Top Quotes: “Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World” — Bill Nye
Background: Our childhood favorite writes an excellent explanation of WTF is climate change (I always understand it a little better every time I read a book about it) and WTF we can do about it. I also learned why puddles evaporate eventually and why lightbulbs get warm — among other fun facts. (But if you don’t own a home, skip the last few chapters as he nerdily outlines every single possible way to make your home sustainable lol.)
Introduction
“The desire to get more done with less effort multiplied by billions of people who burn fossil fuels to satisfy that desire is causing climate change. There are an ever-increasing number of humans on Earth, and every single one of us wants to live a developed-world lifestyle — cars instead of bikes, electricity available at any time, more electronics, more convenience, more luxury. It’s an evolutionary impulse to want comfort, to secure as many resources as you can for yourself and your relatives. But that impulse is currently getting us into serious trouble.”
“We know of only one other species that has the power to change the climate of an entire planet — blue-green algae. They were the first organisms to develop photosynthesis, which filled the atmosphere with oxygen and changed the chemistry of everything you see, eat, and breathe. Today, that seems great, but billions of years ago, oxygen wiped out much of the life that could not tolerate it.”
“If we had some sort of extraordinary ladder-car that allowed us to drive straight up at highway speed, we’d be in outer space in less than an hour. We’d be above the breathable part of the atmosphere in just five minutes! Outer space is barely 62 miles from here, where you and I live. That’s it. Earth’s atmosphere is very, very thin.”
“Energy from the Sun, mostly in the form of visible light, passes through the gases of the atmosphere, strikes the planet’s surface, and is partially absorbed. The surface warms a bit. The warmed surface partially reradiates some of this energy, as heat. On its way back out to space some of the heat energy is trapped by certain atmospheric gases, especially water vapor and carbon dioxide.”
“A carbon dioxide molecule is the right length and atomic flexibility to allow visible light, with wavelengths of 390–700 nanometers, to pass right by. But, these molecules block the longer reradiated infrared rays (heat), whose wavelengths are about 10 times as long as those of visible light. That heat-trapping ability is a feature of the size and shape of carbon dioxide molecules, and the length of the waves they trap or let pass. Yes, this really is somewhat like what happens in a greenhouse. A greenhouse traps warm air inside that’s generated by the transpiration of photosynthesizing plants. The warm air does not get driven up and away by wind. The glass of the greenhouse, like carbon dioxide, is transparent to light but does a pretty good job of blocking heat. Solar energy comes in, but a lot of it does not get back out. That is how a greenhouse can stay warm even in winter.”
“Without our atmosphere holding in heat through the greenhouse effect, Earth would be completely inhospitable for us. It would be a frozen world, with an average temperature of under 0*F. The problem is not that we have the greenhouse effect; it’s that our greenhouse effect is getting stronger by the hour. The extra heat in the atmosphere is altering weather patterns around the world. Atmospheric models show that carbon dioxide — produced by us burning fossil fuels — is causing the overwhelming majority of the current climate change.”
“Not every place will become warmer all the time. With the western portion of the North Atlantic Ocean slightly warmer than usual, you would expect more moisture in the atmosphere and more snow along the eastern seaboard of North America. The energy in the atmosphere can increase the odds of severe storms.”
“Since 1750, humans have increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 40%.”
“There is no stopping a large fraction of future warming, because billions and billions of tons of the gases that are going to bring it on are already in the air. Even the most fragile of them do not break down for decades. Their effects will be felt for millenia to come.”
“Carbon dioxide is very significant, but it is not the only greenhouse gas. Human activity also produces methane. Because of the characteristics of methane molecules, they hold in heat much more effectively than carbon dioxide molecules. And methane molecules remain intact for decades. Over a century timescale, a kilogram of methane is about 30 times as powerful as a kilogram of carbon dioxide.”
“There are billions of tons of methane in molecular cages of water ice called ‘clathrates’ held tight in the permafrost soil of Earth’s northern regions and at the cold bottom of the ocean. As Siberia warms, and as the water that circulates along the seafloor warms, the clathrates in the sediments both on land and deep in the sea will release the trapped methane molecules. Once liberated, they’ll come bubbling up — in the same fashion that bubbles are released by opening a bottle of soda. It seems likely there’s a lot of methane and a lot of potential for a lot of trouble.”
“Water expands when warmed. The warming of seawater is a major cause of our rising sea levels. Melting glaciers and ice sheets also contribute to the rise.”
“With more heat energy in the atmosphere, storms are going to get stronger or further spread out. With more heat energy in the atmosphere, there will be more water carried aloft as vapor which will fall as precipitation — and that will cause trouble.”
“At the North and South poles we’re headed for trouble in two ways. In the Arctic Ocean, the ice floats on the sea and reflects sunlight into space. As it melts, the sea would stay the same level — like what happens in a glass of ice water — except, that since it’s soaking up sunlight and getting warmer, it’s expanding. And as ice melts in Greenland, fresh meltwater is flowing into the surrounding sea, raising its level and making it less salty. The less salty water is not as dense as it used to be, so it does not sink at its former rate. The vertical currents have slowed and are changing the weather on two continents.”
“As ice melts at the South Pole, in contrast, huge sheets of frozen water will slide off the rocky continent of Antarctica and fall into the Southern Ocean. When they slide into the ocean, sea levels around the world will go up.”
“As our world warms a little, the ranges over which certain germs and parasites can live continue to expand. Human population that used to be safe from tropical disease no longer will be. Pine forests protected by freezing winter temperatures are being destroyed by beetles that no longer have to deal with the cold. There will be enormous, heretofore unexperienced costs dealing with the disease, death, lost wages, and lost productivity as more of us get sick more and more frequently.”
Carbon Dioxide
“A lump of coal is nearly pure carbon. When you burn it, each carbon atom hooks up with two oxygen atoms from the atmosphere to make carbon dioxide (CO2). An oxygen atom weighs one-third more than a carbon atom, so the greenhouse gases add up quickly. When you burn 1kg of coal, you get 3 ⅔ kilos of CO2. At standard atmospheric pressure and temperature, one ton of CO2 takes up 534 cubic meters — which would fill a cube 27 feet on a side. That’s about as tall as a U.S. football goalpost.”
“Humans create about 1,150 tons of CO2 every second. That’s over 96 million tons of CO2 around the world every day, which adds up to 35 billion tons a year. Over the last couple of centuries, we’ve tossed up enough carbon to convert almost 4 trillion tons of life-giving oxygen into 6 trillion tons of carbon dioxide.”
“Back in the days of the dinosaurs, there was three times as much carbon dioxide in the air as there is today. And sure enough, there was a lot less ice and snow. And sure enough, the middle of what is now North America was an inland sea. And sure enough, we absolutely cannot let that happen again. If we do, there will be a lot fewer of us alive.”
“Living things in the dinosaur age were happily adapted to the way things were — life was flourishing. Herein lies an essential idea. It’s not the total amount of carbon dioxide in the air today that poses a threat to us. It’s the rate of change — the speed at which the fraction of CO2 is growing — and our modern society is built around a specific kind of climate and a specific level of carbon dioxide.”
Modeling & Measuring
“How do we know how much carbon dioxide was in our area two and a half centuries ago, even hundreds of thousands of years ago? Because we have discovered places where the ancient atmosphere is preserved: It is locked away in the ice sheets of Antarctica, Greenland, and Siberia. Here’s what happens. When it snows in these locations, the extensions of snowflakes called tines fall together and trap tiny pockets of air. As it snows and snows, year after year, the tiny pockets betwixt, the tines get smooshed, and the snowflakes get bent and broken by the weight of the snow above. As they mechanically deform, the flakes liberate a tiny bit of heat, softening the surrounding crystals, and the whole snowpack turns to often perfectly clear ice with tiny bubbles embedded. The process is often called regelation. Those trapped bubbles are the gases of the atmosphere at the time the ice formed. When scientists get hold of those bubbles, they can determine with extraordinary precision just what mixture of gases they’re dealing with. The masses of gases can be assayed in wonderful machines that shoot atoms and molecules horizontally across a vacuum chamber. By measuring where the atoms fall, scientists can determine their masses and deduce just what quantity of which atoms are present in a sample. Using these mass spectrometers, scientists have measured the amount of carbon dioxide and other gases in the Earth’s atmosphere back over hundreds of thousands of years. We can see exactly when the Industrial Revolution started.”
“Arctic ice is highly reflective. When it melts, it exposes seawater, which is dark. So the more the ice melts, the more sunlight the ocean absorbs. The warm ocean melts more ice. Over the past 40 years, Arctic sea ice has been decreasing over 5% a decade.”
“The energy of motion is converted to the energy of heat all the time in just about everything we do — like rubbing our hands together or rolling car tires over a road. Every device always loses some of its oomph to heat — which is a real drag. James Watt figured out how to drive energy in the other direction. In 1781, he developed a steam engine with a spinning shaft. When you heat water enough, you get steam. With steam, you can drive a piston back and forth in a cylinder and do work. If you can convert the back-and-forth to an around-and-around, you can spin a shaft. When you get a shaft spinning, you can run things like pumps and textile-weaving machines.”
“Heat engines require controlling motion on the molecular level. Molecules have motion just like bouncing balls. The thing we call temperature is a measure of the moving energy of molecules — the average kinetic energy of molecules is the modern definition of temperature. The hotter the temperature, the faster molecules are moving. If you let them, they’ll spread out, just like the air inside an inflated balloon, if you leave it untied. This is why a teakettle can whistle: The heated steam spreads out, fleeing the kettle, and so does its energy. Spreading out is the key to making motion. You can’t get heat to do any work unless you let its energy spread out.”
“When we measure the temperature, we’re actually measuring the average of the molecular speeds. That’s why a puddle of water can evaporate even though it is nowhere near its boiling temperature. Some of the molecules are going faster than others; the faster ones escape and become vapor. After a few molecules have left the liquid, the heat energy available to the puddle is redistributed to fewer molecules. There’s more energy per molecule, so more of them evaporate, until the whole puddle is gone.”
“The maximum and minimum temperature in your engine control how efficient you can get. The greater the difference, the more efficient the engine can be. A typical car burns gas at an average temperature around 1,000*C. On a cool day, the outside temperature might be 10*C. The very best efficiency you can get with these temperatures is 77%. You just lost 23% of the energy in your gas, and that’s if the tires and crankshaft are perfect and there’s no aerodynamic drag. The rest of that heat energy just goes out into the world and ultimately to outer space, spread throughout the universe and lost to us forever. Climatologists think of a hurricane as a giant heat engine. As the sea surface warms with climate change, the temperature difference between the sea and the sky increases a little and the cyclonic storms can become more powerful. This is why many researchers anticipate stronger storms in a warmer world.”
New Ideas
“Light from the Sun bounces off the Moon to your eyes. But sunlight also bounces off Earth and reflects off the Moon and then to your eyes. The effect is most easily seen when the Moon is a thin crescent. At that time, if you were on the lunar surface, you’d see that the Earth is nearly full and particularly bright. The result is that you, here on Earth, can see the whole of our side of the Moon: the crescent bright from sunshine, the night side of the Moon ghostly lit by earthshine.”
“30% of the sunlight that strikes Earth bounces back into space — a number that’s so high because Earth has clouds and ice. On a typical day our planet has about 70% of its surface covered with clouds. Puffy white clouds are 75% reflective; heavy dark stratus clouds are about 45%. The ice at the poles is 60% reflective. Seawater reflects only 10%, so as the world warms and ice melts, less light is reflected into space, there’s more absorption, and an even warmer world.”
“What if we could compensate for the melted ice and warming atmosphere? We could affect over 2% of the U.S. if we required all roofs of every suitable building be white or nearly white. Or if someone can come up with a ‘pale pavement’ to replace asphalt, we could increase reflectivity of paved surfaces from 10% to 70%. A physicist has proposed blowing bubbles in seawater and ponds since bubbly water-air becomes slightly more reflective than an airless quantity of water. This happens in whitewater rapids — bubbles in water produce a great many surface to reflect light. A key is that bubbles of just the right diameter can persist in seawater for a surprisingly long time — for a week or more. I am pretty sure the first place we ought to try this are at reservoirs — it would decrease evaporation, increasing water supply, and increase reflectivity, bouncing just a little more sunshine away from our planet. It’s easy to imagine taking some of the energy that the Hoover Dam power plant produces to drive some industrial-scale electric bubble pumps that would create a hydrosol of bubbles in much the same way the jets in a hot tub produce bubbly streams of water until a little pressure. Suppose we put bubble-makers on all of the 40,000 enormous cargo ships that are plying the high seas every day. They could be required to generate, or be given tariff credit for generating, huge swaths of microbubble hydrosols — possibly affecting 1,000 square kilometers of ocean.”
“All the solids, liquids, and gases you’ll ever come across contain atoms created in supernovae, stars so massive that they soon reach a critical point and explode. Supernovae spew extraordinary amounts of their guts into the cosmic void, where their elements blend into and compress existing clouds of hydrogen gas to create a new generation of stars. Earth and everything on it (other than hydrogen from the Big Bang) is made from atoms that were built up in the nuclear reactors of stars.”
“Radioactive elements are unstable atoms that spontaneously break down. They were born in supernova explosions, and now they are undoing part of the nuclear process that created them in the first place. As they decay, these elements spontaneously release subatomic particles — pieces of themselves. The interactions of the subatomic particles release heat, and so provide us the means to transform the energy of the ancient exploding stars into energy that we can use.”
“You’ve probably seen the tall curving towers often associated with nuclear plants. In fact, they’re used at any power plant in temperature latitudes like the ones in France or Western Washington. In eastern Washington, on the other hand, it gets pretty hot in the summertime. So a nuclear power plant there has no curved towers. There you’ll see an arrangement of low buildings with powerful boost fans. It’s all to get the heat efficiency up.”
“We are able to convert sunshine directly into electricity because if light strikes certain metals, it gives off a flow of electrons — electricity. The brighter the light, the more electrons you can get; but it’s not just the brightness that matters. Turns out the color matters too. Light toward the violet end of the rainbow is more energetic than the light toward the red end. There’s an essential amount of energy, a tiny amount, and if you’re below it, you get no electron, no electricity. But if you go up and get your photons above a certain threshold: Bang, you get an electron. It turns out energy in nature only moves in quanta. A quantum is the smallest amount of energy there is.”
“Some groups are developing spray-on solar cells; you could literally paint them onto a building and turn its entire exterior into a giant solar cell. Imagine cities in which every structure is its own power plant.”
“Right now the U.S. produces only about 0.4% of its electricity using solar. In Germany, which is not especially sunny, almost 7% of their electrical grid is supplied by solar power — over 50% during peak production hours. The potential for the U.S. is enormous.”
“In some places, homeowners with solar can actually sell their power back to the utility and become active contributors to the grid. The stand-alone potential of solar power is especially important in the developing world, where many people have no access to a grid at all. With cheap panels, they may not need it.”
“Hypothetically, you could capture solar energy up in outer space above the clouds and beam in down to an antenna here on the ground. There are proposals to build solar panels kilometres on a side, in orbit above Earth. It would require multiple rocket flights and some tricky assembly in the cold vacuum of space. But the idea is to transmit energy down as a beam of microwaves, a hundred thousand times longer than visible light.”
“The wind blows because sunlight warms the world, which warms the air. That heated air gets squeezed up by cooler air nearby.”
“Water flowing through a pipe loses some of its energy to friction. It flows along the rough walls. Its momentum is redirected around corners and through the sharp edges of valves. That lost energy becomes heat. In electricity, the steady transmission of energy through conductors like wires and electronics leads to losses as well — hold on to your phone charger or put your hand near an old lightbulb and you’ll feel some of that lost heat. In the case of the lightbulb, there’s so much lost energy that you can bake little cakes with it — hence the enormous success of the Easy Bake Oven.”
The Gas Problem
“We could let the price of gas rise to what the market would actually bear. Today, the price of gas in the U.S. is subsidized to hold its price at about half of what it is almost everywhere else. It’s about $5 per gallon in other countries like the U.K. or Japan, but people still drive. So many people in the U.K. try to drive into London every day that there is an $18 USD ‘Congestion Charge’ just to cross the city limit in a car. And people pay it — every day! Some people want to be in cars that badly.”
“The gas subsidy in the U.S. is not a visible thing that shows up in our budget documents, but it’s there. Keeping a standing Army and Navy at the ready to defend oil fields on the other side of the world is an extraordinary subsidy for gas-powered vehicles. Cheap leases on federal land for drilling and mining are subsidies. Tax breaks for the fossil fuel industry are subsidies. If we enhanced the grid, subsidized electric vehicles, and let gas cost what people are really willing to pay (and what we pay to get and protect it), we could bring a lot of our military home. And change the world.”
“If Western countries did not need the oil that ISIS controlled, the money that ultimately funded their operations would’ve dried up. They could’ve no longer operated as a terrorist state, certainly not at the level they did. Freedom from oil would make international cooperation easier. Fossil-fuel energy is the cause of the conflict and the enabler of the terror. The whole web of American involvement in the Middle East is tied to petroleum, either directly or indirectly.”
“The pessimists would rather give up than own up to the problems we have all created. The people who worry most about what we are doing to our planet are the optimists who believe we have the intelligence — we, as a species, working together — to come up with powerful solutions to the problems we’re working on that will change the world for the better.”
“A tax on carbon would make gas and oil and jet fuel cost a little bit more and companies would be motivated to explore alternative fuel like algae-based fuel which is in development. The main customer for domestically produced, non-petroleum-based fuel is the U.S. military. Aircraft carriers go through enormous amounts of jet fuel. What if the U.S. military made the case that this country has to have renewable jet fuel on the grounds of national security alone? The Department of Defense is funding biofuel research for exactly this reason. If our military leaders decide this is the way to go, it would change things in a hurry.”
“The U.S. military is deeply concerned about climate change. A tremendous amount of military planning has been done to address conditions around the world as water runs short and populations are displaced, situations that will, almost certainly, result in conflict. If the American economy and American interests were not tied so directly to oil from overseas, U.S. diplomats and politicians could approach the rest of the world in new ways. They could eliminate a lot of military actions that have little benefit other than protecting the oil supply, and they could devote a lot more time to improving the lives of citizens everywhere affected by climate change — including the citizens right here at home.”
Looking Ahead
“Humankind has paved over 2% of the U.S. land.”
“When you drive on interstates, you see trucks tailgating each other. They’re doing their best not to lose energy to the air. Unfortunately, close drafting is dangerous. Drivers may not have time to react to trouble ahead. Trains don’t have this drafting problem. They suffer a lot less from the effects of air resistance.”
“Most cities have bridges and it might not be so hard to convert the main surface, which is nominally open to the elements, into an enclosed tunnel that has tailwinds — prevailing winds or fans to force air through the tunnels, so that cyclists going in either direction would be personally assisted.”
“The Sun drives water from the surface of lakes, ponds, and seas high into the sky where the water condenses to tiny cloud droplets. Clouds can form, and remain high above, because the water molecules weigh less than the nitrogen and oxygen molecules that dominate our air. Water just floats on up until the molecules spread out enough, and cool off enough, to turn into tiny droplets of liquid. As those encounter each other, droplets become drops. Then they drip on an atmospheric scale, falling on us by the ton but with no salt — when water changes from a liquid to a vapor it leaves the salt behind.”
“Mangrove trees thrive in places where freshwater flow rolls up against the ocean and can live in salty, salty water. Some species have roots fitted with membranes so fine that salt from the sea can’t get in. Even stranger are the mangroves that have glands in their leaves that reject salt. They use some of the energy they get from the sun to drive the salt out of their leaves and leave it to dry — those salty crystals that often cover their leaves. Just think of the possibilities if we could mimic what the mangroves do, if we could find an organic way to desalinate on an industrial scale. What if we created crops or shoreline desalination plants that could turn seawater into freshwater for us, on an industrial scale? Those plants might save coastal cities from drought. They might pump water to inland farms, keeping crops green even as temperatures rise and rainfall patterns change. They could bring clean drinking water to parts of the world where it is scarce or unavailable. The global standard of living could keep improving, unstoppable.”
“The economic sector that uses the most of the Earth’s resources and produces the largest environmental change is agriculture. Our farms produce greater volumes of greenhouse gases than all of our cars, trucks, trains, ships, and airplanes combined. Humans farm about 11% of the Earth’s dry land. By 2050, we’ll be farming on just 9% which means that farmers can give up some land — yielding it to urban growth, new forest tracts (afforestration), or pulling inland from areas that climate change has rendered unsuitable — and still produce enough food for everyone. The scientists and farmers working are confident that this reduction can be achieved in a sustainable function by introducing new breeds and varieties of crops that produce more food on less land. This could also free up land to be established as riparian or coastal wetlands, allowing an increase in biodiversity.”
“The Green Revolution in India enabled that country to feed a billion people on an area of land smaller than what the industrialized U.S. uses to feed a sixth as many.”
“Worldwide we are consuming three times as much meat as we were a half-century ago. We are catching six times as many fish.”
“NASA’s budget is about 0.4% of total federal spending. The dollars we spend in space have proven crucial to understanding and solving our Earth-bound problems. Without satellites, we would have no clear picture of global warming, and the way in which human activity contributes to it. We would have no precision farming, no detailed weather forecasts, no GPS for guiding cars and planes. Without deep-space missions, we wouldn’t know about the runaway greenhouse effect on Venus or the 4 billion years of dry ice age on Mars, both of which have provided deep insights into the workings of our own planet’s climate.”
“The reason most major rocket launches in the U.S. are at Cape Canaveral in Florida is because if you want to orbit Earth above the equator, you want to launch as close as possible to the equator, because our planet’s rotation is helping you. The spin of Earth adds to your orbital velocity. Because rocket parts are big heavy, the launch site needs to be accessible by rail, which is why we don’t do it in Hawaii.”
“In ‘cap and trade,’ every country would have a cap or maximum amount of carbon and other greenhouse gases that each was permitted to pump into the atmosphere. Those countries that can’t get to the agreed upon cap would trade with other countries that might have a little credit below their cap to trade. But cap and trade has not worked well enough, at least so far, because there are enough countries with carbon to spare that the whole scheme as been rendered ineffective.”
“The U.S. could establish a carbon fee and dividend system. Whenever you or the corporation you work for or own creates carbon dioxide, you have to pay a fee — maybe ten dollars per ton of carbon dioxide to start. That money would be directed into a fund that could become a trust fund akin to the Highway Trust Fund. Once the money is in that fund, it has to be used for its intended purpose — which could be building renewable-energy infrastructure. We could build a better transmission grid. We could invest in battery tech, concrete gravity pistons, solar photo-electric systems, solar hot water systems, better lightbulbs, and so on. Or it’s been proposed that we just give that money back to every citizen to offset our existing taxes. The carbon fee would raise the cost of things you buy (since right now there is some carbon emitted in the production and distribution of pretty much everything). But at the end of the year, the government would take all of the money collected by the carbon fee, divide it up, and give it back to you as a dividend check. All the fee would do is put a realistic price on the carbon we dump into the environment. Every factory, every company would have an incentive to reduce emissions, because then they can sell things at a lower price. Consumers would see a cost advantage in choosing low-carbon items. If you live a low-carbon lifestyle all year, when your dividend check arrives you will find that you came out ahead.”
“Rich people use more gas, heat bigger homes, own multiple homes, and buy many more plane tickets than middle-class and poor people. Rich people would almost certainly pay more in carbon fees than anyone else — and they can afford it.”
“If we had this carbon-fee system in the U.S., it would affect everyone in the world. Goods that came from Asia to America would be effectively paying a fee, because the ship would have to pay a fee for its fuel. The cost would be passed on to everyone who buys the goods. In this example, the countries buying the theretofore-shipped goods might find it’s cheaper to manufacture some of those goods at home. That would stimulate the local economics and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
“Energy prices would more accurately reflect the societal costs that come with them, which would encourage the move to things like wind and solar. Farmers would be able to see the precise upside of the renewable-energy economy. Factories would see a clear economic benefit in improving efficiency or phasing out dirty production processes. The builders that manufacture huge container ships would be strongly motivated to make their ships more efficient.”
“If you think action on behalf of climate change is expensive, just wait ’til you see the price of inaction. Regulation will be required sooner or later, but if we wait until things reach crisis level they will be a lot more onerous. There might be requirements to restrict your use of gas. Requirements that restrict your access to proteins like steak and fish. Regulations watching what you put in the trash. There may be limits on shipping and air travel.”
