★★★★★ 4
interesting science
Format: Hardcover
Under A White Sky, The Nature of The Future, Elizabeth Kolbert, 2021
In 2015 Elizabeth Kolbert won the Pulitzer Prize for her book the Sixth Extinction. In my review of that book, I wrote: Kolbert is not a scientist but a reporter and writer for The New Yorker magazine and as such her book is structured as a series of bylines as she travels around the world reporting on scientists investigating extinctions in both the present and the past. As in that book she adopts the same format but this time investigating “how the very sorts of interventions that have imperiled our planet are increasingly seen as the only hope for its salvation”.
Ice cores from the Antarctic and Greenland have shown that the last 10,000 years of earths history have been the most benign and stable climatological periods in the last 100,000 years. During this time, we have been able to develop agriculture, an amazing technological and a pervasive globe encompassing culture with a population now of almost 8 billion people. Without this unusually stable climate most of our current civilization would probably have not evolved or been possible. Up to this point we humans have taken this for granted thinking that this benign state will somehow last forever. In Kolbert’s last book she emphasized that due to our own rapacious destruction of earth’s ecosystems and our destabilization of climate stability, this situation is coming to an end and not responding is not an option.
Facing an unimaginable crisis of our own making how should we respond? When we intervene, are we smart enough not to cause newer unanticipated problems greater than the original problem we sought to solve? Kolbert travels around the world seeking an answer to this question. She visits places and examples where we historically have tried to solve problems such as sewage in Chicago or taming floods on the Mississippi only to create larger problems such as invasive species or sinking cities such as New Orleans.
The most interesting part of her book is when she addresses the people and places that are using current cutting-edge technology to save ecosystems and reverse global warming. One such example is on the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, one of the most diverse and prolific ecosystems on earth, which is under dire threat from oceanic warming and acidification. Faced with the real possibility of extinction of the reef in just decades, scientists are turning to genetic modification of Corals to make them more resistant to these fast-changing conditions.
Since 2012 a new gene editing technology called CRISPR-Cas has become ubiquitous. In fact, so ubiquitous that you can buy your own “genetic engineering home lab kit” from a company in California called Odin for $1800. Kolbert buys her own kit and is able to engineer a colony of E. coli bacteria into a strain that is resistant to streptomycin antibiotic. She then inserts a jellyfish gene into yeast which then glows in the dark. Sound dangerous? Yes, what could possibly go wrong, but this is also the technology to develop new global warming resistant corals or destroy malaria carrying mosquitos, control rapacious rodents on Pacific Islands or control a plague of Cane Toads in Australia, not to mention breakthrough medical benefits. We have so altered natural systems with invasive species, with climatological chaos that the only solution is further intervention. She quotes a scientist at the Australian Animal Health Laboratory: “What people are not seeing is that this is already a genetically altered environment. Invasive species alter the environment by adding entire genomes that don’t belong. By contrast Genetic engineers, by contrast, alter just a few bits of DNA here and there”. “The classic thing people say with molecular biology is: Are you playing God? Well no. We are using our understanding of biological processes to see if we can benefit a system that is in trauma”.
Do you feel guilty about all the carbon you are emitting into the atmosphere when you drive around in your SUV or eat a filet mignon? Now there is a way to assuage your guilt. There is a now a company called Climeworks that will do just that for the price of $1000 per ton of sequestered CO2. Being that each American emits about 20 tons per year following the American way of life and to totally assuage your guilt will cost you a cool $20,000 per year. Do you feel that guilty? Kolbert purchases one ton of sequestration and then visits the place where the deed is done which turns out to be at a geothermal power plant in Iceland. There they inject CO2 into the hot molten basalt at the bottom of their well to form limestone. This is a way the earth has been doing this process for millions of years without payment. In fact, it is the very process that transpired when the Himalayas were pushed up by the Indian subcontinent million of years ago, sequestered billions of tons of carbon into limestone and enabled the ice ages to begin 3 million years ago. Is this process a feasible solution to our current crisis? According to the latest UN climate report at this point, some form of sequestration is almost certainly required to avoid a catastrophic global temperature rise above 2 degrees regardless of what green technologies are introduced. Almost certainly the cost of that sequestration will have to be drastically reduced.
Is there another way to approach the problem? Here Kolbert interviews scientists who are studying a process called solar geoengineering which involves shooting reflective compounds or crystals into the stratosphere to reflect sun light and reduce the earths albedo or heat absorption. This the same process that occurs when large volcanic explosions expel billions of tons of dust and S02 that block incoming sunlight and cool the planet. Last time a truly global volcanic eruption occurred was Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 and caused catastrophic cooling causing mass famine in various places around the world. Is this a feasible solution? Maybe, certainly not to the extent of Tambora and one side effect might be changing the sky from blue to white and hence the title of the book. Sunsets might be improved however.
This a short book and quick read and one gets the sense that it was somewhat truncated because of the pandemic restricting travel. However, there is still a lot of interesting information about the future fate of our planet and what can be done to ameliorate the damage that we have inflicted. JACK
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Reviewed in the United States on March 1, 2021
