ice,
the barrier might become strong enough to halt the flow of drifting ice for one night. If the sea behind the boom then freezed, a
much wider and stronger barrier of fast ice would be created, and
a lot of new ice might form behind it.
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Recommendation: Nobody knows whether this would work, but it might
be worth trying.
63. Scattering the Drifts of Fresh Snow
Strong winds can pile most of the fresh, white snow on large drifts.
Snowdrifts are like sand dunes consisting of snow. There is often
a lot of shining white snow on some parts of the landscape but on
most sites none of it. If the fresh, shining white snow was more
evenly distributed, it would greatly increase a glacier’s or an ice
sheet’s reflectivity. Is it possible to reduce the accumulation of fresh
snow in drifts?
One proposal is to produce a lot of snowcat tracks whose
direction differs by approximately 90 degrees from the most common direction of the wind. For instance on the Greenland ice
sheet the wind normally blows towards the sea. Snowcat tracks
following the direction of the coastline would become filled with
fresh snow, so that the snow would be more evenly spread over the
ice field.
Recommendation: This might actually work.
64. Flooding the Northern Peatlands in Winter
Northern peatlands and other northern wetlands cover an enormous area of land, probably more than a billion hectares, if we use
the widest possible definition for what constitutes a wetland. In
many cases it would be possible to flood enormous areas of such
northern wetlands by constructing tiny dams on carefully chosen,
strategic sites. The same dams could also be used to increase the
depth of the peat layer, in order to absorb carbon dioxide from the
atmosphere (see chapter 13).
In summer a wet peatland produces more methane than a dry
peatland, so we would not want to flood the peatlands during the
summer. But in the autumn and winter temperatures will mostly
be so low that very little methane is produced.
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In many cases it would be possible to cover wetland areas with
thick ice by raising the water level, little by little, during the late
autumn and winter. The thicker the ice, the longer it would withstand the summer temperatures. Thus wetlands could maintain a
high reflectivity for a much longer time.
Instead of increasing methane emissions from peatlands, such
a program might actually reduce them by lowering summertime
temperatures inside the peat. Also, much of the methane produced
deeper in the ground might become trapped under the ice, and
could thus be captured or burned.
Recommendation: Proof-of-concept-type
pilot trials are warmly recom-
mended.
65. Increasing the Amount of DMS-producing Plankton
In chapter 21 I discussed the possibilities of fertilizing the oceans
with iron in order to sequester carbon dioxide from the air. The
approach has been criticized by many marine scientists, because it
is uncertain whether more than a few per cent of the carbon dioxide absorbed by the plankton would be taken permanently out of
the air. However, the same method could also be used to improve
the Earth’s reflectivity.
I wrote, in 2002, a letter to the New Scientist magazine, about
professor Lars Franzen’s studies (see chapter 21). Franzen had
found a connection between cold periods and the amount of space
dust falling on Earth and becoming stored in peat bogs. In the letter I said that the observed amounts of space dust were too small
to influence the Earth’s climate directly, by shading the planet
from solar radiation. A large part of space dust, however, consists of iron, so the dust might have fertilized the oceans and thus
increased the amount of DMS (dimethyl sulphide) in the air.
DMS is a sulphur compound that some types of plankton,
especially the so called coccolithophorids, as well as coral polyps,
produce as an integral part of their metabolism. What we consider
as the smell of the sea actually comes from DMS.
Franzen wrote back to me, saying that the idea was interest185
ing. He said that the micrometeorite spherules he was digging up
from the peatlands were probably too large to fertilize the oceans
directly, because they would sink too quickly. But he noted that the
dust burning in the atmosphere should produce a vast number of
tiny particles that would sink so slowly that plankton would have
more time to capture them.
In the first major iron fertilization trial, described in chapter
21, half a ton of iron increased the amount of plankton by approximately 30,000 tons (3,000 tons of carbon), which was a very significant result. However, also the amount of DMS in the air more
than tripled.
This may have been even more important than the sequestration of carbon, because DMS particles are highly reflective. They
also act as cloud condensation nuclei, like sulphur dioxide or salt
particles do. Most of the clouds over the oceans exist because of
DMS. It has been calculated, that without DMS and the clouds
produced by it, the Earth might be approximately 10 degrees Celsius warmer.
If we produced fine-grained iron dust and treat it so that it
would float for some time, so that all of it would be consumed by
the plankton before it sinks, each ton of iron could produce up to
100,000 - 150,000 tons of plankton, sequester at least temporarily something like 10,000 - 15,000 tons of carbon, and catalyze the
production of a billion billion tiny droplets of DMS. What if we
produced some kind of irondust-sawdust pellets? Pellets, which
would float for a few weeks or for a couple of months before they
would have disintegrated and released all their iron?
What if we took a ship-load of such pellets and released them
into the oceans in long lines, so that ocean currents and winds
would disperse them over a vast area? Would this produce a lot of
extra cloud cover? Would it increase the life-span of the already
existing stratocumulus clouds, and make them more reflective?
Should we try this? This could actually be the cheapest and most
effective way to halt, at least temporarily, the melting of the Arctic.
We should, of course, keep the timing in mind, especially in
the northern seas. In the North it is very important that our artificial plankton blooms will sink and the DMS produced by them
disappear before the autumn comes, because in the autumn and
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winter the extra clouds would start heating the Arctic Sea, instead
of cooling it.
There might also be other ways to catalyze the formation of
bioaerosols in the High Arctic. Trees also produce aerosols that
can assist the formation of cloud droplets. The hardest trees growing in Siberia or in the fells of Scandinavia would most probably
also grow in Iceland and in the ice-free parts of Greenland and
many other Arctic islands that are now barren. Should we plant
more trees on these islands? Coniferous trees might reduce the
reflectivity of the islands a bit, but we could plant broad-leaved
trees. (see chapter 38). Bioaerosols produced by trees growing on
Arctic islands should, at least in theory, increase the summer-time
cloud cover over the Arctic Ocean.
RECOMMENDATION: We should organize more experiments along these
lines. In the Arctic Ocean even most of the carbon sequestered by the
plankton might stay out from the atmosphere, instead of only a few per
cent, because the water is extremely cold, minus two at the surface and
half a degree at the bottom.
66. Establishing Arctic Pleistocene Parks
The Russian ecologist Sergey Zimov, director of the Northeast Science Station in Cherskii, Siberia, has pointed out that it might be
possible to save the permafrost areas from melting by introducing
massive herds of large, plant-eating animals to the Arctic tundra.
Snow is a good insulator and it often prevents permafrost areas
from re-freezing during the winter. A much larger number of foraging herbivores would compress the snow and thus reduce its
insulating capacity. Zimov has, together with the people of nearby
villages, already established a 2,000-square-kilometre “Pleistocene
Park” and stocked it with moose, reindeer and Yakutian horses.
Zimov has also experimented with compressing the snow with a
military tank.
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RECOMMENDATION: Warmly recommended. The idea is scientifically
sound and makes perfect sense. Besides reindeer, moose and Yakutian
horses, musk oxen should also be introduced. What a pity that mammoths and woolly rhinos no longer exist! Vast Arctic Pleistocene Parks,
with millions or tens of millions of wild herbivores, could become the
world’s most amazing tourist attraction, leaving even the SerengetiMara ecosystem in Tanzania and Kenya in their shadow. Moose also eat
pine seedlings and increase the percentage of broad-leaved trees with
the expense of conifers, which improves the reflectivity of the northern
forests (see chapter 38).
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Reducing the greenhouse gas emissions
This book concentrates on reflectivity and on removing carbon
from the atmosphere, because the earlier books describing how we
can fight global warming have not dealt with these issues in length.
However, the idea is not to say that reducing the greenhouse
gas emissions would be of secondary importance. What follows is
a brief summary of some of the possibilities. Many other methods
have already been mentioned, in the previous chapters. The list, of
course, is far from exhaustive.
Especially the renewable energy field is now changing and
developing extremely quickly. 2008 was the first year during
which global investment in renewable energies (euro 112 billion)
exceeded the combined new investments in fossil fuels and nuclear
power.
The environmental organization Friends of the Earth has
pointed out, that while the EU and many other governments have
now adopted ambitious long-term goals about cutting greenhouse
gas emissions by 60 or 80 per cent before 2050, their short-time
targets are still modest. If the aim is to cut the emissions by 6 or
10 per cent by 2020, there is a problematic gap between the 2020
and the 2050 targets. To bridge this gap, Friends of the Earth Britain proposed, that there should be a law that would commit the
United Kingdom to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by
a certain percentage, every year, so that the 80 per cent target in
2050 could be achieved smoothly and in a predictable way. The
British industries and businesses appreciated the predictability
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such a model would create, and almost enthusiastically supported
the Climate Law, so it was adopted in the British parliament with
a clear majority of the votes. Similar laws would be helpful, especially for the industries, in other countries, as well.
Passive solar energy
In the long run we will most probably get a very large majority of
all our energy from the Sun. The Sun produces an almost unimaginable amount of energy, roughly equivalent to 60,000,000 large
nuclear power plants for every inhabitant of our planet. 60 million
nuclear power plants for you, 60 million for me and 60 million for
every other woman, man and child living on Earth. Only one part
in two billion of this excessive flow of energy ever reaches the Earth,
but even this tiny trickle amounts to 170,000,000 gigawatts, about
14,000 times our present, official consumption of energy.
In a way most of our present consumption of energy or even
a huge majority of it, already is and will always be passive solar
energy. It would be somewhat harder to start the heating of our
houses from the average temperature of the Universe (about minus
270 degrees Celsius).
But passive solar energy could be harnessed much more efficiently both for heating and cooling purposes, and for many other
things, as well. The simplest way to utilize passive solar heating is
to concentrate most of the large windows in a house on the southern side, and some of them on the western and eastern sides. On
the northern side there should be no windows or only some very
small ones. Breathing construction materials like wood and clay
are also an effective means of utilising passive solar energy (see the
next part).
Saving Energy: Houses
In the northern areas heating consumes a large share of a household’s energy budget. As a general rule, a large apartment/house
consumes more energy than a small apartment/house if they are
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otherwise similar. In reality the solutions currently in use are so
different, that the various technological choices influence a house’s
ecological footprint even more than its size.
If you have a yard of your own, the cheapest way to save heating energy is a windbreak consisting of trees. A dense fence is not
the best option because the wind jumps over it, but a garden with
different types of trees in several different layers breaks the wind
effectively. Even when the house is warm, well built and airtight,
windbreaks can save a lot of energy. Architects should also think
in terms of exposure degrees! In not so tight and warm houses can
have a dramatic impact on heating bills.
Ideally, the windbreaks on the southern side of the house
should be situated so far that they do not prevent sunlight coming in from the windows, but this is only possible when the yard is
relatively large. On the northern side the windbreaks can be very
close to the house.
Some of the trees that are growing on your land may be important also for the neighbouring houses as windbreaks or as a sunshade. It is a good idea to give a thought for your neighbour’s
energy bills, as well, when you consider where you should grow
trees or whether you should cut an existing tree.
After the windbreaks the most economic way to cut heating
bills is to add insulation on the top, into the roof, because a large
percentage of heat escapes that way. New windows with three or
four different glasses save a lot of energy. Using a Venetian blind
or drawing a curtain in front of the window during cold days Is
almost as effective as adding an extra window glass. It is, of course,
possible to hang more than one curtain in front of the windows.
Two or three separate, thin and light sheets of silk or artificial
silk are, together, a very efficient insulating layer. However, the
curtains must not fall on top of a radiator, so that they direct the
flow of warm air towards the windows. An extra horizontal frame
dividing the windows saves a lot of heat by splitting the convection
cell of warm air on the surface of the glass.
Placing the warm water or electric radiators at the outer walls
is a very good way of wasting a lot of energy, as much of the heat
will be channelled directly into the outer wall or windows. Placing an aluminium foil between the radiator and the outer wall
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can eliminate part of the wastage, but the best option is to situate the heat sources in the middle of the house. In regions where
the temperatures often fall below the freezing point of water, one
of the most important things to do is to design the houses so that
there are as few vulnerable spots (water pipes!) as possible. If antifreeze is put into the radiators, it is no longer necessary to heat all
the rooms during the cold days: only the rooms that have water
pipes must be heated in winter even when they are not in use. This
transforms the other rooms from consumers of heat to extra layers
of insulation.
Adding insulation to walls is less cost-effective than the measures mentioned above, unless you have empty cavities inside the
walls. Such empty places can be filled with sawdust or some other
breathing but insulating material simply by making a small hole
and blowing the insulation material inside.
When the problem is too much heat, the cheapest way to cut
air-conditioning bills are trees shading the house. White paint
or paints which reflect the sunlight even more efficiently are also
a good option, as well as other passive or active cooling methods
using solar energy. Some interesting technologies utilize the phase
changes of salt crystals and brines.
Breathing construction materials like wood and clay can
reduce both the energy needed for heating and the energy needed
for cooling. When the temperature drops at night, and some of
the water vapour inside a breathing wall condenses and becomes
water, it releases a lot of heat (2260 joules/gram) and thus warms
up the house. When the wall dries during the day, the evaporation
of the water in turn consumes an equivalent amount of energy and
cools the house. Most traditional construction methods and styles
have utilized the phenomenon very effectively, but modern architecture has almost totally neglected it. This is absurd! It is criminally stupid to burn coal to produce electricity for air-conditioning
and heating when the same effect could often be achieved in a way
that is both pollution-free and almost free of cost.
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Saving Energy: Washing
People in many countries have become obsessed by washing themselves and their clothes. For example in the USA most people now
shower many times per day, and typically wash their clothes after
having used them for a couple of hours, only. It is not my intention to say that we ought to go back to the habits of 17th century
Europe, when people almost never washed themselves, not even
once a year. But I do think that for instance the present US washing habits could probably be classified a bit hyster…exaggerated.
In Jakarta, Indonesia, somewhat similar habits have led to a massive overuse of water, thanks to which the whole city is now rapidly sinking further and further below the sea level.
The US environmental group Project Laundry List has
observed, that even if people kept on washing themselves and their
clothes as often as now, they could typically cut their power bills
by about 10 per cent, if they used cold water and dried their laundry on a clothes line, instead of a tumble drier, and if they abandoned the habits of bleaching and ironing.
Saving Energy: Lighting
The provision of lighting annually produces about 500 million tons
of carbon. This is annoying, because compact fluorescent lights or
light-emitting diodes (leds) can produce the same amount of lighting with five times less power than the old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs. Luckily, the issue has been widely publicized, and
things are now starting to change. For instance on 28th of March,
2009, approximately one thousand million people protested
against the mindless wasting of electricity. “The Earth Hour” was
the largest demonstration ever organized on this planet.
What comes to lighting, romantic notions about going back to
candles or oil lamps do not help. If 30 per cent of the energy content of kerosene can be transformed to electricity, to power a fluorescent lamp, this produces approximately 450 times more lighting than burning the same amount of kerosene in an oil lamp. On
a long run, solar-powered led lights are the best option, because
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the best light-emitting diodes can transform up to 64 per cent of
power to light.
Saving Energy: Cars
Transportation is responsible for 20 or 25 per cent of the carbon
dioxide emissions in the industrialized countries. Besides this cars
also produce nitrogen oxides, nitrous oxide, carbon monoxide and
soot.
The easiest and cheapest way to cut the energy consumption of
your car is to drive less, and to use trains, busses, trams, a bicycle
or your feet instead. When the trains or busses are full, the greenhouse gas emission for each person-kilometre can be only one
tenth of what a single person driving his own car would have produced.
If you need a private car, only use it when it really saves a lot
of money or a lot of time – in many cases the car does exactly the
opposite. The appeal of the private car is at least partly based on
strong, preconceived ideas and promises about unfettered freedom
of movement. However, when you spend from two to four hours
a day in a traffic jam commuting towards your office and back,
you must really use heavy blinkers on your eyes if you can honestly consider this as unfettered, blessed freedom made possible
only by the use of your own, private car. In a train or bus you can
read, work with the computer, watch a movie, sleep or just relax.
All hard to do if you’re driving.
When the speed increases from 80 to 120 kilometres per hour,
nitrogen oxide emissions increase four-fold and fuel consumption
and carbon dioxide emissions by 30 per cent. The most important
thing, therefore, is to avoid speeding, especially during midsummer when the sunshine is bright. The issue is particularly important if you live in a tropical or subtropical region, where sunlight
is five times more efficient in converting nitrogen oxides to ozone,
compared to Central Europe.
Maintaining a proper tyre pressure has some significance,
underpressurized tyres can increase the fuel consumption by five
or six per cent. Small and light cars of course consume less fuel
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than large, heavy vehicles. Don’t carry any unnecessary weight, if
your car is of average size, each 25 kilograms of extra weight will
increase your fuel consumption by roughly one per cent.
However, the most important thing is to drive in a relaxed,
non-aggressive and anticipatory way, and to maintain a relatively
long distance to the next car. Driving this way is economic in the
sense that it can save a lot of fuel for you. But a small number of
drivers with such a relaxed style of driving can also reduce the fuel
consumption of hundreds, if not thousands, of other cars.
This sounds crazy, but there are many drivers who do the
opposite: who behave aggressively, overtake a lot and drive right
behind the next car. When there is a lot of traffic, such aggressive
drivers trigger “shock waves” in the traffic flow. When somebody
suddenly slows down the next car has to slow down and stop if it is
too close, and so on. The result is a wave that moves backwards on
the road with an average speed of 20 kilometres per hour, until it
is stopped by a stretch of less dense traffic, or by a driver who had
kept a long enough distance to the next car so that the wave did
not force her to stop or even slow down, more than a little bit.
In other words: in dense traffic aggressive drivers tend to generate an endless series of shock waves, each of which can force
thousands of other cars to brake, stop and re-accelerate, over and
over again. Non-aggressive, intelligent drivers maintaining a long
distance to the next car can damp these shock waves, literally
destroy them, and thus prevent the stop-and-go oscillation of the
traffic. A small number of intelligent drivers can save everybody a
lot of time and a lot of fuel!
Diesel cars drink less than cars using gasoline, but they produce more black aerosols (tiny soot particles and tar balls). A better option are the Elsbett engines that use unprocessed vegetable
oil or two-tank systems (“Elsbett kits”) which make it possible to
run an ordinary diesel engine with unprocessed vegetable oil. You
only have to start and halt the motor with biodisel or ordinary diesel oil. This saves about 15 per cent of the original energy content
of the vegetable oil and should produce (on average) much larger
soot particles. Biogas cars also burn their fuel without producing
large soot emissions.
However, electric cars are the ideal solution, especially in the
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tropics, because they do not produce any nitrogen oxide, carbon
monoxide or soot emissions. If their batteries are loaded with
renewable energy, they will not produce carbon dioxide, either,
except what is released into the air when the car is manufactured.
Electric cars are rapidly becoming a feasible alternative. Tesla
Roadster, a fancy electric sports car, already has a range of 400
kilometres without a recharge of batteries.
Both electric and other cars would consume much less energy
if they were made of lighter materials like bamboo, magnesium
or carbon fibre composites, instead of steel. Car manufacturers should be forced to move towards this direction. As the environmentalist and technological visionary Amory Lovins has
remarked, typically only 0.3 per cent of the energy content in a
car’s fuel can nowadays be converted as the forward movement of
the driver. 80 per cent of the energy is just wasted and most of the
rest is used to moving the heavy steel structures of the car.
In the tropics it would also be possible to make very light and
small, three-wheeled electric cars powered with a solar panel on
their roof. If the cars would have a maximum speed of 20 kilometres, if they would be made of magnesium, bamboo, carbon
fibre or other very light but strong materials, and if they would
only have a relatively small battery, they could get all their power
directly from the sun. This would be a better, non-polluting vehicle for the larger cities in the South, which have heavily congested
traffic conditions. Electric busses would, of course, be the best
solution.
Saving Energy: Food
As mentioned above (see chapter 25), the most important way
to reduce your personal greenhouse gas emissions is to become
a vegetarian. The production of meat consumes an enormous
amount of land, fodder, fertilizers, water and energy and produces
vast greenhouse gas emissions. Prawns and shrimp, cheese and
other milk products, rice, vegetables grown in heated greenhouses
off-season and the meat of large, predatory fish also have large carbon footprints. The catching of fish that live in great schools con196
sumes less fuel. The growing of rice produces large methane and
carbon emissions.
Potatoes, onions and carrots have a very low carbon footprint,
as well as locally grown fruit. Eating organic food reduces nitrous
oxide emissions, at least to an extent, and may lead to some
sequestration of carbon out of the atmosphere, by thickening the
humus layer in the fields. If food has been grown nearby, transportation has not caused major greenhouse gas emissions. Food that
has been brought for you from another continent by an aeroplane
makes a heavy contribution to global warming.
Many retail outlets selling food waste large amounts of electricity. Avoid supermarkets and food shops that have remarkably low
inside temperatures during the summer heat.
Two exotic possibilities should perhaps also be mentioned, in
this context. Many research facilities are trying to develop artificial fish fillets and artificial meat, produced with the help of animal
stem cells in modern food factories. They assume that in the future
it will be possible to produce artificial tissues in such factories with
a fraction of the present cost of fish and meat. This would reduce
both greenhouse gas emissions and consumer prices. If it would
mean the end of animal husbandry and poultry-keeping, it would
in practise also free us from the threat of new influenza epidemics.
Influenza pandemics always come from domestic animals, either
poultry or pigs. Artificial meat would also be an almost ideal solution from the animal rights viewpoint, so this line of research
should perhaps be supported.
Another interesting issue is called calorie restriction. It seems
that it would be possible to increase the maximum life-span of
human beings by several decades with a diet containing an adequate supply of all the key proteins, fats, trace nutrients and vitamins, but 30 per cent less calories than the earlier recommended
minimum calorific intake. According to new research, such a diet
should also increase our average life-span and reduce the incidence of many diseases. No human population – with the possible exception of Indian saints – has ever followed this kind of calorie restriction, because the unvoluntarily malnourished people
also suffer from trace mineral and vitamin malnutrition. The people on the Japanese island of Okinawa, however, probably come
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the closest. On Okinawa it is customary to stop eating a little bit
before you actually become full. The inhabitants of Okinawa have
a 40 times larger chance of living to the age of one hundred than
the people living on the other Japanese islands, even though the
rest of the Japanese are also among the healthiest people on Earth.
Saving Energy: Food Negawatts
Still in late 1960’s and early 1970’s at least one half of the food
eaten by humans in the so called Third World countries was actually consumed by parasites and infectious, fever-causing diseases like malaria, typhoid, typhus, pneumonia and bronchitis.
Nowadays people do not have so many different parasites, combined parasite loads are far smaller and bacterial infections can
be treated with antibiotics. Because food production is, by far, the
largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions, the improvements in public health care programs have actually contributed a
lot to reducing the scale of the problem.
However, at least two billion people still carry roundworms or
hookworms in their intestines, and various unnecessary diarrhoeal
and respiratory ailments, schistosomiasis, malaria and other infectious disease still consume a large share of the calories eaten by the
poorer people. Better and more efficient control of infectious disease could further reduce the need of food - and greenhouse gas
emissions from the agricultural sector!
Food negawatts can also be produced by reducing the burden
of manual labour. A peasant doing forestry or farm work with simple, non-mechanized tools can consume two or three times more
calories than a person doing less heavy manual work with better
equipment.
Saving Energy: Reducing Food Waste
People in industrialized countries currently waste a surprisingly
large percentage of their food. Cutting this wastage is an efficient
way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Researchers in Cardiff
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University have estimated that in United Kingdom 5 per cent of
food is wasted at the agricultural level, 7 per cent in processing
and distribution, 10 per cent in retail, and 33 per cent at the consumer level.
In Southern countries much less food is wasted in a similar
way, but post-harvest losses due to fungi, insects and rodents are
still a major problem.
All these losses could and should be reduced to a fraction of
their present size. The European Union and the United States of
America should ban practices that create unnecessary waste,
instead of enacting legislation that adds to it. Some of the worst
directives adopted by EU have forced farmers to throw much of
their production away, because it has not been of the right shape
and size. Wise legislation would do the opposite. It should make
wastage illegal, so that a supermarket cannot legally refuse perfectly edible fruit or vegetables from its contract farmers because
of minor cosmetic defects.
There should be a clearer distinction between “best before” and
“use before” dates. People now throw much food away immediately after the “best before” date, thinking that their health might
otherwise be in danger. We should all become aware of how much
food we throw away, and how much money and greenhouse gas
emissions we could save if we rationalized our personal habits in
this field.
Development cooperation agencies should pay more attention to reducing post-harvest losses in Southern countries. Such
losses still amount to 10-25 per cent of all food grain produced in
the South and typically much more for fruit and vegetables. Assistance to agriculture currently amounts to approximately 3 per cent
of all international development aid, and of this only 5 per cent is
devoted to reducing post-harvest losses. If we are worried about
the present world food crises and about the availability of cultivable land in the poorer countries, why do we only invest 0.15
per cent of our international development aid and something like
0.0005 per cent of our GNP in reducing post-harvest losses in the
South? This is absurd, because cutting this wastage would also be
an excellent way of cutting our greenhouse gas emissions!
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Saving Energy: Cooking
Cooking is often done with fossil fuels or with electricity produced by them. There are a number of ways to reduce these emissions. For instance new, energy-saving pressure kettles can save up
to 70 per cent of the energy needed for cooking. Microwave ovens
are more efficient than ordinary ovens. Solar cookers are the ideal
solution, whenever they can be used, but buying electricity that
comes from renewable sources is also a good choice.
Saving Energy: Consumption
A significant part of our greenhouse gas emissions are indirect.
The production of almost everything does cause at least some carbon dioxide emissions. So the more you consume, the more emissions will be produced. Perhaps the most important single thing is
to buy good-quality products that last for a long time and which
do not have to be replaced, very often. Using second-hand products is a good idea, as well as lending all kinds of things to friends.
When you buy electric equipment, choose models in which the
consumption of electricity has been reduced to a minimum. For
instance laptop computers consume only five per cent of the electricity that goes to feed an old-fashioned table computer.
Boycott flat-screen televisions! The manufacturing of flatscreen televisions releases nitrogen trifluoride into the air. In 2006
there was only 1,200 tons of nitrogen trifluoride in the Earth’s
atmosphere, but in 2008 the amount had grown to 5,400 tons. The
concentrations are still tiny, but nitrogen trifluoride is 17,000 times
more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. If every
family acquires a flat-screen TV, the emissions of this new greenhouse gas can become a major problem.
Saving Energy: Recycling
Recycling metals and glass saves a lot of energy. Making a can
from new aluminium consumes 20 times more energy (electricity)
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than making the same can from recycled aluminium. Recycling
paper saves energy and water, and reduces methane emissions
from garbage dumps. Separating organic waste so that it does not
go into landfills also reduces methane emissions. The organic matter can be used to produce biogas or brickets that can be burned
like coal.
Saving Energy: Children
From the viewpoint of global warming, the most important single
decision might be, how many children of your own you want to
have. A couple who decides to have six children and to rear all of
them so that they might do the same, will produce a vastly larger
carbon footprint than a couple that will only have one child.
From an ecological viewpoint it is better to acquire children
when you are thirty-six than when you are eighteen. This slows
down the population growth.
However, there is no actual reason to panic because in a way
“the population bomb” has already been defused. A large majority of the world’s couples now use birth control. In Bangladesh the
birth rate has dropped from six to three children per woman, in
Iran it dropped from five births per woman in 1989 to only two a
decade later.
Because of the earlier, rapid growth of population there are
now very many young or relatively young people in the world. This
means that the Earth’s population will keep on increasing for some
more time before it hits the peak around 2050, and then starts to
decline. According to recent predictions the Earth’s peak human
population will most probably be somewhere between 9.2 billion
and 8.5 billion.
In Latin America and Asia women now have on average 2.5
babies, but most of them would like to have even fewer. It has been
estimated, that there are still about 80 million unwanted pregnancies in the world, every year, a figure that exceeds the world’s current population growth (78 million per year).
By empowering the women, and by ensuring that even the
poorest people can afford birth control, we might be able to ensure
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that the population peak will be reached at 8.5 billion or perhaps
even at 8 billion, instead of 9.2 billion or more. This would, of
course, make everything else a little bit easier.
To word it differently, empowering the women might amount
to something like one quarter of the solution to the climate problem, even excluding what has already been achieved.
International Travel
International travel, especially flying, might be the most complex
issue related to global warming. Aeroplanes are responsible for
approximately two per cent of our carbon dioxide emissions. They
also produce condensation trails that heat the planet.
On the other hand, travel industries provide 200 million fulltime and 300 million part-time jobs. Many families are totally
dependent on this income. Ecologically oriented mass tourism
may also be the best and perhaps even the only hope for coral
reefs, mangrove swamps, peatland, lowland and mountain rainforests, Africa’s wild ecosystems (including the remaining grasslands
growing strong perennial grasses), elephants, great whales, river
dolphins and numerous individual, magnificent, giant trees. Much
of all this only remains because the tourists enjoy such things and
travel where they can see them. Because of mass tourism it is now
more profitable to protect the whales and the lions than to kill
them. Without mass tourism, nature conservation would most
probably be fighting a doomed, uphill battle, and it is very difficult
to say how much of the world’s natural wonders could survive the
struggle.
Tourism is also important for human rights and democracy.
Tourists automatically become a kind of human rights monitors.
An average mass tourist is not willing to take chances, therefore
even a relatively modest amount of violence immediately leads to a
collapse of mass tourism. In other words, if a government wants to
have its cut of the tourist buck, it needs to behave itself.
So the choice is not as easy as some people would like to
believe. A runaway greenhouse effect would of course destroy the
rainforests and most of the marine biodiversity, but we should
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not try to prevent a greenhouse catastrophe in a way that would
ensure the destruction of biodiversity through other mechanisms.
Besides, if the remaining mangrove forests, tropical rainforests,
tropical peatlands and coral reefs will be destroyed, enormous
amounts of carbon dioxide will be released into the atmosphere.
Traveling to the South during the winter is also very beneficial for the health of the people who live in the northern areas and
who do not get enough sunlight during the darkest season of the
year. Even a short trip to the South can fill the body’s vitamin D
stores for a month or two, and staying in the sun during the darkest months is even better, from the public health viewpoint. Mass
tourism saves lives, or at least prolongs them. Studies that have
compared the health statistics of the southern and northern states
of the USA have shown that a lack of sunlight increases the risk of
strokes, heart attacks, diabetes, osteoporosis, Parkinson’s disease,
MS-disease, Alzheimer’s disease and at least 18 different types of
cancer. Differences between South Europe and Northern and Central Europe are even more dramatic, because many Europeans live
above the 50th latitude, thanks to the heating impact of the North
Atlantic Current. Olive oil, red wine and other ingredients that
belong to the Mediterranean diet must also play a role, here, but
sunlight could still be the main reason for lower cardiovascular,
cancer and diabetes mortality in Southern Europe. If you act carelessly, so that you burn your skin repeatedly, you of course increase
your risk of getting skin cancer, but this is a very minor issue compared to the list of benefits. Taking vitamin D pills regularly might
be as useful as exposing the skin to sunlight, but we cannot yet be
certain about this.
And then there are the mental health issues… Depression
can also be a lethal disease! It causes many of the world’s suicides
(roughly a million a year) and triples the risk of serious cardiovascular illness.
We humans are very strange and unique creatures. In a way
we have been trapped between two different worlds. Our closest
genetic relatives are the forest chimpanzees and gorillas, but we
also have our other sisters, which are in many ways anatomically
closer to us than the forest chimpanzees. We are also sea mammals, marine apes, aquatic apes.
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We do not have fur but a layer of fat under our skin to insulate
us from the cold water. This is a sea mammal thing, none of the
other primates have it.
We have a sea mammal’s heat removal mechanism: we sweat.
In other words: we have sea mammals’ kidneys and their capacity to remove salt from our bodies. Wild land animals sweating and pissing like humans would die off as a species in a couple
of months, because in an inland savannah or in a rainforest this
would be a suicidal way of wasting both water and salt. A marine
mammal, however, dies unless it can get rid of the extra salt accumulating into its body.
We have a sea mammal’s descended larynx, which enables us
to swallow a deep rapid gulp of air before we dive. We also have a
sea mammal’s ability to control our breath. No other land mammal
can do this, but this ability and the structure of our larynx provide
us with a capacity to produce complex sounds. For this reason we
can talk to each other - and sing, like for instance humpback, bowhead and beluga whales do.
We weep and shed tears. All sea mammals do this, but of the
land animals only humans and elephants weep. We often forget
that our capacity to dive and swim is actually quite substantial,
somewhere between grey seal’s and sea otter’s abilities, actually a
little bit closer to what a grey seal can do. None of the other primates can swim. You can’t even get them into the water. According to experiments we can learn to adjust our eyesight under the
water. Human babies can swim and dive before they learn to walk.
Other land mammals give birth to skinny babies, but human
babies are born “overweight” because they used to need the fat
both as buoyant and as water insulation, just like other sea mammals do. According to a most interesting global piece of statistics
seven per cent of human babies still have leather between their
toes when they are born.
And why have the oceans of our planet produced about 35 genera of creatures with very large brains, and the continents none?
It all boils down to simple biochemistry. Brains require a number
of different fatty acids, some of which, especially decosahexaenoic
acid (DHA) and arachidonic acid (AA), cannot be substituted by
anything else. DHA and AA a very common in marine food webs,
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but their availability on land is much more limited. According to
South African scientists, who tend to have the best and longest
fossil series – partly because they have an easy access to Greater
Karroo, “the largest graveyard in the world” - long life on land
makes the mammal genera grow larger bodies and smaller brains,
while living in the sea seems to have an opposite, growth-inducing
impact on mammals’ brainpans.
Anyway: mermaids do exist and you may have seen thousands
of them, yesterday. They do not only belong to the realm of legend and fiction, nor do they have anything to do with sea cows,
dugongs and manatees. The stories about mermaids are, most
probably, faint echoes from our own, distant, long forgotten past.
Just forget the fish tails!
Many, if not most of us have a strong and somewhat unexplainable longing for the sea, for warm water, sun and sandy
beaches, for the sound of the breaking swell on the shore. There is
no mystery, here, because this is where we came from and what we
actually are. To us, the sea shore is home, our real home, not the
savannah nor the rainforest, and being in physical touch with our
deep primordial memories may be important for the mental health
of many of us.
For all these reasons I do find it ethically and morally difficult,
if not impossible, to recommend to people that they should not
make a holiday trip during the winter, in order to reduce their personal greenhouse gas emissions.
So what is the clever thing to do, here?
Personally, I am almost convinced that we need mass tourism
to save the Earth. It would be very short-sighted to concentrate on
fighting the economic structures that might be our best hope of
preserving some of the planet’s most significant carbon stores and
carbon sinks.
This, of course, does not mean that we should not be more
responsible in what we are doing and how we are behaving. We
definitely must reduce the environmental impact of air traffic.
The carbon dioxide emissions from air traffic have this far
received most of the public attention. This is a problem, because
the jet plane condensation trails and artificial cirrus clouds born
from them heat the planet 1.5 - 30 times more than the carbon
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dioxide produced by the aeroplanes.
The easiest way to eliminate globe-warming condensation
trails is to reduce the flight altitude, especially in late afternoon,
evening and night flights. Night flights only constitute a quarter
of all flights but they are responsible for 60 or 80 per cent of the
heating impact of contrails. Day-time condensation trails cool the
planet as long as the sun keeps shining, and start heating it only
after sunset.
Propeller planes can only produce contrails in very cold conditions, because they do not fly as high as the jet planes. Some jet
planes can easily fly a couple of kilometres lower without increasing their fuel consumption by more than a few per cent. However,
many modern jet planes have been designed to fly in very thin air,
and their fuel consumption increases steeply if they lower their
flight altitudes.
Because the focus has been in carbon dioxide, only, jet plane
manufacturers are still trying to design planes that would fly even
higher and thus consume a little bit less fuel. This is very counterproductive, because it will be very difficult for jet planes designed
this way to reduce their flight altitudes so that they would not produce contrails. Besides, if the future jets fly higher than our present
planes, their contrails will stay up longer and heat the planet even
more than the contrails produced by our present jet plane models.
It has been estimated, that a jet plane cruising at 17 to 20 kilometres heats the planet 5.4 times more effectively than a plane flying
at 10 to 13 kilometres. If carbon dioxide constitutes 2.5 - 40 per
cent of the problem and contrails cause 97.5 - 60 per cent of it, it
does not really make much sense to multiply the larger problem by
a factor of five to reduce the smaller problem by ten per cent or so.
According to the most pessimistic calculation the damage for the
climate could be two hundred times larger than the benefit.
Aeroplane manufacturers and many air companies are even
talking about replacing kerosene with hydrogen as the main jet
plane fuel. This would be the worst conceivable option, because a
jet plane using hydrogen would heat the planet at least 13 times
more effectively than our present jet planes, using kerosene.
In other words: condensation trails and artificial cirrus clouds
produced by a single aeroplane using hydrogen might heat the
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planet as much as the carbon dioxide produced by 20 - 400 present kind of jet planes, burning kerosene in the presently used flight
altitudes.
The highest priority should be to ensure, that jet planes continue to use kerosene manufactured from fossil fuels or from wood
or single-celled algae, instead of hydrogen. What comes to air
traffic, this is much more important than anything else. The second priority should be to ensure, that the aeroplanes of the future
can, when necessary, fly so low that they will not produce climate
warming condensation trails, without increasing their fuel consumption too much.
But what about carbon? One way to reduce the planes’ carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions per passenger-kilometre
would be to ban business and executive classes. This would make it
possible to reduce the emissions on shorter flights to 95 grams of
carbon dioxide per passenger-kilometre, when the plane is 80 per
cent full.
If governments forced airlines to cooperate more effectively and
to pool all their flights together so that there would be no more flying with half-empty planes, further savings could be achieved. In
full planes it is possible to achieve the level of 50 grams of carbon
dioxide (12 grams of carbon) per passenger-kilometre on longer
flights, and 76 grams on shorter flights, if there are no business and
first classes. This would be 2.5 times less than the present average.
Better coordination between the flight control authorities of
different countries would enable shorter and more direct routes
and shorter waiting times before landing, and thus cut 15–20 per
cent from carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions. Some
more savings could be achieved by reducing the average flying
speeds of the aircraft. Even a relatively modest drop in speed can
often save a lot of fuel.
A shift to modern propeller planes, like the Canadian Bombardier Q400, could do even more. Such a move would increase
flying times a little, but carbon dioxide emissions would be cut by
one half and condensation trails would be eliminated almost completely. Moreover, propeller planes can use biodiesel. Jet planes flying in higher altitudes and in colder temperatures cannot do this,
because the so called cloud point of biodiesel is too high.
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There are still other ways to reduce the ecological footprint of
traveling. Your carbon dioxide emissions or at least a certain percentage of them can be compensated in a very simple way if you
can stay in the South for a little bit longer, and if you can keep
your home unheated or at least in a relatively cool temperature
while you are away. For example in Finland an apartment kept in
five degrees Celsius during the winter should statistically consume
only 10–25 per cent of the energy that would be required for keeping the same rooms at 20 degrees. If you live in the Far North, flying to South for midwinter could actually reduce your personal
carbon footprint, if you do not have to heat your house (much)
while you are away. We should perhaps demand smaller salaries
and longer holidays!
As mentioned before, nitrogen oxides cool the climate by
destroying methane and heat the planet by producing ozone.
According to one estimate these impacts roughly cancel each other
at mid-latitudes, over Europe and continental USA. According to
this assessment, the tropical sunlight is so intense and converts
nitrogen oxides to ozone so effectively, that the heating impact
in the tropics might be five times stronger than in mid-latitudes.
In the northern areas the cooling impact might dominate, especially if methane emissions from permafrost, peatlands and methane clathrates keep on increasing. Therefore shifting a larger part
of the air traffic between Asia, Europe and North America into
more northern routes could be a partial solution to the problem.
This would, in many cases, also reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
Because the circumference of our planet becomes the smaller the
closer to the poles we get, surprisingly northern routes are often
the shortest way between the continents. Shifting air traffic to
more northern routes might even reduce winter-time cloud cover
(see chapter 52), but this is still uncertain. However, according to
another, more recent estimate, the methane-destroying impact
of the nitrogen oxides might be more significant than what was
previously assumed. If this new assessment is closer to the mark,
nitrogen oxide emissions always have a cooling impact on the
planet, no matter what the latitude.
All these things can help, but there still is a limit to the amount
of flying we can do. Making several different journeys in a year
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should be seen as a serious sin, something that should be avoided.
Don’t be fanatic, carry out the journeys that are genuinely important for you, for your family or for your work. But forget the trips
that involve flying and which are only marginally interesting, or
which are not absolutely crucial for the work you are doing.
We should perhaps also demand wind- and sun-powered,
intercontinental passenger ships and the return of the airships.
Modern airships could perhaps utilize solar energy with the help
of thin-film solar cells, and use powerful kites or sails to harness
the energy of the jet streams and other strong winds of the high
atmosphere.
Halting Tropical Deforestation
Tropical deforestation still causes at least 20 per cent (and probably more) of our annual carbon dioxide emissions. Preventing the
destruction of tropical rainforests is thus very important both for
the climate and for biodiversity – a great majority of the plant, animal and fungus species living on land are endemic to tropical rainforests.
Industrial Process Emissions: Cement and Steel
Most of the concrete annually produced in the world is based on
Portland cement, because it is cheap, easy to use and because it
makes strong and durable concrete. Unfortunately, the manufacturing of Portland cement produces approximately two billion tons
of carbon dioxide per year (see chapter 3). These emissions could
still double before the year 2030, unless we shift to better raw
materials.
It has already been mentioned that magnesium-based cements
were a better alternative, because they could in theory absorb a lot
of carbon from the atmosphere, assuming that the magnesium carbonate is manufactured in the right way. However, even a shift to
the geopolymer cements would cut the emissions by 90 per cent
or so.
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The concrete made of geopolymer cements would most probably be both cheaper and stronger than the concrete made of Portland cement. Geopolymer cements bear a great resemblance to
the qualities of the so-called Pozzolana cement, which the ancient
Romans used as a construction material. Many houses made of the
Pozzolana concrete are still in a prime condition, more than 2,000
years after they were built.
Modern geopolymer cements are manufactured of the fly ash
from coal-fired power stations and steelworks. Aluminates and silicates are extracted from the fly ash. When they are treated with
alkali, a polymerisation reaction binds them into long-chain molecules known as geopolymers. No heating to high temperatures
is required, and there are no carbon dioxide emissions from the
chemical reactions. However, in 2008 there was only one company
– the Australian Zeobond – that was already manufacturing larger
amounts of geopolymer cement.
The manufacturing of steel also causes very large carbon dioxide emissions, because iron oxides are usually reduced to iron with
coke, a purified form of mineral coal. It would be possible to eliminate these emissions, or at least a major part of them, by replacing
coke with charcoal. The steel used in tanks and in some other military equipment is often purified with charcoal.
Whenever possible, steel and Portland cement should be
replaced with wood, bamboo or mud in construction. Wooden
houses are carbon sinks. Mud is also a very good but neglected
construction material. Houses constructed of mud or air-cured
mud bricks are cool in the summer and warmer than concrete
houses during the winter, because water keeps on changing its
phase inside such materials, from water vapour to liquid and back
to water vapour. Mud houses can be constructed almost without
any greenhouse gas emissions. Large “bricks” of compressed straw
are also an interesting and cheap alternative construction material.
However, for example traditional Indian houses were not made
of mud, only. They were based on a kind of composite structure
that integrated mud with tree branches and shoots. Such a structure can be amazingly strong. When the terrible earthquake of
2001 killed tens of thousands of people and destroyed the houses
of five million people in Gujarat, in many areas it was only the
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houses built by the traditional methods that were able to withstand
the devastation. For example in the village of Ludiya in Kutchch,
all the modern houses made of concrete collapsed, but every single one of the round traditional houses that had used mud-wood
composite structures remained standing. The mud-wood-composites were able to absorb the seismic shock, while the concrete-steel
structures were shattered.
Solar Heat Collectors
Solar collectors are not exactly a new technology. They were
invented already in the Carboniferous era, 300 million years ago,
by large fin-backed lizards known as dimetrodons. Dimetrodons
had a large but thin, probably rather dark sail at their backs. In the
morning they raised the sail towards the sun and circulated the
heat collected by it into the rest of their body through the blood
veins. Unfortunately many governments have not yet reached the
Carboniferous period in their renewable energy development programmes. Bureaucracies are, of course, supposed to be slow and
sluggish. But still, noticing that you are now more than 300 million years behind your time in an important field of technological
development…shouldn’t that ring a red warning bell, somewhere?
Or could that at least be considered as a “weak signal”?
Luckily, the more advanced countries have already moved
beyond the capacity of dimetrodons in the field of solar collectors.
There are numerous well-designed flat-plate solar collectors on the
markets, by which people can warm their houses and heat water.
Numerous Chinese companies are manufacturing cheap but
efficient solar collectors based on transparent, vacuum-insulated
glass tubes. The Chinese models had already in 2006 been installed
in 35 million households and their number was expected to quadruple in ten years.
Air-based solar collectors could be still simpler and cheaper,
but this branch of the technology has not yet received the amount
of attention it would rightly deserve.
A shallow pond of dark water, or a pond whose bottom has
been painted black, will absorb most of the sunlight falling on it
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during the daytime. However, when the temperatures drop during
the night the pond quickly loses heat through the convection of
the water: warmer water always rises on the surface of the pond. A
lot of heat is also lost through evaporation. The convection can be
prevented by transparent films or with the help of a salt gradient.
Such a construction, a solar pond, is a very efficient and affordable
collector of solar heat.
Thin-film Photovoltaics
What comes to solar electricity, there are two main approaches:
photovoltaics and solar-thermal electricity or concentrating solar.
The combined approach is known as concentrating or concentrator photovoltaics. In the following pages I will take a brief look on
all these possibilities.
At the end of 2008 Spain and Germany were leading the global
solar power revolution, with Spain having 44 and Germany 26
per cent of the installed capacity. Most of the truly promising
new techniques now come from an area which could be called the
Solar Triangle, consisting of three US states: California, Arizona
and New Mexico, and including California’s famed Silicon Valley.
However, it should be recognized that the research and development efforts of many US companies have in practise been heavily
subsidized by the Spanish and German investments in solar power.
Without these contributions the Americans could not have made
so much progress during the Bush era.
In photovoltaics solar radiation falling on semi-conductor surfaces produces electricity. The phenomenon was described already
1887 by the German physicist Heinrich Hertz, who also discovered the radio waves. Another scientist born in the same country, Albert Einstein, later received a Nobel price for physics for
explaining the theoretical basis of Hertz’s observation.
However, the spread of the photovoltaic technology has been
slowed down by the high price of effective semi-conductor materials.
In regions with a lot of direct sunlight, concentrating photovoltaic or cpv systems (see below) is one of the most promis212
ing solutions to this problem. In cpv systems the amount of semiconducting materials can be reduced by thousands of times by
concentrating sunlight by lenses or with parabolic mirrors. But at
least in areas where most of the sunlight has been diffused (dispersed) by clouds, water vapour or air pollutants, thin-film solar
cells are probably the best option, because they can also utilise diffused sunlight. Thin-film solar cells do not use silicon but other
materials which are up to one thousand times more effective in
capturing solar energy. Therefore they require roughly one hundred times less semi-conducting materials than ordinary solar
cells.
The US company First Solar announced in February 2009 that
it had been able to reduce the manufacturing costs of its solar
modules to 98 US cents per watt, thus becoming the first company
to break the one dollar per watt barrier. First Solar is manufacturing Cd-Te (cadmium-tellurium) thin-film solar cells, which seem
to be among the most promising options.
However, the most unpredictable wild card in the thin-film
solar cell field is Nanosolar, which has its headquarters in San Jose,
California. Nanosolar was the first company that started to produce thin-film photovoltaic panels by printing them.
Nanosolar’s thin-film panels are amazing, flexible foils which
have had an efficiency of 19.9 per cent in laboratory experiments
and 14.6 per cent in independent field trials. The cells have been
manufactured to last for at least 25 years and their energy payback time is less than one month. In other words the panels can be
expected to produce hundreds of times more energy than what is
required to manufacture them. Each gram of Nanosolar’s copperbased CIGS semiconductors can, during its life-time, produce five
times more energy than a gram of enriched uranium or forty times
more than a gram of natural uranium. After this the material in
the solar cells can be recycled.
Nanosolar’s thin-film solar cells are printed by a machine, in
which a long roll of thin metal foil is unwound and covered with
a special semi-conducting ink that contains a little bit copper and
a secret mixture of other ingredients. In June, 2008 Nanosolar
announced that its new solar cell coater, that only costs USD 1.65
million, should be able to manufacture 1 gigawatt of solar cells in
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a year, when running with the speed of 30 metres a minute or 50
centimetres a second. According to company representatives this
kind of roll-to-roll processing can cut manufacturing costs by two
full orders of magnitude.
The claim may sound outrageous, but in theory a much larger
coater machine could use twenty times wider rolls containing
kilometres of material, and moving with the speed of 600 metres
instead of only 30 metres per minute. Such a huge manufacturing
robot, resembling the machines in a large paper mill, could produce a mind-boggling amount of solar cells in a year.
The whole production line would, of course, cost more and the
materials are expensive, but the shift from high-vacuum to nonvacuum processing of thin-film solar cells may still have a dramatic impact on the attainable price levels. Nanosolar may soon be
able to manufacture thin-film solar cells with only a couple of US
cents per watt. If this becomes a reality, many of the other renewable energy options described in this book will, unfortunately, lose
their economic feasibility.
Concentrating Solar
In concentrating solar power (cs) sunlight is concentrated by parabolic or trough-like reflectors. In most designs the concentrated
heat then produces steam, which in turn produces electricity with
a steam turbine or with a modern steam engine. There are also
solar-powered Stirling engines. In them in turns expanding and
contracting gas is driving a piston engine.
In solar trough plants long, trough-like collectors concentrate
sunlight on black tubes. The idea was originally proposed by the
Swedish inventor John Ericsson, already in the 1840’s. According to a study made by OECD solar trough plants should become
cheap enough to compete with coal and nuclear power without
any subsidies or pollution taxes after 5,000 megawatts have been
installed. At this stage the expected cost of solar troughs would be
about USD 1,500 per kilowatt, fifty per cent of their present price.
In the South, where labour costs are lower than in the United
States or in Europe, economic sustainability could be reached even
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with a much smaller level of investment. A solar trough project in
Rajasthan, India, is aiming at an installation cost of USD 1,000 for
a kilowatt of power.
Steam turbines and steam engines run by solar energy unfortunately consume a lot of freshwater, just like coal-fired thermal
power plants and nuclear power plants.
Concentrating Photovoltaics
Concentrating or concentrator photovoltaics (cpv) is a hybrid of
the two main schools of solar electricity.
Ordinary photovoltaic panels cannot deal with concentrated
sunlight, they overheat and experience a brownout, which means
that they stop producing electricity. However, if the photovoltaic
cells are kept cool, the situation changes and the efficiency of the
cells grows when the photon flux (the amount of light falling on
them) increases. When sunlight is concentrated 1,000 times the
concentrator photovoltaic cells can produce 2,000 times more electricity, if they do not overheat. The US company PhotoVolt Inc has
been able to produce 400,000 watts of electricity per one square
metre of photovoltaic cells by concentrating the sunlight 2,500
times, and IBM 700,000 watts per square metre with a concentration of 2,300 suns. The Israeli scientists have experimented with
even higher concentrations of sunlight amounting to 9,600 suns (!)
but these seem to be a little bit too much for the presently available
materials and cooling techniques.
Concentrator photovoltaic systems will soon be able to produce electricity with a much lower price than coal-fired power
plants because they now routinely attain efficiencies of 25, 30 or
even 40 per cent, and because they can reduce the need of expensive semi-conductor materials by thousands of times.
In practise semi-conducting materials are replaced by reflecting mirrors or Fresnel lenses. There are numerous different
designs. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (in Israel) and the
Australian company Solar Systems are using very large parabolic
reflectors with a small photovoltaic panel at their focal point. The
German Concentrix GmbH and the US Amonix have developed
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modular panels in which numerous small Fresnel lenses concentrate sunlight to small pieces of semi-conducting material.
The Japanese Sharp, the Californian SolFocus and the Australian
Green and Gold Energy have developed modular panels using a
large number of small parabolic reflectors.
The Israeli MST Renewable Energy Company has estimated that it would cost about USD 850 million to construct a
1,000-megawatt concentrator photovoltaic power station, and that
a factory annually producing 1,000 megawatts of further power
plants would cost about USD 650 million.
The chief executive officer of SolFocus, Gary D. Conley, has
said that his company could produce a hundred megawatts of its
concentrating photovoltaic panels with less than one dollar per
watt, and that the retail price will drop to USD 0.35 when the
orders reach the level of 1,000 megawatts.
Spanish firms are running trials with narrow strips of photovoltaic cells placed on the focal lines of solar troughs. This
approach also sounds very interesting and promising.
Low-Concentration Photovoltaics
The so called low-concentration photovoltaics is also an important possibility which should be mentioned separately because Its
strengths and weaknesses are very different from the technologies
that concentrate sunlight hundreds or thousands of times. In this
approach sunlight is concentrated only a couple of times with the
cheapest and simplest flat mirrors that can be produced, or with
some other, affordable method. Flat mirrors are easy and cheap to
manufacture, and the power production in some systems does not
collapse completely even when the weather becomes cloudy.
Solar CHP (Combined Heat and Power)
and solar CCP (Combined Cooling and Power)
Most photovoltaic and cs systems can be designed to produce,
with only marginal additional costs, both power and heat when216
ever there is demand for industrial process heat, heat for desalination purposes or heat for warming the houses. This is especially
easy with the concentrator photovoltaic systems that use very large
reflecting mirrors, because many such systems already use the
ground as a heat sink and channel heat into the soil through plastic pipes. With a little bit more complex arrangements the same
power stations could also provide power and district cooling.
Fuelwood
In the northern areas the most ecological way to produce biofuels is to grow aspens, poplars, birches or other fast-growing broadleaved trees. The largest biomass yields have been achieved with
dense stands of willows on heavily fertilized fields, but it makes
better ecological and economic sense to grow a much smaller
number of aspens, poplars or birches on ordinary forest lands. If
the trees are relatively large when they are cut, fertilizers are not
needed because only small branches, leaves and needles contain
substantial amounts of nutrients. If they are left in the forest, the
nutrient loss with the actual trunk wood is insignificant.
Wood can be burned to produce heat or used in heat and
power co-generation (CHP). A third recommendable option is to
convert most of the wood’s energy content to charcoal and wood
oil (bio-oil, pyrolysis oil) and to use the waste heat to produce
electricity and district heating. Numerous different technologies
are now used in biomass-based CHP plants of varying sizes. Wood
can also be converted to fuel alcohol.
The climatic impact of burning wood in a small scale, however, is extremely complex. The ash particles, numerous different
organic carbon compunds and other “bright” aerosols produced by
burning wood have a cooling impact on the planet, but soot has
an opposite effect, both in the air and especially on snow and ice.
Carbon monoxide heats the planet by prolonging the life-span of
methane in the air, and the free hydrogen from incomplete combustion creates cirrus clouds, whichh contribute to global warming. Nitrogen oxide emissions have both heating and cooling
impacts. Burning wood also produces carbon dioxide, but this is
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quickly re-absorbed by the new trees and circulated over and over
again, unless too much wood is used so that the amount of carbon
in the standing stock begins to decline.
Carbon monoxide and soot emissions are often counted in
ppms, meaning parts per million in the flue gases. This can be a
bit misleading. If you have a poorly designed stove that only has
an efficiency of 10 per cent, you need eight times more wood
and produce eight times more flue gases than if you had a better
stove with an efficiency of 80 per cent. If the bad stove produces
20 times more carbon monoxide and a hundred times more soot,
when counted as parts per million in the flue gases, it will, in practise, release 160 times more carbon monoxide and 800 times more
soot to achieve the same heating result. Drying the wood properly
is very important, the burning of moist fuelwood causes extremely
high carbon monoxide and soot emissions, and releases hydrogen
into the air.
In a nutshell: burning wood in a very inefficient and polluting
way may not be an eco-friendly thing to do, but if wood is burned
in a way that minimizes the soot, hydrogen and carbon monoxide emissions, using wood instead of fossil fuels definitely helps in
preventing a global climate catastrophe.
Other Biofuels
Biofuel production can destroy tropical rainforests and peatlands, and increase greenhouse gas emissions and hunger. But it
could also assist in protecting the rainforests, tropical peatlands
and mangrove forests, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, eliminate
hunger and absorb huge quantities of carbon dioxide from the
atmosphere.
In spite of contradictory claims, actual photosynthesis is not
a very inefficient way of harnessing solar energy. Its efficiency is
28 per cent, but only with the so called photosynthetically active
wavelengths between 400 and 700 nanometres, which make about
50 per cent of the Sun’s radiation. Besides this limitation, about 10
per cent of the photosynthetically active radiation is reflected back
and lost.
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These factors reduce the theoretical maximum efficiency of
plants as solar collectors to 9.4 per cent. The so called C4 plants
require about 40 per cent of this for their own metabolism, so
the maximum drops further to 6.7 per cent. With the C3 plants it
drops to 3.3. per cent because of the extra photorespiration losses,
which happen when the C3 plants become saturated with sunlight.
Thus the theoretical maximum production of the C4 plants
in a temperate climate is 55 tons of organic carbon per hectare
per year, or roughly 110 tons of dry plant biomass. In the tropics
higher yields are theoretically possible because the amount of sunlight is larger. This theoretical maximum production has in practise never been reached because of the lack of water and nutrients
and because most plants do not grow rapidly throughout the year.
But in ideal conditions it is possible to get quite close to these figures, especially if several different species complementing each
others’ growth cycles are grown together. With single-celled algae
growing in water the respiration losses are smaller and even higher
levels of productivity can be attained.
In most regions the availability of water is the factor that sets
the limits for how much biofuel can be grown. One solution to this
problem might be the cultivation of the so called CAM- or crassulean acid metabolism-plants, like cacti. CAM plants keep their stomata shut during the day and only take carbon dioxide in during
the night, in order to minimize their evaporation losses. For this
reason CAM plants are superbly efficient in their water use. Their
theoretical maximum productivity is 1 gram of carbohydrate for
50 grams of water. This is phenomenal, because for example wheat
requires 2,000 grams of water to produce 1 gram of carbohydrate.
In practical experiments cultivations of edible cacti have provided
5-7 times more calories for each tonne of water than C3 plants. In
Israel opuntia and cereus cacti have produced 400 tons of edible
cactus flesh and 40 tons of cactus fruits per hectare per year, with
400 millimetres of rain and irrigation water.
This far cacti have been cultivated in a large scale only in Mexico. However, if the world becomes significantly warmer and drier,
they could be planted on vast dryland areas in dozens of countries
to provide food and fuel alcohol for the people.
In a nutshell, these figures mean that it would be theoretically
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possible to produce very large amounts of biofuels in ecologically
and socially sustainable ways. However, if the production of biofuels means heavy use of nitrogen fertilizer and/or the destruction
of tropical rainforests and peatlands, it will be very harmful for the
climate.
The most dramatic demonstration of both the possibilities
and dangers related to biofuels is the recent expansion of oil palm
plantations. The two important oil palm species, the African oil
palm (Elaies guineensis) and the Amazonian peach palm (Bactris
gasipaes) are among the most useful trees nature has provided for
us. African oil palm plantations produce, as a global average, about
four tons of oil per hectare per year, but the best new cultivars can
give 7-12 tons. Some of the peach palm varieties originally bred
by the indigenous peoples of the Amazonas have been reported to
yield up to 15 tons. The seedcakes are edible and oil palms provide good soil cover against erosion. The oil itself is highly oligotrophic and contains hardly any nutrients, so if only the oil is harvested and the nutrients from seedcakes are recycled, heavy doses
of chemical fertilizers are not necessary.
Above all, in terms of dry matter, oil only makes about 10 per
cent of the overall biological production of an oil palm plantation.
If palm oil effluent is used to produce biogas, plantations can yield
16,000 litres of oil-equivalent per hectare per year. Besides this,
Graig Venter (of Celera), Vinod Khosla (of Sun Microsystems) and
many other individual investors, companies and scientists have
invested large amounts of money in research and development
related to cost-effective ways of converting woody materials to cellulose ethanol. If these efforts will succeed, the combined average production of palm oil, biogas and cellulose ethanol from the
future oil palm cultivations might well reach 40,000 or even 50,000
litres of oil-equivalent per hectare per year.
In spite of this potential, oil palms have acquired a very bad
reputation, for three different reasons. First, numerous people’s
movements in the South fear - for a reason - that the new biofuel
production programmes will lead to massive forced displacement
of indigenous peoples and millions of other small farmers, sharecroppers and landless labourers. It would be important to ensure,
that most tropical biofuels were grown on hundreds of millions
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of small farms, together with other kinds of crops, and not on a
small number of vast plantations owned by giant corporations or
wealthy individual landowners. This way biofuel production would
have a strong stabilizing, instead of destabilizing, impact on many
societies. Of course, this is not what is currently happening!
The nitrogen fertilizers used in most biofuel plantations should
be seen as another, serious problem. If four or five per cent of the
nitrogen in the fertilizers is converted to nitrous oxide, instead of
only one per cent (see chapters 15 and 25), the growing of biofuels with heavy doses of nitrogen fertilizer will almost inevitably increase our greenhouse gas emissions. It is extremely important to take this issue more seriously. The problem can be greatly
reduced, if not eliminated, by recycling crop residues and by the
application of biochar (see chapter 15). High-cellulose, low-nitrogen biofuels like those made of wood can also be grown without
nitrogen fertilizers.
The third dilemma has to do with Indonesia’s peatland rainforests, which can contain thousands of tons of organic carbon on
one hectare. According to one assessment, oil palm plantations
established on such peatlands have sometimes produced biodiesel
that has a 25 or even 36 times larger carbon footprint than ordinary diesel.
Which is more than a little depressing. How on Earth can we
start with the ideal biofuel crop, a biofuel species from heaven, and
end up increasing our carbon dioxide emissions 36-fold? Perhaps
we should really die off and leave the planet for more intelligent
species!
However, if we decide to hang around, we should get our act
together and rationalize our biofuel production, at least to a minor
extent.
Indonesia also has 60,000,000 or 80,000,000 hectares of completely destroyed or seriously degraded forests that would urgently
need re-planting. In Indonesia oil palms produce, on average, four
times more oil on mineral soils than on peatlands.
In West Africa cacao plantations were, for a long time, always
established by first removing the rainforest trees and then planting cacao on the same land. Then farmers in Cameroon realized
that cacao trees grow better in the shade of larger trees, because
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that is the ecological niche for which they had originally evolved.
Nowadays cacao in Cameroon is grown in forested areas without
destroying the rainforest.
The model provided by the farmers of Cameroon might be a
good compromise in Indonesia, as well. African oil palm (generally known as the oil palm) and Amazonian oil palm (known as
the peach palm) have evolved like cacao, as plants that grow in the
shade of larger rainforest trees. It might make perfect sense to replant Indonesia’s 60,000,000 or 80,000,000 clear-cut or seriously
degraded forest hectares so that both larger trees and oil palms
growing between them would be used. A lot of carbon dioxide
could be sequestered, a lot of biofuels could be produced and even
the biodiversity should be more than on the artificial alang-alang
(Imperata cylindrica) grasslands.
In all types of biofuel plantations the need for fertilizers could
probably be reduced by adding crushed charcoal or fine-grained
biochar into the soil. The method should also increase the amount
of humus in the soil, thus making the biofuel cycle carbon negative. For example oil palm plantations and sugarcane plantations
produce enormous amount of organic waste matter, some of which
could be converted to biochar.
Oil palms’ main shortcoming is that they have a shallow root
system which grows near the surface as thick bunches of relatively small roots. It is not possible to grow other crops between oil
palms if they are more than a few dozen or one hundred on a hectare. It would thus make ample sense to do some selective breeding on the most promising tropical or subtropical oil tree species
which have a vertical taproot system. West African safou (Dacryoides edulis) deserves special attention because it can, already in
its wild form, produce almost as much oil as the present oil palm
cultivars, and because it does not compete much with the surrounding crops. Safou can easily be integrated into various tropical multi-storey home garden systems, food-producing vines like
yam can be grown on its trunk and it can even be used as a shade
tree for coffee. Other palm species, especially the nipa palm, are an
excellent source of fuel ethanol (see chapter 17).
In June 2008 I enquired from the new secretary-general of
CNS (Conseilho Nacional de Seringueiros) of Brazil, whether CNS
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would be interested in experimenting with peach palms cultivated
in the shade of larger rainforest trees.
CNS is the national organization of rubber-tappers, nut-gatherers and other people who get their livelihood from the rainforests of the Brazilian Amazonas without destroying the forest. We
had been cooperating for more than twenty years, so I expected a
straight answer.
The secretary-general and the other CNS representatives said
that even though the idea might be technically feasible, they did
not find it very interesting. They said that they would prefer to collect oilseed produced by trees already growing in the Amazonas.
According to detailed surveys a surprisingly large percentage of all the trees growing naturally in the Amazonian rainforests
produce good crops of oilseed. It seems that there are a few billion
wild oil trees already growing in the rainforest, when all the different species are counted together.
According to CNS, it would be possible to collect much of this
crop and process it to make “raw biodiesel” in the Amazonian villages and individual households. If it was economically feasible to
produce, collect and transport such raw biodiesel, the programme
could make a major contribution towards saving the Amazonas.
At the moment tropical rainforests produce very little economic value for the more than one billion mostly very poor people living in the forests or in the areas surrounding them. According to one estimate the economic productivity of one hectare of
rainforest can be as little as USD 20 per year. If natural rainforests
could also produce a lot of valuable oilseeds, it would be much,
much easier to protect them against other forms of land-use.
Whenever biofuels are produced, it is important to plan and
organize the production so that it does not compete with food
production. For example the production of soya oil also provides
large amounts of protein-rich seedcake, as a kind of by-product.
Soya seedcakes have been processed into animal feed, soya grain,
soya flour, soya cheese (tofu), soya cream, soya ice cream, soya
sausages, soya meat and tempeh. These products have made soya
the world’s most important protein crop, and most other oil seedcakes could be used in a similar way. Special attention should perhaps be paid to the Indonesian habit of making palatable and pop223
ular food, tempeh, from protein-rich seedcakes by treating them
with a special kind of fungus.
The most popular biodiesel plant in semi-arid and sub-humid
regions is currently jatropha (Jatropha curcas). For example
India and numerous African countries are planning to plant jatropha on very large acreages. Jatropha plantations, unfortunately,
have this far produced seedcake which is poisonous for both
humans and domestic animals. Thus the planting of jatropha has,
in many localities, directly competed with food production. However, some of the Mexican jatropha varieties are edible and nonpoisonous. People in the mountains of the Mexican states Puebla
and Vera Cruz eat the seeds of these jatropha varieties after only
a little roasting. Ipalac, International Programme on Arid Land
Crops, a programme of Icrisat (International Crop Research Center for Semi-Arid Tropics) in Niamey, Niger, has started to disseminate two edible jatropha varieties (“Mexico” and “Las Pilas”) but
its work has suffered because of the programme’s lack of secure
core financing. If the tens or even hundreds of millions of hectares of new jatropha plantations will, in the future, also produce
a couple of tons of highly nutritious, edible seedcake per hectare
per year, besides the fuel oil, the world’s food security will be much
improved.
Ordinary Wind Power
When the blades of a wind rotor become ten times longer the area
swept by them, and the amount of energy collected, becomes one
hundred times larger, so up to a certain point it makes sense to
construct as large windmills as possible.
The world’s largest windmills are currently manufactured in
Germany. They have a capacity of 6 megawatts. According to some
experts the economically optimal size will probably be reached
around 15 or 20 megawatts. After this the material costs are likely
to rise faster than the production of power.
Small windmills have also become an economically attractive
option on windy sites. In England small windmills can now pay
their investment costs back in less than a year, on sites which have
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good wind conditions.
According to recent data, the average price of wind power was
still, in 2007, clearly higher than the equivalent price of electricity from the coal-burning power plants. The price of wind power
was roughly the same as the cost of gas-generated electricity, but
less than the price of nuclear power, even when the dismantling
costs of the nuclear power plants and the defence and safety costs
(the extra costs for the army, navy and air force units) were not
included in the calculations.
The average price of wind power is still likely to decrease, due
to increasing size and lengthening production series of wind turbines, and because of new innovations related to the cheaper erection of offshore wind parks. Also, the wind turbine market has,
during the last few years, become seriously overheated. The superfast growth of the sector has maintained a high price level at the
global wind turbine markets. When the growth rate of the industry, at some point in the future, begins to decline, there will be a
notable further reduction in wind turbine prices.
According to European Wind Energy Association Europe’s
economically competitive offshore wind power potential might
reach 2,600,000 gigawatt-hours (800 gigawatts) in 2020, and rise
to 3,400,000 Gwh (1,130 gigawatts) in 2030. The technical potential could be around 25,000,000 Gwh (8,000 gigawatts) in 2020 and
about 30,000,000 Gwh (10,000 gigawatts) in 2030, most of which
would be at the North Sea and elsewhere at the North Atlantic.
It might also be a good idea to negotiate with Russia about
the establishment of large wind parks on the Kola Peninsula.
The Kola Peninsula is one of the world’s best sites for producing
wind energy. It is the windiest part of Russia’s northern coast. The
winds are very strong and there are not many calm days. A study
financed by the Norwegian environmental organization Bellona
estimated, some years ago, that the theoretical annual wind power
potential of the Kola Peninsula might amount to 21,000,000 gigawatt-hours (7,000 gigawatts!), and that even the technical and economic potential would be around 360,000 gigawatt-hours (120
gigawatts). Because the present windmills are larger - and still
growing bigger – both the theoretical and the technical potential is
still increasing together with the improvements in the technology.
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If a mutually beneficial deal can be negotiated with Russia,
it would make perfect sense to construct a lot of wind power on
the Kola Peninsula. The area is not very far from West Europe or
from Moscow. Modern HVDC -transmission lines (High Voltage
Direct Current) are much smaller than the old-fashioned, gigantic lines using alternating current, but they can transport power
for thousands of kilometres with surprisingly small losses. There
is a 1,700-kilometre-long HVDC-line in Congo, and China is constructing at least two 2,000-kilometre-long ones. The other one of
them should have the capacity to transfer 5,600 megawatts of electricity.
The portion of wind power in an electric grid can be increased
to a rather high level even without extra backup power, if the
wind-generated electricity comes from many separate areas whose
winds operate in a different rhythm. In other words, if wind power
is being produced at the North Sea, at the Baltic Sea, at the Norwegian Sea and at the Barents Sea (on the Kola Peninsula), and not
only at the Baltic and North Seas, a much larger percentage of all
electricity can come from wind power. The mentioned four seas
are never still at the same time!
In North America for example the coastal waters of the USA
and Canada and many of the continent’s great plains have a
huge wind power potential, as well as the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico. On the Isthmus of Tehuantepec the average speed
of winds is so high, that wind power can reach 50 per cent of its
installed (theoretical) production capacity, instead of the more
normal 30 or 40 per cent.
Kite Power
A growing number of companies have been developing an even
more high-flying form of wind power, based on large kites. As a
general rule the wind speed roughly doubles when you rise from
100 metres to one kilometre. This means that a similar structure
produces eight times more electricity if you can lift it to the height
of one kilometre. A tower rising to such heights would be prohibitively expensive, but a large kite can reach them with ease.
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In Europe Bas Lansdorp and his co-workers in the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands have already demonstrated that a 10-square-metre-kite can produce three kilowatts of
electricity. The kite rises to the sky pulling a tether and spinning a
power generator. When the tether has become fully unwound, the
computer-control mechanism adjusts the kite’s position, so that it
glides down quickly, with minimum air resistance.
According to Lansdorp’s calculations a larger, automated,
20-square-metre version should be able to produce 20 kilowatts.
Lansdorp’s group is also involved with the project Aeolus, named
after the Greek God of winds, which aims at replacing the kites
with fixed-wing planes. The Aeolus team hopes that they would be
able to develop a 1-megawatt generator in 2010.
The Italian company KiteGen has estimated, that it should be
possible to develop much larger kites producing 50 megawatts of
electricity. This may sound fanciful, but ships already use large
kites that complement their primary propulsion systems. The largest kites currently developed could create a pull of 130 tons, equivalent to the thrust generated by 50,000 or 60,000 horsepowers of
diesel engines.
Coal power now costs about euro 60 and ordinary wind power
euro 100 per megawatt-hour. According to KiteGen kite power
could probably be produced with euro 15 per megawatt-hour.
The search robot company Google has invested USD 10 million to a company called Makani Power, based in Alameda, California. Makani Power is developing a top secret power kite, which
should, according to the company, be able to produce electricity for 100,000 households. Makani Power is aiming at the height
of ten kilometres (!). This sounds a bit ambitious, but if Makani
Power will succeed, all the older calculations about wind power
potential on this planet will start to look very foolish.
If kite power becomes a serious form of power generation, our
practical potential for generating wind power will increase at least
10- and possibly 100-fold.
The main objection has been that high-flying kites are a problem for air traffic. This problem could be avoided by concentrating the kite power plants on the no-fly-zones which have been
created around nuclear power plants after the terrorist strikes on
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11.9.2001. This would also make an very important contribution
to the safe-guarding of the nuclear power complexes. If a nuclear
power plant would be surrounded by thousands of tethered kites
or fast-winged gliders, it would be impossible to crash an aeroplane on it. Tethered hydrogen balloons were widely used against
fighters and bombers during the First and Second World Wars.
Continuously rising and falling kites would be even more effective.
Hydroelectric Power
According to latest estimations, the artificial reservoirs behind
large dams now produce between 104 million and 120 million
tons of methane in a year. This amounts to 20–25 per cent of the
human-made methane emissions. During the next twenty years
these emissions will have the same global warming potential as the
annual production of six or seven billion tons of carbon dioxide.
Many hydroelectric power plants produce practically no greenhouse gases. However, if the reservoirs flood relatively flat lands
whose soils contain large amounts of organic matter, large greenhouse gas emissions may be created. In the worst cases small
dams producing minuscule amounts of electricity have flooded
vast peatland areas. Such hydroelectric plants can cause far larger
greenhouse gas emissions for each megawatt of power than any
other known form of energy production.
Individual dams and the adjoining reservoirs have been
reported to produce at least three and a half times more greenhouse gas emissions for each megawatt-hour than a typical coalfired power plant, even if we consider methane to be an only 20
times stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. If we take a
shorter perspective, according to which the global warming potential of methane is more than one hundred times stronger than the
GWP of carbon dioxide, greenhouse gas emissions from mentioned hydroelectric plants become more than 20 times larger than
the typical emissions from a coal-fired thermal power plant.
If the annual variation in water height Is major, a very high
level of greenhouse gas emissions can be a permanent feature of
a reservoir, and not only a temporary phenomenon, because the
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vegetation grows back when the ground is dry and decomposes
when it becomes flooded again.
Forced displacement of people is often a major problem related
to large reservoirs. However, there are a number of technologies
which make it possible to produce hydroelectric power in small
and large rivers even without any dams. Cased turbines can be
placed in pipes which lay under the water, and which are not even
visible to the surface.
The best way to produce hydroelectric power would probably
be to install millions of small, cased hydroturbines in thousands of
small streams high on the mountains without any dams or reservoirs, and transfer the power via long HVDC transmission lines to
the central plateaus and coastal and riverine flatlands.
A huge majority of all hydropower potential is in the high
mountains. Water at the height of 5,000 metres has 50 times more
potential energy than water at the height of only a hundred metres
from the sea level. However, because it was not possible to transfer electricity for long distances without losing most of it on the
way, governments and companies have historically only generated
hydropower in areas where the water in a river has already lost 90
or 98 per cent of its potential energy. Because of this reservoirs
have often flooded fertile and densely populated river valleys. Fifty
or one hundred million people have been displaced by the artificial
lakes and huge amounts of excellent farming land have been lost.
And then there is the Revenge of the Dam Refugees: at least
one ton of methane in a year is now generated for each person
evicted by the reservoirs.
Modern Thermoelectric Cells
Thermoelectric cells are U-shaped semi-conductor devices that
can transform temperature differences to electric power. The concept was first discovered by the Estonian Thomas Johann Seebeck already in 1823. Thermoelectric cells have long been considered a marginal field with no real scope in energy production, but
this is now changing due to the advances in material science. For
example in some new Japanese nuclear reactor designs steam tur229
bines have been replaced by modern thermoelectric cells. Also the
technology developed by the Icelandic Varmaraf and the British
PowerChips looks very promising. If highly efficient thermoelectric cells become a reality, they can be used to convert solar heat
and geothermal heat to electricity. The residual heat of the already
existing coal-, gas- or biomass-fired plants could also be harnessed.
Geothermal Energy
Geothermal power already is a cheap form of energy in many volcanically active regions. However, Iceland is developing two technologies that may multiply the economic possibilities of this form
of energy production. The Iceland Deep Drilling Project is trying
to develop geothermal plants that use supercritical steam. If this
succeeds, each hole can produce up to ten times more electricity
than before.
The potential fringe benefits include the possibility of combining energy production with mining. All kinds of metals become
dissolved in the deep, hot water, and it might be profitable to collect them as a by-product. Because many rare elements are already
becoming scarce, it is even possible that most of the mining in the
future would be done this way, as a side-activity of geothermal
energy production. Another technology the Icelanders are spearheading is the use of modern thermoelectric cells in the production of geothermal power.
Research laboratories and companies in the USA have developed other, very interesting Enhanced Geothermal Systems (see
chapter 4).
Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC)
In 1881 the French physicist Jacques d’Arsonval proposed that the
temperature difference between tropical surface water and deep
water could be utilized to produce electricity. During the oil crises of 1970’s the US government and a group of large corpora230
tions – including Lockheed Martin – constructed a pilot system
in Hawaii. They lowered a water pipe from a barge into the depth
of one kilometre, and proved that the concept of OTEC did work
in practise. The system produced 50 kilowatts of electricity by
vaporising ammonia with the heat of the surface water, and then
cooling it back to liquid with the cool, deep water. The expanding,
gaseous ammonia drove a turbine which generated electricity.
The temperature difference between the surface water and
deep water is relatively small, less than 20 degrees centigrade. On
the other hand, it is much cheaper to just lower a water pipe down
than to drill a hole in the rock. There have been proposals about
10-megawatt, 100-megawatt and even 500-megawatt OTEC plants.
In theory such floating power stations could provide for all our
energy, but it is still very unclear whether they could do this with a
reasonable price.
I am sceptical on whether it can ever be economically profitable to utilize such small temperature differences to produce electricity. However, it would also be theoretically possible to turn the
idea upside down. The oceanic ridges and their midrifts stretch for
60,000 kilometres on the ocean floor. They are, actually, the most
important single geographical feature of our planet, and they contain an enormous number of volcanoes and hot vents. A substantial percentage of all the deep heat produced by the decay of radioactive substances in the Earth’s mantle and core escapes into the
sea via these fiery spots. The water in the hot vents is superheated
to several hundreds of degrees. An OTEC plant lowering its pipes
towards such a hot vent could utilize a much larger temperature
difference to generate power. The problem is that the power should
still be transmitted to the regions where it is needed. This might be
too costly, except in some parts of the Mediterranean, in Indonesia
and in a number of other especially favourable sites.
The Problem with the Back-up
Many energy utility companies do realise, that the price of renewable energy will fall down when the necessary equipment will be
produced in larger series. However, they are worried of the back231
up power. Where does the electricity come from, when there is no
wind and the sun isn’t shining? Luckily there are a number of realistic solutions to this dilemma.
If we combine wind, solar, biomass and geothermal energy, the
problem will be much reduced. Wind power could be transmitted along long HVDC-lines (High Voltage Direct Current) from
many different regions, whose winds rise and fall with a different
rhythm. Solar power could be transmitted with similar HVDC –
cables along the East-West-axis, from areas where the sun is still
shining to areas where it has set.
Some solar power plants – like solar chimneys and solar trough
plants equipped with energy storage facilities – can also produce
electricity during the night. Hydropower can be used as a backup.
Heat can be stored and cold can be stored. In the future the batteries of a billion modern electric cars could also act as a backup system, feeding power into the national grid, local grids or for
the electric equipment in a single household. When the lithiumiron phosphate batteries of the electric cars have lost part of their
capacity, after 200,000 or 300,000 kilometres of driving, they could
still have a second life as part of the back-up system of an individual household or of a local wind or solar power plant, before their
materials are recycled. Electric cars should not carry much extra
weight with them, but this is not a concern when the batteries can
just lie still on a concrete floor of a shed.
The key to constructing an energy system based on renewable
energy instead of fossil fuels is a new kind of power distribution
system, the so called smart grid. Our present power grids have
been designed so, that they can sell power in millions of spots, but
only buy it from a very limited number of larger power stations.
However, Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), the joint mobile phone
network company of Nokia and Siemens, announced in November 2009 that it aims to expand its activities into the field of smart
power grids. This makes eminent sense, because mobile phone
networks and intelligent power grids use many of the same technologies.
Smart grids could both buy and sell power in millions or tens
of millions of spots. This would reduce the average distance of
transmission and the losses related to it. Further savings would be
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achieved whenever old-fashioned power lines were replaced with
modern HVDC lines, using direct current, and because it would
no longer be necessarily to keep power stations at hold, with a very
small part of their capacity actually in use. Above all, smart grids
would provide a very strong incentive for decentralized production of electricity and for companies, governments and households
to implement all kinds of energy saving measures. It would, effectively, create a vast, real-time stock exchange system for electricity. Strong peaks in demand would immediately raise the price of
electricity, so that all the households and companies would have to
decide whether they want to buy extremely expensive electricity or
to sell power with a truly handsome profit. In other words: smart
grids would lead to significant leveling in the demand of electricity, via a simple market mechanism.
NSN has also announced, that it aims to power its mobile
phone stations with solar, wind and other renewable energies,
especially in the areas which are still outside of the presently existing national power grids. Such areas have about two billion inhabitants. The company has also been playing with the idea, that its
mobile phone link stations might in the future produce more
solar and wind power than they need, themselves, so that the
extra power could be fed to local micro-grids. If this happened,
the whole electric grid in the sparsely populated or presently very
poor areas in the South could grow in a decentralized way from a
hundred thousand or a million separate spots (mobile phone link
stations), which could then combine to make a vast, intelligent
power grid based on renewable sources of energy. In the next stage
such an intelligent grid could then “eat away” the old-fashioned,
dumb, fossil fuel-based national grids.
Saving the World by Burning the Peat?
The great peat fires in Indonesia have released enormous amounts
of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Indonesia’s peat bogs contain at least 50 billion tons of carbon, and possibly much more, up
to 20,000 tons per hectare. During the worst year peat fires produced between 800 million and 2.6 billion tons of carbon, and
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were responsible for a large share of all human-made carbon dioxide emissions.
In the 1980’s the government of Indonesia moved millions of
people from the densely populated islands of Java and Bali into the
forests of Kalimantan, Sumatra and Papua. The programme, called
Transmigration, was lavishly supported by the World Bank and by
a number of other development cooperation agencies. The original
goal was to settle 65 million people on the “outer islands”. Luckily
this did not happen, partly because of a major international counter-campaign by the environmental and development NGOs, and
partly because most of the settlers were not happy and sent unflattering reports to their friends and relatives.
However, large areas of peatlands have been ditched for rice
and maize farming and for pulp and oil palm plantations. When
the peat dries, peatlands become vulnerable to fire.
Forest companies have been the other main culprit. When
they logged the swamp rainforests, they somehow had to transport the timber to harbours or saw mills. Because it is not economically feasible to construct roads on a twenty-metre-deep peat
bog, the logging companies dug canals and just floated the trees
away. Unfortunately this also dries the surface layer of the peat and
exposes it to fires.
The best option would be to protect the swamp rainforests and
to leave them alone. However, if it is necessary to cultivate something in them, it would be better to use crops that thrive on wet
soil and grow naturally on wetlands.
For example sago palm (Metroxylon sagu) grows in many
freshwater swamps of Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands. Sago
trunks are filled with edible starch, which used to be the staple
food of several indigenous peoples in Indonesia and Papua New
Guinea. Sago gives a better yield of food, compared to the amount
of labour required, than almost any other crop. Sago stands are
self-propagating, they grow by themselves in the swamps, where
weeds do not have a chance to compete with them. Because the
crop (the starch) is protected by the trunk of the palm, no pesticides are required.
The yield of sago is very reliable and there is hardly any annual
fluctuation in it: the average annual crop amounts to about 15,000
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kilograms of starch per hectare. A sago palm grows for 10-15 years
before it starts to flower and then dies. The calorific value of sago
starch is four times higher than that of potatoes (1500 kJ/100g).
This means that in terms of calories, the annual hectare yield of
sago is equivalent to 60 tons of potatoes.
Sago prefers freshwater but it can also tolerate considerable
amounts of salinity. It would be possible to cultivate it on many
of the Indonesian peatlands. No draining would be needed so the
peatlands would not be exposed to fires. Unfortunately the government of Indonesia has been campaigning against sago for decades.
It has labelled sago farming as something primitive, and the growing of rice as something progressive, modern and desirable.
In any case sago can only be grown succesfully where there
is less than two metres of peat. To grow something on a sustainable basis on thicker tropical peatlands, which have from two to
twenty-three metres of peat, other kinds of crops must be used.
One interesting option might be to domesticate some of the wild
tree species that thrive on Indonesian peatland rainforests and that
produce nutritious and tasty fruit. Such wild fruits are the main
source of food for orang-utans, fruit bats and many other wild
animals, and they were also collected by humans and brought to
villages in baskets before the peatland rainforests close to the villages where destroyed. It might be possible to increase the sizes
and yields per tree of such wild fruits by some selective breeding.
If this was done, economically valuable fruit could be grown in the
peatland rainforests without draining or logging them.
Moreover, there is a number of valuable wild timber tree species growing in Indonesia’s peatland rainforests. They produce very
valuable hardwood and grow relatively well even on the extremely
acid and oligotrophic tropical peat: it seems that for example balangera (Shorea balangera) can reach a diameter of one metre in
forty years or so. Such valuable timber trees could be grown on
the Indonesian peatlands on a sustainable basis if only selective
logging would be used so that a good tree cover would always be
maintained, and if the timber would be transported out from the
forests via wooden “rails” and not by digging channels on the peatlands to float the timber away.
If the trees are cut, the production of peat halts, because it is
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the trees that make the peat. Moreover, if there are no longer trees
that produce highly acidic litter, rainwater begins to dilute the
acidity of the peat so that it starts to decompose. The removal of
tree cover exposes the ground to direct sunlight, which greatly
increases the rate of evaporation and accelerates the drying of the
peat. The decomposition of tree roots, acting like billions of microdams slowing down the flow of the water inside the peat and on
top of its surface layer, makes the situation worse. And if, on top
of all these impacts, the timber is floated away by digging channels on the peatlands, the whole area has been prepared for serious
peat fires that can release thousands of tons of carbon per hectare
in a very short period of time.
The International Peat Association and some conservative
Finnish members of the European Parliament have tried to promote an ingenious partial solution to the problem. According to
their brilliant brain-child European Union should reclassify peat,
and no longer call it a fossil fuel but a form of slowly regenerating
biomass. According to the proposal this would increase peat production and thus reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The logic and
mathematics behind the proposal have not convinced many people, and it is easy to understand, why it has been so.
In Finland peatlands are often converted for farming purposes
after the production of peat has stopped. In other words, peat production creates new peatland fields. This is bad because the remaining or residual peat keeps on decomposing, and this can create large additional carbon dioxide emissions. After so much peat
has decomposed that the fields can no longer be kept dry even by
intensive ditching the area has to be abandoned. It again becomes a
natural swamp and begins to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But it is now a swamp largely covered with watery surfaces
instead of peaty surfaces. This is dangerous because the watery surfaces on swamps produce, as a general rule, dozens of times more
methane than the surfaces covered by peat. The intensive methane
production only halts when the peat layer has been regenerated,
after a few thousand years.
A far better option would be to burn the sphagnum mosses
growing on the peatland as biomass before they become peat.
Peatlands are often rather productive because they are wet and
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because the sphagnum mosses grow quickly. A hectare of peatland
can annually produce an amount of moss equivalent to five tons
of carbon. Most of this will quickly be released back to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide with the decomposition of the swamp’s
surface layer. The moss that is decaying deeper in the peatland
produces methane. In the long run only about two per cent of the
biological production of the peatland will be stored in the form of
peat.
However, the moss produced during the latest summer can
also be burned, if it is first dried in the sun and then compressed.
I have been experimenting with “pellets” made of sphagnum moss
grown during the same summer, and the dried moss can definitely
be burned, even in small stoves, even though in small stoves it
seems to produce a lot of particle pollution. In any case, collecting
only the topmost layer of mosses from the peatlands, every summer, would in the long run produce tens of times more energy per
hectare than the burning of peat.
Another option would be to collect the methane forming
inside a peatland with a similar pipe system as is often used in garbage dumps for the same purpose. We know that this is technically
feasible, because there were experiments in the 1970’s. The system
was not economically profitable in the 1970’s but it would produce
large negative greenhouse gas emissions, by reducing the natural
methane flux from peatlands.
Nuclear Power and Global Warming
In many countries, nuclear power has been seen as an important
partial solution to our planetary overheating problem. This could
be the Ultimate Mad Scientist Solution to global warming.
The world’s rich natural uranium deposits are limited. There is
a vastly larger amount of uranium in the Earth’s crust, but mostly
in very small or tiny concentrations. The richer deposits could
probably provide fuel for the present number of nuclear reactors
for one hundred years or so, but that’s that.
In practise this means that if we want to produce much more
nuclear energy, we have to shift to breeder reactors, to nuclear
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reactors that produce more nuclear fuel than they consume.
Breeder reactors use nuclear fuels in which the percentage of
fissile isotopes has been enriched to 15, 20 or 60 per cent, sometimes even more. In a nutshell this means, that it is possible to
make nuclear weapons from the fuel of a breeder reactor, even
without any further enrichment.
During the last few years I have been discussing and debating
various issues related to nuclear power with nuclear safety authorities and with representatives of the armed forces of a few different countries. Through these discussions I have realized, that the
whole nuclear establishment, including the companies producing
nuclear power, the companies making nuclear reactors, the science
and technology institutes involved in nuclear research, the nuclear
safety authorities and the International Atomic Energy Association, have already decided that we will soon move from the ordinary nuclear reactors to breeder reactors. They see this as a given,
something that has already happened, something that is natural
and inevitable, something that is beneficial for the human kind.
They no longer question, not even for a second, the rationale and
inevitability of moving into a breeder reactor economy.
This is a cultural phenomenon. Our minds have been constructed so, that we tend to regard as normal all the things we get
used to. In 17th century Europe people were tortured to death
publicly, on market squares. People thought this was normal,
because they were used to it, they considered public torture and
mutilation as a form of free entertainment provided by the state.
People working in the Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War learned to consider the things they were doing as
the normal and rational thing to do. Something similar has happened also to the people of nuclear power industries and nuclear
control authorities. They are, in practise, trying to increase the
number of nuclear weapons states by one hundred or so, but
because they have hypnotized themselves to believe that there is
nothing to it, they have also been able to convince a growing number of politicians.
At the moment we have 30 countries that produce nuclear
power, and 80 other countries which have said in the International
Atomic Energy Association that they would also like to start their
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own, nuclear power programmes. If we will have, in 2100, 110
countries with nuclear reactors, this will mean 110 countries with
breeder reactors, and 110 de facto nuclear weapons states, instead
of the present ten.
So the first thing to ask is whether we want to have a future
world in which 110 countries have nuclear weapons.
If this is not what we desire, we must demand an international
treaty banning the construction of nuclear reactors that use either
plutonium or uranium 233 or uranium 235 enriched to more than
15 per cent. And we should organize a vast global citizens’ boycott
against all the countries constructing such reactors.
This could be the most important question there is, possibly
even more important than the threat of global warming, because
according to new studies nuclear weapons seem to be even more
destructive than we have, this far, assumed.
In Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear detonations caused firestorms which burned everything and killed everybody inside the
fire perimeter. However, the US Military considered fire damage so
unpredictable, that for fifty years they only concentrated in analysing the impact of the blast. When the USA was afraid of a nuclear
war between Pakistan and India, in 2002, it warned that a nuclear
war in South Asia might kill twelve million people. The figure was
absurdly low, because it only took the impact of the nuclear blasts
into consideration. According to more recent US research fire
damage radii of nuclear blasts are 2 to 5 times larger than those
determined for airblast effects. In practise this means, that areas
destroyed by fire are 4 to 25 times larger than areas damaged by
blast, alone.
Unfortunately, even this is not the full picture, yet. The firestorms in Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused
very strong rising air currents, which in turn created hurricanespeed winds, blowing with speeds from 160 to 270 kilometres
per hour towards the firestorm. A nuclear explosion in a modern city would create a still fiercer firestorm because modern cities contain huge quantities of hydrocarbons in the form of plastics, asphalt, gasoline, oil and gas. A firestorm in a modern city
would create phenomenal, super-hurricane winds. It has been estimated that even the explosion of a small, Hiroshima-size nuclear
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bomb in Manhattan would create winds blowing with the speed of
600 kilometres per hour. Such a super-hurricane would be strong
enough to topple skyscrapers and to destroy most other humanmade structures, in an area that would be dozens of times larger
than the area destroyed by the firestorm and up to one thousand times larger than the area devastated by the blast. Insurance
companies have estimated that the destructive potential of wind
increases 650 per cent when the wind speed increases from 20-26
metres per second to 26-31 metres per second. If this is true, what
kind of devastation would be achieved by wind speeds approaching 200 metres per second?
In a novel called Litium 6 (Lithium 6) I also claimed, that such
super-hurricane winds might perhaps give birth to thousands, if
not millions, of secondary fires, which might grow together and
produce a new, still larger firestorm. A wind blowing 600 kilometres per hour would be strong enough to throw cars, busses, lorries and motorcycles around, so that their fuel tanks would burst.
Metal hitting on metal would produce sparks, as well as the power
lines felled by the winds and by things being thrown around and
acting as projectiles. Gas pipes would break inside collapsing
houses, and shattering fireplaces would cause many fires. There
would be a huge amount of static electricity in the air, caused by
the dry wind, dust and sand. If the event would take place during a bush and forest fire season, millions of burning trees could
become firebrands.
The worst possibility would be the so called Gorbachev-Reagan-scenario. After the Chernobyl accident Mihail Gorbachev
started to worry on what would happen, if somebody attacks a
nuclear power plant compex with a nuclear weapon. Gorbachev
spoke about his concerns to Ronald Reagan’s security adviser, who
reported the matter to Reagan. Reagan later described the story in
his memories.
This is still the worst-case-scenario. A nuclear weapon, especially one producing a lot of neutrons (like uranium-lithium-deuteride bomb) would vaporize the whole plant and transform its
matter into an almost unimaginably lethal radoactive cloud. Moreover, the fissile materials in the nuclear power plant could multiply
the power of the explosion (if the original blast produced a very
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large amount of neutrons).
According to studies conducted by Alan Robock, of the Rutgers University, and Owen B. Toon of the University of Colorado at Boulder, a relatively small nuclear war between Pakistan
and India could have major global consequences. If both countries would launch 50 Hiroshima-sized warheads, the ensuing firestorms might produce seven million tons of smoke, and cool the
planet so much that many crops would fail. According to Robock
and Toon such an exchange of 100 nuclear weapons between Pakistan and India would probably cause a global famine, killing about
one billion people.
This sounds horrible, but we cannot exclude even the possibility, that a single nuclear blast directed for example against
a nuclear power plant complex could achieve a similar amount
of devastation, primarily by igniting a huge, secondary firestorm
in the areas devastated by the super-hurricane winds blowing
towards the original firestorm. At the moment the risk of such an
occurrence is very small, but if we let our nuclear experts spread
nuclear weapons technology to a hundred new countries and to
construct thousands of new nuclear power plants, it comes almost
inevitable that something very nasty will finally happen, sooner
or later. To quote a famous Hollywood movie, the Miami Vice by
Michael Mann: “Probability is like gravity. You cannot fight gravity. The odds catch up.”
Even the climatic impact of nuclear power is not a straightforward issue, because nobody has ever made a proper study of the
matter. When a coal-powered plant is replaced by a nuclear power
plant, less carbon dioxide will be produced. The making of the
cement and steel for the nuclear power plant and the mining and
enrichment of the uranium fuel of course produce some carbon,
but this only amounts to a few per cent of what a coal plant would
produce during its lifetime.
However, in the northern areas the waste heat of a nuclear
power plant cannot be utilised for district heating purposes, unlike
the waste heat from coal-, gas-, oil- or biomass-fired power plants.
This means that between 60 and 70 per cent of all the energy produced by a nuclear power plant is simply dumped into lakes, rivers or seas. This produces a lot of water vapour, tens of millions of
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tons for each nuclear reactor per year. During the winter this extra
water vapour gives birth to impressive cloud formations, which
must have a strong local heating impact. In the summer the clouds
would have a cooling impact, but the phenomenon (of cloud formation around the nuclear power plants) seems to be less significant during the warmer seasons. Water vapour, of course, can also
act as a greenhouse gas.
The waste heat from a nuclear power plant slows down the
freezing of the nearby waters during the autumn and accelerates the melting of spring ice. For example, the man-made area of
spring-time melt-water around the Russian nuclear power plant
Sosnovy Bor often covers thousands of square kilometres, or billions of square metres. This undoubtedly produces a significant
local heating impact during spring, because open water absorbs
90-96 per cent of solar radiation. The phenomenon might even
accelerate the melting of the surrounding areas, so that a multiplier effect is generated.
When we use biomass or wind energy, we do not really bring
any new heat on our planet, we are just shuffling around the
energy we receive from the Sun. However, when we accelerate the
decay of uranium or consume fossil fuels, we produce extra heat
on top of what we get from the Sun. This problem is the most significant with nuclear power, because its waste heat cannot be
utilised as district heat, even in the northern areas.
To put this in perspective, our total planetary heat imbalance now amounts to 500,000 gigawatts. If we were to satisfy all
our energy needs with nuclear power by 2100, we would have
to produce something like 30,000 gigawatts of electricity, and
the amount of extra heat from our nuclear power plants would
amount to 80,000 or 90,000 gigawatts.
Then we have, once again, the aerosol umbrella problem. If
the bright aerosols produced by burning biomass and sulphurrich fossil fuels now cancel three quarters of the global warming, a
rapid shift from fossil fuels to nuclear, wind and solar energy could
– temporarily – quadruple our planetary heat imbalance, and the
speed of warming. This is a serious dilemma that should not be
ignored. When we replace fossil fuels with biomass the problem is
less serious because even if less sulphur is produced, at least a part
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of its loss is compensated by the ash, nitrogen oxide and organic
carbon emissions, which also have a cooling impact and assist the
formation of low clouds.
All the above mentioned issues are real. They definitely exist.
But it is impossible to find studies that would have quantified or
even tried to quantify the impact of all these factors at different
latitudes and in differing climatic conditions.
To sum it up: we really do not know, whether replacing coal
power plants with nuclear power would help us in solving the
global warming problem. At the moment, all such hopes are just
wishful thinking, which might or might not have something to do
with the reality.
Ordinary Nuclear Reactors
Because of the various anti-nuclear campaigns, safety measures of
existing nuclear power plants have been greatly improved. This far
the safety record of the nuclear power industry has been relatively
good: hundreds of reactors have been operated for decades without a single full-scale accident.
Counted in curies, the accident in Chernobyl released about
0.5 per cent of the radioactivity inside one nuclear reactor (50 million curies, according to International Atomic Energy Association)
into the atmosphere. The accident released most of the radioactive
substances that are easily vaporized, but only a tiny part of the uranium and plutonium was spread over the northern hemisphere as
small and nanoparticles. In one of the truly bad scenarios a terrorist group would vaporize the nuclear fuel inside a reactor, all of it,
so that it would spread over the whole northern hemisphere in the
form tiny particles that can be inhaled inside the lungs.
An official study made in the West by the International Atomic
Energy Association and the World Health Organization estimated,
that radioactive exposures caused by the accident in Chernobyl
might finally result in 4,000 extra cancer deaths. However, Russian,
Belorussian and Ukrainian physicians and scientists have published at least 730 scientific studies according to which the accident has already led to notable increases in many types of can243
cers and numerous other illnesses in the affected areas. The picture
that emerges from these seven hundred plus studies is dramatically different than the official view promoted by the UN organizations, western governments and nuclear industries. If these seven
hundred studies are closer to the mark, the final death toll of the
Chernobyl accident will be counted in hundreds of thousands, if
not millions. For the public, such a discrepancy in predictions,
amounting to three full orders of magnitude, has of course been
more than a little bit confusing.
This far, western scientists have simply ignored the Russian,
Ukrainian and Belorussian studies as “nonsense”, which has been
arrogant and more than a little bit unfair. There could be differences in the methodologies used in each country, but the Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian scientists certainly understand
the basic problems of epidemiology, and they have described the
methods they have used in their studies.
The nuclear establishment has also ignored all the Western
studies which have produced “impossible” results. In many countries there was a clear peak in infant mortality during the three
years following Chernobyl. For instance in Britain there were
2,000 extra infant deaths during these years. Similar rises in infant
mortality were reported from Turkey, Poland and some parts of
Germany. Moreover, the decline in the percentage of observed
pregnancies ending in still birth went flat for a couple of years after
Chernobyl in a number of countries, after which the curve again
started to fall.
Spring westerlies certainly carried a large part of Chernobyl’s fallout to India, even though this is almost never mentioned.
Indian physicians reported that while infant mortality in India had
been dropping with a rate of three per cent per year before Chernobyl, it only fell by 1.1 per cent per year during the years 198688, after which the annual reduction again became three per cent.
Indian studies pointed out, that such a statistical anomaly was
equivalent to one million extra infant deaths.
To my knowledge, the figures mentioned above have not been
disputed, because they are based in official demographic statistics, but a causal connection with Chernobyl has been vehemently
denied by the main stream opinion. The main opposing argument
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has been, that further studies for example in Germany have not
been able to find a correlation between increased infant mortality
and a high level of radioactive pollution from Chernobyl. In other
words: there were no additional infant deaths in Germany’s badly
polluted areas, compared with regions that received less radioactivity from Chernobyl. Case closed.
Except that it was the areas, where it rained when the radioactive cloud was passing over, which received the highest amount of
fallout. In these areas radioactive particles came down inside rain
drops. Most radioactive substances are not very dangerous when
swallowed with food or water, because they then come out from
the body after a few hours or days, only. The most dangerous form
of radioactive pollution are small hot particles that are so light that
they are easily inhaled inside the lungs, but so heavy that they do
not easily get out from the alveols (tiny gas-exchanging chambers
inside the lungs), with the return flow of air. If such hot particles
park themselves inside the alveols and then move to other internal organs, they can remain inside the body for years or decades,
instead of only hours or days. The difference is very important,
because there are 8,784 hours in a year with 366 days.
What if many of the areas that “were not badly polluted”
received less radioactivity, but in a more dangerous form? When
radioactive particles come down with rain, they cannot be inhaled.
Therefore a small amount of dry pollution could, in effect, be
thousands if not tens of thousands of times more dangerous than
an equivalent amount of radioactivity inside falling raindrops.
In other words: all the “carefully done” western control studies
about the consequences of Chernobyl have probably been worthless, or worse than worthless, because in reality the scientists did
not have and still do not have a glue of what was compared with
what.
Most of our present nuclear reactors contain much larger
amounts of radioactivity than the Chernobyl-type graphite-moderated reactors. What would happen, if a terrorist strike would,
one day, release for instance 50 billion curies (“1,000 Chernobyls”)
of radioactivity from a single nuclear reactor?
If a major part of the radioactive fallout would be in the form
of aerosols, small particles and nanoparticles, very large mortality
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figures should be expected. Numerous genetic defects (mutations)
should also take place in the exposed human population, and
many of them could be endlessly transferred from one generation
to the next as new hereditary diseases and cancer-causing oncogenes, as long as there are humans living on this planet. Above all,
such cumulative burden of new hereditary diseases and oncogenes
could be expected to increase for a very long time, for millennia,
due to the long-lasting nature of radioactive pollution.
This is, by far, the most frightening aspect of nuclear power:
a single major accident might produce a horrible and steadily
increasing burden of new genetic diseases and cancer-causing
genes. It could be a real Descent to Hell. And it could be a Descent
to Hell for a million years, if the humans would last for so long as a
species. It is possible that at some point the burden would become
so heavy, that the remaining humans would lose their will to live.
Representatives of the nuclear power companies often produce
astonishingly optimistic figures on the possible consequences of
a full-scale nuclear accident or a terrorist strike against a nuclear
reactor. But for instance the US Air Forces – which, in this case,
might be a more reliable source of information – have produced drastically different risk assessments. According to a study
(Nichelson-Medlin-Stafford: Radiological Weapons of Terror) by
three generals of the US Air Forces, terrorists could kill most of
the unprotected population of Washington DC, New York, Baltimore and Philadelphia if they would acquire ten kilograms of used
nuclear fuel just taken out from a reactor, and pulverized it with
a ton of conventional high explosive. Such a dirty bomb of three
million curies or so would also greatly increase cancer mortality
along the whole East Coast of the USA.
Another problem is that even an ordinary nuclear power
plant annually produces a relatively large amount of plutonium. A
1,000-megawatt plant might produce 30 tons of used nuclear fuel
per year, each tonne containing 15-20 kilograms of plutonium.
This is a serious issue because without breeder reactors plutonium
is the easy road to a nuclear weapon, if the bomb can be somewhat
crude and relatively large. If a nuclear weapon is to be produced
from uranium 235, Manhattan Project-sized industrial development is required, because it is very difficult to separate the differ246
ent isotopes of uranium. In practise thousands of older or hundreds of very modern, fragile and expensive gas centrifuges have
to be operated for a couple of years.
Plutonium, on the other hand, can be extracted from the used
nuclear fuel through relatively simple chemical reactions, just by
dissolving the fuel rods into a strong acid. For example North
Korea was able to produce an atomic bomb with this method in
less than a year after George W. Bush’s astonishingly irresponsible
Axis of Evil-speech.
Contrary to a widespread public belief plutonium also exists in
the nature, but only in tiny quantities and in very difficult places.
The minerals bubbling to the surface in hot springs known as
fumaroles sometimes contain up to 20 grams of plutonium per
tonne. But this concentration is one thousand times smaller than
in the uranium fuel which has spent some time inside a working
nuclear reactor.
The most vulnerable points in the presently existing nuclear
complexes are the cooling ponds storing the used nuclear fuel.
Unlike nuclear reactors, cooling ponds do not have containment
shields or multiple security measures. Most of them are not even
guarded. For example the used fuel rods of Finland’s Olkiluoto
Nuclear Power Plant are kept in a metal shed which once lost a
major part of its roof (!) in an ordinary winter storm. The Finnish Nuclear Safety Authority denies that anything like this has ever
happened, but several eye-witnesses have separately verified the
story.
The used nuclear fuel in the cooling ponds is thousands of
times less radioactive than the nuclear fuel which has just been
taken out from a reactor, but it can still be hundreds of thousands
of times more radioactive than natural uranium. For example most
of the cesium 137 isotope is still left. The radioactive fallout from
Chernobyl contained about 50 million curies of radioactivity, but
most of that consisted of very short-lived isotopes and radioactive gases. It now seems that the two million curies of cesium 137
which were released in Chernobyl may have been the most dangerous part of the whole, complex cloud of fallout.
A typical cooling pond of a nuclear power plant usually contains, among many other things, between 20 and 50 million curies
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of cesium 137. Even though the production of residual heat is
much less than in nuclear fuel that has just been taken out from
a reactor, cooling ponds still require active cooling. If something happens to pumps or engines the water in a cooling pond
begins to boil and evaporate. If the used nuclear fuel rods become
exposed, they ignite and burn. Uranium oxide cannot burn, but
the fuel rods have a zirconium alloy cladding that can and will
catch fire. According to many experts who have studied the problem such a fire could release most of the radioactivity contained
in the cooling pond into the atmosphere, unless more water is
brought into the pond.
If we continue to produce electricity with nuclear power plants,
the new reactors should be constructed deep underground, inside
the bedrock, so that they cannot blow their contents into the
atmosphere, in any circumstances.
The containment shields of the already existing nuclear reactors should be strengthened so that they can withstand a rapid
series of three or four separate strikes by large passenger jets, as
well as attacks carried out with bunker-buster missiles like the
“Deep Digger”. Coastal nuclear power stations should be equipped
with improved sea defences. Also the cooling ponds storing used
nuclear fuel should be equipped with proper containment shields
and heavily safe-guarded. At least some national army, navy and
air force units should be concentrated near the nuclear power
complexes. Electric fences and infra-red alarm systems should be
installed around the reactor sites, and especially the actual reactor
buildings should be re-designed by military experts and equipped
with a set of manned strong points with sufficient fields of fire, so
that they can act as formidable fortresses against possible commando strikes by terrorists. There should always be a lrge number of armed security guards or soldiers inside the actual reactor
building.
Kite power stations should be constructed on the no-fly zones
surrounding the nuclear power complexes, in order to prevent a
strike with an aeroplane or with a glider. The protection of the primary cooling pipes should be improved so that they cannot be
destroyed for example by small portable missiles or with rocketpropelled grenades (RPGs). Primary cooling pipes should also be
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guarded against a terrorist strike by divers using aqualungs. The
computer systems of the nuclear power plants should be protected
against flux compressors, other kinds of microwave bombs, Marx
impulse generators and other EMP weapons according to the best
currently available military standards.
If, in spite of all these precautions, the unthinkable does happen, and there is a major radioactive eruption from a nuclear reactor, it would be important to discourage the seriously exposed
people from having children. Otherwise it is possible that each
heavily exposed person would produce a number of new hereditary diseases and cancer-causing genes, which could then be endlessly transferred from one future generation to the next. The
genetic footprint of the radioactive fallout can, theoretically, multiply the human suffering caused by a nuclear accident by a factor of
ten thousand, or more.
Pebble-Bed Modular Reactors (PBMRs)
The so called pebble-bed modular reactors – which are being
planned for example by China and the Republic of South Africa –
are cheaper to construct and more efficient in producing electricity than conventional nuclear reactors, because the steam turbines
have been replaced by gas turbines. The gas heated inside the reactor runs a gas turbine, directly. The negative side is that the release
of the reactor’s radioactivity into the atmosphere in the form of
highly radioactive aerosols, in case of a serious accident, has been
almost automatized by the design. In pebble-beds nuclear fuel is
inside tens of thousands of small carbon balls, or graphite pebbles.
As long as the inert gases running the turbine are willing to stay
inside everything is cool, but if the gases decide to leave the reactor they will be replaced by air. If there is air, graphite in the pebbles behaves like carbon does when it is heated to 1500 degrees
Celsius. A pebble-bed reactor is the ultimate wet dream of a seriously mad terrorist, and should be classified as a weapon of mass
destruction. A pebble-bed reactor using thorium is also a breeder
reactor, even though it does not use fast neutrons (see the chapter
about thorium reactors).
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Fast Breeder Reactors
If the world’s governments want to increase the production of
nuclear power substantially, this will unavoidably mean either fast
breeder reactors or fusion reactors, because the existing natural
uranium fuel reserves will run out. We do not know, yet, whether
it is possible to construct functioning fusion reactors, but we can
definitely build fast breeder reactors which are able to produce
more nuclear fuel, usually plutonium, than they consume.
According to the experience of the nuclear industry it is realistic to aim at a breeding ratio of 1:1.2. This means that five breeder
reactors can produce their own fuel plus fuel for one ordinary
nuclear power plant. Theoretically 20 per cent of all our energy in
2100 could be produced by 6,000 large (1,000 megawatt) nuclear
power plants. Of these six thousand, 5,000 should be fast breeders
and 1,000 could be ordinary nuclear power plants.
Most normal nuclear reactors use fuel in which the uranium
235 content has been enriched to 1.8–4 per cent. Most fast breeder
designs use fuel which contains 15–30 per cent uranium 235 or
plutonium 239. This means that it is possible to construct nuclear
bombs from the fuel of a fast breeder reactor without any further enrichment, the bombs only become a little bit heavier than
the bombs made of the so called weapons grade uranium, containing 93 per cent of uranium 235. With weapons grade uranium
20 kilograms is needed for making a Hiroshima bomb, with fast
breeder reactor fuel containing 20 per cent of uranium 235 the
required amount is 400 kilograms, but this is still manageable.
Some fast breeders which belong to the Rapid class use uranium
fuel in which the uranium 235 content has been enriched to 60 per
cent. This is already uncomfortably close to the strength of weapons grade uranium.
Fast breeders use either liquid sodium or liquid lithium as their
coolant. This makes them especially vulnerable to floods, tsunamis and sabotage, because both elements explode if they get in
touch with water or air. In other words only a small tear or hole in
one cooling pipe could lead to the rapid destruction of the whole
cooling system in a chain of sodium-water or sodium-air explosions. If the breeder reactor fuel first melts and then cools and
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recrystallizes, the possibility of a major nuclear explosion cannot be excluded. This cannot happen in ordinary nuclear power
plants. The first event in Chernobyl was a tiny nuclear explosion, but the amount of energy liberated in the explosion was very
small because the uranium 235 content of the fuel had only been
enriched to 1.8 per cent. Most of the original damage in Chernobyl was actually done by hydrogen and steam explosions. If a
breeder would explode, the ensuing radioactive fallout would be
extremely lethal, much more so than what would be the worstcase scenario in an ordinary nuclear power plant. Besides this, fast
breeder reactors tend to have a positive, instead of a negative, coolant void coefficient. This means that when a fast breeder loses its
coolant, it starts to produce more heat, which increases the possibility of a truly serious accident. In a water-cooled nuclear reactor
water also acts as a moderator, so the production of heat immediately collapses, if the coolant (water) is lost.
When the Boxing Day tsunami hit the coastal areas in many
Asian countries in December 2004, it also washed over a fast
breeder reactor under construction at the coast of Tamil Nadu,
India, as a seven-metre-high wall of water. Luckily the reactor
had not been finished and there was only a large slab of concrete
when the tsunami came. If the tsunami had come ten years later,
the whole world would have changed, overnight. It would have
become a very different place from the world now known to us.
A warning for politicians and journalists: the nuclear industry’s
currently favoured euphemism for fast breeder reactors is “fourthgeneration nuclear reactors”. Or, to be very precise, the term refers
to six different reactor designs, four of which are fast breeders and
one a breeder using thermal neutrons (the thorium-burning pebble-bed modular reactor, see the chapters above and below).
Thorium reactors
Many proponents of nuclear power have recently claimed, that
thorium reactors were a safer option than uranium or plutonium
reactors. The same people have also claimed, that while an ordinary nuclear reactor can utilise only 0.7 per cent of natural ura251
nium (the uranium 235 component), a thorium reactor can use all
the thorium available in the nature. These claims are very misleading. 100.0 per cent of the thorium in nature belongs to the isotope
232, which cannot be used as nuclear fuel without first converting it to uranium 233 in a breeder reactor. In other words: thorium
reactors are breeder reactors. Moreover, in most designs the uranium 233 elements producing the neutrons that convert thorium
232 to uranium 233 are very pure, almost weapons grade uranium 233. In other words, from the viewpoint of nuclear proliferation, thorium reactors are actually the most dangerous option. At
the moment there are 30 states which have nuclear power plants
and 80 states which have said to the IAEA that they would like
to produce nuclear power. If we move to thorium economy, like
some nuclear experts have proposed, and we will have 110 nuclear
power producing states by 2050, this would also mean 110 de facto
nuclear weapons states. Thorium reactors are, by far, the easiest
route to nuclear weapons.
Deuterium-Tritium Fusion Power Plants
ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor),
the joint fusion power project by Japan, USA and the European
Union, has been hailed as an effort to produce safe and non-polluting nuclear energy. We are being told that such fusion reactors
would not produce any dangerous radioactive waste, unlike present nuclear power plants. It is also said that in ITER-type fusion
power plants it is not necessary to deal with dangerous radioactive
substances like plutonium and uranium and that a fusion reactor
would use seawater as its “fuel”. All these statements are more than
a little bit misleading.
In practise ITER would “burn” lithium 6, broken down to tritium, and deuterium. Tritium and deuterium are not exactly
harmless substances, they are the main ingredients in hydrogen and hydrogen-uranium bombs (fission-fusion bombs and fission-fusion-fission bombs). Tritium is approximately half a billion
times more radioactive than uranium 238. Therefore it is used as
the trigger in many ordinary fission bombs, and a few grams of tri252
tium or lithium 6 and deuterium multiplies the explosive strength
of an ordinary fission bomb.
The easiest way to make a truly massive atomic bomb is to use
some lithium 6, some deuterium (which can be distilled from sea
water), 270 grams of very pure uranium 235 or a little bit smaller
amount of plutonium – and a lot of natural uranium. The explosion of the uranium 235 or plutonium 239 core triggers fusion
reactions in the second phase of the bomb, consisting of lithium 6 and deuterium. This produces so much heat and neutrons
that if the bomb has been surrounded by a thick mantle of ordinary uranium 238 (or natural uranium), many of the uranium
238 atoms will split, even though uranium 238 cannot experience
a proper chain reaction. USA exploded such a hydrogen-uranium
bomb (Castle Bravo) in the Bikini atoll in 1954. Hydrogen-uranium bombs produce very lethal radioactive clouds, which are in
some ways even worse than the fallout that would be produced by
a cobalt bomb. Castle Bravo’s fallout made people fall ill even on
coral islands which were five hundred kilometres away from the
ground zero.
Moreover, an ITER-type fusion power plant would not bring
us clean nuclear power. It would most probably produce a larger
quantity of highly radioactive nuclear waste than an ordinary
nuclear power plant. ITER would not produce used nuclear fuel
rods, but the whole mantle of the plant becomes very radioactive
and has to be changed at least once in a few years, possibly even
more often than this.
The material of the mantle then becomes highly dangerous and
radioactive nuclear waste, and there will be a lot of it. The problem
arises from the fact that the fusion of deuterium and tritium produces neutrons and not protons. Because neutrons do not have an
electric charge it is not possible to direct them by strong magnetic
fields. Thus they hit the reactor’s mantle and make it very radioactive. For the same reason the nuclear fuel of an ordinary nuclear
power station has typically become almost one billion times more
radioactive when it comes out from the reactor. When nuclear fuel
goes in the reactor it typically contains about 0.3 curies of radioactivity for each ton, when it comes out it contains approximately
300,000,000 curies per ton. This is because of the induced or arti253
ficial radioactivity, radioactive impurities which have been created by the intensive neutron bombardment inside the reactor. The
neutrons created by the deuterium-tritium fusion will do the same
thing for the mantle of a fusion power plant.
The US senator and Apollo astronaut Harrison H. Schmitt –
for the time being the last person who has stepped on the Moon
– has discussed the differences of various fusion power plants for
example in his book Return to the Moon.
Helium 3 Fusion Power Plants
A fusion power plant based on the reaction of two helium 3
atoms would not produce much radioactive waste because helium
3-helium 3-fusion produces protons which have a positive electric charge and which can therefore be steered by magnetic fields.
However, the nearest significant sources of helium 3 are the solar
wind, the Moon (whose loose sediments contain up to 20 parts per
billion of helium 3) and the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn.
A research team at the University of Wisconsin (USA) has calculated that mining of the Moon’s helium 3 reserves for fusion
power plants might become economically feasible if we can reduce
the price of delivering equipment to the Moon to USD 1,000 per
kilogram. The Apollo flights delivered material to the Moon with
slightly less than two million dollars per kilogram. Advances in
rocket, space tether and solar technologies may change these equations, but they are not likely to make lunar helium 3 mining economical compared with the new cpv, thin-film solar cell, geothermal and wind power technologies.
Deuterium-Deuterium Fusion Power Plants
It would, at least in theory, also be possible to construct a fusion
reactor that would only use seawater, or, more precisely, only deuterium as its fuel. In the oceans one water molecule in six thousand is heavy water, and contains deuterium instead of ordinary
hydrogen.
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In reality nobody is interested in seawater fusion power plants,
except in speeches meant for politicians, journalists and the public.
It is true that the fusion of two deuterium atoms has a fifty per
cent chance of producing a neutron and a fifty per cent chance of
making a proton. Besides this the secondary reactions emit some
more neutrons, but the production of neutrons is still much less
than with tritium-deuterium fusion.
The problem is that the fusion of two deuterium atoms produces only 3,65 MeV (megaelectronvolts) of energy, while the
fusion of deuterium and tritium provides 17,6 MeV and the fusion
of two helium 3 atoms 12,9 MeV. Thus a seawater reactor would
produce even more radioactive waste for each megawatt-hour of
energy than a tritium-deuterium plant. You can’t get much farther
than that from the dream of clean nuclear energy!
The Hydrogen Economy
Many companies and technicians have proposed the replacing of
oil and natural gas with hydrogen.
Hydrogen molecules are very small and they escape easily
through the tiniest of holes or cracks in pipes and tanks. We do
not have materials that can last forever. Cracks and holes must
emerge, sooner or later, and hydrogen will start leaking out much
before the holes or cracks become so large that they can be seen
without a microscope.
In the atmosphere hydrogen molecules tend to rise up quickly
and they often reach a very high altitude before they react with
oxygen and make water. In other words, hydrogen leaks can produce artificial cirrus clouds at high altitudes in the stratosphere.
Because such hydrogen clouds stay up for a long time, they have a
strong global warming potential. In other words, hydrogen would
also contribute to our planetary overheating problem.
However, various manmade and natural sources already produce between 15 and 20 million tons of free hydrogen, every year.
40 per cent of this comes from incomplete combustion of fossil fuels and biomass, and 50 per cent from photochemical oxidation of methane. The last 10 per cent is produced by volcanoes,
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oceans and nitrogen-fixing, leguminous plants. This means that a
full-scale hydrogen economy might actually reduce our hydrogen
emissions, if hydrogen would replace biofuels and fossil fuels, and
if less than 3 per cent of It would leak into the atmosphere.
In tightly controlled industrial applications the leakage is often
less than 0.1 per cent, but in poorly designed and maintained automobiles it could amount to 10 - 20 per cent.
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The top ten ways to sterilize the planet:
1. Reducing the sulphur content in ocean-going ships’ fuel from
the present 2.5 per cent to 0.5 per cent (the recommendation of
the International Maritime Organization). This could, at the
moment, be the most acute and imminent threat to our survival!
2. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions by constructing fast breeder
reactors.
3. Producing so much greenhouse gases, soot and artificial cirrus
clouds that the Arctic methane and carbon stores will be released
into the atmosphere (this we are already trying to do).
4. Using recombinant-DNA-techniques to breed bacteria that can
produce vast quantities of free hydrogen – and releasing them into
the environment.
5. Reducing the greenhouse gas emissions by pressurized water
reactors and pebble-bed modular reactors.
6. Increasing air traffic in the stratosphere, especially over the
polar regions.
7. Replacing kerosene with hydrogen as the main jet plane fuel.
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8. Classifying peat, oil shale and the other dirty fuels as slowly
regenerating biomass, and promoting their use as acceptable
sources of energy.
9. Destroying the remaining tropical rainforests, mangrove forests
and swamp rainforests.
10. Doubling the global production of animal meat.
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The top ten ways to prevent
the overheating of the planet:
1. Donating a thousand million charcoal-making Anila cooking
stoves and a thousand million solar cookers to a thousand million
rural households.
2. Using the terra preta (biochar) farming method in fields, gardens, pasturelands and forests.
3. Banning the selling and buying of animal meat – and accelerating the development of artificial meat.
4. Growing billions of very old and large trees. Species that produce fruit, nuts or other popular food and which can attain a substantial size and become very old should be preferred.
5. Regenerating the mangrove forests, the tropical rainforests and
the coral reefs which have been destroyed, and cultivating tree
crops in the rainforests, in the shade of the larger trees.
6. Reducing winter-time cloud cover in the Arctic and Antarctic
areas.
7. Shifting to an energy system dominated by solar, wind and geothermal energy.
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8. Producing carbon-negative electricity in enhanced geothermal
systems that utilise supercritical carbon dioxide and sequester a lot
of carbon into the bedrock.
9. Favouring broad-leaved trees in the northern forests, at least on
the Southern slopes.
10. Producing a lot of extra ice and snow with wind-powered
sprinklers and/or using the shallow, protected bays as “ice nurseries”.
(It may well turn out that for example highly-reflecting agricultural plant species, reflecting mulches and reflecting films on
watery surfaces prove to be more important than some of the
items mentioned on this current, personal, top ten list. However,
so little is known about these possibilities, that I was hesitant to
include them, at this point.)
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The ten most important things everyone of us can do
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of different ways to fight
global warming. It is not possible to participate or implement all of
them in our everyday lives. If the endless lists of things that ought
to be done are making you nervous, anxious or depressed, here is a
short-list of only ten VERY important ways how you can be a part
of the solution instead of being a part of the problem.
1. Write or phone to an oil company – or to many different oil
companies – and say that you would prefer to use carbon-negative
biofuels. When carbon-negative biofuel brands become available,
never use any other types of fuel.
2. Demand carbon-negative electricity from your power utility
company. If it will not react to your request, buy your power from
another company that produces carbon-negative electricity (when
that becomes available). The preceding pages have described
numerous different ways to produce carbon-negative power!
3. Make sure that the politicians you vote understand, at least in a
very basic level, the most important dilemmas mentioned in this
book. If the person you have been voting for doesn’t have a clue
about what she/he should do (this is usually true), educate her/
him or choose a better representative for yourself.
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4. Buy at least one thin-film or concentrator photovoltaic panel
from the company you consider to be the most promising. This
will speed up the solar energy revolution.
5. Become a vegetarian or at least limit your consumption of meat
so that you only eat meat once in a week or so.
6. Don’t do any flying without a REALLY good reason. If you have
to fly, use propeller planes whenever possible. Avoid night flights,
whenever possible, as if they were be a lethal infectious disease.
Write to an airline company (or many of them!) and enquire about
their environmental policies. Ask them whether they have already
bought any propeller planes, what they are planning to do for their
global warming condensation trails etc. Prefer northern routes
during the winters, but avoid the polar routes flying in the stratosphere.
7. Support development cooperation projects that promote terra
preta farming and disseminate solar cookers, Anila stoves (or
other devices that reduce the soot emissions and produce biochar
as a by-product of cooking).
8. Support tree-planting programmes that concentrate on planting
large food-producing trees that have a long life-span.
9. If you own land (farmland, forest, wetland), manage it so that
it absorbs more carbon from the atmosphere. If you do not own
land, contact the public landowners (state, church, municipality)
or your land-owning friends, and discuss the matter with them.
10. Carry out further experiments with the ideas that you found
the most intriguing. Take some more time for thinking. Innovate!
Develop your own reasonable or mad scientist solutions to the
global warming! Like Gandhiji said: become the change you want
to see in the world.
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SELECTED REFERENCES:
I have tried to minimize the list of references, because a full list would have
run over hundreds of pages. Besides, if you know the key concepts (the precise terms the scientists are using in their own debates) and/or the names of
researchers or companies developing a certain technology, you can nowadays
find at least the summaries of all the key articles with simple on-line searches.
In many cases you can only find up-to-date information in the internet.
Preface
James Hansen’s 350 ppm calculation: see for instance Lemonick, Michael D.:
Global Warming: Beyond the Tipping Point, Scientific American, October
2008
The Melting of the Arctic
The Arctic ice cap in 1958: Anderson, William R.: Nautilus 90 North, Signet
Books, New York, 1959. For the extent of the Arctic sea ice, look at the
reports on the website of the National Ice and Snow Data Center of the
USA, or look at The Cryosphere Today, http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere. A superb introduction to the Arctic climate can be found from
Serreze, Mark C. and Barry, Roger G.: The Arctic Climate System, Cambridge University Press, 2005. The amount of ice at the Arctic Ocean,
counted as cubic kilometres, see Freshnor - The Freshwter Budget for the
Nordic Seas, http://freshnor.dmi.dk/handout_freshnor.pdf , by the Danish Meteorological Institute, the Icelandic Meteorological Institute, the
Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research, the Rossby Centre and Greenland
Institute for Natural Resources.
Sergei Kirpotin’s work was first made known in the West by Fred Pearce,
one of the world’s leading climate journalists. Pearce’s excellent book the
Last Generation (Eden Project Books, 2006) contains a full chapter about
the melting of the permafrost. Information based on Euan Nisbet’s estimate about the methane emissions is mentioned by Pearce. See also Walter, Katey and Chanton, Jeff (2006): Melting Lakes in Siberia Emit Greenhouse Gas, Nature, 443, 71-75 or The Other Threat to Climate Change,
Terra Nature, 15 September 2006. The permafrost containing 1,500 billion
tons of carbon: Permafrost Carbon Content Double the Old Estimates,
CSIRO Media Release 08/164, 12 September, 2008. The quotes from Sergei Kirpotin and Katey Walter are mentioned for example in Borenstein,
Seth: Scientists Find New Global Warming Time Bomb, Associated Press, 7
September, 2006 (available online). Methane bubbling up from the subma-
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rine permafrost, see for example Connor, Steve: The Methane Time Bomb,
www.techimo.com, 23 September, 2008; the melting methane clathrates
around Spitzbergen: Warming Ocean Contributes to Global Warming, 14
August, 2009, National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, University of
Southampton and Natural Environment Research Council.
What is Global Warming?
The information about the Earth’s energy imbalance: Scientists Confirm
Earth’s Energy is Out of Balance, Nasa Webpages 28 April 2005, www.
nasa.gov: Earth’s Energy Out of Balance, Goddard Institute of Space Studies webpages, 28 April, 2005, www.giss.nasa.gov; Hansen, James (2005):
A Slippery Slope: How Much Global Warming Constitutes Dangerous
Anthropogenic Interference?, Climate Change, Vol 68, pp. 269-279; Loeb,
Norman G. et al: Toward Optimal Closure of the Earth’s Top-of-Atmosphere Radiation Budget, Journal of Climate, February 1, 2009.
Estimates about the heating impact of soot: 0,44 w/m2: see IPCC’s 2007
report; 0,9 w/m2: see Ramanathan, Veerabhadran and Carmichael,
George: Global and Regional Climate Changes due to Black Carbon;
Nature Geoscience, 1, 221-227, 1 April, 2008.
Why is Global Warming a Serious Issue?
For Richard Alley’s comments and the history of the sea level rise, based on
James Hansen’s lecture, see Pearce (2005), ibid. For surface melt-water acting as a lubricant see also Zwally, J.H. et al (2002): Surface Melt-induced
Acceleration of Greenland Ice Sheet Flow, Science, 297, 218-222. James
Hansen’s analysis about dynamivs of ice sheet melting: Hansen, 2005, ibid.
The impact of soot on snow and ice: Hansen, James and Nazarenko, Larissa: Soot Climate Forcing via Snow and Ice Albedos, Proceedings of the
National Academy of sciences of the USA, published online December 29,
2003. The very rapid rise of sea level 14,200 years ago: Blanchon, Paul and
Shaw, John (1995): Reef Drowning During the Last Deglaciation: Evidence
for Catastrophic Sea-level Rise and Ice-sheet collapse, Geology, Vol 23,
No 1.
Carbon dioxide reducing the nutritive value of a wide range of food crops:
Lawton, Graham: Plague of Plenty, New Scientist, 30 November, 2002.
Carbon dioxide and cassava: Toxic Greenhouse Effect, New Scientist, 11 July,
2009; about cassava in general see for instance, Sasson, Albert: Feeding
tomorrow’s world, Unesco/CTA, Paris, 1990.
Global warming and rice crops: Peng, Shaobing et al: Rice Yields Decline with
Higher Night Temperatures from Global Warming, Proceedings of the
National Academy of the United States of America, 28 June, 2004.
The possibility of a five-metre sea level rise by 2107: Hansen, James: The climate catastrophe, New Scientist, 28 July, 2008.
264
About glaciers speeding up eight times after the break-down of Larsen B ice
shelf: Rignot, Eric and Kanagaratnam, Pannir: Changes in the Velocity
Structure of the Greenland Ice Sheet, Science, 311: 986-990, 2006.
About earthquakes caused by the glacial rebound see for example Arvidsson,
Ronald (1996): Fennoscandian Earthquakes: Whole Crustal Rupturing
Related to Post-Glacial Rebound, Science, vol 274, 1 November, 1996 and
Johnston, Arch C.: A Wave in the Earth, in the same number of Science.
Post-Glacial Rebound Earthquakes and Tsunamis at the Baltic Sea: Mörner,
Nils-Axel: Tsunami Events Within the Baltic, Polish Geological Institute
Special papers, 23, 71-76, 2008; Mörner, Nils-Axel: Paleoseismicity of Sweden, Jofo Grafiska, Stockholm 2003, a contribution to the INQUA from its
Sub-commission on Paleoseismology.
The Australian megatsunamis: Bryant, Edward: Tsunami - the Underrated
Hazard, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001; Bryant, E.A. and
Nott, J.A.: Geological Indicators of Large Tsunami in Australia, Natural
Hazards, 24, 3: 231-249, 2001; Jones, Nicola: get Ready for a Killer Wave,
New Scientist, 14 September, 2002.
Increasing number of (glacial) earthquakes in Greenland: Glacial Earthquakes
Point to Rising Temperatures in Greenland, Earth Institute News, 23rd
March, 2006, The Earth Institute at Columbia University.
Newfoundland’s 1929 tsunami: Lovett, Richard: The wave from nowhere, New
Scientist, 24 February, 2007.
The early estimates on the amount of methane hydrates: Kvenvolden, K.A.
(1988): Methane Hydrates and Global Change, Global Biochemical Cycles,
vol 2, pp 221-229.
The tsunami risk caused by melting methane hydrates: Henriet, J.P. and Mienert, J. (eds, 1998): Gas Hydrates: Relevance to World Margin Stability and
Climate Change, Geological Society Special Publications, Vol 137; Suess,
Erwin et al: Flammable Ice, Scientific American, November 1999; see also
Pearce, ibid.
Can the Atmosphere Become Poisonous for Humans?
Hydrogen sulphide- and methane-induced mass extinctions: Ward, Peter D.:
Under a Green Sky, Smithsonian Books, 2007: Ward, Peter D.: Impact
from the Deep, Scientific American, October 2006; Kump, L.R. et al (2005):
Massive Release of Hydrogen Sulfide to the Surface Ocean and Atmosphere During Intervals of Oceanic Anoxia, Geology, 33 (5), 397-400.
Pasi Toiviainen’s methane shock-a moist greenhouse effect hypothesis: Toiviainen, Pasi: Ilmastonmuutos - nyt, Otava, Helsinki, 2007; see also the documentary film The Venus Theory (by Pasi Toiviainen).
About heat increasing the stress caused to mammals by low-oxygen environment and about the limits of the mammals’ reproduction system: Ward,
Peter D.: Out of Thin Air, Dinosaurs, Birds and Earth’s Ancient Atmo-
265
spheres, Joseph Henry Press, 2006.
Ramanathan’s comment on three per cent albedo change being equivalent to
five-fold increase in carbon dioxide see for example: Henson, Bob: Reflective Research, UCAR (University Corporation for Atmospheric Research)
Quarterly, Summer 2005.
Removing the Extra Carbon from the Atmosphere
Storing Carbon in Oil and Gas Wells (chapter 1): Department of Trade and
Industry (UK): Review of the Feasibility of Carbon Dioxide Capture and
Storage in the UK, 2005. Biomass-based CCS and electric cars: Hamilo,
Marko: Biosähkö vie pisimmälle, Tiede Nro 1, 2010.
The problems related to ocean acidification (chapter 2): Jones, Steve: Coral,
Abacus, 2007; Mitchell, Alanna: Seasick - The Hidden Ecological Crises of
the Global Ocean, Oneworld Publications, 2008; Cesar, Herman: The Economics of Worldwide Coral Reef Degradation, Cesar Environmental Economics Consulting, 2003; Henderson, Caspar: Paradise lost, New Scientist, 5 August, 2006: see also the webpages of World Resources Institute,
National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and of the
Coral Reef Alliance. How acidification prevents the formation of organic
oozes by changing the calcite compensation depth: Corfield, Richard: The
Silent Landscape, John Murray, 2005.
The fate of concrete blocks (chapter 3): Monbiot, George: Heat, Penguin
Books, 2006; Kaila, Panu: Talotohtori, WSOY, Helsinki, 1997.
Geothermal Power with supercritical carbon dioxide (chapter 4): Smith,
Julian: Going Underground, New Scientist, 11 October, 2008; The Future of
Geothermal Energy – Impact of Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) on the
United States in the 21st Century, Massachusetts Institute for Technology,
2007 (available in the internet).
Turning carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide (chapter 5): Graham-Rowe,
Duncan: Let’s Hear it for CO2, New Scientist, 1 March, 2008.
The well-preserved palisade of Pataliputra (chapter 6): Sagreiya, K.P.: Forests
and Forestry, National Book Trust, India, Delhi 1967.
Straw preserved in rammed walls: Man, John: The Great Wall - The Extraordinary History of China’s Wonder of the World, Bantam Books, 2008
The girth of 70,000 trees in Africa (chapter 8): Trees across the Tropics are
Getting Bigger and Offering Unexpected Help in the Fight Against Climate Change, The Guardian, February 18, 2009; The Amazonas may be
absorbing 600 million tons of carbon: Fox, Douglas: Saved by the trees,
New Scientist, 27 October, 2007. North American forests absorbing 0.81.2 billion tons of carbon per year: Goulden, Michael L. et al: Exchange of
Carbon Dioxide by a Deciduous Forest: Response to Interannual Climate
Variability, Science, 271, pp. 1576-1578, 15 March, 1996 or Song MiaoFan et al: Terrestrial carbon sink in the Northern Hemisphere estimated
from the atmospheric CO2 difference between Mauna Loa and the South
266
Pole since 1959, Tellus, 51B, 863-870, 1999. Trees and global warming in
general: Isomäki, Risto: Puukirja, Maan ystävät ja Ympäristö ja kehitys,
1997; Isomäki, Risto and Gandhi, Maneka: The Book of Trees, The Other
India Press, 2004. About bioaerosols look: Jaenicke, Ruprecht (2005): Science, Vol 308, p 73; about the trees’ capacity to remove pollutants from the
air see for example Air Pollution Control – The Tree Factor in Urban Forest Research, January 2005 (available online). Terpenes and ozone: Beware
of ozone on shady sidewalks, New Scientist, 20 June, 2009. A review of
new studies concerning the age of the African and South American rainforests: Pearce, Fred: Deep Jungle, Journey to the heart of the rainforest,
Eden Project Books, 2006. You must also see Rocheleau, Dianne E. and
Raintree, John B.: Agroforestry and the Future of Food Production in Developing Countries, ICRAF reprint series 35, ICRAF, Nairobi, 1987.
The present carbon store in red wood ant mounds (chapter 11): Risch, Anita
C. et all: The Contribution of Red Wood Ants to Soil C and N Pools and
CO2 Emissions in Subalpine Forests, Ecology, Vol 86(2), 2005, pp 419-430.
About algal biodiesel (chapter 12): Sheehan, J. et al: A Look Back at the U.S.
Department of Energy’s Aquatic Species Programme: Biodiesel from
Algae, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, July, 1998; Bassam, N. El:
Energy Plant Species, James & James Science Publishers, London, 1998;
Briggs, Michael: Widescale Biodiesel production from Algae, www.americanenergyindependence.com/biodiesel; Strahan, David: A tank of the
green stuff, New Scientist, 16 August, 2008. The story about the dead celt
salt miner: Kurlansky, Mark: Salt, a World History, Vintage Books, 2002.
Peatlands containing 500 to 1,000 billion tons of carbon (chapter 13): Pearce,
Fred: Forests Destined to End in the Mire, New Scientist, 7 May, 1994. The
oxidation and burning of Indonesian peatlands, see for example Page,
Susan et al: Restoration Ecology of Lowland Tropical Peatlands in Southeast Asia: Current Knowledge and Future Research Directions, Ecosystems, 12, 888-905, 2008. The carbon store in and the carbon emissions
from Finnish peatlands: Laine, Jukka et al: Turpeen ja turvemaiden kasvihuonevaikutukset Suomessa, Maa- ja metsätalousministeriö, Helsinki,
11/2007.
Drained peatlands producing 17 tons of carbon per hectare (chapter 14):
Lovett, Richard: Carbon lockdown, New Scientist, 3 May, 2008. No-till or
minimum-tillage farming methods absorbing 500-700 kg of carbon per
ha/year, and British soils losing 0.6 per cent of their carbon, annually:
Goodall, Chris: Ten Technologies to Fix the Climate, Green Profile, 2008.
Information on Broadbalk and Geescroft is based on a letter published
in New Scientist 16 November, 2002 by David Powlson, Pete Falloon and
Kevin Coleman of the Agriculture and Environment Division, Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (of Britain). The carbon
store in Russian forest soils: Alexeyev, V.A. and Birdsey, R.A. (eds): Carbon Storage in Forests and Peatlands of Russia, Radnor, PA, US Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Northeastern Forest Experiment Sta-
267
tion, 1998. See also Harmon, Mark et al: Effects on Carbon Storage on
Conversion of Old-Growth Forests to Young Forests, Science, 247, 699702, 9 February, 1990, a real classic on the same subject.
About the terra preta (chapter 15): Glaser, Bruno: Amazonian Dark Earths:
Exploration in Space and Time, WI Woods, 2004; Lehmann, J. et al (eds):
Amazonian Dark Earths: Origin, Properties, Management, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003; Mann, Charles C.: 1491, The Americas Before
Columbus, Granta Books, 2005. About biochar, methane and nitrous
oxide, look at: Amonette, Jim: An Introduction to Biochar: Concept Processes, Properties and Applications, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory,
Harvesting Clean Energy 9, Special Workshop, Billings, MT, 25 January,
2009.
About the Chinampas bacterium and Mexican toilets based on it (chapter 16):
Mena Abraham, Josefina: Sirdo – Planning for Recycling, Grupo de Tecnologia Alternativa, Mexico City; about the Chinampas system: Aguilar, Jasmine (ed): Las Chinampas, Una Tecnica Agricola Muy Productiva, Arbor
Editorial, Mexico DF, 1982. About the looming phosphorus deficit: Vaccari, David A.: Phosphorus: A Looming Crises, Scientific American, June
2009. About the state of USA’s sewerage system and the power consumption of wastewater treatment facilities: George, Rose: The Big Necessaity,
Adventures in the World of Human Waste, Portobellobooks, 2008.
About mangrove forests and carbon sequestration (chapters 17 and 18): Isomäki and Gandhi, ibid; Warne, Kennedy: Forests of the Tide, National
Geographic, February 2007; About the cultivation of the nipa palm as an
ethanol crop: Päivöke, Aira: Nipapalmu, itäisen tropiikin uusiutuva luonnonvara, in, Erkkilä, Antti and Kuuluvainen, Timo (eds): Tropiikin metsät, Silva Carelica 12, The University of Joensuu, 1988. About the soluble
carbon compounds produced by the mangrove forests, look for instance:
Nagamitsu, Maie et al: Mangrove Tannins in Aquatic Ecosystems: Their
Fate and Possible Influence on Dissolved Organic Carbon and Nitrogen
Cycling, Limnological Oceanography, 53: 160-171, 2008 or Kristensen,
Erik et al: Organic Carbon Dynamics in Mangrove Ecosystems: A Review,
Aquatic Botany, 89: 210-219, August 2008.
About coral reefs: see the references for chapter 2.
Adding limestone into the ocean (chapter 20): Brahic, Catharine: Earth’s Plan
B, New Scientist, 28 February, 2009.
Fertilizing the oceans (chapter 21): Martin, John H. and Fitzwater, Steve
E. (1990): Iron Deficiency Limits Phytoplankton Growth in Antarctic Waters, Global Biogeochemical Cycles vol 4, pp 5-12; Kunzig, Robert
(2000): Mapping the Deep, Sort of Books, London: Young, Emma: A Drop
in the Ocean, New Scientist, 15 September, 2007.
Greening the deserts with seawater sprinklers (chapter 22): Elsbett, Ludwig,
Elsbett, Gunther and Elsbett, Klaus: Änderung des klimatischen Geschehens
mit technishen Mitteln, Deutsches Patentamt, DE 41 08 615 A 1, Anmeldetag: 17.3.1991, Offenlegungstag: 19.9.1991; Salter, Stephen: Spray Turbines
268
to Increase Rain by Enhanced Evaporation from the Sea, a paper presented
for the tenth Congress of International Maritime Association of the Mediterranean, Crete, May, 2002.
Paul Crutzen’s new calculations concerning nitrous oxide (chapter 25) see
for instance: Crutzen, P.J., Mosier, A.R., Smith, K.A. and Winiwarter, W.:
N2O release from agro-biofuel production negates global warming reduction
by replacing fossil fuels, Atmos. Chem. Discuss. 7: 11191-11205, 2007; see
also Del Grosso et al: Estimating agricultural nitrous oxide emissions, Eos
89 (51): 529-530, 2008. About diseases we have acquired by eating meat
and keeping domestic animals: Wolfe, Nathan: Preventing the Next Pandemic, Scientific American, April, 2009; Wolfe, Nathan et al: Origins of
Major Human Infectious Diseases, Nature, 447, 279-283, 17 May, 2007.
About toxoplasmosis, traffic deaths and mental disorders: Wikipedia has
an excellent article on Toxoplasmosis, with a very good list of references
to the most important scientific studies about the subject. About Diabetes 2 and persistent organic pollutants: Lee, Duk-Hee et al: A Strong Doseresponse relation Between Serum Concentrations of Persistent Organic Pollutants and Diabetes, Diabetes Care, 29: 1638-1644, 2006; Brown, Phyllida:
Trouble in Store, New Scientist, 13 September, 2008. About domestic animals and greenhouse gas emissions: Trivedi, Bijal: Dinner’s dirty secret,
New Scientist, 13 September, 2008; Rifkin, Jeremy: Beyond Beef, The Rise
and Fall of the Cattle Culture, New York, Dutton, 1992; Steinfeld, H. et al:
Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options, UNFAO, 2006;
Fiala, Nathan: The Greenhouse Hamburger, Scientific American, February
2009. The power consumption of British supermarkets: Monbiot, George:
Heat, Penguin Books, 2006.
Jaakko Pöyry’s predictions about the world’s future paper consumption (chapter 26): Lang, Chris: Tehtaan varjossa, Into Kustannus, Helsinki, 2008. The
carbon footprint of the internet: Graham-Rowe, Duncan: Is the net hurting the environment?, New Scientist, 2 May, 2009; Vise, David A.: The
Google Story, Pan Books, 2005.
Halting the Albedo Changes
The depletion of stratospheric ozone and its potential consequences: One of
the best, if not the best and clearest account on the subject I have ever
read was produced by Robert Parson of the University of Colorado, and
it should still be available online: Ozone Depletion FAQ Part 1: Introduction to the Ozone Layer, http://www.faqs.org/faqs/ozone-depletion/intro.
About ozone depletion due to increased CO2 concentrations, see for
example Austin, John et al: Possibility of an Arctic ozone hole in a doubled-CO2 climate, Nature, Vol 360,221-225, November 1992. About the
cooling of the mesosphere and stratosphere due to greenhouse gases and
tropospheric warming, see for instance New Scientist cover story on 1
May, 1999.
269
About increasing carbon dioxide contents reducing the nutritive value of food
plants: Lawton, Graham: Plague of plenty, New Scientist, 30 November,
2002; Nowak, Rachel: Global Warming Makes for Less Nutritious Crops,
New Scientist, 5 January, 2008.
About the aerosol umbrella (chapter 27): See Andreae, Meinrat O., Jones,
Chris D. and Cox, Peter M.: Strong present-day aerosol cooling implies a
hot future, Nature, 435, pp 1187-1190, 30 June, 2005 and Pearce, Fred: The
Last Generation, ibid, look also at Hansen, James: Storms of my Grandchildren, Bloomsbury, 2009, p. 6. About sulphur as a geoengineering solution: Crutzen, P. (2006): Albedo enhancement by stratospheric sulfur
injections: a contribution to resolve a policy dilemma, Climatic Change,
vol 77, pp 211-219. About sulphur and ships: Lauer, Axel et al: Assessment of Near-Future Policy Instruments for Oceangoing Shipping: Impact
on Atmosphereic Aerosol Burdens and the Earth’s Radiation Budget,
Environmental Science and Technology, 43, 5592-5598, 2009; DK Group
Marine Industry Innovators: One ship pollutes as much as 50 million cars,
6 February, 2008, Fuglestvedt, Jan et al: Climate forcing from the transport sectors - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, approved
October 5, 2007, www.pnas.org, Eyring, Veronika et al: Brief Summary of
the impact of ship emissions on atmospheric composition, climate and
human health, Document submitted to the Health and Environment subgroup of the International Maritime Organization on 6 November, 2007.
About the impact of soot (chapter 29): Hansen, James and Nazarenko, Larissa: Soot Climate Forcing via Snow and Ice Albedos, Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, published
online December 29, 2003; Flanner, Mark. G. et al: Present-day Climate
Forcing and Response from Black Carbon in Snow, Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol 112, D11202, 5 June 2007; Koch, Dorothy and Hansen,
James: Distant Origins of Arctic Black Carbon: A Goddard Institute for
Space Studies ModelE Experiment, Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol
110, DO4204, 25 February, 2005; Xu, Baiqing et al: Black Soot and the
Survival of Tibetan Glaciers, www.pnas.org, October 15, 2009. The nature
of diesel nanoparticles may require rethinking of particulate matter standards, Diesel Progress North American edition, June, 1998; Gose, Chandrachur: Nanoparticles, as tiny as a billionth of a metre, pose a challenge to
scientists and regulatory authorities alike, Down to Earth, 15th September,
2003.
About the Twomey effect and the possibilities of making the clouds whiter
(chapter 30): Salter, Stephen; Sortino, Graham and Latham, John (2008):
Sea-going Hardware for the Cloud Albedo Method of Reversing Global
Warming, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, vol 366, pp
3989-4006, published online 29 August 2008; Latham, John (1990): Control of global warming?, Nature, vol 347 pp 339-340; Salter, Stephen H.
and Latham, John (2006): The Reversal of global Warming by the Increase
of the Albedo of Marine Stratocumulus Cloud; Twomey, Sean (1977): The
270
influence of pollution on the shortwave albedo of clouds, Journal of Atmospheric Sciences, vol 34, pp 1149-1152.
About the proposal of Edward Teller and his friends (chapter 32): Jones, Nicola: Sunblock, New Scientist 23 September, 2000.
About geoengineering with moon dust (chapter 33): Curtis Struck’s original
paper was published in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, vol
60, pp 1, 2007. About the nature of moon dust, see for example Schmitt,
Harrison H.: Return to the Moon, Praxis Publishing, New York, 2006.
A giant reflector in space (chapter 35): See Jones, Nicola, ibid.
About large numbers of reflectors in outer space (chapters 36 and 37): Angel,
R.(2006): Feasibility of cooling the earth with a cloud of small spacecraft
near the inner Lagrange point, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 103, pp 17184-17189.
About the solar chimney concept (chapter 44): Schlaich, Jörg: The Solar Chimney, Edition Axel Menges, Stuttgart, 1995.
About de Soto’s ideas (chapter 45): de Soto, Hernando: The Mystery of Capital, Bantam Press, 2000; About the impact the reflecting greenhouses have
had on Almeria’s climate: Hot White Roofs are the Height of Cool, New
Scientist, 11 October, 2008.
About SETI, CETI and reflecting solar radiation to space with large radio telescopes (chapter 47): Isomäki, Risto: Intelligent Life on Earth? The Impact
of the New Solar Economy on Communication Networks and Technologies,
Including the Search for (and possibly Communication with) Extraterrestrial
Intelligence, The University of Tampere, Department of Journalism and
Mass Communication, 2008 (available online).
For a good introduction about wind-generated waves and swell (chapter 48) I
would recommend Smith, Craig B.: Extreme Waves, Joseph Henry Press,
Washington DC, 2006. For the history of applied meteorology, see: Battan,
Louis J.: Cloud Physics and Cloud Seeding, Doubleday & Company, New
York, 1962. For Arctic weather systems and how snowfall is made, look:
Karttunen, Hannu et al: Ilmakehä, sää ja ilmasto, Ursa, Helsinki, 2008;
Serreze, Mark C. and Barry, Roger G.: The Arctic Climate System, Cambridge University Press, 2005. See also the references for chapter 22.
The climatic impact of Artic wintertime clouds: see for instance Serreze and
Barry, ibid, 2006. For the climatic impact of Antarctic clouds, look for
instance Svensmark, Henrik and Calder, Nigel: The Chilling Stars, Icon
Books, 2008.
The climatic impact of condensation trails (chapter 52): Travis, D.J. et al:
Contrails Reduce Daily Temperature Range, Nature, 8 August, 2002;
Mannstein, H. and Schumann, U.: Observations of Contrails and Cirrus
over Europe, Proceedings of the AAC Conference, 30 June-3 July 2003,
Friedrichshafen; Report of the Workshop on the Impacts of Aviation on Climate Change, June 7-9, 2006, Boston, MA; Stuber, Nicola et al: The Importance of the Diurnal and Annual Cycle of Air Traffic for Contrail Radiative Forcing, Nature, 441, 864-867, 15 June, 2006; Minnis, Patrick et al:
271
Contrails, Cirrus Trends and Climate, Journal of Climate, Vol 17, 16711685, 15 April, 2004; Williams, Victoria and Noland, Robert B.: Air Transport Cruise Altitude restrictions to Minimize Contrail Formation, available
online, revised version, 3 February, 2003; Schmidt, Gavin; Unger, Nadine
and Schindell, Drew, Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Center for Climate Systems Research, Columbia University: Modelling the
Impact of Aviation on Climate Change, Greener Skies Conference, Hong
Kong, October 2009. The Bergeron process: Karttunen at al, ibid (chapter 48).
Dropping the clouds with bacteria (chapter 59): Hooper, Roman: Bugs Make
Rain to get Back Home, New Scientist, 8 March, 2008.
I became interested in the idea of making ice-and-something-composites
(chapter 61) when I was in Greenland in May and June, 2008. When I
started to investigate the matter, the first source of relevant information I
discovered was the story of pykecrete and Habakkuk in von Tunzelmann,
Alex: Indian Summer, Simon and Schuster, 2007. Besides the amazing
story of pykecrete, von Tunzelmann’s book does not say anything about
ice, but it is otherwise a delightful read.
The idea of the Arctic Pleistocene Parks: Simpson, Sarah: The Peril Below the
Ice, Scientific American Earth 3.0, 19, 2, 30-37, 2009.
Reducing the greenhouse gas emissions
Food and global warming: see references for chapter 25. For an excellent
overview about food waste, look Stuart, Tristram: Waste, Uncovering the
Global Food Scandal, Penquin, 2009.
Damping the waves in traffic: Vanderbilt, Tom: Traffic, 2008, pp 124-128.
The aquatic ape theory: Morgan, Elaine: The Scars of Evolution, Souvenir Press,
London, 1990: Morgan, Elaine: The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, Souvenir
Press, London, 1997.
The heating impact of condensation trails: see references for chapter 52.
The global warming impact of aeroplanes flying at 17-20 kilometres: Monbiot,
George: Heat, How can we stop the planet burning, Penquin Books, 2007.
The global warming impact of hydrogen using jet planes: Royal Commission
on Environmental Pollution: The Environmental Effects of Civil Aircraft
in Flight: Special Report, 29 November, 2002.
Thin-film Photovoltaics: The information in the books will be out-dated.
Search online with words like thin-film solar cells, thin-film photovoltaics, CdTe thin-film solar cells/photovoltaic cells, Moser Baer India, Nanosolar etc.
Concentrating Solar: The information in the books is mostly seriously outdated. Search online with concepts like concentrating solar, cs, Stirling
engines, solar Stirling, solar troughs, solar tower, solar windmill, solar
chimney.
272
Solar troughs becoming economically competitive after 5,000 megawatts had
been installed: Philibert, Cedric: International Energy Technology Collaboration and Climate Change Mitigation, Case Study 1: Concentrating
Solar Power Technologies, OECD Environment Directorate, International
Energy Agency, Paris, 2004.
Concentrating Photovoltaics: I have not found much relevant information outside the internet. Use different combinations of the following names and
terms: concentrator photovoltaics, concentrating photovoltaics, cpv, lowconcentration photovoltaics, Emcore, Boeing Spectrolab, IBM, PhotoVolt, Amonix, Concentrix, Solar Systems, Solaria, SolFocus, Sharp, MST
Renewable Energy Company, Green and Gold Energy, Moser Baer India,
Ben Gurion University of the Negev, and so on. For an overview I would
specially recommend three articles available online: Jones, Jackie: Time
to Concentrate, Earthscan REW Solar PV, 18 October, 2006; Faiman,
D., Raviv, D. and Rosenstreich, R.: The Triple Sustainability of the CPV
within the Framework of the Raviv Model, in, Proceedings of the 20th European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference, Barcelona, Spain, June 6-10,
2005; Conley, Gary D.: Solfocus, Towards $1/watt, NREL Growth Forum,
November 8, 2005.
Modern thermoelectric cells: This is cutting-edge technology so the information in books cannot be up-to-date. Look at what is available online with
words like thermoelectric cells, Varmaraf, PowerChips etc.
Geothermal power based on supercritical steam: See the web-pages of the Iceland Deep Drilling Project, www.iddp.is.
Wind Power in the Kola Peninsula: See or example Minin, Valeriy and Dimitriev, Grigoriy. Prospects for Development of Non-Conventional and Renewable Sources of Energy on the Kola Peninsula, Bellona, Murmansk, 2007:
Hall, Giles: New Winds of Change Blow Through Russia, New Energy
Finance, 13 May, 2008.
For another opinion on the increasing (and final) size of windmills, look at:
Edwards, Rob: Anywhere the Wind Blows, New Scientist, 11 October,
2008.
Kite Power: Brooks, Michael: High Flyers, New Scientist, 17 May, 2008; Jha,
Alok: Giant Kites to Tap Power of the High Wind, The Observer, 3 August,
2008.
Biofuels: A complete list of the literature on biofuels would now run to several millions of articles. My own Biofuel Bibles are: Bassam, N.: Energy
Plant Species, James & James Science Publishers, London, 1998 and Duke,
James, A.: Handbook of Agricultural Energy Potential of Developing Countries, CRC Press, Boca Raton, Florida, 1987. About peatland plantations
increasing carbon emissions 25-36 times, see for instance: Pearce, Fred:
Bog Barons - Indonesia’s Carbon Catastrophe, New Scientist, 1 December
2007. For the future of oil palm, look for instance: Basiron, Yusof: Palm
Oil Production through Sustainable Plantation, European Journal of Lipid
Science and Technology, 109, pp 289-295, 2007. About the nitrous oxide
273
problem see the references of chapters 15 and 25. About cacao in Cameroon, see Pearce, Fred: Deep Jungle, Eden Project Books, 2005. About
the wild Amazonian oil trees, see Shanley, Patricia and Medina, Gabriel:
Frutiferas e Pantas Uteis na Vida Amazonica, CIFOR, Amazon, 2005.
HVDC Transmission Lines: Sorensen, Bent: Renewable Energy Conversion,
Transmission and Storage, Academic Press, 2007; ABB (ABB web pages):
Overhead Transmission Lines for HVDC; 25.2.2007; Ruddervall, Roberto,
et al: High Voltage Direct Current Transmission Systems, A World Bank
Technology Review paper (available online, un-dated).
Firestorms caused by nuclear weapons and the US military ignoring them:
Eden, Lynn: Whole World on Fire, Organizations, Knowledge & Nuclear
Weapons Devastation, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 2004.
A Hiroshima-sized nuclear weapon detonating in Manhattan causing superhurricane winds blowing 600 kilometres per hour: Goldman, Bruce:
Nuclear Nightmare in Manhattan, New Scientist, 18 March, 2006.
Soot produced by a small nuclear war causing a global famine: Robock, Alan
and Toon, Owen B.: Local Nuclear War, Global Suffering, Scientific American, January, 2010.
Gorbachev-Reagan scenario: Rhodes, Richard: Arsenals of Folly, the Making
of the Nuclear Arms Race, Simon & Schuster, 2007; Reagan, Ronald: An
American Life, Simon & Schuster, 1990.
The Health Effects of Chernobyl: I will not list all the Russian, Belorussian
and Ukrainian studies, here, but you will find the English summaries of
730 of them from the book: Busby, C.C. and Yablokov, A.V.: Chernobyl 20
Years on: Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident, European Committee
on Radiation Risk, Bruxelles, 2006, also available as a free e-book. Extra
infant mortality in the United Kingdom in 1986-88: Herbert, Ian and Linton, Deborah: Chernobyl Disaster linked to higher rate of infant mortality,
http://news.independent.co.uk, 23rd March, 2006. India and Chernobyl:
Ghoshal, Sumit: One Million Infant Deaths in India from Chernobyl,
www.mothersalert.org, 26 April, 2000. The 6.2 per cent rise in infant
mortality in Poland after Chernobyl, Wise, July 6, 1990, available online.
A German study denying the causal link between infant mortality and
Chernobyl: Grosche, B., Irl, C., Schowtzau, A. and van Santen, E.: Perinatal Mortality in Bavaria, Germany, After the Chernobyl Nuclear Accident,
Radiation and Environmental Biophysics, 36, 1432-2099, July, 1997.
Terrorists vaporizing ten kilograms of used nuclear fuel to highly radioactive aerosol: Nichelson, Scott M., Stafford, Matthew C. and Medlin, Darren D.: Radiological Weapons of Terror, Maxwell AFB, Air University, Air
Command and Staff College, 1999. The risk of a zirconium fire in a cooling pond: Edwards, Rob: The Nightmare Scenario, New Scientist, 13 October, 2001; Zirconium. Covering the Fuel Rods, The New York Times webpages; http://query.nytimes.com; Safety and Security of Commercial Spent
Nuclear Fuel Storage: Public report, Board on Radioactive Waste Management, USA, 2006; Wald, Matthew L.: Study Finds Vulnerabilities in Pools
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of Spent Nuclear Fuel, The New York Times, April 7, 2005; Sensintaffar,
Edwin L. and Philips, Charles R.: Environmental Impact resulting from
a Fire at a Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage Facility, International Journal of
Nuclear Governance, Economy and Ecology, Vol 1, No 3, 2007.
The German KiKK study: Kaatsch, P. et al: Epidemiologische Studie zu Kinderkrebs in der Umgebung von Kernkraftwerken (KiKK Studie), Abschlussbericht, Technische Bericht, Institut von Medizinischen Biometrie, Epidemiologie und Informatik (IMBEI), Universität Mainz, 2007; Kaatsch, P. et al:
Leukaemia in Young Children Living in the Vicinity of German Nuclear
Power Plants, International Journal of Cancer, 122, 721-726, 2008; Spix, C.
et al: Case-Control Study on Childhood Cancer in the Vicinity of Nuclear
Power Plants in Germany, 1980-2003; European Journal of Cancer, 44: 275284, 2007.
The construction of nuclear weapons from uranium 235 or uranium 233
enriched to 20 per cent: See for example Forsberg, C.V., Hopper C.M.,
Richter, J.L. and Vantine, H.C.: Defition of Weapons-Usable Uranium 233,
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory and
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, March 1998; Glaser, Alexander
and Hippel, Frank von: Thwarting Nuclear Terrorism, Scientific American, February 2006, 38-45; Allison, Graham: Nuclear Terrorism, The Risks
and Consequencies of the Ultimate Disaster, Constable, 2005.
The fuel of the breeder reactors containing from 15 to 30 per cent uranium 235, plutonium 239 or uranium 233: See for example the muchpraised and awarded Hyperphysics webpages of the Department of
Physics and Astronomy of the Columbia State University, hyperphysics + fast breeder reactors. About the Rapid or Rapid L breeders containing up to 60 per cent of fissile material, see: Kambe, M., Tsunoda, H., Nakajima, K. and Iwamura, T.: Rapid Operator-free Fast
Reactors Combined with a Thermoelectric Power Conversion System,
Journal of Power and Energy, Vol 218, No 5, 2004, 335-343.About the
problem of increased heat production in a fast breeder reactor in the
case of a loss of coolant accident (LOCA): Kumar, Ashwin and Ramana,
M.V.: The Safety Inadequacies of India’s Fast Breeder Reactor, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. 21, July 2009. If you want to read more, feed
words like Rapid, Rapid L, pebble-bed modular reactors, fast breeder
reactors, sodium-cooled breeder reactors, lithium-cooled breeder reactors, plutonium breeding, and so on for a search robot. I would also
especially recommend the archives of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
Deuterium-tritium, deuterium-deuterium and helium 3-helium 3 fusion reactors: Schmitt, Harrison H.: Return to the Moon, Praxis Publishing, New
York, 2006. Hydrogen-uranium bombs: Rotblat, Joseph: The HydrogenUranium Bomb, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May 1955, 171-172.
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