Crude by Sonia Shah

Author:Sonia Shah [Shah, Sonia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2010-05-25T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

Carbon Perils

FOR HUNDREDS OF millions of years, the carbon that had filtered down deep into the earth’s crust lay dormant, locked in its silent caves and tunnels beneath tons of rock. Then, in just a blink of time, humans expelled over half of it back to the circulating winds and currents at the surface of the planet.

The first glimmers of what this might do to the climate had been predicted over a century ago. In 1883, in an explosion heard over two thousand miles away, the Indonesian volcano Krakatau erupted, projecting ash, dust, and carbon dioxide six miles out into the atmosphere. Over 35,000 people died under tidal waves and a two-hundred-foot-thick layer of ash smothered area islands. The sun’s rays didn’t penetrate the thick cloud of dust for over two days.

On the other side of the planet, the chemist Svante Arrhenius was studying for his doctorate. The eruption set him to thinking. He theorized that the rapidly growing factories spouting carbon and other pollutants into the air might not be so different from Krakatau’s explosive release in its climate-changing impacts. He called it the “hothouse” effect.

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, along with methane and water vapor, absorbs the heat that radiates from the sun-warmed ground and seas, enmeshing the planet in a warming protective blanket. Water vapor is more abundant and methane absorbs more heat, but carbon dioxide is arguably a more dynamic player. It can linger in the atmosphere for centuries.1 A doubling of the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide levels, Arrhenius wrote in an 1896 paper, would increase the planet’s average temperature by five to six degrees Celsius.

The wooly Swede wasn’t too worried about it. The global warming would “allow our descendants, even if they only be those of a distant future, to live under a warmer sky and in a less harsh environment than we were granted.”2

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