SURVIVING CLIMATE CHANGE
Space solar farms, geothermal power and food produced by way of the sky: how revolutionary ideas and advanced technologies might help slow global temperature rises... and save humanity
INTERVIEWING 100 climate scientists – proper in-depth interviews, two cameras, lights, the lot – about the consequences of our warming Earth is a crash course in coping strategies. Most of these men and women are suffering from quiet desperation, because they know what’s going to happen and they can’t seem to change it.
They feel obliged to sound optimistic, but give them a half hour to talk about it and the sadness and despair start to show.
Over the course of four years, I met with these experts to pose one question as our carbon emissions continue to soar: What else can we do? And to my surprise, I have come away with some hope for the future.
Please don’t get carried away with that notion. We’re still in the deepest trouble imaginable. But things have got a bit better. Five years ago, everybody was still pretending that we were going to fix everything by cutting greenhouse gas levels.
It was a complete fantasy. Global emissions have not fallen in one single year since Margaret Thatcher first declared global warming a major threat in 1988.
In fact, scientists recently confirmed global concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide – three of the top greenhouse gases humans are responsible for – reached record highs last year. Yet the increases were “not quite as high as the record jumps observed in recent years”, said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the US-run government agency that released the data.
For decades, climate scientists loyally followed the orthodoxy that we could prevent 1.5 degrees warming by emissions cuts alone. That time is now past. In February, global warming exceeded 1.5 degrees for the first time over a 12-month period. It may fall back a bit once the current El Niño warming ends (that’s a natural cycle that dumps some extra heat into the system around once every three to seven years). But we will see the same levels return by 2030. So what can we do now?
The lost time hasn’t been entirely wasted. Solar and wind power have grown faster than anybody dared hope, though not fast enough to start cutting into the 80 per cent market share of fossil fuels yet.
ELECTRIC vehicles would already be driving down the emissions from motoring, if 40 per cent of the world’s car-buying public had not decided that they must have a high-emitting SUV.
But most importantly, a generation of inventors, engineers and entrepreneurs foresaw that there would be a big demand for new approaches to curbing the warming once the public realised the urgency of the situation.
A profusion of those new ideas and technologies is now spilling out on to the market and if enough of them fulfil their promise, we might still get through this century without runaway global warming wrecking our future. But only on one condition.
We are teetering above the danger zone. Most climate scientists believe that somewhere between 1.5 degrees and two degrees hotter, we will cross various “tipping points” that will trigger “feedbacks” – extra warming from non-human sources. For example, parts of the Arctic are warming four times faster than the rest of the planet because the ice and snow cover are melting.
This exposes dark rock and open water that absorb sunlight instead of the bright ice reflecting it back into space – and therefore causes more warming. That sort of thing is why we have to hold the temperature down while we work on our emissions, even if that means doing it artificially. There are promising ideas for how to do that and they will probably be needed. It will be a long, hard slog, but we are not doomed just yet.
GOING UNDERGROUND
THE hottest new idea, quite literally, for generating power without fossil fuels is deep geothermal power. It used to be a speciality of countries such as Italy, Iceland and New Zealand, which have lots of hot volcanic rock near the surface. But start-ups have fracking techniques to go up to two and a half miles below ground and fracture dry, hot rock with water under high pressure. The water flashes into super-heated steam and blasts up another borehole to spin turbine blades and create electricity, then cools and is pumped back down to go around again.
Go deep enough and there’s hot rock (200 to 400C) almost everywhere. It’s a closed system, doesn’t need a lot of water, and produces electricity day and night in any weather. This one could be bigger than solar or wind. The first megawatt-scale plant opened in Nevada, US, last year and construction began on the first UK site in Cornwall in January.
SPACE-BASED SOLAR POWER
THE advantages of big solar arrays in geostationary orbits are obvious: perpetual sunshine and energy beamed back to Earth at radio frequencies that pass right through terrestrial weather. The one huge deal-killer was the cost of boosting a couple of thousand tons of “lightweight” solar panels into a very high orbit to build a solar array a mile in diameter. But maybe billionaire space entreLENNON
preneur Elon Musk can help with that. The European Space Agency reckons the breakeven price for putting solar farms into space is $1,000 per kilo.
Musk’s Falcon Heavy, the cheapest rocket currently available, charges $1,500 per kilo, but his new Starship ultra-heavy-lift vehicle might be able to do it for $200 a kilo.
The first successful transmission of highfrequency radio waves from a satellite to a ground station that converted them into DC electricity happened last year. The UK government commissioned a report from the Frazer-Nash consultancy that envisaged an operational two gigawatt orbital solar power station by 2040.
FOOD FROM THE SKY
HOTTER weather and bigger storms mean we can grow less food and the world’s population is still increasing. At the same time, we have already taken so much land to grow food on that biodiversity is collapsing.
So wouldn’t it be handy if we found a way to produce unlimited amounts of food without using any land? We have. It’s called precision fermentation: put the right bacterium in a bioreactor, give it water, carbon dioxide, hydrogen and sunlight, and it will double its mass every three hours.
Drain the resultant soup off once in a while, dry it and you have 65 per cent edible protein, fats or carbohydrates.You can turn it into appetising food for people if you work at it, but the first big prize is animal feed.
Half the world’s farmland is used to feed our domestic animals. We could return most of that to nature if we feed them this instead. The cattle won’t mind a bit. However, the farmers will mind a lot, so expect this to get very political. The first factory opens near Helsinki this year.
CARBON DIOXIDE REMOVAL
IT IS AT least 10 times more expensive to get carbon dioxide back out of the air than to avoid dumping it into the atmosphere in the first place. Unfortunately, we have been dumping it for two centuries, so we’ll have to do a lot of CO2 removal if we want a bearable climate by the end of this century.
The very first megatonne-scale CO2 removal plants are now under construction in Texas and Louisiana, largely at the US government’s expense. They are mostly located in old oil fields because the same rock that held the oil will also hold the CO2 that must be captured and buried.
This provides jobs in the same area for some of the people who used to pump the oil out, which eases the political resistance. A similar plant will soon be built in Scotland, for the same reasons. It is estimated the world will need 10,000 such plants to meet the demands of net zero by 2050.
SOLAR RADIATION MANAGEMENT
THIS involves reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the planet’s surface just by one or two per cent, in order to hold global warming below two degrees while we work to reduce our emissions. It is not a solution, but it will probably be a necessary stopgap measure to avoid political and economic chaos. Solar Radiation Management requires sunlight to be reflected back into space, but it comes in a variety of flavours.
The leading candidate involves using special aircraft to put sulphur dioxide high into the stratosphere. Big volcanoes already do this naturally when they explode. The sulphur dioxide combines with moisture in the stratosphere to form quadrillions of tiny droplets of sulphuric acid that reflect some incoming sunlight and cool the planet.
Nobody gets hurt as there are no living things in the stratosphere, and research suggests that, while this process might slow the healing of the ozone hole over the Antarctic, it will not stop it. More research is needed.
Alternatively, we could build unmanned vessels that spray a fine mist into the clouds near the ocean surface and thicken them so they reflect more sunlight that way. We haven’t yet built the planes and ships to do these jobs, but we probably will. We are on our way to becoming, as English scientist James Lovelock once said, “planetary maintenance engineers”.
● Intervention Earth by Gwynne Dyer (Old Street Publishing, £12.99) is published tomorrow.Visit expressbookshop.com or call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832. Free UK P&P on orders over £25