What my 13 year-old ought to know about climate change

A letter to a smart kid

The first thing to wrap your head around is, well, fire.

Actual fire.

We’ve had it all along. We weren’t even properly modern human beings before we’d figured it out. That’s no exaggeration.

Anthropologists think people co-evolved with fire: ancient humans figured out how to cook, which meant they could get more nutrition out of food without having to spend so much time chewing and digesting. Cooking gave us the edge that let our brains get bigger and bigger. Fire made modern humans the way we are in the first place. Think about what that means: there was never a time when there were modern humans around but not fire. It’s us.

The ancient Greeks had this story about Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans and had to be tortured for all eternity for his sin. They had to chain him up and crows would come in the day and eat his liver out of his tummy all day, then it would regrow at night, and it would happen again the next day. Gruesome stuff.

But then, Prometheus did something unthinkable: he gave lowly little humans something only fit for the gods. There was this idea even then that there was something divine about fire, something God-like. And something so powerful, we’d end up being punished eternally for it.

Not, obviously, that the Greeks had any idea about combustion or atmospheric chemistry or anything like that. Call it a lucky guess. But they weren’t wrong. Fire is magical, but it has a dark side. The chemistry is rock-bottom basic.

Fuel + O₂ → CO₂ + H₂O

You add free oxygen to fuel in the presence of a spark and you’re going to get heat, water and CO₂. That’s what combustion does. That’s what fire is.

For the longest time, this wasn’t such a big deal. People were burning bits of wood and coal here and there to cook and to warm ourselves, but there weren’t enough of us or enough fires to produce all that much CO₂.

Only then the industrial revolution happened and we started burning much more stuff to get a whole lot of things done. Not just for cooking and heating, but to go places in trains, to make iron and steel and cement and fertilizer and to build all kinds of things. We started burning stuff not just in stoves and campfires but in engines and in great big factories on a scale that was way bigger than we’d ever done before. And who could blame us, right? This is what we’d been doing literally since before we were even fully modern humans!

We were just doing it more, and getting more out of it. Much more. Industrialization took us from where we were 300 years ago, when pretty much everybody except for a tiny minority was dirt poor, to where we are now, where most people worldwide have enough to eat every day. And it did that even though there are many more people now than there were then!

It’s important to keep this straight in your head, because there’s a lot of confusion about this out there. Lots of people who haven’t thought about it very carefully are going to tell you industrialization has been a terrible disaster. That’s just wrong. Modernity is an incredible achievement, and you should be proud of it. More people live decently now than was even imagined possible a few hundred years ago. It’s been such a thumping big success that lots of people have lost all sight of what it was even like to live at a time when most people went hungry most of the time.

And yet.

And yet, and yet. Just because the modern economy has been an incredible success story doesn’t mean it doesn’t have any drawbacks. Obviously it does. Part of growing up is to develop this ability to understand complexity: things can be good and bad at the same time. The modern economy relies on fire and that has incredibly good consequences and pretty serious downsides too. We rely on fire so much, we’ve actually started to change the chemical composition of the atmosphere. And scientists, on the whole, are pretty freaked out about it.

In 1959, out of every million particles in the atmosphere, 319 were CO₂. When I was born in 1975, it was up to 331. By the time you were born in 2011, it was up to 392.

Now we’re at 422 and still climbing.

And look, 422 parts out of a million might not sound like a lot, but it’s a big deal because CO₂ traps heat in the atmosphere. That’s not some new insight, we’ve known about the link since the 1890s.

At first, this was imagined to be a merely theoretical point. In the 1960s, a few scientists started to realize CO₂ emissions were growing so fast, they could have real impacts on people. Starting in the 1980s, as more and more evidence accumulated that the effect was likely to be really serious, we’ve spent more and more time trying to figure out what it all means. And for the last 20 years or so we’ve gotten into a little bit of a panic as we realize both that the climate effect could be very serious indeed and that we’re now so dependent on burning stuff that just stopping all of a sudden isn’t really possible.

What makes this so hard to deal with is that the cheap power we get from burning stuff is a huge part of the reason most people aren’t dirt poor anymore. So seemingly simple solutions like “just stop oil” won’t work. Our whole civilization is built around the availability of cheap energy to be gotten from burning stuff. Without it, people would be dirt poor again pretty soon. They’d hate that, and vote against whichever politicians had made them stop burning stuff, and put in power people who want to go back to burning stuff again.

What’s confusing is that it’s not like we don’t have other ways to make energy: we do! Solar! Wind! Hydro-power dams! Nuclear! You’d think we can just switch to those, pay a bit extra if that’s what it takes, and solve the problem. And a lot of people do think that. A lot of environmental activism is about saying exactly that. It sounds good in theory. But we’re starting to find out it’s not so easy in practice.

What we have is an extremely tricky coordination problem.

If the world had a king, it wouldn’t be hard: if everyone would shift at the same time, the shift would be difficult but doable. But we don’t have one king, there is no World Government. Instead, we have 192 separate governments for 192 separate countries. They’re each sovereign, which means none of them is allowed to make rules for the other ones. They can agree to rules, but coordinating among all 192 of them to agree on rules strict enough has turned out to be impossible.

It’s tricky beacuse each of those 192 governments would prefer the same thing: for the other 191 to stop burning stuff! Because the newfangled energy sources are all more expensive and more complicated than just burning stuff. For any given country, the best thing would be if all the other countries had to pay the extra costs and deal with all the extra complexity, while they continued to enjoy the simple, cheap power you get from burning stuff.

You can see the catch. If everyone thinks that way, then nobody stops burning stuff! It’s infuriating, but that’s where we are.

Now you might think “hey, if all those other countries want to be dicks and won’t stop burning stuff, maybe we should forget about them and do the right thing ourselves!” And yeah, some countries have tried that. But what we’re finding out is that that doesn’t work very well either.

Like take Germany: they decided that they didn’t care if nobody would join them, they’d try to run their whole country off of wind and solar. And for a while people in Germany felt really good about that. Only over time the problems of moving alone started to become pretty obvious: for one thing, power started to get really expensive in Germany, so big factories that use a lot of power started shutting down there, because they couldn’t make any money after paying those fat power bills. Then they opened the same factories over the border in Poland, or Turkey, or other places where power was cheaper…because they made it by burning stuff. So Germany ended up with fewer factories, fewer people working in factories, but that didn’t mean they were making any less CO₂. They were making just as much, just that they weren’t emitting it in Germany.

And it’s not just that, it’s that the wind doesn’t always blow, and the sun doesn’t always shine, so Germany ended up stuck with a crazy system where power is super cheap some of the time (when the sun is out and it’s windy) but super expensive at other times. Just this year they went through a couple of periods when the wind didn’t blow at all for days in a row and the whole system almost collapsed: they had to buy up lots of power from neighbouring countries, but of course that bid up the price of that power, which made power more expensive in France and Denmark and Poland too…it was like they were exporting their problem to all their neighbours through these high prices, which made people there mad at the German system too.

Of course politicians from other countries see what’s happened in Germany and realize trying to copy what Germany did isn’t a very good idea. Which leaves us kind of stuck about what to do next. Right?

Sort of. But not really. Because we do have some ways of making power that’s reliable and stable and cheap in the long run. You can use nuclear fission —splitting heavy atoms apart— to make lots and lots of power. The machines you need to do this are called nuclear reactors. They’re big and expensive to build, but once they’re built you can get power out of them really cheaply for 80 to 100 years. And they don’t produce any CO₂ at all. None.

So why don’t we just do that? Well, couple of reasons. Some of the older designs for reactors weren’t very safe, and there were a couple of accidents in the past where they malfunctioned and radiation leaked out, which really scared people. If you ask me, people hugely over-reacted to these accidents: even the worst one, back in the Soviet Union in 1986, killed way fewer people than just regular old pollution from burning stuff kills every year.

People aren’t very rational about this stuff. Or well informed. We now know how to build nuclear reactors that are 100% safe. Engineers have worked really hard on this, and have come up with clever designs that just can’t leak radiation no matter what: they’re built in such a way that if something goes wrong they shut themselves off automatically, without any need for anyone to do anything. Every single person on earth could die of a heart attack at the same time and these new reactors wouldn’t leak any radiation.

But people don’t know this, and it’s like they somehow enjoy being scared of nuclear power. So there’s been a lot of resistance to building more of these. But that’s starting to fade.

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People are starting to realize that if you want to keep the lights on and keep power affordable and reliable without burning stuff, relying on wind and solar won’t really work. Look at Germany. So, it’s going to have to be nuclear, mostly. As older people who remember the big nuclear disaster in 1986 die out, people are going to start asking more and more why we’re still holding back on this very obvious solution.

Thing is, this is going to take time. Nuclear reactors are big and complicated. It takes time to design and build them, and they cost a lot of money. But the good news is that the more of them you build the cheaper it gets to make the next one. Nuclear’s the only technology that’s ever successfully been rolled out in a big enough scale to really curb a country’s CO₂ emissions: France did it. From the 1970s to the 1990s they built more than 50 reactors, and all that practice paid off. Each reactor got cheaper than the one before. By the end, they were producing a LOT less CO₂, and their power is now cheap and reliable.

So what we need to do is pretty clear, really. It’s just a question if we can do enough of it quickly enough to stop the planet from heating up too quickly. We may not be able to. And if we’re not, we’re going to have to look at different options for cooling the planet directly.

There are actually a lot of ways we could do that, too, though most people find that discussion kind of upsetting, so they prefer to avoid it. We’d have to add particles to the atmosphere that make clouds brighter, or that make the top of the atmosphere itself brighter, to shield the earth from some sunlight. This would balance out the extra heating from the extra CO₂ from burning stuff.

But it freaks people out when you tell them you’re going to solve one problem you caused by putting weird garbage in the atmosphere by putting a different kind of weird garbage in the atmosphere. Scientists are pretty sure this would work, but people aren’t very rational about this stuff. Your daddy thinks we’re pretty sure to end up coming around to it, but not very many people agree with him about it. Yet. It’s going to take a long time to get people even comfortable enough to talk about these ideas in public — right now people are too scared even to do that. So this is stuff probably more for the deep future than for the next decade or two.

The bad news, then, is that for the next 20 years or so it’s definitely going to keep getting hotter and hotter. Summers are already disgusting here in Japan, and they’re going to get even worse. What else this will mean we’re not really sure, but a lot of scientists are worried about weather getting crazier and crazier over time. But in that time we’re also probably going to be moving pretty decisively from burning stuff to getting our power from nuclear reactors. That should mean that the rate at which the weather gets crazier slows down.

If, 20 years from now, the weather is really messed up, chances are we’ll then also get serious about trying to repair it by cooling the planet directly. We really should be spending more money researching the techniques to do that so that, when the time comes, we have a good idea of how to go about it. If we succeed at getting most of our energy from nuclear reactors between now and then, it may be that we only need to cool the earth down a little bit through those techniques. If we keep burning stuff willy-nilly, we may need to do that more aggressively.

I’m not going to lie, the bigger picture is pretty concerning. You’re going to have to deal with a lot more heat waves than I did, and probably with bigger storms and more droughts but also more floods, just more extreme weather in general. We’re basically Prometheus in all this: we got fire, this thing that’s so powerful it’s almost divine, and it transformed everything, but now we’re being punished for it. It’s really not fair for kids like you: none of this is your fault, but you’re still going to be stuck dealing with the consequences.

Still, the way around this isn’t some kind of secret. Your generation is going to need much more nuclear power, and it will probably have to repair the climate with techniques my generation isn’t comfortable with at all. Sorry! It’s definitely our bad!

But then, I’m not that sorry. We are leaving you a bit of a mess, there’s no question. But we’re also leaving you with the knowledge and the technology it will take to deal with it. We got into this mess because we’re humans and humans burn things. But you can get us out of it because you’re human, and humans repair things.