Superfreakonomics_ global cooling, patri - Steven D. Levitt [84]
Too optimistic. “A lot of the things that people say would be a good thing probably aren’t,” Myhrvold says. As an example he points to solar power. “The problem with solar cells is that they’re black, because they are designed to absorb light from the sun. But only about 12 percent gets turned into electricity, and the rest is reradiated as heat—which contributes to global warming.”
Although a widespread conversion to solar power might seem appealing, the reality is tricky. The energy consumed by building the thousands of new solar plants necessary to replace coal-burning and other power plants would create a huge long-term “warming debt,” as Myhrvold calls it. “Eventually, we’d have a great carbon-free energy infrastructure but only after making emissions and global warming worse every year until we’re done building out the solar plants, which could take thirty to fifty years.”
This hardly means the energy problem should be dismissed. That’s why IV—along with inventors all over the world—are working toward the holy grail: cheaper and cleaner forms of energy.
But from an atmospheric perspective, energy represents what might be called the input dilemma. How about the output dilemma? What if the greenhouse gases we’ve already emitted do produce an ecological disaster?
Myhrvold is not blind to the possibility. He has probably thought about such scenarios in greater scientific detail than any climate doomsayer: a collapse of massive ice sheets in Greenland or Antarctica; a release of huge amounts of methane caused by the melting of arctic permafrost; and, as he describes it, “a breakdown of the thermohaline circulation system in the North Atlantic, which would put an end to the Gulf Stream.”
So what happens if the doomsayers turn out to be right? What if the earth is becoming dangerously warmer, whether because of our fossil-fuel profligacy or some natural climate cycle? We don’t really want to sit back and stew in our own juices, do we?
In 1980, when Myhrvold was a grad student at Princeton, Mount St. Helens erupted back home in Washington State. Even though he was nearly three thousand miles away, Myhrvold saw a thin layer of ash accumulating on his windowsill. “It’s hard not to think about volcanic dust when it’s raining down on your dorm room,” he says, “although to be honest, my room was messy in many other ways.”
Even as a kid, Myhrvold was fascinated by geophysical phenomena—volcanoes, sunspots, and the like—and their history of affecting the climate. The Little Ice Age intrigued him so much that he forced his family to visit the northern tip of Newfoundland, where Leif Eriksson and his Vikings reputedly made camp a thousand years earlier.
The connection between volcanoes and climate is hardly a new idea. Another polymath, Benjamin Franklin, wrote what seems to be the first scientific paper on the topic. In “Meteorological Imaginations and Conjectures,” published in 1784, Franklin posited that recent volcanic eruptions in Iceland had caused a particularly harsh winter and a cool summer with “constant fog over all Europe, and [a] great part of North America.” In 1815, the gargantuan eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia produced “The Year Without a Summer,” a worldwide disaster that killed crops, prompted widespread starvation and food riots, and brought snow to New England as late as June.
As Myhrvold puts it: “All really big-ass volcanoes have some climate effects.”
Volcanoes erupt all the time, all over the world, but truly “big-ass” ones are rare. If they weren’t—well, we probably wouldn’t be around to worry about global warming. The anthropologist Stanley Ambrose has argued that a supervolcanic explosion at Lake Toba on Sumatra, roughly seventy thousand years ago, blocked the sun so badly that it triggered an ice age that nearly wiped