Conventional wisdom got in a fight with economics in the
best-selling first instalment of Freakonomics
in 2005, and naturally, economics won.
Now, Steven D. Levitt, the acclaimed young University of Chicago
economics professor, and Stephen J. Dubner, the New York Times writer, are back
again to fuse the weird and the wonderful, under the ‘unifying theme’ of how
people respond to economic incentives and their unintended consequences, in the
follow-up: Superfreakonomics.
Though Freakonomics
never even flirted with anything close to the environmental, preferring instead
to focus on cheating school teachers and sumo wrestlers, how real estate agents
are similar to the Ku Klux Klan (don’t worry it’s nowhere near as nefarious as
you might first think), and the economics of drug dealing, Superfreakonomics is breaking the ELR blog bank with a couple of
eye-opening chapters on the lesser discussed solutions to Climate Change
(though true to form, the book still explores the hidden economics of
prostitution, suicide bombers and altruism!).
The first chapter that caught my attention started by
discussing the devastating consequences hurricanes have increasingly had on
coastal economies. As Climate Change raises
the ocean’s temperature, hurricanes are becoming increasingly common and
increasingly destructive. Hurricanes are formed as the ocean water
rises in temperature and the winds gather that thermal energy from the ocean’s
surface and convert it into physical force.
These hurricanes are hard to predict and for those unfortunate enough to
live in their path, their lives are changed for years if not forever. Of particular concern to Americans is
Hurricane Alley, a stretch of ocean running from the West coast of Africa
through the Caribbean and up towards the South-eastern United States (think Hurricane
Katrina (New Orleans, 2005) and Hurricane Sandy (New York, 2012)).
Enter Nathan, a plucky man with a curious and intellectual
mind, who has come up with an ingenious idea.
It’s called the Salter Sink (a.k.a. the Hurricane Killer). Unassumingly referred to as “an inner tube
with a skirt” that sits on the ocean surface, the Hurricane Killer works by
rupturing the process that warms the ocean winds by using wave power to
continually sink the warm surface water down to mix with the significantly colder
subsurface waters.
Below is a mock-up of the design: quite simply a large
floating ring, anywhere from 30 to 300 feet across, with a long
flexible cylinder affixed to the inside running 600 feet deep into the ocean’s
subsurface.
As warm waves splash over the top of the ring, the water
level inside the tube rises above that of the surrounding ocean creating a
‘hydraulic head.’ The force this
hydraulic head creates pushes the warm water down and out into the cold water
below, therefore causing it to mix with the cold water and lowering the
temperature of the surface water as it rises again. This cyclical process is low-impact,
non-polluting, scalable and slow (taking about 3 hours to push a molecule of
warm water out of the bottom).
Nathan’s solution is thus to prevent the water in Hurricane
Alley from getting warm enough to form a destructive hurricane in the first
place. A couple of thousand could be
deployed (the most expensive version of which would cost a maximum of $100,000)
to prevent hurricanes in the Caribbean and the Gulf. A picket fence from Cuba to the Yucatan could
theoretically negate the billions of dollars’ worth of damage that wrecks coastal
areas every year (hurricane alleys also exist in the South China Sea and the
Coral Sea off the coast of Australia). Deploying
10,000 world-wide would cost $1 billion and would require relatively little
maintenance, freeing hundreds of coastal cities to develop without the threat
of regular destruction (furthermore, they could be moved in reaction to weather patterns).
In addition to cooling category 5 storms into less
destructive ones, the salter sinks could also possibly be used to smooth out
the boom-or-bust nature of rainfall in Africa and thus help to develop
agriculture and address food-supply shortages.
When considering the expense that the majority of Climate Change
mitigation strategies advocate, this solution is devilishly simply and cheap,
but as Levitt and Dubner reveal, Nathan is only just getting started.
As the next chapter reveals, Nathan is Nathan Myrhvold, the
former Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft and, at one time, one of the wealthiest
men in the United States. Nathan left
Microsoft several years ago to set up “Intellectual Ventures,” (IV) a social
enterprise gathering some of the brightest scientific and technological minds (including
renowned climate scientist, Ken Caldeira) to work towards solving the world’s
largest problems (without much concern for commercial payback). In addition to
what I am about to discuss, IV are also working on a eradicating malaria by
designing a laser system that kills mosquitos as they cross a boundary, amongst other amazing projects:
But more pertinent to this blog is the fact that Myrhvold
has his sights set on addressing Climate Change. Rather strangely, the ‘eureka’ moment came on
June 15th 1991 when Mount Pinatubo erupted. The eruption was the second largest of the 20th
century and caused 20 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide to be spewed into the
atmosphere. What scientists noted over
the following decade, contrary to popular belief, was actually a significant cooling of the earth’s
atmosphere (0.5 ⁰C). Nathan’s
observation was one that is scarcely uttered in environmental circles: we’re
too concerned with carbon dioxide!
The effect sulphur dioxide has on the earth’s atmosphere was
first noted by Benjamin Franklin in his 1784 publication, Meteorological Imaginations and Conjectures, when he noted that recent
eruptions in Iceland had caused a particularly harsh winter. Though Franklin could only postulate at the
time, as we now understand, the reason was because sulphur dioxide reduces the
amount of solar radiation reaching the earth’s surface. Thus, while carbon dioxide (and actually more
potently, methane and water vapour) warm the earth’s atmosphere by trapping
heat, sulphur dioxide has the ability to cool the earth by decreasing the
amount of heat entering the atmosphere.
But those of you who paid attention in chemistry class may rightly
be thinking, don’t we already emit a lot of sulphur dioxide into the air when
we burn coal? In fact we do. In the UK,
in 2011, we emitted 379,000 tonnes of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere (National
Atmospheric Emissions Inventory website).
However, when you consider that in 1970 the UK emitted 6,370,000 tonnes,
sulphur dioxide is actually one of the gases for which we have been extremely
successful in reducing emissions.
In spite of this trend, the important question is not how
much sulphur dioxide we are putting into the atmosphere, but where are we
putting the sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere?
You see, emissions from coal plants go into the troposphere (the layer
of the atmosphere closest to the ground) where it falls back down to earth, in
the form of acid rain, within a week or two.
Why volcanic eruptions were so effective at cooling the planet is because
they shoot the sulphur dioxide all the way up into the stratosphere (about 7.5
to 32 miles above the earth’s surface) where it absorbs water vapour and will
form an aerosol cloud that can linger for up to a year.
So Myrhvold set his team of self-proclaimed geeks the
following puzzle: how do you get sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere, and how
much would you need to put up there to mitigate the temperature rise caused by
Climate Change?
After a series of costly, complex and impractical ideas
(including firing artillery shells full of sulphur dioxide into the sky, or
launching a fleet of jet fighters using high-sulphur content fuel into the
stratosphere), Myrhvold’s team at IV came up with another fiendishly simple and
cost-effective method: a garden hose to the sky!
By using a series of high-strength helium balloons (one
every 300 yards) and pumps (one every 100 yards), you could extend a hose 18
miles up into the stratosphere where it would spray a fine mist of liquefied sulphur
dioxide out of a nozzle that would then be carried by the wind.
But how many hoses and how much intentional pollution are we
talking about? Rather surprisingly,
Myrhvold has calculated that we would only need two hoses (one at the north
pole and one at the south pole) emitting 100,000 tonnes per year (0.05% of
global sulphur dioxide emissions) to effectively reverse the warming effect.
Now, geo-engineering projects have traditionally been
written off as science fiction (e.g. the space mirror scheme sending 55,000
reflective sails to orbit around the earth), but this is an idea that is backed
by sound science, that is not incredibly expensive and let’s face it there’s something
childishly fun about it. If Myrhvold’s
predictions are correct, the project (referred to Budyko’s Blanket, after the
Russian climatologist, Mikhail Budyko) could be up and running within three
years, for a start-up cost of $150 million and an annual operating cost of $100
million. When you consider the findings
of the UK Government’s Stern Report that estimated the cost of addressing
Climate Change to be $1.2 trillion per year for the foreseeable future, this
would be an incredibly cost-effective strategy.
In addition, it effectively repurposes existing pollution and provides
the potential to avoid anti-carbon initiatives that could seriously hinder the
global economy.
But this is where my showering of praise and optimism ends
unfortunately.
Firstly, I recognise Myrhvold’s arguments that current
Climate Change mitigation strategies are too small (alternative energy will not
yet scale to a sufficient degree to address emissions problems), too late (the
half-life of atmospheric carbon is roughly 100 years) and/or too optimistic (creating
a carbon-free energy infrastructure will actually require a lot of emissions, effectively
making Climate Change worse every year until we’re done building the necessary
infrastructure, which could take thirty to fifty years), but I do not accept
that they are lost causes.
Pumping sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere should be a plan
of last resort. It is comforting to know
that we have a potential back-up plan should other plans fail, but two wrongs
do not a make right. Wouldn’t such an unnatural
counter-emissions strategy create apathy towards the environment, providing
industry a free pass to pollute the atmosphere as much as desired now that we
have the means to reduce the temperature?
Even if the answer to that question is ‘no,’ this is a
strategy to negate “global warming,” not Climate Change. Reducing the earth’s average temperature does
not address the related problems of pollution, habitat destruction, biodiversity
loss, energy profligacy, energy security, geo-politics and the squandering of
natural resources. This is not a
solution to the problem; this is more like someone cranking up the air
conditioning in your house when it is scorching hot outside causing you to
forget that you’ll still need sunscreen when you step outside.
Furthermore, the fact that we cannot know the unintended
consequences of this plan until after commencement should be enough to give
pause to even the staunchest proponent.
Sulphur dioxide in the troposphere is already a known cause of
respiratory problems and acid rain. Moreover,
the earth operates a complex feedback system regulating the concentration of gases
in each eco-system and such a plan would fail to respect the delicate balance
the earth’s forces constantly work to achieve.
Lastly, the practicalities of implanting such a strategy
would be incredibly complex. Who would
pay for such a scheme (it could not plausibly be a commercial venture as it
generates no revenue)? Who would own
it? You could not alter the earth’s
atmosphere unilaterally, so who would give permission to implement such a
plan? International agreement at the UN
is hard to come by, even without regard to how easy it would be to scaremonger
people on such a strategy (most people
feel uneasy with intentionally altering the earth’s atmosphere – note the irony
here!).
Nonetheless I commend the provocative thinking and the desire
of Myrhvold’s team at IV to do something big (see also the DESERTEC plan in the
previous blog – Sustainable Energy – Without
the Hot Air). Within the next few
decades it will be essential to drum up political support for a big idea,
implemented on a global scale, if something meaningful is to be done. The problem is that the political capital
will be wasted if the wrong plan is proposed.
With that said, Superfreakonomics
is a fascinating and fun read. I was
pleased that Levitt and Dubner took the time to unearth one or two of the
exciting ideas surrounding Climate Change mitigation; I just want to caution
that if a solution sounds too good to be true, it generally is. Nonetheless, I implore everyone to keep a
close eye on Nathan and his team at IV, they are undoubtedly one of the most ingenious
and humanitarian organisations I have ever encountered.
Score: 70/100
