Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (14 page)

At the Biesbosch nature center, I met up with a water-ministry official named Eelke Turkstra. Turkstra runs a program called
Ruimte voor de Rivier
(Room for the River), and these days his job consists not in building dikes, but in dismantling them. He explained to me that the Dutch were already seeing more rainfall than they used to. Where once the water ministry had planned on peak flows in the Rhine of no more than fifteen thousand cubic meters per second, recently it had been forced to raise that to sixteen thousand cubic meters per second and was already anticipating having to deal with eighteen thousand cubic meters per second. Rising sea levels, meanwhile, were likely to further compound the problem by impeding the flow of the river to the ocean.

“We think in the run of this century, sea levels can rise by sixty centimeters,” or just under two feet, Turkstra told me. “When that happens—we’re sure that it
will
happen—that makes things very complicated.”

From the nature center, we took a car ferry across the Nieuwe Merwede. The area we were driving through was made up entirely of “polders”—land that has been laboriously reclaimed from the water. The polders were shaped like ice trays, with sloping sides and perfectly flat fields along the bottom. Every once in a while, there was a sturdy-looking farmhouse. The whole scene—the level fields, the thatched barns, even the gray clouds sitting on the horizon—could have been borrowed from a painting by Hobbema. All this land, Turkstra said, was destined for inundation. The plan of Room for the River was to buy out the farmers who were living in the polders, and then lower the surrounding dikes. By selectively abandoning rural areas like this one, the water ministry hoped to be able to protect population centers like the nearby city of Gorinchem. The price tag for the project we were looking at had been set at $390 million. Similar projects were under way in other parts of the Netherlands, and still others were in the design phase. Some of the designs had provoked angry, ongoing protests. Surrendering land that people have been living on for decades, in some cases centuries, was, Turkstra acknowledged, bound to cause political problems, but that was precisely the reason that it was important to get started immediately.

“Some people don’t get it,” he told me as we zipped along. “They think this project is stupid. But I think it’s stupid to continue the old way.”

When climatologists discuss the hazards of rising greenhouse gas levels, they use the phrase “dangerous anthropogenic interference” or, for short, DAI. The term does not refer to any disaster in particular, although there are, it is generally agreed, a number of scenarios that would fit the bill—climate change dramatic enough to destroy entire ecosystems, for instance, or cause mass extinction or disrupt the world’s food supply. The disintegration of one of the planet’s remaining ice sheets is often held up as the exemplary catastrophe. The West Antarctic ice sheet is, at this point, the world’s only marine ice sheet, meaning that it rests on land that is below sea level. For this reason it is considered particularly vulnerable to collapse. Were the West Antarctic or the Greenland ice sheet to be destroyed, sea levels around the world would rise by at least fifteen feet. Were both ice sheets to disintegrate, global sea levels would rise by thirty-five feet. It could take centuries for either of the ice sheets to disappear entirely, but once disintegration got under way it would start to feed on itself, most likely becoming irreversible. Other catastrophes have similar built-in delays, which follow from the tremendous inertia of the climate system. DAI is therefore understood to refer not to the end of the process—the moment when disaster actually arrives—but to the beginning of it: the point at which its arrival becomes unavoidable.

Exactly what forcing or temperature or level of CO
₂
represents DAI is a question of the utmost significance and one that cannot at this point be answered. Policy studies often take 500 parts per million of CO
₂
—roughly double preindustrial levels—as the threshold. But this figure has at least as much to do with what appears to be a socially feasible goal as with what has been scientifically demonstrated.

In the last decade, a great deal has been discovered about how the climate functions, both through measurements made in real time and through reconstructions of the paleoclimatic record. Just about everything that has been learned—from the observed acceleration of the ice sheets to the inferred history of the thermohaline circulation—has tended to push the level of DAI downward. Many climate scientists now believe that 450 parts per million of CO
₂
represents a more objective estimate of danger, while others argue that the threshold is 400 parts per million or even lower.

Probably the most significant of the recent discoveries was made in Antarctica, at a research base known as the Vostok station. Between 1990 and 1998, an 11,775-foot-long ice core was drilled there. Since less snow falls in Antarctica than in Greenland, the layers in an Antarctic core are thinner and the climate information contained in them is less detailed. However, they go back much farther. The Vostok core, which is now stored in pieces in Denver, Grenoble, and on Antarctica, contains a continuous climate record stretching back four full glacial cycles. (As is the case with Greenland cores, temperatures can be ascertained by measuring the isotopic composition of the ice, and the makeup of the atmosphere determined by analyzing tiny bubbles of trapped air.)

The record from the Vostok core shows that CO2 levels and temperatures have varied in tandem. Current CO2 levels are unprecedented in the last 420,000 years. Credit: J.R. Petit et al,
Nature,
vol. 399 (1999).

What the Vostok record shows is that the planet is already nearly as warm as it has been at any point in the last 420,000 years. A possible consequence of even a four- or five-degree temperature rise—on the low end of projections for the end of this century—is that the world will enter a completely new climate regime, one with which modern humans have no prior experience. When it comes to carbon dioxide, meanwhile, the evidence is even more striking. The Vostok record demonstrates that, at 378 parts per million, current CO
₂
levels are unprecedented in recent geological history. (The previous high, of 299 parts per million, was reached around 325,000 years ago). It is believed that the last time carbon dioxide levels were comparable to today’s was three and a half million years ago, during what is known as the mid-Pliocene warm period, and it is likely that they have not been much higher since the Eocene, some fifty million years ago. In the Eocene, crocodiles roamed Colorado and sea levels were nearly three hundred feet higher than they are today. A scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) put it to me—only half-jokingly—this way: “It’s true that we’ve had higher CO
₂
levels before. But, then, of course, we also had dinosaurs.”

The town of Maasbommel is situated about fifty miles east of Biesbosch. It lies on the banks of the River Meuse and is a popular holiday destination; every summer it fills with tourists who have come to go boating or to camp out. Thanks to the risk of flooding, building is restricted along the river, but a few years ago one of the Netherlands’ largest construction firms, Dura Vermeer, received permission to turn a former RV park on the banks of the Meuse into a development of “amphibious homes.”

The first of the amphibious homes were completed in the fall of 2004, and on a dull winter’s day a few months afterward, I went to take a look at them. On my way, I stopped off at Dura Vermeer’s headquarters to meet with the company’s environmental director, Chris Zevenbergen. In his office, Zevenbergen played for me an animated video on the future of the Netherlands; it showed large chunks of the country gradually being swallowed up by water. It was lunchtime, and after a while his secretary came around carrying a tray of sandwiches and a large pitcher of milk. Zevenbergen explained that Dura Vermeer was also working to construct buoyant roads and floating greenhouses. While each of these projects represents a somewhat different engineering challenge, they have a common goal, which is to allow people to continue to inhabit areas that, periodically at least, will be inundated. “There is a flood market emerging,” Zevenbergen told me.

From the company’s headquarters, it was about an hour’s drive to Maasbommel. By the time I arrived, the sun was starting to sink, and in the afternoon light, the Meuse was glowing silver.

The amphibious homes all look alike. They are tall and narrow, with flat sides and curved metal roofs, so that standing next to one another they resemble a row of toasters. Each one is moored to a metal pole and sits on a set of hollow concrete pontoons. Assuming that all goes according to plan, when the Meuse floods, the homes will bob up and then, when the water recedes, they will gently be deposited back on land. At the point that I visited, a half a dozen families were occupying their amphibious houses. Anna van der Molen, a nurse and mother of four, gave me a tour of hers. She was enthusiastic about life on the river. “Not one day is the same,” she told me. In the future, she said, she expected that people all over the world would live in floating houses, since, as she put it, “the water is coming up, and we have to live with it, not fight it—it’s just not possible.”

Chapter 7

Business as Usual

In climate-science circles, a future in which current emissions trends continue, unchecked, is known as “business as usual,” or BAU. About five years ago, Robert Socolow, a professor of engineering at Princeton, began to think about BAU and what it implied for the fate of mankind. At that point, Socolow had recently become codirector of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative, a project funded by BP and Ford, but he still considered himself an outsider to the field of climate science. Talking to insiders, he was struck by the degree of their alarm. “I’ve been involved in a number of fields where there’s a lay opinion and a scientific opinion,” he told me when I went to visit him at his office shortly after returning from the Netherlands. “And, in most of the cases, it’s the lay community that is more exercised, more anxious. If you take an extreme example, it would be nuclear power, where most of the people who work in nuclear science are relatively relaxed about very low levels of radiation. But, in the climate case, the experts—the people who work with the climate models every day, the people who do ice cores—they are
more
concerned. They’re going out of their way to say, ‘Wake up! This is not a good thing to be doing.’ ”

Socolow, who is sixty-seven, is a trim man with wire-rimmed glasses and gray, vaguely Einsteinian hair. Although by training he is a theoretical physicist—he did his doctoral research on quarks—he has spent most of his career working on problems of a more human scale, like how to prevent nuclear proliferation or construct buildings that don’t leak heat. In the 1970s, Socolow helped design an energy-efficient housing development in Twin Rivers, New Jersey. At another point, he developed a system—never commercially viable—to provide air-conditioning in the summer using ice created in the winter. When Socolow became codirector of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative, he decided that the first thing he needed to do was get a handle on the scale of the carbon problem. He found that the existing literature on the subject offered almost too much information. In addition to BAU, a dozen or so alternative scenarios, known by code names like A1 and B1, had been devised; these all tended to jumble together in his mind, like so many Scrabble tiles. “I’m pretty quantitative, but I could not remember these graphs from one day to the next,” he recalled. He decided to try to streamline the problem, mainly so that he could understand it.

Here in the United States, most of us begin generating CO
₂
as soon as we get out of bed. Seventy percent of our electricity is generated by burning fossil fuels—a little more than 50 percent from burning coal and another 17 percent from natural gas—so that to turn on the lights is, indirectly at least, to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Making a pot of coffee, either on an electric or a gas range, adds more emissions, as does taking a hot shower, watching the morning news on TV, and driving to work. Exactly how much CO
₂
any particular action produces depends on a variety of factors. Though all fossil fuels produce carbon dioxide as an inevitable product of combustion, some fuels, most notably coal, give off more than others for each unit of power generated. A kilowatt-hour of electricity delivered from a coal-fired plant will produce slightly more than half a pound of carbon, while if the power is originating from a plant that runs on natural gas, it will produce roughly half that amount. (When measuring CO
₂
, it is customary to count not the full weight of the gas, but just the weight of the carbon—to convert back, multiply by 3.7.) Every gallon of gasoline that is consumed produces about five pounds of carbon, meaning that in the course of a forty-mile commute, a vehicle like a Ford Explorer or a GM Yukon throws about a dozen pounds of carbon into the air. On average, every single person in America generates twelve thousand pounds of carbon per year. (If you would like to figure out your own annual contribution to greenhouse warming, go to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Web site and plug various facts about your lifestyle—what kind of car you drive, how much of your trash you recycle, and so on—into the “personal emissions calculator” provided there.) The largest single source of carbon emissions in the United States is electricity production, at 39 percent, followed by transportation, at 32 percent. In a country like France, where three quarters of the power is produced by nuclear plants, this ratio is very different, and it’s different again in countries like Bhutan, where many people don’t even have access to electricity and where they burn wood and animal waste to cook and heat their homes.