Climate Trek – The Book

Here’s an introduction to my forthcoming book— a fresh and independent overview of natural history that tells of planetary elements, forces and patterns that shape climate. It’s an in-depth portrait of Earth’s labyrinthine, interconnected systems that reveals the delicate balance between environment and sustainable life. Weaving together all the earth stories, Climate Trek shows that our climate is entering territory that no human has ever experienced—that hasn’t happened on Earth for 55 million years.

I’ve worked to review and summarize an ocean of scientific data and present it in accessible terms, to provide a solid context for understanding planetary climate today. It is my hope that the book will renew our sense of wonder and respect for the amazing world we inhabit, and increase awareness of the role of human beings in influencing the environment. I look forward to sharing it with you.

Mike

Climate Trek
Exploring the Forces that Shape Planetary Change
By Mike Tidwell

Introduction

Your life is a ride on a huge rocky sphere 25,000 miles around, with an atmosphere 7 miles deep. It’s a world where the stupendous interplay of elements and forces that allow you to take your next breath began 4.5 billion years ago. Yet how little we know of the blue-green world we humans cling to as it spins through the vastness of space!

Climate Trek is a journey into the complex and mysterious Earth processes that have forged the world we live in. It reveals the labyrinthine workings of our planet to be a single unified system that always seeks equilibrium—the delicate balance between environment and sustainable life.

Climate Trek is also about understanding change at the surface of our world. The surface environment is a wild patchwork of gases, liquids, solids, and solar variations that have been going at each other for billions of years. Yet the constant shifts in Earth materials—water, rocks, sunlight, hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, sulfur, and volcanism—work together to fashion what is our only home in the midst of a hostile universe. This is at once what makes it such a great story, and one that is hard to tell.

To learn Earth’s story, we will be trekking through two realms that encompass all we know of our world:

First, the tiny world of atoms and photons—the elements and energies that compose all of life. To know elements at their most primal level is to hold a Rosetta Stone for understanding huge Earth systems such as the atmosphere and biosphere.

Second, we make a journey in time, from the deep past of Earth’s formation to the present. This reveals how the movement of atoms in geologic time created conditions that generated life, and how finely balanced and interconnected that life is.

Section 1 of Climate Trek uncovers the mysterious world of atoms and photons, the key to understanding all planetary processes. It explores the origin, movement and nature of matter, and how science interprets hard-to-find clues about the early earth to learn of primal elements and energies influencing life.

Section II portrays the power of the sun, its output, its influence, and the extreme energies in play when solar photons smash into the upper atmosphere, warm the land and penetrate the seas.

Section III delves into the ancient past to tell the story of forces and elements that formed oceans, land masses and the atmosphere, and generated the evolution of life.

Here we track the patterns of key climate players—metals and non-metals (hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and sulfur). Hydrogen’s story ties together acidic oceans, weathering, coral reefs, diatoms, and the Tibetan Plateau. Oxygen’s story concerns its ancient battle with carbon, its importance to emerging life, and its long, slow rise into our atmosphere. Carbon’s story weaves together deep-earth methane, diamond, peat bogs, strange underground life forms, oxygen, warming, and periodic extinction of surface life. Sulfur’s story involves its relationships with oxygen, carbon, aerosols, cloud formation, and cooling.

This section also sheds light on a great split that must be maintained for surface life as we know it to continue: the separation, bounded at the Earth’s crust, between the oxygen world where we dwell, and the hidden, non-oxygen world that ruled during the great extinctions.

Retelling the major extinction events shows what happens when methane, a classic carbon-based greenhouse molecule, emerges from the deep earth.

Section IV builds on the understanding of elements and patterns to explore the deep Earth, rocks, moving plates and volcanoes. Here we see how greenhouse gases affect the atmosphere, and how the flow of atoms from the interior to the surface controls life and climate. The trek continues through changes in the world’s oceans and Antarctica.

Section V explores climate change in the context of a fully integrated and natural Earth process. It delivers a summary of changes in the sea, land and ice. The inevitable shift in our present climate is set in context with extinction patterns in the deep past.

Weaving together all the earth stories, Climate Trek shows that our climate is entering territory that no human has ever experienced—that hasn’t happened on Earth for 55 million years. Compelling evidence is presented that human activities are returning our climate to the polar swamps of the ancient past.

Throughout our trek, we’ll examine minute clues from millions of years ago as avidly as crime scene investigators. We’ll see how atoms found in ice, leaves, pollen, sediments, and mere molecules tell a dramatic story of forces that drove and reshuffled atoms in endless cycles over immense periods of time—building the atmosphere, the seas, the continents, and life itself. The discoveries of dedicated scientists will give us insight into the deep earth, the deep ocean, the stratosphere and polar ice—realms impossible to experience directly, but which exert a powerful influence on our existence.

As we trek through these worlds, a grainy picture of vast forces starts to emerge. The flow of atoms from the deep-earth to the surface controls life and climate. The carbon cycle is an ancient process that drives life and determines temperature and the amount of oxygen available for life. The conclusion is inescapable: a technologically savvy, but environmentally illiterate society faces eventual catastrophe when it burns enough fuel to change the atmosphere of the entire planet.

Climate Trek represents my exploration into earth sciences for the past thirty years. Because I love the story of our Earth, I created this planetary “field manual” not only to share wonders beyond imagination, but also to raise awareness about things we shouldn’t be doing on this small planet—such as burning hydrocarbons.

 Long ago I discovered that I had a knack for figuring out this nature business. After I earned a degree in engineering, I continued to study science, enthusiastically exploring natural history, physics, biology, genetics. The amount of information was staggering. With so much research coming out, it was the greatest time in the history of the world for a nature freak like me to be alive.

In 1988, however, I ran into something unsettling. On a field trip to the Monteverde Cloud Forest in Costa Rica, we were searching for one of the key species of the reserve, the endemic golden poison-arrow frog. No matter how hard we looked they weren’t to be found, much to the frustration of our guide. He told us that these frogs were common residents of the forest, yet he had not seen one for several months. Those animals, in all the years since my visit, were never located. A creature that had lived for millions of years in that forest had suddenly disappeared. No convincing explanation was forthcoming about the loss of this amphibian until recent work revealed that warmer night temperatures were activating different suites of fungi, some of which are deadly to frogs.

This incident was part of an accumulation of small, disturbing signs—a steady barrage of weird reports, a hodgepodge of articles on dying plants and animals and melting ice that was unnerving. Nothing you could point your finger at; it just kept coming, year after year—constant signs of environmental change. Finally I had a sobering thought: What if this stream of change wasn’t a natural variation, but a sustained shift in the climate? If true, it changed everything.

I went to the bookstores, but much to my amazement I couldn’t find any credible works on climate change as part of a whole planetary system. The traditional Earth books I found were lacking; they paid too much attention to the big sexy Earth structures and not enough to the nitty-gritty world of atoms and photons where the real action is.

I embarked on a journey of discovery as an expeditionary explorer, an adventurer—not bound by focus on one discipline, but free to follow wherever the clues led. I decided to follow certain elements through deep time, and track the photons issued from the sun, and see what patterns emerged. I would become a mini-expert in each piece of the puzzle and analyze what I found out. This allowed me to take a broad view, without the pressures of industry or academia, and discover that the secret to understanding nature lies in letting the very small (atoms and photons) inform us about the very large (systems and broad patterns).

Climate Trek is the outcome of this research and my passion for sharing the splendors of the Earth.

Last year I came across an article by James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies that fueled my commitment to a bold and unfettered view of climate change as part of the whole Earth story:

Reticence is fine for the IPCC [International Panel on Climate Change]. And individual scientists can choose to stay within a comfort zone, not needing to worry that they say something that proves to be slightly wrong. But perhaps we should also consider our legacy from a broader perspective. Do we not know enough to say more?

. . . There is, in my opinion, a huge gap between what is understood about human-made global warming and its consequences, and what is known by the people who most need to know, the public and policy makers. IPCC is doing a commendable job, but we need something more. Given the reticence that IPCC necessarily exhibits, there need to be supplementary mechanisms.

. . . Clearly, there is not sufficiently widespread appreciation of the implications of putting back into the air a large fraction of the carbon stored in the ground over epochs of geologic time.

J. E. Hansen, NASA Godard Institute for Space Studies
       Article submitted to Environmental Research Letters
       March 23, 2007

My research has led me to consider the many explanations homo sapiens has concocted about our surroundings. Part of being human is to fill the unknown with something. Staring in awe at an eclipse, or trembling at the roar of thunder—too many times explanations of the unknown have been tinged with primitive fears. We often prefer our own mythology over the way nature actually works. The environment that fosters free and open scientific inquiry has been rare for most of human history.

I have also reflected on the work of devoted investigators who gave everything in service to science. Often those honest explorers suffered great sacrifice—feared by society, ostracized, persecuted, ridiculed, even executed for what we now know to be truth. This makes their discoveries all the more special. Their contributions have given us fantastic insights into the nature of things, such as how atoms move and interact with light. Others have continued to courageously further that knowledge . . . in the impossible cold of Antarctica, under the black depths of the Mariana Trench, or on the dizzying peaks of the Himalayas, men and women now work steadfastly to bring light and understanding to the world.

Because of such commitment and perseverance, for the first time in human history we have a chance to know our world fully. We are living in an amazing time when one person can access the discoveries of investigators in myriad specialized fields. This is what has enabled me to make the climate trek and use the fundamentals—the atomic world and geologic time—as a lens to view the ocean, land and atmosphere, and to examine the influence of human behavior on climate. Each turn of the road, each peak scaled on that journey gave an ever more compelling picture of the changes taking place now, moment by moment, on our planet, and the inescapable conclusion about the human role in affecting Earth’s climate.

The Earth story turned out to be more moving than I could ever have imagined.

I invite you to gear up with compass, backpack and cap, and embark on the Climate Trek, to know the wonder of the amazing world we share.