The Carbon Age, climate denialism and lessons from Star Trek

I owe author Eric Roston a book review. He was kind enough to send me a copy of The Carbon Age: How Life's Core Element Has Become Civilization's Greatest Threat late last year. It took me a while to get around to it, and I regret not reading it earlier.

The Carbon Age is not the best piece of science writing I've ever had the pleasure of devouring. It could have used another edit, for starters, to ensure that new ideas and terms are explained at first occurence rather than several pages later. And I'm not sure that a biography of carbon is enough to tie together disparate chapters on stellar evolution and bullet-proof jackets. But it's still an important addition to my library if for no other reason than the brilliance of the 10th chapter, titled "The Bell Jar: Humans and the Hundredfold Acceleration of the Carbon Cycle."

I've never come across a better written summary of the fundamental science behind global warming. We get lessons in molecular thermodynamics -- just why it is that some gases are transparent to certain portions of the electromagnetic spectrum while others are good at absorbing and re-radiating other wavelengths. Given that one should always qualify the metaphor of the greenhouse when explaining the planetary greenhouse effect, it's immensely helpful to have a concise and colorful guide to the subject.

There's plenty more in that chapter, from the early warnings from Svante Arrhenius to a brief discussion of carbon dioxide equivalency, that help illuminate the science behind the consensus on anthropogenic global warming. Somehow, Roston managed to pack into 25 pages what others can't squeeze into entire books.

There's even a quick attempt at understanding climate science denialism, a subject that's never far from the top of my mind these days. Roston's description of the problem doesn't explain it all by any means, but it does prompt one to think about the challenge facing science communicators, who stopped dealing with prosaic, experiential phenomena a long time ago:

Our bodies perceive reality inadequately. Humans cannot see things smaller than the width of a hair two arms lengths away, cannot walk further than perhaps twenty miles a day; we blink in about a third of second and we live about eighty years. Everything smaller than a hair, longer than twenty miles, occurring more quickly than a blink and longer than a lifetime falls outside the range of experience and emerges as a candidate for scientific inquiry. Without visual corroboration of atmospheric change, it is hard for many people to swallow results published in scientific journals. The invisibility of carbon dioxide emissions to the naked eye is part of the reason it has been so easy for deniers to confuse the public about dangerous man-made global warming for more than twenty years.

I am not convinced this explains why George F. Will and other conservative pundits refuse to accept the science. I suspect it has more to do with ideological blinders. But Roston is probably right at the level of the average citizen who is trying to evaluate which theories make more sense.

It reminds of me an original Star Trek episode (as do most things), "The Cloud Minders," in which Kirk has to negotiate a truce between the technologically and intellectually sophisticated overlords who live in the sky and the developmentally challenged miners who keep the planet's economy running underground. McCoy discovers that the miners' intellectual development has been stunted by an odorless and invisible gas emitted by the ore they dig, a find that is dismissed by the miners and overlords as absurd -- until Kirk seals them all in a cavern and both sides remember that they need an invisible, odorless gas called oxygen to breathe.

The moral of the story (and there's always a moral in Star Trek) being that maybe those who can't accept the effects of carbon dioxide on the Earth's heat balance need to face a serious threat to their existence before they will understand. I've long feared that what this country really needs is a weather-related catastrophe that makes Katrina look like spilled milk. While climatologists will continue to advise that you can't link specific storms to climate change, it will probably motivate more people to reconsider their position on AGW that any amount of animations of declining Arctic sea ice extent or Keeling curves.

The Carbon Age is published by Walker & Co. Roston has an accompanying website.

More like this

Its all about balance and sustainability - Gaia.

I read Roston's The Carbon Age. It was a bit uneven, but on the whole the book was entertaining and informative. Several of the chapters (like the one you mention about global warming) would make fine stand-alone essays.

You cute whacky doomsday types are always good for a hearty chuckle. Hopefully, living in total fear of the unknown and unproven makes you somehow feel better at least.

We all know ignorance is bliss, Big Joe. Yet many choose not to be ignorant and blissful. Why did you choose otherwise?