Climate Restoration? Maybe, maybe not!

 I recently read Climate Restoration: The Only Future That Will Sustain the Human Race, by Peter Fiekowsky (Rivertowns Books, 2022, 259 pages). The author's thinking about climate change and what it would take to reverse it impresses me with its breadth and depth. He cites an armamentarium of technologies that can be deployed to task, but fails to include the one that I consider most critical for assuring success. 

The prevailing public understanding of climate change is that it can be stopped by reducing carbon dioxide (CO₂) and other greenhouse gas emissions to their pre-industrial levels by mid-century. Peter Fiekowsky explodes that popular myth by casting emissions reduction as “Job 1” in a much more ambitious but necessary program to save civilization and bring long-term stability to the biosphere. Stopping at Job 1 does nothing to halt the warming baked in by past emissions, reverse ocean acidification, sequester carbon emitted in the past, or prevent catastrophic methane bursts from thawing permafrost in the Arctic. He outlines programs to accomplish these jobs by scaling up and commercializing existing technologies that mimic what the biosphere has done naturally in the geologic past, but doing it much more quickly. These include

• Synthesizing limestone from CO₂ for building materials.
• Sequestering CO₂ in the seafloor by (1) expanding kelp forests and (2) sprinkling tiny amounts of iron to trigger phytoplankton blooms. Both programs would also enhance marine biodiversity.  
• Enhancing atmospheric methane oxidation to suppress methane spikes.

Finally, Fiekowsky outlines a plan to bring global population down to 2 billion people before the end of the century, because the demand of today’s 8 billion people on Earth’s resources makes climate restoration impossible. I agree that reducing the human population may be necessary, but not nearly as drastically as he envisions.

What I find rather unfortunate is Fiekowsky's deference to Mark Jacobson, who claims that the energy sector can be decarbonized with renewable sources alone. When scientists criticized Jacobson's assumptions¹, he chose to sue them rather than defend his assumptions. That is the action of a propagandist for the fossil fuel industry, not an independent scientist. Renewables are the industry’s favorite zero-carbon sources because they are intermittent. When their output is down, wind and solar farms must burn fossil fuels to provide base load power. While batteries can store renewable energy to smooth their output, their capacity is woefully inadequate to liberate renewables from dependence on base load sources (fossil fuels and/or nuclear).

Jacobson is cited frequently by proponents of renewable energy who believe that nuclear power isn’t needed to decarbonize the energy sector. Most experts in energy and the environment disagree, and regard that belief as dangerous thinking. Climatologist James Hansen, for example, has argued since 2009 for ramping up nuclear power, and has been frustrated by antinuclear activists who have shut down nuclear power plants. In 2017 he said, "We cannot remain silent. If we sit back and say that in a few decades’ time it will become clear that phasing out fossil fuels will not succeed without nuclear power, we will be right, but by then, it will be too late! ... The opposition to nuclear power is truly insane. All these fears – about radiation, about waste, about accidents – have no basis in science. This aversion is quasi-religious and irrational." ²

Fiekowsky’s claim that a global population of no more than about 2 billion people can be sustained indefinitely on 100% renewable energy is probably right. Paul Ehrlich and Lester Brown came to similar conclusions long before him. The limit comes from the diluteness of solar radiation at Earth’s surface, just 100 watts per square meter. Sun and wind are free, but collecting their energy takes a huge mass of materials spread over vast areas. Nuclear energy is so much denser that nuclear plants require only 1/18^th the mass of solar farms and 1/11^th the mass of wind farms, for the same energy output. On a given parcel of real estate, a nuclear plant would generate 37 times as much energy as a solar farm, and 132 times as much as a wind farm. These facts make nuclear the most environmentally benign energy source. If Fiekowsky had included lots of nuclear power in his calculation, he would have estimated a much higher sustainable population limit.

I rate the book Climate Restoration Four Stars. Reading it raised my confidence that we can save civilization and restore the health of the biosphere on which it depends, by deploying technologies at our disposal today. The chapters on drawing down greenhouse gases to pre-industrial levels, preventing catastrophic methane bursts, and stabilizing the population to a long-term sustainable level, provide ideas and insights I had not encountered elsewhere in the climate change literature. I would have rated the book Five Stars if the chapter “Job One: Completing the Energy Transition” had included nuclear power, and the chapter “Population Restoration” had shown how the sustainable population limit increases with the percentage of nuclear in the energy mix.

I hope a future edition of Climate Restoration includes a chapter on the long-term consequences of restoring the climate to its pre-industrial composition. Temperature drops that have led to ice ages were not precipitated by atmospheric changes in CO₂ concentration, as Fiekowsky asserts, but by long-term variations in Earth’s orbit and axial tilt (Milankovitch cycles). For this reason, people before 1980 were more worried about global cooling and the next ice age, than about global warming. If CO₂ levels are reduced to 300 ppm by 2100, the Milankovitch cycles will again dominate temperature trends, leading to an ice age in about 50,000 years.³

But industries profiting handsomely from sequestering carbon over the next half century may want to keep going after they’ve outlived their usefulness and could become self-perpetuating “cash cows” (like today’s fossil fuel industries). If they cannot be stopped and reduce CO₂ concentrations below 250 ppm, they could trigger the next ice age much more quickly. I’d be interested in reading how Fiekowsky deals with this prospect.

References. If a link fails, copy it and paste to web browser.

1…https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Z._Jacobson#Critiques_of_100%_renewable_papers_and_court_controversy

2…https://www.replanet.ngo/post/climate-scientist-james-hansen-the-opposition-to-nuclear-power-is-truly-insane.

3...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles#Present_and_future_conditions.

 

Did Complex Life Begin in a Natural Nuclear Reactor?

Two unique events in world history are believed to have both taken place around 1.7 billion years ago.  Might their coincidence in time explain why life as we know it exists? 

The Emergence of Eukaryotes.  

For more than 2 billion years, the only life forms that existed were the two domains of prokaryotes, the bacteria and the (slightly larger) archaea.  Since their origin almost 4 billion years ago, these simple cells became so successful and adaptable that they haven't evolved greater size or complexity even to this day.  Then all of a sudden, geologically speaking, there appeared about 1.7 billion years ago much larger and more complex single cells known as eukaryotes, the third domain of life (Ref. 1).  Eukaryotes include every complex single-cell species and every multi-cellular species known today, characterized by much more complex biochemistry and cellular structure than those of the prokaryotic domains.  

In Reference 1, author Nick Lane argues that the first eukaryotes evolved from the coalescence of an archaeon ("host") and bacterium inside it ("parasite"), a very rare event which almost always kills the host, but in this case formed a chimeral cell that lived and reproduced.  Over succeeding generations, the parasites became "endosymbionts", losing most of their DNA and retaining only what they needed for energy production.  They became the sub-cellular organelles known as mitochondria.  The host's DNA concurrently expanded to include most of the genes for synthesizing many of the proteins and enzymes that the mitochondria needed to function and reproduce.  This one (and perhaps only) successful prokaryotic chimera to emerge in world history has evolved into all the branches and twigs of the eukaryotic domain: all algae, fungi, plants and animals.

The Only Known Natural Nuclear Reactors.

The other unique event in world history that took place about 1.7 billion years ago was the onset of natural self-sustaining nuclear reactions at 16 sites in Oklo, Gabon (Ref. 2).  It is believed to be a unique event in world history because the decay products of nuclear fission fragments have been found nowhere else in rock strata that predate the atomic era.  These nuclear reactions took place in a uranium layer embedded in sandstone.  When it became inundated with ground water, the layer moderated (slowed down) neutrons enough to sustain a fission chain reaction.  The energy imparted to fission fragments heated the water and boiled it off, shutting down the reaction until the layer cooled enough for water to flow through again and restart it.  This cycle repeated every 3 hours for a few hundred thousand years, until there was too little fissionable uranium left to sustain the chain reaction. 

A nuclear chain reaction, natural or otherwise, is only possible when at least 3% of uranium atoms are the fissionable isotope U-235.  They can no longer occur in nature because the decay rate of U-235 is much faster than the dominant isotope’s (U-238).  In the last 1.7 billion years, the natural abundance of U-235 fell from 3% to only 0.72%, much too low to sustain a chain reaction. 

How might these unique events be causally connected? 

To understand how, consider that adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the energy-storing molecule common to all life, is produced in very thin membranes (6 nanometers thick) which are porous to the flow of protons in one direction but not the other. The "respiratory chain" (oxidizing food, hydrogen sulfide, or even ferrous iron!) drives protons in the porous direction until the voltage drop across the membrane exceeds 150 millivolts.  While this sounds low, such voltage across such a thin membrane creates lightning-bolt-high electric fields (25-30 million volts per meter), strong enough to pull protons back through the membrane in the non-porous direction. This reverse flow of protons powers the production of ATP by ATPsynthase molecules, exquisitely complex protein nanomotors embedded in the membrane.  Every 10 protons rotate a nanomotor one complete turn, producing 3 ATP molecules from 3 adenosine diphosphate molecules (ADP) and 3 phosphate ions(Pi).  The ATPsynthase kicks the new ATPs off the membrane to float around the cell until they encounter proteins that split them back into ADP and Pi, releasing the stored energy to carry out the cell's work.  The ADP and Pi continue floating until they encounter other membranes, whose ATPsynthases grab them to make more ATP.  The main consequence of this mechanism is that the energy available to a cell is proportional to the total area of its energy-producing membranes.

Bacteria and archaea are both limited in their size and complexity by the limited area of their only membrane, the one that encloses most of the cell just inside the cell wall. Given this constraint, these simple cells lack the energy they would need to grow larger or more complex.  Lane believes this constraint was overcome when an archaeon somehow acquired a bacterium and survived.  Archaea are larger than bacteria, but the latter reproduce faster, so an archaeon with bacterial parasites multiplying within is most likely to burst.  But in a sheltered, energy-and-mineral rich environment, such as a porous mineral matrix through which hot water flows, there's a chance that the archaeon and its endobacteria could mutate by sharing DNA, giving the archaeon the ability to expand and accommodate the growing number of bacteria within.  This would enable it to survive and reproduce as a chimera, evolving in size and complexity.  Thus evolved the first eukaryotic cells, 15,000 times the chimera’s original size.  Its thousands of mitochondria, descendents of the original bacterium, contain densely folded membranes that collectively crank out millions of times more ATP than any prokaryote.  

Lane proposed an alkaline hydrothermal vent as the site where this took place.  But such vents are numerous on the ocean floor, and have been around for billions of years, yet no other multicellular domains of life emerged from them.  Why did this only happen once in 4 billion years, giving rise to only one domain of complex life?

Any of the natural nuclear reactors at Oklo might have provided a similar environment, exactly when the earliest eukaryotes emerged.  Uranium in the absence of oxygen is insoluble, and before that time there was not enough oxygen for uranium to dissolve in water and percolate through sandstone to form the uranium ore layer.  Shortly after that time the U-235 in the ore became too depleted to sustain fission.  So if complex life had been kick-started by nuclear power, it would only have happened in a very narrow window of time (0.0004 billion years wide), 1.7 billion years ago.  Translated into an a priori probability per unit time, that’s one domain of complex life per 400,000 years.  Comparing to the a priori probability per unit time of it happening in alkaline hydrothermal vents (once per 4 billion years), it’s 10,000 times as many domains of complex life per unit time! 

While these a priori probabilities are scientifically meaningless because they’re based on an event that happened only once anywhere, they suggest that the Oklo sites are well worth investigating as a possible birthplace of complex life as we know it.  Is there an Evolutionary Biochemist in the House who agrees?  

References

1.  Nick Lane, The Vital Question (Norton & Co. 2015).

2.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor

Why is Science so Easy for People to Ignore?

Lately the challenge of distinguishing facts from falsehoods has been a lively topic of discussion online. Freethinkers frequently express their belief in science rather than religion or politics, for reasons such as the one I read most recently:

"... With science, you know what you know, there are facts you can stand on and reason from in certain surety. But politics is mostly about follow-the-money with some well-meaning exceptions, religion is a smile on a dog, a lie in the fog, humanity is about primates too smart for their own good."

But with science, most non-scientists only think they know what they know. If you think like a scientist, you know that scientific knowledge is tentative and can be subject to revision in the future, following new discoveries. That's both its strength and its weakness. Science is the most reliable path to truth about the world, but the easiest to dismiss by ideologues because none of its truths are absolute. People desiring absolute truth often find it in religious, political, and economic ideologies which, driven by charismatic leaders, propel many of the dangerous trends we see today - pollution, global warming, unregulated free markets, discrimination against "undesirable" populations, wars, and reliance on "dogs and fogs" to save the world.

Maybe the human race wasn't ready for science when it arose in the middle of the second millennium. Given their natural desires to survive, to reproduce, and to seek absolute truth, humans have been enabled by science to overpopulate the planet and amplify their impact on the biosphere to apocalyptic levels.

What next? I think Generation Z will double down on science to get us out of this mess. If Mother Nature takes its course with no further advances from science, She will wipe out civilization and possibly exterminate the human race. That's what the Gaia Hypothesis would predict. Let's see what happens.

Open letter to my mayor to join Mayors for Peace

Dear Mayor Tran:

I would be very proud to see Milpitas become a "Mayors for Peace" City, joining with 211 other US cities and over 7,000 cities worldwide, to advocate for the abolition of all nuclear weapons.  For more information on Mayors for Peace, see 

http://www.mayorsforpeace.org/english/

For a city to join, the mayor would fill out this form: 

http://www.mayorsforpeace.org/data/pdf/02_request_otherlanguages/02_request_in_english.pdf

I am motivated to request this now, because of recent bellicose exchanges between President Trump and North Korean President Kim Jong Un.  But over the years it has become obvious that none of the signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) who already have nuclear weapons has any intention of abiding by Article VI of that treaty, which reads*

"Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control."

The lack of progress toward disarmament since 1970, when the NPT entered into force, has rightfully angered many of the nuclear 'have-nots', convincing them that the treaty was a conspiracy by the nuclear 'haves' to keep the nuclear 'have nots' in their place.  I believe this perception contributed to N. Korea's decision to withdraw from the treaty in 2003, out of fear for its national security.

Since nuclear disarmament hasn't been pushed from the top down, the only way it will get going is by pushing from the bottom up.  That's why mayors worldwide are pushing, and why I am asking you to push with them.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Michael Pelizzari
Milpitas, CA, USA

"Nuclear disarmament begins at home"

* Page 4 in 

https://web.archive.org/web/20070807060917/http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Documents/Infcircs/Others/infcirc140.pdf

Book Review

The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future, by Gretchen Bakke, Bloomsbury, 2016.

Few people give the electrical grid a passing thought until it fails to deliver the juice, through blackouts and brownouts.  The Grid explains how this huge and complex machine evolved from a myriad of local microgrids at the start of the 20th Century, how most of them were merged into one of three centralized grids (Western, Eastern, and Texas) by mid-century, and how 60 years of upheavals in the energy industry, deferred maintenance, and proliferation of small, intermittent producers feeding the grid (wind and solar) have frayed its stability.  Author Gretchen Bakke's historical narrative explains how the American economy has become so dependent on the grid, how and why the grid is deteriorating, and how this alarming trend can be reversed.  Everyone who complains about the overhead charges on their electric bill needs to read this book.

Bakke researched this book extensively and organized the subject matter well. But what a range of intelligence from genius to stupidity she exhibits in the text!
The zenith of intelligence
She raises many profound but rarely recognized truths to the reader's attention. An example from page 259, regarding maintaining the grid during its transition from just barely stable to robust: "...anything we add to the grid must have the capacity to interface effectively with everything that was there before, while everything we subtract from it must not disrupt the flow of power that we are so reliant upon."
The nadir of stupidity
On pages 262-263 she writes glowingly about renewables because the only expenses, "once they have been built and put into operation," are the fuels, which cost nothing: sunshine and wind are free! Even large corporations like renewables because "It's simply easier to make a profit if one can reduce to nothing the cost of a necessary ingredient."  She says nothing about the costs of getting renewables "built and put into operation", and nothing about the replacement costs 20 to 30 years down the line when solar panels and wind turbines would have to be replaced. These are the necessary ingredients she glosses over, the very ingredients that always have and always shall impede widespread adoption of renewables.
Stupider than stupid
The Notes section in the back is designed with ebooks in mind, having entries referenced by text phrase rather than page number. What's a reader of a printed copy to do, scan the whole chapter to find the text corresponding to that note?  Notes have citations like "Lacey (2014)", but there's no bibliography anywhere to look them up. Again, what's a reader of a printed copy to do, scan the entire book for the first occurrence of author "Lacey"?  This is obviously an ebook whose text was printed as is, with no thought given to the difference in text-scanning speeds between people and machines.

On the whole the intelligence in the Author's content outweighs the stupidity, so I'll give her 4 stars. Had she recognized any role for nuclear power in the grid of the future, I'd have given her 5 stars.  But I give the publisher of the printed edition only 2 stars for failing to insist that the author reference notes by page numbers, and include a bibliography.  The average of 4 for Bakke and 2 for Bloomsbury earns The Grid 3 stars.

The American Inquisition

Inquisitor:  What's in your wallet?
Me:  Why do you ask, are you an art enthusiast?
Inquisitor:  Not sure what you mean; you carry works of art in your wallet?
Me:  Doesn't everybody?  Let's see ... here I have portraits of some presidents.  I forget which ones, they're always coming and going.  Today I have a George Washington, an Abe Lincoln, a couple of Andrew Jacksons, and ... wow, here's a Ulysses S. Grant, I don't get many of him!  These are the only engravings I have, but here's a photograph of my nuclear family.
Inquisitor:  Huh?  You have two mothers?
Me:  No sir.  This is my mother on the left, and that one is her best friend from the Art Students League, Virginia Clark.
Inquisitor:  Go on.
Me:  Well, that's all the art I carry around.  The rest is the usual assortment of plastic cards of no possible interest to you ... then there's this: my Pope Card.
Inquisitor:  Gimme that!!
Me:  Don't take it out of its sleeve, it's very worn at the edges.  I got it from Robert Anton Wilson for performing an amazingly spiritual exercise: listening to him speak for an hour without walking out.
Inquisitor:  I'm in awe ... "Be it known that M. A. Pelizzari, aka Sri Spock, is a genuine Pope of the Paratheoanametamystickhood of Eris Esoterica (POEE) with all the rights, privileges, and responsibilities.  Good Forever.  Ewige Blumenkraft!  Issued by POEE Milpitas Cabal".  Jeez, is this for real?
Me:  What do you think.  Check the type font.
Inquisitor:  Gothic!  Forgive me, Your Holiness.  You are free to leave.
Me:  Thank you, officer.  May I have the wallet, please.
Inquisitor:  Sorry, here you are.  But first, what are these atom symbols?
Me:  Carbon atoms.  See, they have 6 electrons.  Carbon, the element that makes all life possible.  Don't burn it, or it will make all life impossible.

Remember: Only U Can Prevent Global Warming

That U is for Uranium, specifically the isotopes U-233, U-235 and U-238.  Without some form of nuclear power, the world as we know it would be destroyed.  The reasons are simple.

Nuclear-free visions of the future rely most heavily on solar power.  But sunlight is dilute and human populations are dense.  Sunlight amounts to no more than 100 watts per square foot which, averaged over the day-night cycle, amounts to 25 watts per square foot, or 300 watt-hours per square foot per day.  Conversion efficiency to electricity reduces that to 60 watt-hours per square foot per day currently, perhaps double that with future conversion technology.  Climatologists looking at these numbers have concluded that solar power alone (wind power is also solar in origin) cannot possibly replace fossil fuels fast enough to avoid catastrophic climate change and collapse of marine food chains from ocean acidification.  See http://edition.cnn.com/2013/11/03/world/nuclear-energy-climate-change-scientists-letter/index.html for one of their strongly worded statements.

There are only three ways I can imagine renewables alone meeting humanity's energy demand: (1) human populations take a nosedive, (2) the entire population drastically reduces its power consumption, or (3) humans push most other large land-dwelling species to extinction by exploiting their habitats to harvest renewable energy.  Those opposing nuclear power are obligated to explain which of these visions of the future they prefer, and chart at least one realistic path toward achieving that vision in the very near future.

If nuclear power didn't exist, I would prefer a variation on scenario (1), in which human populations on Earth take a nosedive, as most people migrate to habitats in space to maintain their energy-intensive life styles.  That option may or may not be viable over the long haul, depending on how well their artificial biospheres function in space, but at least it would limit the severity of Earth's sixth mass extinction by directing the human population explosion off-planet.

Fortunately nuclear power does exist, so there is no need to bet our collective future on the viability of artificial biospheres.  Nuclear power has such a small footprint per kilowatt-hour that it would permit the entire population of Earth to enjoy a high standard of living without endangering the biosphere.  But nuclear power can only save us from global warming if we harness it intelligently.  To date it has been harnessed so stupidly that the majority of people regard it as more dangerous to life on Earth than renewables.  Little do they realize how much safer nuclear power has proved to be, on a per kilowatt-hour basis, than all other forms of power generation.  This safety record is largely invisible to the general public because it emerges from economic studies and insurance company statistics, not the stuff of exciting news stories like the high-profile disasters at Three-Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.  There are thousands of ways to produce nuclear power, many of which are far safer than the solid-fuel light-water reactors that figured in these disasters.  Just Google on "Lithium Fluoride Thorium Reactor" to learn about one of the most promising.