A few years ago, a major scientific experiment began. It was called biosphere2 (biosphere1 would be the planet we live on) and it’s purpose was to study ecological balance and sustainability. Biosphere2 was an absolute and complete failure. Yet, not without value, scientific experiments can sometimes teach us more when they fail than when they work.
In this case, the reasons why Biosphere2 failed is crucial – those reasons shed enormous light on the issue of climate change and how we should address it. Now before I continue the story – a few baselines need to be established. Firstly – there is no doubt that living organisms can and do change the atmosphere: we wouldn’t be here today if plants hadn’t started pumping it full of one of the most reactive, corrosive and toxic substances on the periodic table – something called Oxygen. Instead of wiping out life, life changed, and now virtually all species depend on it ! This change was not minor, the amount of free oxygen in the atmosphere before the evolution of photosynthesis was about 0.3% – it’s been at around 21% for many milions of years now.
To get an idea of the impact this had – imagine if we pumped flourine into the atmosphere to 21%, every animal species alive today (including us) would die instantly. On the other hand, life would survive, new animals would evolve – and they would use the flourine to live on, just like our distant ancestors did with oxygen.
So let’s get one thing clear – plants changed the atmosphere once, and we’re changing it now. We can’t destroy life, it’s survived far worse than us a million times over. If we nuke the planet, new lifeforms will arise that *want* highly radioactive environments. Life evolves everywhere it can… life evolves everywhere it can’t. What won’t be around – is us. Climate change is not about saving the planet. It’s about saving ourselves.
Of course, there’s another catch: the average lifespan of a species is 5 million years – a few made it to 10, some made it barely past 1, most are almost exactly on the average: and humanity is halfway through our time. We got abstract thought though – we could beat the odds – we have a shot – will we do anything with it ? If we are going to, we gotta get emotions and good intentions out of our efforts, listen to scientists and follow good advice – not stuff that sounds good or look fashionable.
So back to our story, why did Biosphere2 fail – and what can it teach us ? Biosphere2 was built and designed to be a perfect, self-sustaining ecology. It had plants, animals and people. A lake and a small desert and a bit of tropical forest. They made one small mistake early on: nobody weighed the carbon they put in (this would be very hard though since you need to estimate carbon from the wet weight of plants… ouch).
And almost immediately, the ecology was in trouble, they had to keep adding more oxygen. Was the plants not photosynthesizing enough ? Well.. they seemed to be, and the carbon dioxide level was stable, it’s just that oxygen kept disapearing…
We only found out where it went… some time after the project shut down in faillure. The carbon dioxide was never stable, and it wasn’t the oxygen that was disapearing. Concrete absorbs carbon dioxide while it cures, for a good ten years actually, any architect knows this – but they don’t really care. Ecologists, usually don’t. The curing concrete in the walls were sucking out carbon dioxide as fast as the humans and animals made it… the plants were producing oxygen – but that oxygen was being breathed in, and the carbon dioxide from that was being sucked into the walls.
So wait… the system was losing carbon-dioxide but the oxygen levels dropped ? Yep – because carbon dioxide is C02. In other words, for every atom of carbon in there, two atoms of oxygen is lost. Or to put it even more simply – if we burn a ton of carbon, we use up two tonnes of oxygen – and pump 3 tones of carbon dioxide into the air.
Carbon credits won’t help us squat. We can’t just put in oxygen instead, it’s a losing battle. We can’t see carbon and oxygen as a debit credit thing – carbon is good, carbon dioxide is a problem, and that is mostly made out of oxygen !
The problem here isn’t getting more oxygen out there, and you can’t offset carbon-dioxide with oxygen either. Emisions are not the major issue either. What we need to do – clear and simple: is burn a lot less carbon.
Carbon that isn’t being burned, can be used for useful things, like laying asphalt for roads, or printing books on – or heck, making babies out off. Carbon that’s burned is no longer there for any other use, it’s now stuck up in the atmosphere trapping inside it a whole lot of oxygen that we could also have use better (you know for stuff like *breathing* perhaps ?) – and trapping heat.
So how do burn less carbon ? Our single major burning activity is energy production – we need to stop burning oil and coal. Some of it we can replace with solar, some with wind, some with water – but none of that will come close to producing enough energy to supply our survival needs – where can we get the rest ?
It turns out, there is an energy source available that can do the job – it’s called nuclear energy. Modern nuclear energy is clean energy. It produces no polution at all (no it does not produce radioactive waste, that was old technology – modern breeder reactors use the waste from one reactor to fuel the next, what you get after that – has a radioactive life measured in decades, not in millenia).
No emissions, and no oxygen being turned into carbon dioxide.
All a good start right ? And finally, the worst thing about the carbon credit thing is that people think they cano offset their carbon usage by protecting rainforrests. There are many, many good reasons to protect the rainforrests but airpollution is not one of them, the two are unrelated. Rainforrests are not oxygen producing areas. Rainforrests produce C02 at night, and thus their actual net oxygen output is zero, they make it, and use it again themselves.
Plants only produce positive O2 when their soil is so rich that they don’t need to burn any carbon again – and that’s not rainforrests. Rainforrests have some of the worst soil in the world for growing plants in. Topsoil only a few inches deep – and that has all the minerals washed away by continous torrents of rain. The plants there survive by reusing their own oxygen production.
So no, saving an acre of amazon does not make up for pumping a ton of carbon dioxide into the air. By all means we need the acre of amazon so save it, but we need you to not pump the ton of carbon-dioxide either. Trading it won’t work. If you can only do one, do the C02 reduction because that helps all of us – but don’t try to pretend that doing the easy one makes up for not doing the hard one…
PS. There is one way the amazon clearing is affecting climate change. Clearing forrests for farmland generally involves burning them – that means a lot of living carbon being turned into carbon dioxide and sucking up a lot of the nearby oxygen while you’re at it. This is not the major form of forrest clearing, it’s a much smaller CO2 source than most power stations, but it should be mentioned for completeness.
