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The Great
ECO LO GY
Climate
Experiment
How far can we push the planet?
By Ken Caldeira
Illustrations by Tyler Jacobson
than in the day. Extreme downpours have Without any change in our habits,
become more common. In the Arctic, ice Earth may warm by about five degrees
and snow cover less area, and methane- Celsius (nine degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100,
rich permafrost soils are beginning to although the actual warming could be half
melt. Weather is getting weirder, with or even double this amount, depending
storms fueled by the additional heat. primarily on how clouds respond. This
What are the ultimate limits of the change is about the difference between
change that we are causing? The best his- the average climate of Boston, Mass., and
Ken Caldeira is a climate scientist
torical example comes from the 100-mil- Huntsville, Ala.
working for the Carnegie Institution
for Sciences Department of Global lion-year-old climate of the Cretaceous In the northern midlatitudes between
Ecology at Stanford University. He period, when moist, hot air enveloped di- 30 degrees north and 60 degrees north
investigates issues related to climate, nosaurs leathery skin, crocodilelike crea- a band that includes the U.S., Europe,
carbon and energy systems. Caldeiras tures swam in the Arctic and teeming China, and most of Canada and Russia
primary tools are climate and carbon plant life flourished in the CO2-rich air. the annual average temperature drops
cycle models, and he also does field
The greenhouse that is forming now will two thirds of a degree C with each degree
work related to ocean acidification.
have consequences that last for hundreds of increasing latitude. With five degrees C
of thousands of years or more. But first, it of warming in a century, that translates
will profoundly affect much of life on the into an average poleward movement of
planetespecially us. more than 800 kilometers in that period,
for an average poleward movement of
A DESERT IN ITALY temperature bands exceeding 20 meters
one of the greatest uncertainties in cli- each day. Squirrels may be able to keep
mate prediction is the amount of CO2 that up with this rate, but oak trees and earth-
will ultimately be released into the atmo- worms have difficulty moving that fast.
sphere. In this article, I will assume indus- Then there will be the rains. Earth is a
trial civilization will continue to do what planetary-scale heat engine. The hot sun
it has been doing for the past 200 years warms equatorial air, which then rises
namely, burn fossil fuels at an accelerat- and cools. The cooling condenses water
ing rate until we can no longer afford to vapor in the air, which falls back to Earth
pull them out of the ground. as rainhence, the belt of torrential rains
Just how much CO2 could we put into that occur near the equator.
the atmosphere? All told, there are about Yet this water condensation also heats
one quadrillion metric tons (1021 grams) the surrounding air, causing it to rise even
of organic carbon locked up in Earths more rapidly. This hot, dry air reaches as
sedimentary shell in one form or another. high as jets fly, then spreads laterally to-
So far we have burned only one twentieth ward the poles. At altitude, the hot air radi-
of 1 percent of this carbon, or roughly ates heat to space and thus becomes cool,
2,000 billion metric tons of CO2. which causes it to sink back toward the
With all the carbon locked in Earths planets surface. The suns rays pass
crust, we will never run out of fossil fuels. through this dry, cloudless air, beating
We are now extracting oil from tar sands down to heat the arid surface. Today such
and natural gas from water-fractured dry air sinks occur at about 30 degrees
shaleboth resources once thought to be north and south latitude, thus creating the
technologically and economically inac- great belts of desert that encircle the globe.
cessible. No one can confidently predict With greenhouse warming, the rising
just how far ingenuity can take us. Yet air is hotter. Thus, it takes more time for
eventually the cost of extraction and pro- this air to cool off and sink back to Earth.
cessing will become so high that fossil fu- As a result, these desert bands move to-
els will become more expensive than al- ward the poles.
ternative resources. In the scenario envis- The climate of the Sahara Desert may
aged here, we ultimately burn about 1 move northward. Already southern Eu-
percent of the available organic carbon rope has been experiencing more intense
over the next few centuries. That is in the droughts despite overall increases in pre-
range of the amount of extraction most cipitation globally, and it may lose the
likely to become technologically feasible Mediterranean climate that has long
in the foreseeable future. We further as- been considered one of the most desir-
sume that in the future humanity will able in the world. Future generations may
learn to extract unconventional fossil fu- say the same about the Scandinavian cli-
els but will burn them at slower rates. mate instead.
FA S T - F O R WA R D
Global temperature
(annual average,
degrees Celsius) 25 14 15 20 25
High
Carbon dioxide
(atmospheric
concentration)
Sea level
Biomass
Biodiversity
Low
CRETACEOUS PREINDUSTRIAL TODAY NEAR FUTURE FAR FUTURE
(100 million years ago) (100 years ago) (100 years from now) (10,000 years from now)
FAR FUTURE: If green enters the oceans, it reacts with seawater Such chemical changes will most di-
house gas emissions from to become carbonic acid. In high enough rectly affect reef life, but the rest of us
burning fossil fuels continue concentrations, this carbonic acid can would be wise to consider the physical
unabated, sea levels may rise cause the shells and skeletons of many changes afoot. At the most basic level,
by 120 meters and polar marine organisms to dissolveparticular- water acts like mercury in a thermometer:
regions will become much ly those made of a soluble form of calcium add heat and watch it rise. The sea is also
warmer. Any human civiliza carbonate known as aragonite. being fed by water now held in ice caps.
tion still extant will need to Scientists estimate that more than a In high-CO2 times in the ancient past,
adapt to these conditions. quarter of all marine species spend part of Earth warmed enough for crocodilelike
their lives in coral reefs. Coral skeletons are animals to live north of the Arctic Circle.
made of aragonite. Even if chemical condi- Roughly 100 million years ago annual av-
tions do not deteriorate to the point where erage polar temperatures reached 14 de-
shells dissolve, acidification can make it grees C, with summertime temperatures
more difficult for these organisms to build exceeding 25 degrees C. Over thousands
them. In just a few decades there will be of years temperatures of this magnitude
no place left in the ocean with the kind of would be sufficient to melt the great ice
chemistry that has supported coral-reef sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. With
growth in the geologic past. It is not known the ice sheets melted completely, sea level
how many of these coral-dependent spe- will be about 120 meters higher, flooding
cies will disappear along with the reefs. vast areas. That waters weight on low-