Ice Time: 19th Anniversary Edition, or I'm Sorry, But I Didn't Have Time to Write a Short Post

Life stood still, sort of, before the book packed itself off for the typesetter. Two weekends ago I raked the leaves, which had been lying in piles in the backyard since November. It was gross. This weekend I revisited something I’ve wanted to do since January. Hopefully pretty soon I’ll catch up and will be able to write about events in real time. In the meantime, here is an entry I wrote in January, didn’t post, and then revisited last weekend.

When I introduced myself and my work to my dinner companions at the 2nd annual North Carolina Science Blogging conference in January, Tom Levenson shared that he had written a book about climate, in 1989. [Paraphrasing:] “You know how much the story has changed since then?” he asked rhetorically. He shrugged his shoulders. “Not much.”


For readers of Tom’s blog, Inverse Square, an interesting place to begin talking about this book, Ice Time, is with Tom’s charming consistency of voice. Ice Time’s narrative rolls smoothly from transfigurations of Earth’s earliest atmospheres and climates—from billions to millions to thousands to hundreds of years ago—through the maturation of climate science, through the modeled futures that scientists ran on what passed for powerful computers in the late 1980s. Nearly 20 years later, Tom’s blog is illustrated with paintings and other artful images. This eye for illustration works its way into the flow of the book. In fact, one of several shared elements between The Carbon Age and Ice Time is their authors’ penchants for dropping art metaphors and passages from literature into explications of scientific arcana — arcana that otherwise obscure the artfulness and creativity within science. From Ice Time:
Science gets a bad rap because the math is hard, the technology daunting, and the work—digging about in the ice or running a deep ocean drill off some workaday ship—is so prosaic. But ideas in science are as much a creative product as they are in a painting or a book, and they can be judged by the same criteria. [My emphasis — ER] Do the parts of the reasoning fit together nicely? Is the explanation complete? Does the argument advance with grace, without too many stumbles to account for stray details? Does the idea possess that wonderful clarity that makes it seem like it ought to be true?
Art proper should be judged (arguably) by these criteria. It’s glorious that science can be as well. As it turns out, nature in many instances functions in ways that can and do seem beautiful to our human penchant for simplicity, neatness, and symmetry (see the entry below about Occam’s Razor Carl Sagan’s baloney detector). This attraction to certain “beautiful things” may even be a function of biological predisposition. Bilateral symmetry is probably the first place to look for possible links between various human aesthetics and patterns in nature. Even my high school biology textbook made this point. With the entire world of bilateral symmetry to choose an illustration from, the authors picked a headshot of Lucille Ball. 



Ice Time divides into three parts, the deep past, the maturation of climate science, and visions of the future – climatologists’ computer models that “discipline the imagination.” Since this is a blog, and not the New York Review of Books, I’ll limit myself to analyses of how the science of each section has changed — or largely hasn’t — since Ice Time was published. In a way, parts of The Carbon Age read (to me) like a 19th anniversary edition of Tom’s first book.

Back to Durham, in January. When Tom said he’d written a climate book in the late ‘80s, I asked him the title. “Ice Time,” he said and smiled – and then shrugged his shoulders. “It’s not a great title.” I’d like to walk through this door Tom opened for a second, at least in terms of the first part of the book, also called “Ice Time.” Part I drives out of the most distant Earthly past, the collection of dust into pebbles, pebbles into rocks, rocks into asteroids, into planetesimals that slammed into each other, making the volatile viscous soup of early Earth. 

The overarching trajectory of science in these early chapters has not changed all that much. By the late 1980s, scientists had determined the planet had vanishingly little atmospheric oxygen for the first half of its existence (“You can nail that to the wall,” John Hayes, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, once put it to me.) Rocks 2.3 billion years old or so show traces of a massive glaciation. The same year Ice Time came out, Joseph Kirschvink of Caltech published a seven-paragraph note in a 1,400-page geology compendium suggesting that climate collapses led to a series of “snowball Earth” episodes 800 million to 600 million years ago. This dramatic phrase later encapsulated this much older global freezing as well, and made the whole topic of study catchy enough for limited mass-media attention. The stories of how oxygen may have accumulated in the atmosphere, and eventually enabled complex cells and multicellular life are regular fodder in the scientific journals.

This first third of the book, “Ice Time,” sets up the myriad interactions among sources and sinks of the global carbon cycle. What’s fun about reading the book today is that climate science was a truly a novelty. Computer scientists were beginning to form institutional alliances with atmospheric chemists and geologists. The time was filled more with intellectual drive and excitement than looming threats. Today, the novelty of climate science captured in Ice Time has worn off, or it’s been supplanted by the astonishing severity and reality of climate change. Evidence was strong 19 years ago that warming was occurring and that it was anthropogenic in cause, but the margins of error – the gap between modeled and observed climates — were still a concern. That’s no longer the case, and hasn’t been for some time. 

At the core of this new science was the interplay of many previously stovepipe disciplines. Institutions needed to draw on many areas of expertise given the dynamism of the Earth system. “Perhaps the single central concept of climate science is the idea of feedback, or more generally, of connections between disparate places and processes, connections that go both ways,” Tom writes. The first part of the book illustrates the regular and irregular processions of climates, the driving effects of tectonics and influences of evolution. The glaciation 2.3 billion years ago was truly an icy time, probably the most severe in Earth history. Many living things probably disappeared forever, unable to cope with the oxygen onslaught and the climate collapse it caused over millions of years.

But here’s the thing. In an absolute sense, there’s never been an ice time on Earth. Mars has seen a literal ice time for probably a couple of billion years. If there was ever organic life on Mars it won’t be coming back under current conditions. Earth has never turned irreversibly into an icehouse or a greenhouse. Microscopic crystal zircon flakes found in Western Australia date to 4.4 billion or 4.3 billion years ago. Oxygen isotope evidence within them suggests that they formed in contact with liquid water. That may mean that Earth has had liquid water on it continuously for 4.4 billion years. Before that it would probably have been too hot from its violent formation for oceans to precipitate. During the paleoproterozoic “snowball Earth” episode, it is estimated that oceans froze 300 meters thick at the equator. Beneath the ice, tectonic processes would have kept spewing heat and minerals into the liquid ocean, and significantly, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This gas would have accumulated and eventually built a new greenhouse that melted the ice and returned life to the surface. 

That brings me to a semantic point about how scientists and by extension, everybody else, talk about the atmosphere, and how it has changed since the late 1980s. Anthropogenic global warming was lumped into the general phrase “greenhouse effect” until somewhere in the early- to mid-1990s. Perhaps clarity came from the first IPCC report. An interesting scientific paper to read after reading Ice Time might be “The Greenhouse Effect: Science and Policy” [NB: Link is .pdf!]. Stephen Schneider wrote the paper when he hung his hat at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the history of which takes up much of the middle third of Ice Time. Schneider wrote in 1989: “It is helpful to break down the set of issues known as the greenhouse effect into a series of stages, each feeding into another, and then to consider how policy questions might be addressed in the context of these more technical questions.” In 1989, the stages of the greenhouse effect were breaking down, but not so much that “global warming” or “climate change” became the predominant descriptor of the trend. [True fact ex-Ice Time: Stephen Schneider appears in Woody Allen’s 1973 movie Sleeper, which is filmed in part at NCAR’s architectural gem of a headquarters. “In his daily life, Schneider is hardly used to filling an extra’s role, and Allen noticed. ‘He told me,’ Schneider says, ‘he promised me that I would be in the scene, that my grandmother would get to see me. Then he told me not to look at the camera.”]

I was in college in 1989 and remember conversations in which the newly topical, now naive question emerged, “Do you think the greenhouse effect is really happening?” The answer is, Yes, because there has likely been a greenhouse as long as Earth has existed. There is no life (that we know of) on Venus, in part because its 96 percent carbon dioxide greenhouse keeps the surface about 700 degrees C. 

The second part of Ice Time, “Electronic Winds,” reads nearly as fresh today and is possibly even more important than it was in 1989, since this time has passed and computer modeling is still treated like a mysterious black box by the vast majority of people.

Ice Time covers the emergence of climate science, specifically the rise of the NCAR. Were it not for Tom’s obligatory references to climate as a “new science,” even though it still is, this material would still be current – just add a few paragraphs here or there, or another chapter, about how computing power continues to grow exponentially, and models become more refined. Tom spent a good deal of time at NCAR in Boulder, Colorado, hanging out with the programmers and scientists who ran what today seem like primitive machines. 

“Climate science lives and dies by the computer,” Tom writes at the beginning of Part II, a history of mathematical modeling of weather and climate, going back to Lewis Richardson of Harvard, who 80 years ago produced five equations that describe motion in the atmosphere. The piece de resistance here is the narration of the building of NCAR, and the centrality of computing power to scientific thought on how the Earth system works: “Model-based science forces its practitioners, before they can understand what they see in their results, to dissect how they constructed the thought, the electronic experiment, which allowed them to produce results. The study of climate becomes, in large measure, the study of climate models.” The key words here are “in large measure.” Recently I asked James Hansen why computer modeling remains such a black box for non-scientists, when they are pretty much the fundamental tool that our companies and governments use to limit uncertainties about anything. He suggested that it’s not the modeling that should be placed on the pedestal, but in the case of climate the paleoclimate proxies (ice cores and other physical evidence) that allow scientists to think about models in the first place.

Here’s what climate modeling looked like in 1989. NCAR then used a machine called the Cray-1A, a sort of legend in the annals of climate science. Through sixty miles of wire (two orders of magnitude less than its predecessor) the Cray executed commands in a billionth of second. The Cray took in and spat out the equivalent of 80 white pines of paper a day processing commands. 
"Over the past twenty years, however, NCAR has accumulated a library of 14 trillion pieces of data, with the size of the data store doubling every year. Some person has to walk over to a bank of cassettes, locate the right one, grab it off the wall, and load it by hand into a machine that can read the tape and transmit it back to the supercomputer, which is capable of 200 million operations a second once it has something upon which to operate."
Two points here. First is to emphasize that there was niggling uncertainty in climate modeling that made scientists uncomfortable in 1989. Here’s what Stephen Schneider wrote in his Science article that year:
“Despite this array of excuses why observed global temperature trends in the past century and those anticipated by most GCMs [global climate models] disagree somewhat, the twofold discrepancy between predicted and measured temperature changes is not large, but still of concern. This rough validation is reinforced by the good simulation by most climatic models of the seasonal cycle, diverse ancient paleoclimates, hot conditions on Venus, cold conditions on Mars (both well simulated), and the present distribution of climates on Earth. When taken together, these verifications provide strong circumstantial evidence that the current modeling of the sensitivity of global surface temperature to given increases in greenhouse gases over the next 50 years or so is probably valid within a rough factor of 2."
Today, climate modelers tell an entirely different story. Jim Hansen has written, "These consequences [of warming] are no longer speculative climate model results… Our best estimates for expected climate impacts are based on evidence from prior climate changes in the Earth’s history and on recent observed climate trends.” See for yourself the refinement in what climate models allow scientists to understand as computing power has accelerated with Moore’s law. Chapter One of Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis offers a striking visual history of climate modeling from the IPCC’s first assessment report (1991) to its fourth (2007).


This reproduction doesn’t do it service, but gives you a taste of how the resolution has improved. The graphic shows four views of Europe. At first, it’s not even recognizable as that familiar western peninsula of Asia. By last year, the “boxes” that serve as the fundamental units of geography are small enough to give the land its familiar contour.
 
Not only have the models themselves become more precise – “tunable” to our current climate, paleoclimates, or those of other planets – but these days you (Yes, you!) can run climate models on your own computer. Columbia University hosts NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the professional home of James Hansen, Real Climate’s Gavin Schmidt, David Rind, and many others. Mark Chandler is director of the Educational Global Climate Model (EdGCM), a Web resource for teachers, students, and anybody else who is interested in fiddling with the Earth’s climate (in silico). The interface is fairly intuitive. An instructional video shows you how the site works, and how you can adjust parameters to see how, say, different projections of CO2 emission and absorption rates affect models of future climates. It does take a bit of computing power. I ran one, though quite slowly, on my 2003 iBook G3. Newer computers shouldn’t have trouble crunching the data.

By Part III, Tom has established that climate science is both a sub-discipline of computer science and an amalgam of a dozen others. “What follows then,” he writes of possible futures — imaginations disciplined by computer modeling — “is a catalogue of disasters, some already in the making, some possible, and one that is, I hope, nothing more than a fairy tale, a grim and monitory fable.”

The “grim and monitory fable” is not global warming. I’ll get to that in a minute. Global warming is one outcome that silicon climates allowed scientists to understand, within a margin of uncertainty now narrowed to practical insignificance. What’s disconcerting about these chapters isn’t anything having to do with the book, but that you could (should) revise and reprint Ice Time today, leave these passages virtually in tact, and it would still be news to many people, particularly people in this White House:
“What is happening is that the by-products of our economic life are altering the chemical composition of the atmosphere by increasing the amount of carbon dioxide and a number of other rarer compounds… [T]he issue again is one of perspective. We simply don’t have it. Human beings have never in their recorded or remembered history experienced anything like the scale of the change that our ways of life are now imposing on the global climate system. The transition from the last ice age to the current, largely ice-free world in which human society has thrived hinged on a temperature rise of the same, apparently modest scale – several degrees Fahrenheit, no more. One crucial difference is the speed involved. The shift from ice age to interglacial took a few thousand years; this new, human-driven warming will reach the predicted strength, if the climate theorists have it right, in our lifetime, perhaps during the lives of our children, certainly.
 
“The greenhouse effect is a touchstone, an event so extraordinary that it shapes all the rest of our existence, but the problem is that it is typically an event that happens out of sight. As a part of daily life, the greenhouse effect poses probably the hardest test of the imagination, requiring you and me to leap from the local, our rooted life in a given place, to the grand global abstractions of ‘the atmosphere’ or ‘the climate,’ and then back again to each of the particular patches in which we live.
 
“But I don’t live in the world; I live in Boston. I don’t change the world; I drive my car five miles to my office, and at night five miles home again, burning about a third of a gallon of unleaded high-test on the round trip. The greenhouse effect, this global transformation, does not fit the ordinary categories of experience, and so unless it can be trimmed to size it will remain remote, an abstraction, until it slams us in the face.”
SPOILER ALERT!
 
The “grim and monitory fable” isn’t even global warming – “the greenhouse effect” to use the late 80s phrase. It’s nuclear war.
 


I don’t want to spoil the analysis, writing and conclusions, any more than this. In 1989, the Soviet Union was on its last legs, even if our most esteemed sovietologists didn’t know it at the time. Nuclear war was still the Cold War’s nightmarish, illogical logical end. [By the way, the possibility of a nuclear exchange has only become more likely since then. Just this week, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs held a hearing called “Nuclear Terrorism: Confronting the Challenges of the Day After.”]
 
Global thermonuclear war would be a unique geological event. Modernity will have enough trouble against global warming in the long run, also a unique geological event.  The U.S. and U.S.S.R. reduced their nuclear arsenals. Ukraine gave its up (to Russia). These hopeful actions demonstrate that rational decision-making can reduce superlative threat. But rational action must be universal. The cold war between India and Pakistan, between North Korea and everybody else, keep the “nuclear option” viable. Levenson:
“Here is the farce: If a global nuclear war that kills ‘only’ two billion people or three or four is not a dreadful enough prospect to bring about some degree of prudence, then it seems highly unlikely that the threat of killing the remainder is going to bring about any startling change in policy or behavior."
The same logic might be applied to global warming, but we are in a time of transition, hopefully one fast enough to make a difference. It's still possible to have startling change in policy or behavior. I'll leave this meandering, discursive trail with this positive note. Tom wrote, “…unless [global warming] can be trimmed to size it will remain remote, an abstraction, until it slams us in the face.” Where are we now? It seems to me we have trimmed it down to size, yet it's still to most people something of an abstraction that, nonetheless appears to be slamming us in the face. People are increasingly working on both levels, changing their lifestyles, however incrementally, to reduce their climate impact, and welcoming government action.

The subtitle of The Carbon Age is How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat. I joke half-seriously that the next two books should be about how nuclear weaponry and anti-biotic resistance are also ties for “civilization’s greatest threat.” My brother, Joel, has argued privately that McDonald’s, weekdays, French augmented sixth chords, Sand People, the Modern Novel, and the Cardinal directions might also qualify as civilization’s greatest threat. I leave this open to debate.
The farce of global warming has only grown in the 19 years since Ice Time came out. The threat of nuclear weaponry has receded only in media. Global warming is in the long term just as sobering a trend and one already in progress. Action is accelerating, but no where's near the speed it needs to be to avoid that actual slam in the face.
 

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Posted by Eric Roston at 4/17/2008 8:29 PM
Categories: scienceblogs,Modeling,My brother Joel,Soviets,Global Warming,Books
 
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