By Susan Farist Butler
Sierra Club volunteer and former Executive Committee member, Sue Farist Butler, recently published an article in Harvard's Advanced Leadership Initiative journal, Social Impact Review, called "Building Climate Stability", which is partially reproduced below, with permission.
All Earth is now subject to forces creating climate instability, all worsening simultaneously. The extreme degradation of the global ecosystem and climate recently merited the CODE RED called by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UNIPCC) issued in the summer of 2021. However, in many reports issued over the past decades, carbon dioxide (CO2) levels have been narrowly defined as the cause when CO2 is only one of many causes in a multi-dimensional problem. Addressing climate change effectively requires understanding factors other than CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions.
Not enough attention has been given to other inter-related factors impacting global climate health: heat, water, and photosynthesis. Heat is our greatest problem now, accumulating in excess of our current estimation as described by Whitmarsh et al. (2015), exacerbating climate instability. The transfer of heat energy each time water changes state gives us a method to manage heat for global climate health. As water melts, or evaporates, it absorbs large amounts of heat to change from solid to liquid or liquid to gas. Either of these endothermic, heat absorbing, changes offer us an opportunity to move heat energy within the global climate system. As we lose the heat absorbing capacity of ice melting, we must find alternatives. Evaporation is one strong alternative. Photosynthesis sequesters carbon, occurring as water evapo-transpires from plants’ leaves, simultaneously cooling Earth and sequestering carbon. The powerful combination of evaporation and photosynthesis can stabilize the runaway heat and carbon event now happening on Earth. Humans must protect and nurture plant life to stabilize the climate.
The climate is a vastly complex, multi-dimensional, interactive system. The correct action to restore equilibrium to our climate must account for all the variables accurately measured, in correct relationship to each other, recognizing the massive scale of these materials and forces. Determining the full risk of “unintended consequences” is very difficult. For example, heat is a primary problem now, not just carbon. To sequester carbon without cooling exacerbates the heat problem. To cool without capturing carbon is also inadequate. Nature’s complex ecology has many healthy symbioses and interactive stabilizing feedback loops. By working with Nature, we include these existing balancing systems in our efforts to restabilize the climate. We must work with Nature in the full glory of her capacity to build climate stability.
Figure 1 shows how oceans have absorbed far more heat than the land, as has melting ice in the Arctic Ocean, Antarctica and Greenland. Warming oceans and melting ice have been a buffer from incoming heat, maintaining climate equilibrium. Whitmarsh et al. underscore these factors must be fully included to have an accurate model. Without ice to melt, we will need other means to cool the climate. It is possible to move heat by managing heating and cooling forces in water’s change of state, melting, freezing, evaporation, condensation. Forests cool earth and build climate stability. With less ice to melt, the only other cooling force of equal capacity is evaporation. Increased evaporation from warmer ocean water is fueling massive storm events. On land, trees transpire, evaporating water vapor, cooling the locale, while simultaneously sequestering CO2 through photosynthesis. These many evaporative processes are Nature’s effort to re-establish a heat equilibrium in Earth’s climate system. We can thoughtfully manage these ecosystems to restore global climate equilibrium.
In 2015, Whitmarsh et al. described the heat-absorbing capacity of the ocean waters as a heat store of such magnitude that "if the lower 10 km of the atmosphere were able to absorb this same quantity of heat, [as the oceans have, it] would warm by 36°C." Heat energy is highly mobile; it seeks equilibrium. If we cool the air, the oceans will warm the air again until there is an equilibrium.
Our goal is to keep Earth’s warming to 1.5°C. How do we keep Earth at 1.5°C warming, when there is enough heat stored in the oceans to warm the atmosphere by 36°C? The ocean heat store must be considered in setting realistic climate goals. The present goal of limiting atmospheric temperature increase to 1.5°C underweights the heat stored in the oceans. We must accurately assess all factors that determine climate disintegration and climate health.
Figure 1: Water and Energy: What is a ZettaJoule? (1021 Joules)
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