After her book on the Sixth Extinction looked at
the damage human activity is causing nature,
Elizabeth Kolbert next looked at interventions
underway to try to save nature from past human
activity in Under a White Sky: The nature of
the Future, Bodley Head, 2021. The book
uses a pleasant narrative of the author’s
research travels that uncovered problems and
some of the solutions being attempted. The
author takes us to a location where she meets
with researchers and they show her the problem
and what they are aiming to do. The
story-reports are lively and interesting and the
pictures and explanatory drawings are helpful in
showing how the science being used is expected
to work. All of the narratives, pictures and
drawings are lacking in this short summary. The
book itself is a collection of these
story-reports and the reader gets
informed. Sadly, there are no simple
affordable fixes for any of the situations she
describes.
The book falls into three sections with
headings: Down the River; Into
the Wild; and Up in the Air. The
theme Down the River tells two stories, one
about the Chicago River, and the other about the
Mississippi. Both stories feature work of the US
Army Corps of Engineers.
Down the River
The first takes a look at the current problems
resulting from the late 19th century Chicago
Sanitary and Ship Canal that was dug to divert
the Chicago River from emptying into Lake
Michigan. It goes a considerable distance to the
Des Plaines River, then into the Illinois and
then into the Mississippi. Before the canal was
dug, all of the city’s waste – everything – went
into the Chicago River and on into Lake Michigan
- from which came the city’s drinking water! The
drawing in the book shows that locks now close
the entry into the Lake from the river and that
canal. Presumably boats can still pass. Changing
the river’s route made the Chicago of today. It
sent the waste from Chicago on towards St Louis.
But that diversion also upended the hydrology of
two thirds of the US. Before that, there were
two distinct drainage basins: Mississippi; and
the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River. They are
now connected.
It is not the only example of huge scale change.
Humans have dammed or diverted most of the
world’s major rivers. Our travel and our
industries now pump out 100 times more CO2 to
warm the globe than volcanoes do. Humans now
create earthquakes. The last huge global change
of this scale was the asteroid whose arrival
ended the era of dinosaurs.
Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, about the
effect of chemicals like DDT. In response
to the chemicals, there was some movement to use
creatures to clean the water. Some thought
of carp fish as a possible solution. In the
1970’s, after the Clean Water Act passed, there
was pressure for cheap upgrades to sewage plants
– like carp scavenger fish. This invasive
species was imported into the Southern states
around the Mississippi but they spread. By the
1990s there was a problem of how to keep carp
out of the Great Lakes system from the connected
Mississippi system. The US Army Corps of
Engineers was called in to do something. They
ended up by inserting strong electric fields in
the Southern end of the Chicago Canal – fields
that hopefully won’t electrocute people.
Moreover, electric fields notwithstanding, the
book tells of the need for regular large-scale
netting and culling of carp to protect the
electric barriers – with semi-trucks taking the
dead fish to be ground up and sold as
fertilizer.
Despite the electric fields and the culling, the
fish have moved into the formerly separate Great
Lakes water system. Chicago has had most of a
twentieth century of development with and around
the Sanitary and Ship Canal. Politically, what
has been done cannot now be undone. This
reporting ends with the story of a recent
enterprise manufacturing fish balls that are
carp, but given a more attractive name. After
all, the Chinese have eaten them for centuries.
The author found the US product tasty.
The second story looks into problems of New
Orleans and the Mississippi delta from decades
of attempted flood control measures before,
around and after the city. Before the first
French settlers, the Mississippi would flood and
in so doing spread a new layer of sediment over
the land. Now, miles of high walls keep the
river from spilling its sediment over the plain.
Dykes and pumping try to keep lower city areas
dry. The problems are that these have stopped
deposits of sediment along the river. In the
case of New Orleans and the surrounding
populated areas, the lack of sediment and the
drying of the land is helping the city to slowly
sink further below a sea level that is rising.
The more pumping, the more New Orleans is
sinking and the ocean is moving in.
The short paragraph above captures the message
and the conclusion is now foregone. However, the
full story-report captures the range of the
author’s activities and insights from flying
over vanishing land in the delta with
rectangular lakes of former fields, advancing
sea. She also visits land that is saturated and
the consistency of soft putty. The narrative is
good reading, but offers little more that can be
summarized. I can only invite people to read the
book for more detail on the context of all this.
Into the Wild
This section contains three stories each of
which involves keeping living things alive after
human intervention - by more human intervention.
The first features a rare small fish, the
pupfish, that lived for centuries in an ancient
aquifer in a cavern below an opening known as
Devil’s Hole in Death Valley desert, Nevada. In
the 1950s humans used the desert, about 50 miles
away from Devil’s Hole, for nuclear weapon
testing. Radioactivity remains. Then land was
purchased relatively near to Devils Hole in
anticipation of developing a community there.
Wells were dug. As water was drawn the water
level in the aquifer began to fall, exposing
more of the underground sand shore at the sides
of the water hole that the fish use for spawning
grounds. It seems the drop in water level is
irreversible. Enter scientists. Now there are
efforts to preserve the species in a human made
model of the aquifer complete with a replica of
the sandy-shelf. This solution depends on humans
being around to maintain their replica as
reliably as the aquifer was maintained before
humans!
The second “wild” story, deals with global
warming, consequent rise in ocean level and
temperature, and ocean acidification and the
impact on coral. The heat in particular
threatens coral reefs with extinction. The story
reports on efforts at the reef off northern
Australia to speed up genetic adaptation of
coral so they might survive in the increasingly
warmer conditions.
The third story reports a new DNA modification
approach, using a technique that allows a strip
of the DNA code to be cut out and replaced. The
author herself buys a kit on the market that
allows her to do some rather risky experiments.
The story downplays that this genetic
engineering tool comes with risks of dangerous
biohazards unless conducted with care in
containment facilities! The story explains that
genetic change need not be a matter of
statistical chance as is usually taught in high
schools. There are “driver” genes that can lead
genetic change in a species continually in a
particular direction. Everyone could end up with
a lighter skin for example. Then the story
focuses on engineering in animals in the hope of
dealing with previous problems of a human
making, and in particular on the story of the
importing of Cane Toads into Australia. In the
Australian context they could not deal with the
weevil on sugar cane crops as was intended.
However, the Toad was new to Australian animal
life. Since it was deadly poisonous and there
were no predators in Australia. Any animal that
attacked it died! It is now pervasive and
a big threat to Australia’s natural wildlife.
Genetic research hopes to create a Toad with a
driver gene that will make the venom weaker
across the entire Cane Toad population such that
it will no longer kill Australian native animals
that attack it, but will only make them ill so
that they can learn not to attack and, more
importantly, continue alive themselves.
Into the Air
There are stories within stories in this third
and final section. The first collection of
stories is about forms of carbon capture from
the atmosphere – or even before it enters the
atmosphere. CO2, the leading greenhouse gas, can
be permanently captured in basalt as a stone.
Growth of plants – new trees – can remove CO2
from the air. But this is not necessarily
permanent.
On the permanent capture of CO2 as stone, the
author paid a Swiss company to do this with some
of her CO2 production from her air travel. She
went to look into how this is done. She found
the stone was made in Iceland at the Reykjavik
geothermal power plant and buried deep in the
ground. The plant runs on superheated water
pumped from an underground volcanic fault. It
turns out that the water comes with CO2 gas and
contaminants like hydrogen sulphide that are
taken out. The power plant decided to also
remove the CO2 from its exhaust gases and found
that it could remove some additional CO2 from
the atmosphere as well. This was the CO2 the
author had paid to have removed. Before the
human era and its use of fossil fuels like coal,
oil, and gas for power and heat, volcanoes were
the main source of CO2. The process used at the
Reykjavik plant first captures the CO2. Next it
dissolves it in water to make a high pressure
“club soda”. Then it injects that “club soda”
back deep into the earth into basalt rock.
Within 2 years it has become stone. In the book
there is a picture of a cylindrical core of the
stone. It is a mixture of black basalt rock with
white limestone rock embedded in it. The stone
is stable and long-lived, and this process is
essentially natural but, of course, speeded up
by the energy input to collect, pressurize the
CO2 and deposit it deep down in the basalt rock.
There are researchers considering bringing the
basalt up to the surface where the CO2 warming
the globe is. There are calculations of how many
solar panels would be needed to provide the
energy to carry out this CO2 capture on a large
scale. (Solar panels over an area equivalent to
Nigeria would be needed.) But for me the
questions are: who would do this and when? There
are also questions that the author raises about
where to create or put all the resultant
stone. Details of the method, the
time-frame and the realistic scale that is
possible using basalt rock CO2 removal on the
surface of the earth are not given. This
possibility is speculative in 2021 and I think
it is therefore of little use as a tool for
meeting target dates for limiting CO2
concentrations in the atmosphere.
There is a discussion of planting forests for
CO2 uptake and careful disposal of the wood by
burying it in ditches to avoid release of CO2 by
decay. But an intriguing use of plants is by a
company in Switzerland that uses CO2 found in
waste gases from an incinerator. The author sees
the capture units for CO2 in waste gases that
remind her of the Reykjavik geothermal plant.
Here, waste heat provides power. The
concentrated CO2 is then fed to greenhouses. The
level of CO2 can be adjusted inside a greenhouse
to twice that outside. The greenhouses enjoy a
summer climate, with bees, in Winter! Plants
grow well in CO2-enriched warm air – eggplants
especially! However, this “capture” of CO2 is
only temporary – until the crop is eaten!
So this, too, is not likely to be a major
contributor to reducing atmospheric CO2 levels.
The second collection of stories looks at what
historically massive volcanic eruptions did –
beyond throwing up lava and ash and killing
thousands of people. The volcanos pumped
particles high above earth where they caused
cooling by blocking the sun’s radiation and
making darkness. Annual temperatures fell and
crops failed. (The account says the particles
came from upper atmospheric volcanic SO2 that
became sulphuric acid.) The effect was fairly
long-lived – several years - but the atmosphere
returned to its former temperature.
Global
warming was reported in 1965 to President
Johnson. It is not a temporary phenomenon; it is
cumulative. CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere
brings the related cumulative temperature rise.
After a massive volcanic eruption today, the
earth could at best return to the former CO2
level and former temperature. Moreover CO2 would
continue to accumulate so that after the
hypothetical volcanic eruption there would then
be more years’ worth of greenhouse gases and
related warming in the atmosphere.
Yet in the global warming context, geophysicists
point out that there is only one way to cool.
That way is to ship particles, calcite or
sulphate, into the upper atmosphere, well above
the stratosphere, to cause temporary cooling.
This would be done knowing that it deals only
with a symptom. It is no cure for ongoing global
warming. It removes no CO2. It does not stop
more CO2 being added. Any cooling by particles –
if it can be done and if it works as predicted -
would be followed in a short time by a return to
the even higher CO2 and so even hotter world.
Once tried, this cooling could be like an
addiction: a follow up would be needed and it
would require more and more particles, with
return to an even worse CO2 heated world as the
effects wore off.
This yet-to-be-developed cooling does not come
cheaply. A fleet of aircraft capable of
delivering loads of 20 tons each to a height of
60,000 ft would be needed. The aircraft would
have to be developed from known designs at a
cost of several billion dollars. The fleet would
cost $20 billion per decade to operate. (The
effect of particulates would be to produce a
white sky – hence the title of the book.) There
is of course, as the author notes, the recurrent
danger of human history - unwanted consequences.
I note that the huge 19th century volcanic
eruption (Tambora, 1815) caused widespread crop
failures and starvation for several years. I
wonder whether particles in the upper atmosphere
would similarly disturb today’s complex global
patterns of agriculture. There is research
underway that aims to use balloons in the
stratosphere, below the intended delivery level
for 20 ton loads, to try out the effects on a
small scale.
The third story-report is about the history and
science of Greenland’s Ice Sheet – plus a
surprising outcome! In the mid twentieth
century Cold War days, the US army developed a
camp cut out within Greenland’s Ice Sheet. It
was intended to allow Cold War missiles to move
around in tunnels. It was powered by a small
nuclear reactor. There were lots of unforeseen
consequences including the fact that ice flows,
so that the shape of tunnels had to be
constantly maintained. The project was abandoned
in 1967, but some research continued. That
included drilling out ice cores down into the
ice. The ice is just layers of snow, so that as
one bores through the ice one travels through
time when particular levels of snow – now ice –
fell. Thus a particular ice level can be tied to
a particular date. In addition, the snow can be
deciphered to yield climatic information about
the time it fell - and that led to surprising
information.
The author visited the current Danish North
Greenland Ice Core Project, “North GRIP”,
situated on the top of 2 miles of ice sheet.
Within layers of snow that make the ice there
are tiny bubbles of air. The ice has volcanic
ash from the Tambora Volcano eruption, pollution
from Roman lead smelters, dust from Mongolia
carried on Ice Age winds. A Danish geologist
could use isotopic information in rain to
determine the temperature at which it was
formed. He realized that this technique could be
applied to snow. The reading of the ice core
data confirmed what was known: the most recent
Ice Age (Wisconsin) dates to about 110,000 years
ago. When that Ice Age ended Greenland warmed.
But the detail provided about that is new. The
temperatures were hugely variable during the Ice
Age with big swings within each decade. Then
came a different pattern – for the next 10,000
years the climate remained constant decade after
decade. It is the most stable period of
temperature. It coincides with the arrival of
human settlement, agriculture and human
civilization. It appears that human
“civilization” is tied to this change. Now, with
human induced global warming, we humans threaten
the gift of stable climate that made our
civilization possible.
The ice sheet itself is under threat from global
warming. It reflects sunlight whereas once it
melts it becomes darker water which will absorb
the heat from the sun. As a result there is an
acceleration of heating if the ice is lost. Such
positive feedback effects may have been behind
the observed large fluctuations in temperature
as the Wisconsin Ice Age was coming to an end.
Geologists want to resist loss of the ice sheet
and such effects. They have suggested building
walls to hold up the ice cap. As the author
notes, we humans increase the temperature 3C,
then we prop up the ice cap to try to keep it
from melting!
The book ends. It is an earlier ending than the
author had intended. COVID 19 put an end to
human international travel in 2020 and her
planned final trip to complete her project on
the Greenland ice cap could not take place. The
abrupt ending is apt. It underscores that we
humans are better off when we work with natures’
ways than when we work to control them.