A short history of climate change

It will possibly be my last book, but Not Your Usual Science is going to be HUGE, close to 1.5 million words, equal to a dozen 'airport books', the thick tomes you buy to read on a long flight. It collects together many of the articles and essays that I have generated over the past 35 years, covering science, how science works and how what we now call science was put together. It even includes some of the blog entries that have appeared here. In due course, it will be released as an e-book.

Here's a small taste of it, but let me add here that in late March 2019, a circular from Rush Holt at AAAS drew my attention to Eunice Foote:

"Let me add one interesting historical note that is not widely known. In 1856 at the AAAS Annual Meeting, the work of Eunice Foote was presented, showing that carbon dioxide is a heat-blanketing greenhouse gas that in the atmosphere could warm the Earth. This was years before the work of the men usually credited with the finding (Tyndall in England and Arrhenius in Sweden)."

Well, that bit into my weekend a bit. Here is a link to the paper in question. Her short piece begins on p. 382, and here is a key comment: "An atmosphere of that gas [carbonic acid, CO2] would give our earth a high temperature..."

Now I have to go back and amend the book to add this!

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Jens Galschiot's installation 'Unbearable' in Copenhagen. [Peter Macinnis]

If the illustration above seems rather savage, the J-curve on which the polar bear is skewered reflects the graph of the inexorable rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and the curve is made from a length of oil pipe. Art and politics go together very well.

Here is some surprising news: we knew that “global warming” was happening, way back in 1950! Now, of course, most reputable atmospheric scientists believe human activity is driving the modern slow warming of our climate, but back then it was just a passing reference that came my way.

All the same, now we know that global warming is a bad description, so we call it ‘climate change’. Under any name, it’s the same beast, and the same looming disaster, and we knew it was happening, two thirds of a century ago.

Mind you, the knowledge that humans are to blame is even older, because as we will shortly see, the whole thing had been predicted. The problem before was that there was not a lot of hard science in the arguments, which come down to logic, reason, careful modelling—and interpretation that is likely to be biased by a generous serving of self-interest. That has changed in the last ten years.

Nobody denies that the Earth is getting warmer, because the evidence is there, and it was apparent in 1950, when George Kimble reported in Scientific American that the northern limit of wheat-growing in Canada had moved northward some 2 – 300 miles (call it 400 kilometres), adding that farmers in southern Ontario were experimenting with cotton. While that industry seems not to have taken off, he reported another trend that continues to this day, the northward retreat of the permafrost:

In parts of Siberia the southern boundary of permanently frozen ground is receding poleward several dozen yards per annum.

The matter open to question back then was the cause. Kimble noted that the Domesday Book featured 38 vineyards in England in 1086, in addition to those of the Crown. He pointed also to the Greenland colony which was frozen out, back around the mid-1400s and other evidence that climates change. He also looked at Biblical evidence on the distribution of date palms to suggest that conditions in 1950 were much those of Biblical times, providing a picture of a climate that fluctuates around a mean. Maybe it was just one of those cycles.

That was in a time before ‘global warming’ when climate change was referred to as the ‘greenhouse effect’. In cold climates, a greenhouse is a glass shed which allows sunlight to shine in, where much of the radiation is absorbed and changed to heat.

Glass is less transparent to heat, but a greenhouse does not just trap warmth that way: it also holds a body of warm air around the plants, and protects them from wind-driven evaporation. So while we still speak of ‘greenhouse gases’, it is rare to hear anybody mention the greenhouse effect these days, but that goes way back to those early predictions.

In the 1820s, Joseph Fourier realised that heat-trapping might occur. Then in 1896, Svante Arrhenius reminded us that both water vapour and carbon dioxide were ‘greenhouse gases’ (escaping that bad analogy is hard) and so water and carbon dioxide would play a role in making the planet get warmer.

He also considered changes that might be happening, and consulted Arvid Högbom, who just happened to know all about carbon dioxide sources and sinks. Carbon dioxide was coming from life forms when they breathed, from volcanoes, and from humans burning fossil and other fuels. The human additions were a very small part of the total in the air already, perhaps one part in a thousand was added by the burning of coal, and there were probably checks and balances.

Arrhenius estimated that it would take 3000 years to double the atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, if it ever happened, but that such a doubling would raise world average temperatures by 5 to 6°C.

Back in 1896, when Arrhenius did that calculation, the CO₂ level was around 290 parts per million: in 2016, the value was estimated at 396 parts per million: we had travelled one third of the projected distance in just 120 years.

To Europeans back in the 1890s, the warming effect seemed nothing to worry about, because nobody had stopped to consider the cascades, the flow-ons that might be driven by that rise in temperature. Walter Nernst, even wondered if it would be feasible to set fire to uneconomical and low-grade coal seams, so as to release enough carbon dioxide to warm the Earth’s climate deliberately!

In the 1990s, global warming was in much the same position that “continental drift” had been in, a generation earlier, with some of the scientists arguing furiously, even when they agreed on the main principles, and as in the puzzle of the wandering continents, the key evidence was there. Mind you, when I covered the 2002 Spring Conference of then American Geophysical Union, there were no nay-sayers there.

The problem is that so long as people can get away with saying “global warming”, we are once again stuck with a bad analogy, just as the early 1960s saw us hung up on “continental drift”.

That aside, the cost of disagreement and bickering is remarkably different. It mattered not at all if people disagreed about plate tectonics (except, perhaps, that it makes tsunamis like the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami easier to understand), but global warming is likely to be a major disaster for humanity, and any delay has the potential to cost lives. To understand this, we have to accept some puzzling propositions.

To take one example, the formation of sea ice in the northern Atlantic is probably what stops Dublin and New York being iced-in each winter. This is because the sea ice is largely free of salt, and leaves a residue of cold brine that drives a current known as the Conveyor, which in turn drives the Gulf Stream.

The Gulf Stream takes warm water from the Caribbean and swirls it up around the North Atlantic, contributing to fogs and breaking icebergs loose, but keeping many ports warm and open, even in winter.

Just as the prion proteins of mad cow disease have more than one stable form, so do weather patterns, and if the weather once drops into a new pattern, we may not be able to bounce it back to where it started.

The good news is that as northern Europe freezes over, the glaciers which are now melting away fast will be replenished, lowering sea levels. The increased snow cover will also increase the reflectivity of the northern hemisphere, and that may cool the planet down a little. We just have to hope it does not trigger a new stable pattern that happens to be an ice age.

The actual changes that might follow the breaking point are hard to predict. They are unlikely to be spectacular and major, and probably they will do their harm stealthily, when infrastructure, port facilities and cities are flooded, or when agricultural land is lost, either by being covered by the sea or as a result of drastically changed rainfall patterns.

If any significant amount of rock is exposed in Antarctica, this could lead to a low pressure zone over the icy continent that could change weather patterns around the world.

It hasn’t happened yet, but we need to learn from history. Ten years ago, no politician would take a long-term view and force the changes needed in the next thirty to forty years, when most of them are elected for a mere three to four years, and then have to face the voters again.

It is easier to bleat plaintively that there is no real agreement among the scientists yet (even when there is), or that some eminent scientists believe that there are other explanations (they don’t: just look at where the funding of these “scientists” comes from).

That load of bollocks saves the politicians from having to act—and the honesty of scientists in saying that they cannot be sure just how things will go wrong allows devious short-term opportunists to prate that “the scientists aren’t sure…”

Politics is a marvellous human discovery. It is a pity that politicians still have to discover humanity and consider its prospects. It is likely that politics, dithering, duck-shoving and shilly-shallying will make this disaster happen.

The reader is referred to my comments about “future value” in the piece preceding this, called A Question of Values. So long as the electorate value their comfort right now, over the comfort of their grandchildren, we are doomed like the bears.

A question of values

It will possibly be my last book, but Not Your Usual Science is going to be HUGE, close to 1.5 million words, equal to a dozen 'airport books', the thick tomes you buy to read on a long flight. It collects together many of the articles and essays that I have generated over the past 35 years, covering science, how science works and how what we now call science was put together. It even includes some of the blog entries that have appeared here. In due course, it will be released as an e-book.

Here's a small taste of it...

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According to Edward O. Wilson, there are three kinds of value: commodity value, or how much you can sell something for, amenity value, or the dollar value of the pleasure and benefit you get from its existence, and morality value, which has no dollar value at all, but relates to our responsibility to those species less able than us to protect themselves.

Consider a property owner who rents out a house. There is no economic gain, no commodity value in doing repairs, there is no pleasure in doing repairs when you don’t have to live with the mess that the house is becoming, but maybe there’s a morality value in making sure there’s something left for the owner’s heirs. Those of us who are parents and grandparents may see some merit in that line of thought…

A different set of values. [Peter Macinnis]

From the viewpoint of short-term economic gain, old-growth trees have no dollar value because they are producing nothing, but they are in fact extremely valuable because they offer places of shelter for animals that help to control pests and maintain balance within the forest. They have immense background value, like grandparents.

Old trees and grandparents are both often seen as unproductive, and you can’t taste the egg in a cake, but old trees hold ecosystems together, grandparents hold societies together, and the egg holds a cake together. I think there is a case for factoring in the background value of things. I plan to call this “future value”, a sort of investment in a future for our species and our world.

A forest is much more than trees, and a plantation of the same species, all of uniform age, is far less diverse and offers a much poorer habitat all round. In most cases, when old growth forest is logged, it is clear-felled and replaced with a plantation. At the very least, the area should be left dotted with islands of old-growth forest, and these should be linked by old growth corridors, so forest biodiversity can be retained.

Gutta percha and cauchu

Let us begin with gutta percha, because it was in practical use before rubber was.  This came from the sap of an Asian tree that could be tapped, much as the rubber tree (and rubber is the cauchu we will come to later).

In 1832, Dr William Montgomerie saw gutta percha being used to make handles for parangs (machete-like knives) in Singapore. He introduced gutta percha to Europe in 1843, where it was used first for knife handles and in golf balls. In 1845, Werner Siemens suggested using it to insulate telegraph wires, the method was patented in 1847, and the first recorded use of the new insulated wires was in 1849.

In 1848, Michael Faraday was delighted by gutta percha. It could be softened by warming and moulded, but when it cooled, it was flexible and resilient, and it was an insulator. By 1853 in the Gardener’s Chronicle, ‘CRD’ (alias Charles Robert Darwin, a keen reader) was seeking advice on any problems he might expect while using a canvas hose, coated and lined with gutta percha, as a siphon tube to move water from one tank to another on a different level.

After 1855, the Second US Cavalry’s soldiers were issued with a gutta percha talma, a long cape or cloak, extending to the knees, with large loose sleeves. Soldiers in one squadron had gutta percha scabbards and another squadron had gutta percha cartridge boxes, but the material could also serve more peaceful uses. In April, the Portadown Weekly News in Ireland carried an advertisement for “Ladies’ and Children’s Leather and Gutta Percha Boots and Shoes”.

Across the Atlantic, an enterprising American was making waterproof packing paper by giving paper a thin coating of gutta percha dissolved in turpentine. Two New Yorkers, Johns and Crosby, offered a cement for roofing based on gutta percha: the advertised cost was “5 cents a foot”. It was guaranteed for five years.

With steamers entering the Amazon, rubber traders were already moving up the river by 1853, so the era of gutta percha would be brief. Critics sniped, suggesting it cracked, that the failure of the covering had destroyed the second Atlantic cable. Manufacturers of gutta percha cables disagreed, but they still lost out in the end to rubber, and just in time, because the jungles of the East Indies were almost cleared of gutta percha trees by 1859.

A few niche markets were left to gutta percha. Even today, when you have root canal therapy, your dentist may insert a temporary gutta percha filling, but a surgeon on the Australian goldfields in the 1850s was well aware that gutta percha could be softened again.

He told a fellow surgeon he had paid five shillings for a bunch of old tools being sold with a gutta percha bucket, just to acquire the bucket. With this and a supply of hot water, he had ‘stopped’ (filled the cavities in) hundreds of teeth at a guinea a piece, and he expected to stop thousands more before the old bucket was used up. He claimed he was known as an unrivalled dentist, with people coming from far and near.

India rubber, alias cauchu, caoutchouc or gum elastic, was interesting stuff. It was used by the Mesoamericans before Columbus and the Spaniards who followed him must have seen games played with balls made of rubber, but the material did not interest the Europeans as much as gold and silver.

By the 1830s, the needs of industry were changing. Slow steam engines could use oiled leather to seal valves, and while shoes and inflatable canvas boats could be made with India rubber, steam valves could not. Inventors everywhere hunted for ways of making India rubber stronger, tougher and more weather-proof.

One of them was a bankrupt called Charles Goodyear (1800–1860), who had been mixing gum elastic with white lead and sulfur, but the mix was unsuccessful until he had a stroke of luck in February 1839. Some of his gum elastic/sulfur mix landed by accident on a hot pot-bellied stove, and when he scraped the material off, he realized that the heat had produced an elastic rim.

Here was the secret to toughening rubber: mix it with sulfur and heat it. But how much sulfur, and how much heat? In the end, he found that to toughen the rubber, it had to be heated by steam under pressure, providing a temperature of about 270°F (132°C) for several hours.

The molecules of rubber are natural polymers, long chains that can slip and slide past each other. The sulfur forms bridges between chains, tying them together and making a more stable product. At the time, there was no theory to explain this, so anybody seeing the material would have no idea of how the gum elastic had been changed.

Goodyear never benefited from his discovery. He died in 1860, worn out by patent battles and owing some $200,000. The giant Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. may carry his name, but there is no family connection. It would be some time before rubber tyres would soften the rides of wagons, bicycles and automobiles, but by 1860, railway cars could be fitted with coiled springs, embedded in vulcanized rubber.

People all over the world died as food crops were displaced by rubber plantations, or as Congolese rubber tappers were terrorized, beaten and killed to make them work harder. At the same time, rubber has made our lives better, and it continues to save lives today. Catheters, surgical gloves, condoms and other products are still made of rubber, as are the tires on vehicles and aircraft.

On balance, rubber has probably done more good than harm, just.

Charles Goodyear’s battle to maintain his patent for vulcanised rubber dragged on through 1859. Rubber was beginning to become more popular, and not only in roles filled earlier by gutta percha. Most new uses needed vulcanised rubber, but in 1855, Augustus Gregory experimented with an inflatable boat made of canvas covered with India rubber to explore rivers in northern Australia. It was not a success.

In 1859, a diver crossed the Schuylkill River near Philadelphia, striding along in an India rubber suit that covered him up to his neck, with a sheet-copper helmet over his head. He breathed through a pipe connected to a compressor on a boat and followed a guide rope during his 25-minute stroll. On another front, Messrs Badger and Co reported successfully making a Boehm flute from Goodyear’s vulcanised rubber, though this was probably more like ebonite than the rubber we know today.

Rubber and cotton hoses could stand the pressures being generated by the new steam fire engines– and the late 1850s was a time when fire brigades were being formed in many places and equipping themselves with steam pumps.

Hoses were a major concern, because the high pressures needed tore most cloth, and the available range of hoses was poor. The choice of textiles for any purpose was limited: cotton and wool for everyday use, silk and linen for the rich, and that was about it. Wool sold in New York for 11 to 50 cents a pound, depending on quality. Cotton was plentiful and cost 8.5 to 12.5 cents a pound.

It was a world where anything might find a use,  even isinglass and seahorse teeth.

Yes, Minister

Originally, a minister was a lesser official, as opposed to a magister — a word which has come down to us as both 'master' and 'magistrate'. The magister was a greater official, a big-wig, an important person, a chief, a boss, a director. The Latin word ministerialis meant somebody who had some menial official duties, but by the Middle Ages, the ministerialis was a person whose task was to entertain his employer by singing and telling tales, and soon the ministerialis took on the role that we now describe by the term 'minstrel'.

The sense of minstrel we now have can also be fitted to the label 'troubadour', which comes from the Provençal trobador, and which is related to the French trouver, meaning 'to find', because it was the task of the troubadour to find, invent and compose in verse, much like the skalds of the Norsemen — or today's rap performers, who, like their predecessors, usually have a range of rhymes prepared in advance, ready to use as a refuge when the going gets tough.

Despite what we sometimes see in Hollywood depictions of Merrie England, the troubadours were inhabitants of the patch from Spain, through southern France to northern Italy, though at the eastern end, the troubadour became il trovatore. England had to make do with minstrels, and these folk were certainly among those who ministered to the needs of the local lord.

The minister in a church is a priest by another name, and while the clergy of an area may be referred to collectively as 'the local ministry', there are still some churches in which the term is avoided, perhaps because it seems to have its roots in a saying of Calvin. One Albert Babinot, who had studied at la Ministerie in Poitiers, and who was addressed by Calvin as "Mr. Minister", a name which then was transferred to other clergy in the Calvinist tradition.

The low position of a minister was clear to the translators who created the King James Version: in Matthew 20, Jesus reminded his disciples that the Gentiles allowed their princes to exercise authority, but then he says "but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister; And whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant." (Matthew 20: 26-27).

Shakespeare knew this meaning of 'minister' as well, for in the first part of Henry VI, we find the Duke of York calling 'La Pucelle' (Joan of Arc) "Thou foul accursed minister of hell".

Indeed, the sense of a minister as a servant can still be seen in the term 'cabinet minister', for these high and mighty officials are conceived as the servants of the government, carrying out its will, and as long as nobody reminds them of this, then probably all will be well. For the most part, these ministers do not sing like minstrels, but when they write their memoirs, they often sing like canaries, to the embarrassment of some of their former colleagues.

So how much difference is there between a magister and a minister? In Venice, where people are worried about the rising sea levels, the Magistrato alle Acque, the Water Magistracy, is the body responsible for planning a set of gates that may help stop tidal and storm surges pouring into the Venetian lagoon. To all intents and purposes, this appears to be the equivalent of a Water Ministry in a country following the Westminster system.

And that raises another question: York has a Minster, not a Cathedral, and what is Westminster itself? The name now indicates not only the seat of the Mother or Parliaments, but also the location of Westminster Abbey. This, however, is a different word, coming from the Old English mynster, which later would become monastery, while the nunnery or convent in Old English was a nunmynster.