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February 2024

History & Culture, Science & Technology

The kingdom of matter stores its treasures on many levels. Until recently, we thought there was only one. We had no idea there were others.

When we strike a match, a chemical reaction liberates energy stored in the molecules. Old chemical bonds break and new ones are forged. Now, the adjacent molecules begin to move faster and the temperature increases. Soon, the process becomes self-propagated, a kind of chain reaction.

The energy represented by a flame has been locked, perhaps for many years, in chemical bonds between atoms. Mediated by the electrons that revolved around their core. When we make a fire, we release this hidden chemical energy.

But there is a deeper level of matter that houses another kind of energy. Inside the heart of the atom, its nucleus. This hidden treasure was forged billions of years ago in distant stellar furnaces. Long before Earth was formed. It’s what powers the stars. Wresting this knowledge from nature is a cosmic rite of passage. The beings of any possible world clever enough to travel this deep into nature’s labyrinth better take care. The secret of starlight is nothing to fool with. Like fire, it can bring a civilization to life and it can burn it to the ground.

What is an atom?

What are atoms made of? How are they joined together? How could something as small as an atom contain so much power? Where do atoms come from?

The same place we do. When we seek the origin of atoms, we are searching for our beginnings. This quest takes us to the depths of space and time.

Long ago, before there was an Earth, there was a wisp of cold thin gas. The gas was made of the simplest atoms. And they were gravitationally attracted to one another. So, the cloud grew. The atoms contained small but heavy particles in their nuclei. The hydrogen had protons, the helium had neutrons as well. They both had a skittering veil of electrons in orbit around them. The atoms in the interior of the cloud moved ever faster as gravity pulled them ever closer together. Until the whole thing collapsed in on itself. This collapse raised the temperature so high, that the cloud became a natural fusion reactor.

In other words, a star.

Atoms operating according to the laws of physics met and fused in the unbroken darkness.

And then there was light.

In this froth of elementary particles, the nucleus of one of the atoms, a helium atom, was formed.

After billions of years, the star is now elderly. Having converted all of its available hydrogen fuel to helium. Now that it’s time for the star to die, it resumes the turning inward of its infancy. Our helium atom joined with two others to become one of our heroes, a carbon atom. That’s what happens in the hearts of stars. Soon, our carbon atom will tumble out of this red giant star into the interstellar ocean of space.

Meanwhile, in another part of the galaxy. Similar processes were unfolding as stars were born and died. The other atom of our tale was formed in the heart of this dying star. In the catastrophic process of going supernova, 226 protons and neutrons became fused to a carbon atom. Turning it into a uranium atom.

As chance would have it, after wandering the vast Milky Way galaxy, our two atoms both happened on the fiery birth of a small solar system.

Ours.

Our carbon atom has travelled far to become part of a small planet. After billions of years, it joined an extremely complex molecule, which has the peculiar property of making virtually identical copies of itself. The carbon atom plays its tiny role in the origin of life. Through all its incarnations, our carbon atom has had no self-awareness. No free will. It is merely an extremely minor cog in some vast cosmic machinery, working in accord with the laws of nature.

And that other atom? The uranium atom made in the supernova? What has become of it?

Our world was born in fire. And this tiny atom was drawn to it. Maybe it rode the explosive wave of a supernova. Or perhaps, it was attracted by the gravity of our sun and pulled down deeper and deeper into the interior, which was even more of a hell.

The Earth’s surface soon cooled, but the interior remained molten. The magma slowly circulating and our uranium atom found itself carried over the ages, from the deep interior, back up to the surface. Despite the high temperatures and pressures deep within the Earth, our atom’s integrity was never threatened. Atoms are small, old, hard and durable.

Everything is made of atoms, including us

Until the last years of the 19th century, we didn’t know about the frenzied activity inside the atom. And this is where our two atoms from opposite ends of the Milky Way galaxy finally met. It happened in Paris.

Our carbon atom became part of the retina of one of the world’s greatest scientists. This was just a few years after the discovery of X-rays. 

Marie Curie and her husband and research partner, Pierre, wanted to know how a piece of matter could make it possible to see through skin and even walls. The knowledge that there were rare places in the world where rocks, rich in uranium, possess these strange properties inspired Marie on her scientific quest.

The dull brown ore, still mixed with pine needles, came from the part of Eastern Europe that is now the Czech Republic. But this material was very rare. And even to distil a tiny amount of it required the most lengthy and labour-intensive efforts.

We lived in our single occupation, as in a dream.

Marie Curie

They worked under the worst possible conditions to purify the ore into a mineral called pitchblende, which was 50 to 80% uranium. This was quite an achievement, but Marie and Pierre were hunting for something far more rare. It took them three years to process tons of ore. To isolate a mere tenth of a gram of a substance she named radium.

Marie and Pierre had discovered a completely new element.

The Curies showed that the radium was entirely unaffected by extreme temperatures. That was strange. Most things subjected to such intense heat would change drastically. And, there was something else. It spontaneously emitted energy. Not through chemical reactions, but through some unknown mechanism. Marie Curie called this new phenomenon “radioactivity”. She and Pierre calculated the energy that spontaneously flowed from a lump of radium would be much greater than burning the same amount of coal. Radioactivity, to their astonishment, was millions of times more potent than chemical energy – the difference between liberating the energy that resides in molecules and the far greater power stored deeper down.

Between Marie, Pierre, little Irene and the man she would later marry, the family would win five Nobel prizes in science.

The bottles, tubes and flasks of pitchblende that they had refined, left a residue of radium particles. They were so potent, that they lit up the lab at night. As Marie wrote years later, “They were like Earthly stars, these glowing tubes in that poor rough shack.” Marie leapt to the correct conclusion that the luminescence was due to something happening inside the nuclei of radioactive atoms.

A World Set Free

For thousands of years, it had been thought that atoms were the smallest unit of matter. Curie’s earthly stars were evidence that within the atom was a possible world where even smaller particles were interacting. A hundred years after this magical night, Marie Curie’s cookbooks still glowed with the exquisite radioactivity she had discovered.

But it took a little time for the darker implications of this deeper understanding of nature to dawn in the mind of a visionary named H.G. Wells.

A writer, H. G. Wells was a genius at turning the new revelations of science into stories that captivated the world. And foreseeing as no one else, their gravest consequences. The writer H.G. Wells, who first imagined time machines and alien invasions had a nightmare of a future world where atoms were weaponized. In his book called The World Set Free written in 1913, he coined the phrase atomic bombs. And loosed them on helpless civilian populations. He set his vision of a nuclear war between England and Germany in the impossibly distant future of the 1950’s.

In 1933, the Hungarian physicist, Leo Szilard, was contemplating becoming a biologist. He read Wells’ novel and it started him thinking. Szilard knew that atoms are made of protons and neutrons on the inside. And a skittering veil of electrons on the outside. Suddenly, waiting for a traffic light to change at an intersection in London, he was struck by the thought, that if he could find a sufficiently large amount of an element that would emit two neutrons when it absorbed one, it would sustain a nuclear chain reaction. Two would produce four, four would produce eight and so forth. Until enormous amounts of energy in the nucleus itself could be liberated. Not a chemical reaction, but a nuclear one.

This was the moment our world changed. Leo Szilard also knew the power of exponentials and if a neutron chain reaction could be triggered down there in the world of the atom’s nucleus, then something like Wells’ imaginary atomic bomb might be possible. He shuddered at the thought of this destructive capability.

But this was just the latest development on a continuum of violence that began long long before.

War, a History

50,000 years ago, all humans were roving bands of hunter-gatherers. They communicated over limited areas by calling to one another. That is, at the speed of sound. Around 1,235 kilometres per hour. But over longer distances, they could communicate only as fast as they could run.

Around 12,000 years ago, about the same time as the invention of agriculture, they developed the power to kill at a longer distance. The kill radius expanded to the arc of an arrow launched by a bow. And they could kill one person with a single arrow. Our ancestors were not particularly warlike because there were so few people and so much room back then that moving on was preferable to armed conflict. Their weapons were used almost entirely for hunting. Their identification horizon was likely small. Only with the other members of their band of 50 or 100 people. But their time horizon took a giant leap. They worked long and hard planting crops in the here and now so that several months later, they could harvest them. They postponed present gratification for later advantage. They began to plan for the future.

By about 2,500 years ago, there was a new kind of war. The conquered territories of Alexander stretched from Macedonia to the Indus Valley. There were now many on planet Earth who owed allegiance to groups composed of millions. Over long distances, the maximum speed of both communication and transportation was the speed of the sail and the horse. Archidamus III, King of Sparta, was famed for his unflinching courage. He relished taking part in hand-to-hand combat with the enemy. It is said that when he first saw a projectile hurled by a Balista, he cried out in anguish. “Oh, Hercules! The valour of man is lost!”. Both the kill range and the kill ratio had increased exponentially. Now, ten corpses lay where one would have been. And the soldier who released the lever on the siege engine never even saw their faces. He remained far removed from the carnage on the other side of the city wall.

Today, the maximum speed of transportation is the escape velocity from Earth. 40,000 kilometres per hour. The speed of communication is the speed of light. The identification horizons have also expanded enormously. For some, it’s a billion or more. For others, it’s our whole species. And for a few, it’s all living things. The kill radius, in the worst-case scenario, is now our global civilization.

How did we get here?

Well, it was the result of a deadly embrace between science and state. And there was one scientist for whom no amount of destructive power was enough.

It’s hard to pinpoint the precise moment when the first nuclear war began. Some might trace it back to that arrow sailing over the treetops. Others might say it started much later, with three messages.

In 1939 on Adolf Hitler’s birthday, one of his brightest young scientists, Paul Harteck, had a special gift in mind for his Führer. Harteck wrote a letter to the Nazi war office, he wished to inform them that the latest developments in nuclear physics would make it possible to produce an explosive exponentially more powerful than conventional weapons. He was trying to give an atomic bomb to Adolf Hitler. But Hitler would never get his hands on a nuclear weapon, he had murdered, imprisoned or exiled many of the great physicists in his territories. Those who happened to be Jews or liberals and many who were both.

Exactly a month before the war began, Leo Szilard made a pilgrimage to the house Albert Einstein was renting on Long Island in New York. The physicist who usually chauffeured Leo Szilard on trips out of Manhattan was unavailable that August day in 1939. So, Szilard enlisted the services of a fellow Hungarian emigrate, a young scientist named Edward Teller. Persecution in Budapest sent Teller and his family to take refuge in Munich, where he lost his right foot in a traffic accident. In the early 1930s, Teller and his family were forced to flee once again.

Just as Harteck felt it his duty to inform Hitler. Szilard wanted the US President, Franklin Roosevelt, to know the awesome power of such a weapon. There was no scientist on Earth whose prestige and influence was comparable to Einstein’s. Einstein’s nightmare was imagining Hitler with a nuclear weapon at his disposal. But what would be the long-term consequences of this dangerous new knowledge? Which, once unleashed, could never be taken back. Einstein would take no role in the U.S. effort to build the atomic bomb, which became known as “The Manhattan Project.” But he did alert the then-U.S. President. Franklin Roosevelt, to the potential use of atomic nuclei in warfare. After the war was over, he told a reporter that if he had known the Germans would fail in developing an atomic bomb, he never would have signed the letter. But Edward Teller had no such ambivalence. He couldn’t wait to get started on weaponizing the atom.

The Russian physicist, G.N. Flyorov had tried for years to alert his leader, Joseph Stalin, to the possible military applications of a nuclear chain reaction. However, the Soviet Union was under siege by the Germans. And an atom bomb project was likely to take years to complete. With their backs against the wall, it seemed too impractical to even think about. In 1942, Flyorov had published a scientific paper on nuclear physics. Now, he was excited to see what the eminent physicists in Europe and the United States had to say about it. Flyorov was puzzled. None of the physicists of the International Scientific Community thought his paper worthy of comment.

At first, he was hurt, but then he realized what was really happening. American and German scientific journals were being scrubbed of any nuclear physics papers as both nations secretly worked on building the bomb. It was this absence of published data, the dogs that did not bark, that moved Flyorov to re-double his efforts to convince Stalin to start his own nuclear weapons program.

In all three cases, it was the scientists, not the generals or the arms dealers, who informed their leaders that a huge increase in the kill ratio was possible.

The Manhattan Project

The U.S. Department of War chose the remote location of Los Alamos, New Mexico as the headquarters for the atomic bomb research project. It had been recommended by the project’s director, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had recuperated there from an illness as a teenager.

But for Edward Teller, an atomic bomb wasn’t big enough. He dreamed of even greater lethality. A weapon in which the atomic bomb was nothing more than a match to light a fuse to the nucleus. A thermal nuclear weapon. What Teller affectionately called, the super.

If Edward Teller had a polar opposite in the scientific community, it would have been Joseph Rotblat. Rotblat was born in Warsaw to a wealthy family, who like Teller’s, had lost everything. In the summer of 1939, just before the Nazis invaded, he was invited to England to take a research position at the University of Liverpool. At the last minute before his departure, his beloved wife, Tola had an emergency appendectomy. She was forced to remain behind until she was well enough to travel. Tola insisted that Joseph go on ahead to prepare their new home. It would just be a matter of weeks, she told him.

The challenge to the Manhattan Project team was to find a chemical fuse that would light the nuclear chain reaction, first imagined by Leo Szilard in London. The scientists and engineers told themselves that they would be averting a grave danger by building a bomb of unprecedented destructive power. Their government could be trusted. They would never use such a weapon in an act of aggression, not like those other governments. These atomic scientists were the first to see building nuclear weapons as a deterrent to using them. The fear of Hitler with an atomic bomb was the driving rationale for the Manhattan Project.

And yet, when Germany surrendered and Hitler was no more, of the thousands of scientists who worked on the bomb, only one resigned. It was Joe Rotblat. In the years that followed, whenever he was asked about his decision, he always rejected any suggestion that he had done so out of moral superiority. He would just smile and say, the truth was that he desperately missed his wife, who had been prevented from leaving Warsaw and lost to him in the chaos of the war. With its end in Europe came his chance to go and search for her. But, he never found her. Except as a name on a list of the dead. Tola had perished in the Holocaust, exterminated at the Belzec concentration camp. Although he lived another 60 years, Rotblat never remarried.

Of the three nations that pursued wartime research into building the bomb, only the U.S. succeeded before the war’s end. And historians believe that was because America had taken in so many immigrants. Of the leading figures in the Manhattan Project, only two were native-born. Only one got his PhD in the U.S. Atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending the Second World War. Two months later, President Truman invited Oppenheimer for congratulations in the Oval Office. But to Truman’s dismay, Oppenheimer was in no mood to celebrate.

Less than four years later, the Russians exploded their atomic bomb. And shortly after, both nations went on to create thermonuclear hydrogen bombs. The nuclear arms race begun by those three letters from scientists was off to a terrifying start. After the war, Teller’s dreams of greater and greater killing power were to come true. In the early 1950s, when the Communist witch hunts began in the United States, he was perfectly happy to hint that Robert Oppenheimer, his former boss, who had brilliantly run the Manhattan Project, should be stripped of his security clearance, thereby ruining Oppenheimer’s career.

Despite dramatic reductions in nuclear arsenals, the spectre of nuclear war haunts us still. How can we sleep so soundly in the shadow of a smoking volcano?

A Tale of Two Atoms

We’re back on the trail of one of our two atoms. The uranium atom. A uranium atom is inherently unstable. Sooner or later, it decays. A particle from its nucleus breaks away, transforming the uranium atom into an entirely different element. Thorium. Subatomic particles move like bullets through the fine structure of life. Shearing electrons from their molecules. This is how ionizing radiation affects living things. Those chromosomes never had a chance. This is why atomic weapons are so much more dangerous than conventional ones. Ionizing radiation is all around us and even inside us. At low levels, it poses no threat. But at higher levels, it’s a different story.

In the near term, exposure to lethal levels of radiation can cause a runaway reaction in the cell that makes it multiply exponentially. Cancer. But its power to harm can also echo down the corridors of time. When radiation tears into the chromosomes of the butterfly, it leaves a trail of destruction in its wake that changes the destiny of the butterfly’s unborn offspring. A mutation in its genes We have a lot in common with butterflies. Any change in the DNA architecture will be copied over and over again in succeeding generations. The damage is passed on. Vandalizing our future.

We are made of atoms that were born in stars thousands of light years away in space and billions of years ago in time. The search for our origins has carried us far from our epoch in our world. We are star-stuff, deeply connected with the rest of the universe. The matter we are made of was generated in cosmic fire. And now, we, ambulatory collections of seven billion billion billion atoms intricately assembled over aeons have devised a means to tap that cosmic fire, hidden in the heart of matter.

We cannot unlearn this knowledge. And tragically, insanity runs in our family.

The letters that the scientists wrote to begin this nightmare were followed by another. This one, a letter to the planet, stating that this new understanding of physics demanded a new way of thinking:

Shall we choose death because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal as human beings to human beings, remember your humanity and forget the rest.

And what of our other atom? The carbon atom? It’s inside one of you.

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Science & Technology

Once there was a world not so very different from our own.

There were occasional natural catastrophes, massive volcanic eruptions and, every once in a while, an asteroid would come barrelling out of the blue to do some damage.

But for the first billion years or so, it would’ve seemed like a paradise, the very personification of its name: The Goddess of Beauty.

This is what we think the planet Venus might have looked like when our solar system was young.

Then things started to go horribly wrong.

The planet Venus, which once may have seemed like a heaven, turned into a kind of hell. The difference between the two can be a delicate balance, far more delicate than you might imagine.

Once things began to unravel, there was no way back.

This is what Venus, our nearest planetary neighbour, looks like today.

Venus’s oceans are long gone. The surface is hotter than a broiling oven, hot enough to melt lead. Why? You might think it’s because Venus is 30% closer to the Sun than the Earth is, but that’s not the reason. Venus is completely covered by clouds of carbon dioxide and sulphuric acid; the latter keeps almost all the sunlight from reaching the surface. That ought to make Venus much colder than Earth.

So why is Venus scorching hot? It’s because the small amount of sunlight that trickles in through the clouds to reach the surface can’t get back out again. The flow of energy is blocked by the dense atmosphere of carbon dioxide. That carbon dioxide gas – or CO2 for short – acts like a smothering blanket to keep the heat in.

No one is burning coal or driving big petroleum guzzlers on Venus. Nature can destroy an environment without any help from intelligent life.

Venus is in the grip of a runaway greenhouse effect.

In 1982, the scientists and engineers of what was then the Soviet Union successfully landed Venera 13 on Venus. They managed to keep it refrigerated for over two hours, so it could photograph its surroundings and transmit the images back to Earth before the onboard electronics were fried.

This is what Venera 13 saw.

Venus and Earth started out with about the same amount of carbon, but the two worlds were propelled along radically different paths, and carbon was the decisive element in both stories. On Venus, it’s almost all in the form of gas – carbon dioxide – in the atmosphere.

Most of the carbon on Earth has been stored for aeons in solid vaults of carbonate rock, like limestone and chalk. How? Volcanoes supply carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and the oceans slowly absorb it. Working over the course of millions of years, microscopic algae harvest the carbon dioxide and turn it into tiny shells. They accumulate in thick deposits of chalk, or limestone. Other marine creatures take in carbon dioxide to build enormous coral reefs. And the oceans convert dissolved CO2 into limestone even without any help from life. As a result, only a trace amount is left as a gas in Earth’s atmosphere. Not even four-hundredths of one per cent.

Think of it – about four molecules out of every ten thousand. And yet, it makes the critical difference between a barren wasteland and a garden of life on Earth. With no CO2 at all, the Earth would be frozen. And with about twice as many, we’re still talking about only six molecules out of ten thousand, things would get uncomfortably hot and cause us some serious problems.

But never as hot as Venus; not even close. That planet lost its ocean to space billions of years ago. Without an ocean, it had no way to capture CO2 from the atmosphere and store it as a mineral. The CO2 from erupting volcanoes just continued to build up.

Today, that atmosphere is 90 times heavier than ours. Almost all of it is heat-trapping carbon dioxide. That’s why Venus is such a ferocious inferno – so hostile to life.

Earth, in stunning contrast to Venus, is alive. It breathes, but very slowly. A single breath takes a whole year.

The forests contain most of Earth’s life, and most forests are in the Northern Hemisphere.

When spring comes to the north, the forests inhale carbon dioxide from the air and grow, turning the land green. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere goes down. When fall comes and the plants drop their leaves, they decay, exhaling the carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. The same thing happens in the Southern Hemisphere at the opposite time of the year. But the Southern Hemisphere is mostly ocean. So it’s the forests of the north that control the annual changes in global CO2.

Earth has been breathing like this for tens of millions of years. But nobody noticed until 1958 when an oceanographer named Charles David Keeling devised a way to accurately measure the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Keeling discovered the Earth’s exquisite respiration. But he also discovered something shocking – a rapid rise, unprecedented in human history, in the overall level of CO2, one that has continued ever since.

It’s a striking departure from the CO2 levels that prevailed during the rise of agriculture and civilization. In fact, the Earth has seen nothing like it for millions of years.

How can we be so sure? The evidence is written in water.

The Earth keeps a detailed diary written in the snows of yesteryear. Climate scientists have drilled ice cores from the depths of glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica. The ice layers have ancient air trapped inside them. We can read the unbroken record of Earth’s atmosphere that extends back over the last 800,000 years. In all that time, the amount of carbon dioxide in the air never rose above three-hundredths of one percent. That is, until the turn of the 20th century. And it’s been going up steadily and rapidly ever since. It’s now more than 40% higher than before the Industrial Revolution. By burning coal, oil and gas, our civilization is exhaling carbon dioxide much faster than Earth can absorb it. So CO2 is building up in the atmosphere. The planet is heating up.

Every warm object radiates a kind of light we can’t see with the naked eye—thermal infrared light. We all glow with invisible heat radiation, even in the dark.

This is what Earth looks like in the infrared. You’re seeing the planet’s own body heat.

Incoming light from the Sun hits the surface. The Earth absorbs much of that energy, which heats the planet up and makes the surface glow in infrared light. But the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere absorbs most of that outgoing heat radiation, sending much of it right back to the surface. This makes the planet even warmer.

This is all there is to the greenhouse effect. It’s basic physics, just bookkeeping of the energy flow. There’s nothing controversial about it.

If we didn’t have any carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, the Earth would just be a great big snowball, and we wouldn’t be here. So, a little greenhouse effect is a good thing. But a big one can destabilize the climate and wreck our way of life.

All right but how do we know that we’re the problem? Maybe the Earth itself is causing the rise in CO2. Maybe it has nothing to do with the coal and oil we burn. Maybe it’s those damn volcanoes. They’ve already doomed the planet Venus anyway.

Every few years, Mount Etna, in Sicily, blows its stack. Each new eruption sends millions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere.

Now, combine that with the output of all the other volcanic activity on the planet. Let’s take the largest scientific estimate – about 500 million tonnes of volcanic CO2 entering the atmosphere every year. Sounds like a lot, right? But that’s not even two percent of the 36 billion tonnes of CO2 that our civilization is cranking out every year. And, funny thing, the measured increase in CO2 in the atmosphere tallies with the known amount we’re dumping thereby burning coal, oil and gas. Volcanic CO2 has a distinct signature – it’s slightly heavier than the kind produced by burning fossil fuels. We can tell the difference between the two when we examine them at the atomic level. It’s clear that the increased CO2 in the air is not from volcanoes. What’s more, the observed warming is as much as predicted from the measured increase in carbon dioxide.

It’s a pretty tight case. Our fingerprints are all over this one.

How much is 36 billion tonnes of CO2 per year? If you compressed it into solid form, it would occupy about the same volume as Mount Kilimanjaro. And we’re adding that much CO2 to the air every year, relentlessly, year after year.

Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, the world’s tallest free-standing mountain. With a bit of tweaking, it gives a scale of just how much CO2 we are dumping into our atmosphere.

Unlucky for us, the main waste product of our civilization is not just any substance. It happens to be the chief climate-regulating gas of our global thermostat, year in, year out. Too bad CO2 is an invisible gas. Maybe if we could see it, if our eyes were sensitive to CO2 – and perhaps there are such beings in the cosmos – if we could see all that carbon dioxide, then we would overcome the denial and grasp the magnitude of our impact on the atmosphere.

But the evidence that the world is getting warmer is all around us. For starters, let’s just check the thermometers; Weather stations around the world have been keeping reliable temperature records since the 1880s, and NASA has used the data to compile a map tracking the average temperatures around the world through time.

Yellow means warmer temperatures than the average, for any region in the 1880s. Orange means hot. And red means hotter. The world is warmer than it was in the 19th century.

As far back as 1896, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius calculated that doubling the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would melt the Arctic ice. In the 1930s, the American physicist E.O. Hulburt, at the Naval Research Laboratory, confirmed that result. So far, it was still just theoretical. But then, the English engineer Guy Callendar assembled the evidence to show that both the CO2 and the average global temperature were actually increasing.

Since Dr Frank Baxter uttered these words in 1958, we’ve laden our atmosphere with an additional 1.36 trillion tonnes of CO2.

If we don’t change our ways, what will the planet be like in our children’s future? Based on scientific projections, if we just keep on doing business as usual, our kids are in for a rough ride:

  • killer heat waves
  • record droughts
  • terminal tropical and highly infectious diseases in the far reaches of the globe
  • mass extinction of species
  • rising sea levels and sinking coastal cities
  • mass death of coral reefs by ocean warming
  • increase in the intensity of catastrophic storms
  • runaway wildfires

We inherited a bountiful world made possible by a relatively stable climate. Agriculture and civilization flourished for thousands of years. And now, our carelessness and greed put all of that at risk.

Okay, so if we scientists are so good at making these dire, long-term predictions about the climate, how come they’re so lousy at predicting the weather? Besides, this year, we are having a colder season in my country. For all us scientists know, we could be in for global cooling.

Here’s the difference between weather and climate: Weather is what the atmosphere does in the short term – hour to hour, day to day. Weather is chaotic, which means that even a microscopic disturbance can lead to large-scale changes. That’s why those ten-day weather forecasts are useless. A butterfly flaps its wings in Kinshasa, and six weeks later, your outdoor wedding in Gaborone is ruined.

Climate is the long-term average of the weather, over several years. It’s shaped by global forces that alter the energy balance in the atmosphere, such as changes in the Sun, the tilt of the Earth’s axis, the amount of sunlight the Earth reflects back to space and the concentration of greenhouse gases in the air. A change in any of them affects the climate in broadly predictable ways.

Climate has changed many times in the long history of the Earth but always in response to a global force. The strongest force driving climate change right now is the increasing CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels, which is trapping more heat from the Sun. All that additional energy has to go somewhere. Some of it warms the air. Most of it ends up in the oceans. All over the world, the oceans are getting warmer. It’s most obvious in the Arctic Ocean and the lands that surround it.

Okay, so we’re losing the summer sea ice in a place where hardly anyone ever goes. What do I care if there’s no ice around the North Pole?

Ice is the brightest natural surface on Earth, and open ocean water is the darkest. Ice reflects incoming sunlight back into space. Water absorbs sunlight and gets warmer, which melts even more ice, which exposes still more ocean surface to absorb even more sunlight. This is what we call a positive feedback loop. It’s one of many natural mechanisms that magnify any warming caused by CO2 alone.

Collapsed block of ice-rich permafrost along Drew Point, Alaska, at the edge of the Beaufort Sea. In the 1950s, the shoreline was two kilometres further out, and it was breaking off at a rate of about 6 metres per year. Now it’s been eaten away at about 20 metres per year.

The Arctic Ocean is warming at an increasing rate. So it’s ice-free during more of the year. That leaves the shore more exposed to erosion from storms, which are also getting more powerful, another effect of climate change.

The northern reaches of Alaska, Siberia and Canada are mostly permafrost, ground that has been frozen year-round for millennia. It contains lots of organic matter, old leaves and roots from plants that grew thousands of years ago. Because the Arctic regions are warming faster than anywhere else on Earth, the permafrost is thawing and its contents are rotting, just like when you unplug the freezer. The thawing permafrost is releasing carbon dioxide and methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. This is making things even warmer, another example of a positive feedback mechanism. The world’s permafrost stores enough carbon to more than double the CO2 in the atmosphere. At the rate we’re going, global warming could release most of it before the end of the century. We might be tipping the climate past a point of no return into an unpredictable slide.

Okay, the air, the water and the land are all getting warmer, so global warming is really happening. But maybe it’s not our fault. Maybe it’s just nature. Maybe it’s the Sun.

No, it’s not the Sun. Scientists have been monitoring the Sun very closely for decades, and the solar energy output hasn’t changed. What’s more, the Earth is warming more at night than in the daytime, and more in winter than in summer. That’s exactly what we expect from greenhouse warming, but the opposite of what increased solar output would cause. It’s now clear beyond any reasonable doubt that we are changing the climate.

The Sun isn’t the problem. But it is the solution. In all its glory, the Sun pours immaculate, free energy down upon us; more than we will ever need; More solar energy falls on Earth in one hour than all the energy our civilization consumes in an entire year. The winds themselves are solar-powered because our star drives the winds and the waves. Unlike solar collectors, wind farms take up very little land, and none at all, if offshore, where the winds are strongest. If we could tap even one per cent of the available solar and wind power, we’d have enough energy to supply all our energy needs forever, and without adding any carbon to the atmosphere.

It’s not too late. There’s a future worth fighting for. How do I know? Every one of us comes from a long line of survivors. Our species is nothing if not adaptive. It was only because our ancestors learned to think long-term and act accordingly, that we’re here at all. We’ve had our backs to the wall before, and we came through to scale new heights. In fact, the most mythic human accomplishment of all came out of our darkest hour.

About 10,000 years ago, our ancestors all over the world took advantage of another form of climate change, the gentler climate of the intermission in the ice age – they invented agriculture.

They gave up the ceaseless wandering, hunting and gathering that had been their way of life for a million years or so, to settle down and produce food. They found a way to harvest ten to a hundred times more solar energy than the environment naturally provided for their ancestors. People all over the world made the difficult transition from nomadic cultures to agricultural ones that used solar energy more efficiently. It gave rise to civilization. We stand on the shoulders of those who did the hard work that such a fundamental transformation required.

Now it’s our turn.

If life ever existed on Venus, it would have had no chance to avert the hellish destiny of that world. The runaway greenhouse effect was unstoppable.

Earth is our world. And that world is now. There are no scientific or technological obstacles to protecting our world and the precious life that it supports. It all depends on what we truly value and if we can summon the will to act.

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