The glomar response

What bizarre tale can tie together a sunken nuclear submarine, a mechanical claw, an eccentric billionaire, some manganese, and some Cold War intrigue? That can only be Project Azorian, you murmur. If you do, you have probably listened to a Radiolab podcast called Neither Confirm Nor Deny which is how I learnt about it. This story relates to one of the most massive covert operations ever handled by the CIA. It resulted in the existence of a phrase that has had journalists and lawyers scratching their head for 50 years.

In January of 1968, a U.S. Naval ship was captured after leaving Japan. This made the U. S. worried that the Soviets had their code books and they thought that they should try to get even. Two months later, a Soviet nuclear submarine suffered an internal explosion while on a routine patrol mission and sank in the Pacific Ocean, northwest of Hawaii. The Soviets undertook a massive, 2-month search, but never found the wreckage. However, the unusual Soviet naval activity prompted the U.S. to begin its own search for the sunken vessel, which they found in August 1968. To the US, the soviet sub, if recovered, would provide invaluable information for the intelligence community since it contained code books, missiles, and nuclear-tipped torpedoes.

The problem was that the submarine was three miles below the surface of the ocean, and the pressure at that depth was roughly 7,500 pounds per square inch. No one had recovered anything from such a depth. To get a sense of the scale of the task involved, the Titanic was about 1.5 km shallower. Malaysia Airlines flight 370 is presumed to be at around 800m less depth. Moreover, the recovery had to be done in secret, lest a very real war should break out should the Russians find out. But the temptation to obtain cryptographic equipment that would allow them to decipher Soviet naval codes was too great, so the CIA began a covert operation called Project Azorian.

They'd have to lift something like 6 million kgs. They got some engineers together in top secret to brainstorm ideas to reinvent the science of deep sea recovery. They finally decided to build a huge, eight-fingered claw and put it in a boat, bring it out on the high seas, and then lower the claw on a three-mile long piece of pipe string. They would position the claw over the submarine and yank it off the bottom of the ocean, pulling it back into the boat. Gates would open on the bottom of the boat and the claw and the submarine would come into a chamber.  

They got the money and the approval from the president. But they still needed a cover story. So they called up the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes and told him to pretend to have a sudden interest in manganese mining from the bottom of the ocean. So his people built a massive ship called The Hughes Glomar Explorer - It was built by a company called Global Marine. Global Marine - GloMar. Altogether, 6 years, and $800 million (more than $2 billion today) worth of unparalleled espionage by the Central Intelligence Agency was invested in the project.

In July of 1974, they got the boat to the right spot, and they lowered the claw. The claw descended three miles to the bottom of the ocean where the submarines was located. The claw had lights and cameras on it so they could see what was happening. The claw wrapped its massive claw hand around this sub and began to pull it back up. 14,000 feet, 12,000 feet ... But there is an age-old problem that often costs mice and men a lot of pain; a pain that the poet Burns so correctly identified - their best laid schemes tend to go astray. About 2.7km from the surface, there seemed to be a bump but everything looked normal on the television screens. 

But then it suddenly occurred to the operators that these television images had not been refreshed. And when they refreshed those images and got the real time picture of what was going on, it showed that most of the submarine - the part with the nukes, with the missiles, maybe with the codebooks, and all the stuff they wanted - had broken off, and years of work, millions of dollars just slowly sank to the bottom of the ocean. Meanwhile, a ragtag crew aboard a Soviet tugboat was only 150 feet away keeping a watch on the Americans. On August 6, 1974, with their lost submarine literally right under its nose, the Soviet boat decided it had seen enough of all this “deep ocean mining,” and left for home.

2/3 of their haul might have fallen away, but the men aboard Glomar knew they still had something on the line. What about the part that remained? What they found in that piece has never been disclosed. Not long after that disappointing loss, the story starts to break in the press. Journalists start calling up the CIA, and they have to figure out what to say and what not to say. This a was tricky task because of a diplomatic element and a legal element.  US didn't want the Soviets to know either what  had been found out or what hadn't been found out; hence the dilemma.

If the US said the truth - that they didn't recover any information on Soviet missiles - then that would tell the Soviets that they don't have to worry about the security regarding their warheads. But the US wanted them to worry. But if they said that the US did recover information on the missiles, but were not telling, then it would be lying which could not be done. Why?  Because of something called the Freedom of Information Act. FOIA. The law says that anybody, any American should be able to ask the government for documents and the government has to respond. 

But every CIA employee is legally bound to protect intelligence sources and methods. It's not an option, it's a law. So the CIA found itself in a soup - Under the FOIA law, the public has a right to know. On the other hand, the CIA has a legal obligation to not tell. The CIA has to say something, it has to be truthful when it says it, but it also cannot reveal anything. Enter a lawyer who devised a solution in half an hour. Here's what he came up with.

We can neither confirm nor deny the existence of the information requested but hypothetically, if such data were to exist, the subject matter would be classified and could not be disclosed. 

Journalists fought it in court, and the fight went on for years, but eventually the government won. The judge agreed to their logic, that sometimes, revealing even the existence of documents endangers national security. Since that initial Glomar Response in 1975, more and more government agencies have begun to use it. And it is not the obvious ones related to national security issues. Thus, you now get such a "Glomar response" from the Department of Commerce, Department of the Treasury, Department of Energy, Center for Disease Control.  

The government may ultimately lose in all of these cases, but it will lose at a time when the public debate will have moved on to something else. The popular perception about the Glomar Response is that it's just a delaying tactic. By the time the truth finally comes out, people don't actually care anymore. It's ancient history. It embodies the tension between the public’s desire for transparency and the government’s need to keep secrets. 

The first tweet by the CIA showed that it had a sense of humour - "We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet." The tricky evasion has become the bane of watchdogs and journalists -- but its utility for those seeking to keep things beyond prying eyes has withstood the test of time, as evidenced by its proliferation, even among private companies and celebrities like Will Smith, Pixar characters, legislators.

The wickedest of all problems - X

Giving more information does not change people’s attitudes. The vast majority of scientific communications is still in the form of data and graphs. In order for there to be any meaningful action, it is not enough to convince the rational part of the brain with data and graphs but the emotional part of the brain must also be convinced. Giving technical answers to technical questions without making use of the myths and philosophies available in a tradition does not move most people. As communications guru Frank Luntz advised Republican candidates on messaging climate change, “A compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth.”

People obtain their information through the people they trust. Attitudes on climate change is now a shorthand for figuring out who is in our group and cares about us. This is where religion can play a crucial role. Previous social justice movements like anti-slavery campaigns,  civil rights, anti-apartheid, anti-debt, and anti-poverty campaigns, arose through church networks. Climate scientists with strong religious faith say that their religious belief and their scientific research are entirely compatible. They believe that God creates the laws and their role as a scientist is to discover them. 

2015 produced two very important publications on climate change: the first was Pope Francis’s encyclical letter Laudato Si, while the second was the Paris Agreement on climate change. One was written by a former teacher of literature and the other by a multitude of diplomats and delegates, Both are founded on an acceptance of the research produced by climate science. In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh compares the two documents. 

He writes that as a primarily religious document, it might be thought the pope’s Encyclical would be written in a vague and elaborate style and the Agreement would, by contrast, be crisp and to the point. But actually the opposite is true. The Encyclical is remarkable for the lucidity of its language and the simplicity of its construction; it is the Agreement, rather, that is very  artificial in its wording and complex in structure. It has eighteen densely printed pages with one large block of text consisting of only two sentences, one of which runs on for no less than fifteen pages! 

This part of the Agreement has thousands of words separated by innumerable colons, semicolons, and commas and only a pair of full stops. The Agreement has thirty-one ringing declarations with phrases like "Recalling decision 1/CP.17 on the establishment . . ." or "Further recalling relevant decisions . . ." It indulges in wishful thinking, repeatedly invoking the impossible: for example, the aspirational goal of limiting the rise in global mean temperatures to 1.5 degrees Centigrade — a target that is widely believed to be already beyond reach.

Laudato Si, on the other hand, addresses complex questions with clarity. It does not suggest that miraculous interventions may provide a solution for climate change. It does not hesitate to take issue with past positions of the Church, as, for example, in the matter of reconciling an ecological consciousness with the Christian doctrine of Man’s dominion over Nature. It is fiercely critical of “the idea of infinite or unlimited growth, which proves so attractive to economists, financiers and experts in technology.” It insists that it is because of the “technocratic paradigm” that “we fail to see the deepest roots of our present failures, which have to do with the direction, goals, meaning and social implications of technological growth.”

In the text of the Paris Agreement, by contrast, there is not the slightest acknowledgment that something has gone wrong with our dominant paradigms; it contains no clause or article that could be interpreted as a critique of the practices that are known to have created the situation that the Agreement seeks to address. The current paradigm of perpetual growth is enshrined at the core of the text. It merely acknowledges that “climate change is a common concern for humankind." It is as if the negotiations had been convened to deal with a minor annoyance. 

In contrast to the Agreement’s careful avoidance of disruptive terminology, Laudato Si challenges contemporary practices. Obscurity and technical jargon fills the official discourse on climate change and its style as well as its vocabulary conveys the impression of language being deployed as an instrument of concealment. Strangely, Laudato S’ seems to anticipate this possibility: in a passage that refers to the way that decisions are made in “international political and economic discussions,” it points to the role of 

“professionals, opinion makers, communications media and centres of power [who] being located in affluent urban areas, are far removed from the poor, with little direct contact with their problems. They live and reason from the comfortable position of a high level of development and a quality of life well beyond the reach of the majority of the world’s population.” 

In Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change, George Marshall says that religious groups have not incorporated the issue of climate change into their world-view unlike previous social movements like those against slavery or apartheid. But there are climate scientists with strong religious faith like Katherine Hayhoe who is the director of the Climate Science Centre at Texas Tech University and is also an evangelical Christian who is married to a pastor. She says:

The facts are not enough. When we look at the planet, when we look at creation, whatever it is telling us is an expression of what God has defined it to be. So instead of studying science, I feel like I'm studying what God was thinking when he set up our planet.

The language won't move people like me but there are a far greater number of people for whom what she says makes perfect sense. George Marshall says that both religion and climate science face the same cognitive difficulties. Both require people to believe something on the authority of the communicator; both manifest in events that are distant in time and place; they challenge our normal experience and assumptions about the world; and they require people to accept certain short-term costs in order to avoid uncertain long-term costs. The difference is that religion has these difficulties to a much greater degree. 

Marshall writes that the Reverend Sally Bingham, an Episcopalian preacher and renewables advocate told him, "We believe that Mary was a virgin, that Jesus rose from the dead, that we might go to heaven. So why is it that two thousand years later, we still believe this story? And how can we believe that and not believe what the world's most famous climate scientists are telling us?" He writes that maybe by resolutely keeping religion and science apart, environment scientists "have ignored the most effective, tried, and tested models for overcoming disbelief and denial".

The wickedest of all problems - IX

One major problem in dealing with climate change is the difficulty human brains have in thinking about the many scales of time involved. In The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that humans must combine two perspectives that involve vastly different time scales - one pertaining to "the planet” and the other to "the globe”. We need to look at humans today from both of these perspectives at once if you want to understand the planetary environmental problems humans face today, 

"The planet” is the Earth system – the earth as a planet in which biological and geological processes connect to create a “system”-like entity that has kept complex multi-cellular life going for more than half a billion years. "The globe” is what humans have created – it refers to the technological connectivity that binds this world together to make human flourishing possible on a very large scale. Global processes – the growth of European empires, global technologies, and a world market - have started impacting the domain of the planetary (the workings of the Earth system).

The scientific literature on climate change brings to our attention the role played by nonhuman creatures (microbes, fungi, planktons, plants) and entities (glaciers, forests, deep seas, oceanic currents, the Siberian permafrost, polar ice caps) in keeping the earth habitable for complex forms of life. We don’t have to forget human desires and priorities but have reached a position in history where we also must become more aware of how this planet “works,” what makes it a life-bearing planet and how life has, in turn, changed this planet.

The global COVID problem can be thought of as the “planetary” clashing with the “global”. Humans are the vector for spreading SARS-COV-2 because we live in congested cities, and are extremely mobile in search of profit and livelihood. That’s global history. But our bodies have also become evolutionary pathways for the virus, and that is an event in the history of biological life on the planet. This virus has been living in the guts of bats for millions of years. Its history belongs to deep, planetary history. 

Elizabeth Colbert calls the current rapid disappearance of species The Sixth Extinction. Far worse extinctions have happened in the past and the earth has recovered. But recovery and restabilisation occur at planetary, not human, time scales — that is, millions of years after the disturbing event. At this scale, we are powerless to harm; the planet will take care of itself. Our planet is not fragile at its own time scale but this time scale is irrelevant to humans in normal times.

The lifetime of fossil fuel CO2 in the atmosphere is a few centuries, plus 25 percent that lasts essentially forever. Around 56 per cent of all the CO2 that humans have liberated by burning fossil fuel is still aloft. The consequences we suffer at any one point in time are the result of past emissions. Because of this long CO2 lifetime, we cannot solve the climate problem by slowing down emissions by 20% or 50% or even 80%. Computer models calculate that even if we stopped increasing CO2 now, the temperature would likely still rise another 0.8 degrees, as previously released carbon continues to overheat the atmosphere.

Our economic model has no simple way to account for environmental costs. Agriculture does not take into account the costs of soil depletion. Fossil fuel burning does not take into account modification of the atmosphere. People do not pay for the CO2 they emit. Habitat destruction does not take into account the destruction of species. Fishermen do not pay for the fish they take from the sea; lumber, oil, coal, and mining companies do not pay for their resources, aside from the cost to buy the land. Economic costs are only those of extraction and delivery — Earth is free.

Some people say that we’re not going to solve the climate crisis until we get rid of capitalism. Maybe there’s something to the argument but it’s just not relevant. There’s no conceivable possibility of the kind of social change that they’re talking about within the timescale that’s necessary to solve this problem. Couple of decades means urgent. This doesn’t mean everybody’s going to die in 20 years. It means processes will be set in motion that won’t be reversible. After that, you can’t do anything to control it. 

In From Beirut to Jerusalem, Thomas Friedman writes that a veteran Israeli religious politician Yosef Burg used to tell a joke about two Israelis discussing philosophy. One says to the other, “Are you an optimist or a pessimist?” and the other answers, “I’m an optimist, of course. I am certain that today will be better than tomorrow.” I am a similar optimist. Surprisingly, religion might have some valuable lessons for secular thought and the two need not be regarded as opposites. (And I say this even though I am not religious at all.)

The wickedest of all problems - VIII

Since all of us are in some way the beneficiaries of cheap fossil fuel, tackling climate change is like trying to build a movement against yourself. People perceive – correctly – that their individual actions will not make a decisive difference in the atmospheric concentration of CO2. Scientists say the available time for meaningful action on climate change is about twenty years. Maybe in hundred years, you could change lifestyles enough to matter – but that much time is not available.  

‘How is it possible, when presented with overwhelming evidence, even the evidence of our own eyes, that we can deliberately ignore something — while being entirely aware that this is what we are doing?’ This is the question that George Marshall explores in his book Don't Even Think About It. He concludes that if the weather extremes continue to intensify, the experience of coping with loss and anxiety will make people push it aside as something that they would rather not think about.

Every article on climate change attracts angry comments in social media. Experiments have shown that the insertion of aggressive comments do nothing to change people’s views but makes them hold on more firmly to the view they already hold. Climate change also lacks any readily identifiable external enemy or motive, has dispersed responsibility and diffused impacts. Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, argues that our long psychological evolution has prepared us to respond strongly to four key triggers that he denotes with the acronym PAIN:

Personal: Our brains are most highly attuned to identifying friends, enemies, defectors, and human agency.

Abrupt: We are most sensitive to sudden relative changes and tend to ignore slow-moving threats.

Immoral: We respond to things that we find to be indecent, impious, repulsive, or disgusting.

Now: Our ability to look into the future 

Gilbert says, the problem with climate change is that it doesn’t trigger any of these. Of the four, he  emphasizes the lack of Abrupt and Now. If our emotional circuitry perceives an immediate threat it will flood us with hormones which ready us to hit or run. But this does not happen if we hear of potential dangers that might emerge in years or centuries to come. Persuading people that there’s an odourless, tasteless, invisible gas that’s gathering in the heavens and capturing the sun’s heat because of what man does in using fossil fuels doesn't trigger any of these emotional circuits.

Unless you live in the Maldives or Bangladesh, the threat seems far away. If the pace of global warming were accelerated to a few years instead of over centuries, people would pay more attention. Gilbert cautions us not to underestimate the importance of Immoral. While we recognise that climate change is bad, it does not make us feel noxious or disgraced. He adds, “If global warming were caused by eating puppies, millions of Americans would be massing in the streets.”

We have two distinct information processing systems. One is analytical, logical, and can make sense of abstract symbols, words, and numbers. The other is driven by emotions (especially fear and anxiety), images, intuition, and experience. The analytic system is slow and deliberative, rationally weighing the evidence and probabilities, the emotional system is automatic, impulsive, and quick to apply mental shortcuts so that it can quickly reach conclusions.

Actually the most comprehensive, complex science shows the reality of climate change. But it is addressed to the analytical part of the brain; to people who are not wired to realise the dangers. Climate change will come over a long time horizon that we can’t see, so it’s hard to convince people. Threats to the global systems that support human life are too macro or micro for us to notice directly. So when we are faced with news of these global threats, our attention circuits get bored.

Our perception of risk is dominated by our emotional brain. It favours proximity, draws on personal experience, and deals with images and stories that speak to existing values. The theories, graphs, projects, and data that scientists rely on speak almost entirely to the rational brain. That helps us to evaluate the evidence and, for most people, to recognise that there is a major problem. But it does not spur us to action.  

The psychologists Kahneman and Tversky found that people are consistently far more averse to losses than gains, are far more sensitive to short-term costs than long-term costs, and privilege certainty over uncertainty. Kahneman sees climate change as a near perfect lineup of these biases and is not very optimistic. He says that to mobilise people, this has to become an emotional issue. The second problem is that dealing with climate change requires that people accept certain short-term costs and reductions in their living standards to avoid higher but uncertain losses that are far in the future. He says: 

No amount of psychological awareness will overcome people’s reluctance to lower their standard of living. So that’s my bottom line: There is not much hope. I’m thoroughly pessimistic. I’m sorry.

The wickedest of all problems - VII

People are able to hold two contradictory ideas in their head comfortably. Thus for eg., you have the spectacle of Hillary Clinton saying that the climate crisis is “the chief threat of the 21st century,” while at the same time negotiating U.S. access to the  Arctic oil reserves. In Britain, energy and climate change are combined into one government department leading to simultaneous action to reduce emissions and to boost oil production. 

The U.S. state of California, and the Canadian province of British Columbia have all declared a long-term target of reducing emissions by 80 percent within forty years. So far, they have managed to achieve all of half a percent reduction per year. Norwegians pride themselves on being honest and conscientious global citizens and their government speaks often of being a world leader on climate change. But it is the eighth largest exporter of crude oil in the world, and its emissions grew five times faster than its already generous allowances under the Kyoto Protocol.

There is a tussle between individual rationality and institutional rationality. In their individual capacities, energy and oil company presidents agree that climate change was happening. They all say that as soon as governments regulate climate change, they would become “energy companies.” But in their official capacity, they will say that the competitive environment forced them to suppress the truth about climate change and ensure that those regulations do not happen. They are good at compartmentalising different areas of their lives and preventing any connections from jumping across those boundaries in their brains.

Those who accept the conclusions of climate scientists indulge in Greenwashing -  giving false, misleading or untrue action about the positive impact that an action has on the environment. There will be use of terms like sustainable, green or eco-friendly -- or just claiming to be "good for the planet" or "better for the environment" -- to make them appear to be greener. Shell says that  that they are good guys who produce energy, find positive environmental solutions, and help solve the climate crisis. 

The world’s governments have been talking about preventing climate change for more than two decades but in that time they have been fudging numbers and arguing over start dates, constantly trying to get extensions. The unfortunate result of all this mystification and procrastination is that global carbon dioxide emissions keep rising faster. As Naomi Klien said 'the only thing rising faster than our emissions is the output of words pledging to lower them.' The annual UN climate summit seems like a slanging match between early polluters and late polluters.  

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change  (IPCC) produces reports outlining options for reducing the rate at which climate change is taking place. The text of these articles and their clauses had been fought over sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, word by word. They are politically acceptable statements  without any mechanisms for enforcement of these carefully worded injunctions. It depends on nations volunteering to do things. Countries can ignore the existence of their own promises without any fear of punishment. 

In Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math, BILL MCKIBBEN says that we have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books of oil companies as climate scientists think is safe to burn. We’d have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground which is unlikely to happen. Although this coal and gas and oil is still technically in the soil, it’s already economically aboveground – it’s figured into share prices, companies are borrowing money against it. If you told Exxon or Lukoil that, in order to avoid wrecking the climate, they couldn’t pump out their reserves, the value of their companies would plummet. 

In Don't Even Think About It, George Marshall writes about the Near Earth Objects Information Centre in Wales which tracks extraterrestrial objects that might collide with Earth. It does not receive much funding which is not surprising since it monitors a threat that is so distant, so uncertain, and to many people so unlikely, that very few people take it seriously. Yet, the ones who take it seriously are climate change deniers who warn constantly about the exaggerated risk of climate change. There are even weirder climate change deniers.

In 2012 David Icke, a new age guru, managed to fill the largest football stadium in the UK for an eleven-hour talk on the takeover of shape-shifting reptilians from the constellation Draco. Apparently these “Reptoids,” who now rule the world, have taken human form and include the late  Queen, Al Gore, and the entire Bush family. Icke describes climate change as a “monumental scam,” showing, once again, that people can believe just about anything if it lines up with their worldview. Peter Ward says in A new History of Life: 

The history of life provides an early warning system that tells us we must reduce human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, but it is human history that tells us that we probably will not heed the warnings and reverse the damage until a succession of climate induced mass human mortalities gives us no choice.

The wickedest of all problems - VI

Technology will always be a part of whatever solution we seek to our various environmental problems. It is claimed that innovations in fields such as synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology will transform every aspect of life. One advocate argues that it would be an “evasion of our ethical duties” to ignore the fact that our human activities have already changed the world to such an extent that we need to engineer a solution.

Technology is so intoxicating that sometimes even distinguished economists speak about it as though it can solve anything. “The world can, in effect, get along without natural resources,” remarked Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Solow. Julian Simon, who writes mostly on economic subjects, goes even further. “Technology exists now,” he wrote, “to produce in virtually inexhaustible quantities just about all the products made by nature—foodstuffs, oil, even pearls and diamonds….We have in our hands now —actually, in our libraries — the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next 7 billion years. (Seven billion years?!)

A joint report published in 2003 by the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Commerce, entitled Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance, concludes, “The twenty-first century could end in world peace, universal prosperity, and evolution to a higher level of compassion and accomplishment.”  What kind of technologies are such optimists dreaming about? There will be animal protein bioengineered in factories rather than obtained from animals grazing in the fields. We can use genetic engineering to improve on the natural process of photosynthesis in plants. This would allow solar energy to be used on a massive scale without taking up too much land. 

According to theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson, the most efficient crops in nature convert just 1 percent of the sunlight they receive into chemical energy. “We can imagine,” he writes, “that in the future, when we have mastered the art of genetically engineering plants, we may breed new crop plants that have leaves made of silicon, converting sunlight into chemical energy with ten times the efficiency of natural plants…. They would allow solar energy to be used on a massive scale without taking up too much land. They would look like natural plants except that their leaves would be black, the colour of silicon, instead of green, the colour of chlorophyll.” In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh wrote: 

Although the Paris Agreement does not lay out the premises on which its targets are based, it is thought that they are founded on the belief that technological advances will soon make it possible to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and bury them deep underground. But these technologies are still in their infancy, and the most promising of them, known as “biomass energy carbon capture and storage,” would require the planting of bioenergy crops over an area larger than India to succeed at scale. To invest so much trust in what is yet only a remote possibility is little less than an act of faith, not unlike religious belief.

When talking about dealing with climate change,  politicians don’t talk of the system viewed as a whole taking into account the manufacture and transportation of every element of a finished good.  For example, take debates over “zero-emission” electric cars helping to fight climate impacts. They are not, in fact, “zero-emission” within a systems perspective. They draw their electricity from an energy grid which may be composed of polluting coal plants. And even if the power is generated in, say, solar farms, there’s the emissions of greenhouse gases in manufacturing the solar panels and the powering of their supply chain. 

For some people, the solution to avert climate catastrophe is Geoengineering. Some schemes focus on reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the earth, floating billions of tiny strips of tinfoil in orbit around the earth to reflect the sunlight, or injecting massive amounts of sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere. Other ideas include fertilising the oceans with iron slurry to increase the volume of marine life, which would consume excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The primary argument against these proposals is that they could never be effectively tested and, in addition, they risk causing even greater problems in their unintended consequences. If, for eg., you put aerosol particles into the air to cut back sunlight, it’s permanent. You can’t withdraw them. You withdraw them, you have a catastrophe. That means we’re instituting a permanent change in the whole ecology. That’s a tremendous burden to put on future generations. As Walt Whitman said, 'It is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary.' But if the geo-engineering solutions are not going to do it, it doesn’t mean we should stop working on them. 

It is natural that people will aspire for better lives. But when we assume that technology can keep solving whatever problems may come up, there is trouble ahead.  One problem about this is simply one of timescale. We have a couple of decades to answer these questions. These developments, even if they’re feasible, even if they’re the right thing to do, are not going to happen in a relevant timescale. There is, also, a concern that if people believe there's an engineering solution to climate change, this would reduce the pressure to curtail use of fossil fuels and give license to continue with business as usual. 

The wickedest of all problems- V

Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere due to human activities not only affects the climate. When water and air come into contact there’s an exchange - gases from the atmosphere get absorbed by the ocean and gases dissolved in the ocean are released into the atmosphere. When carbon dioxide combines with water in the ocean it forms carbonic acid, which makes the ocean more acidic.  This is called ocean acidification which is sometimes referred to as global warming’s “equally evil twin.”

Ocean acidification is often expressed in terms of the pH of seawater.  pH is a measure of acidity or alkalinity. The pH scale runs from zero to fourteen. A pH below 7 is considered acidic, and a pH greater than 7 is considered alkaline, or basic. Average ocean water pH is currently 8.1.  For comparison, the pH of pure water is 7, and stomach acid is around 2. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, average ocean pH was about 8.2. The change might not seem like much but the pH scale is logarithmic, so a one point change on the scale means a tenfold change in concentration. 

The oceans have absorbed between a third and a half of the CO2 humans have released into the atmosphere since about 1850.  This has resulted in the acidity of the oceans increasing by 26% since about 1850, a rate of change roughly 10 times faster than any time in the last 55 million years. If greenhouse gas emissions continue as they are doing at present, the oceans will be 150 percent more acidic than they were at the start of the industrial revolution. While this helps to reduce the rate of atmospheric warming and climate change, it comes at a cost. 

The capacity of the ocean to absorb CO2 decreases as ocean acidification increases making it less effective in moderating climate change. It makes it difficult for marine calcifying organisms, such as coral and some plankton, to form shells and skeletons, and existing shells become vulnerable to dissolution. The extra hydrogen in low-pH seawater reacts with calcium carbonate, turning it into other compounds that animals can’t use to build their shells. Most surface waters will be continually corrosive within decades. The impacts of acidification will extend up the food chain to affect economic activities such as fisheries, aquaculture and tourism. 

Most species seem to be more vulnerable in their early life stages. Juvenile fish for example, may have trouble locating suitable habitat to live. Many marine fish and invertebrates spend their early lives as larvae. Larvae are very small, which makes them especially vulnerable to increased acidity. For example, sea urchin and oyster larvae will not develop properly when acidity is increased. In another example, fish larvae lose their ability to smell and avoid predators. The vulnerability of larvae means that while organisms may be able to reproduce, their offspring may not reach adulthood.  

Ocean acidification will change the makeup of microbial communities, it will alter the availability of key nutrients, like iron and nitrogen. For similar reasons, it will change the amount of light that passes through the water, and for somewhat different reasons, it will alter the way sound propagates. (In general, acidification is expected to make the seas noisier.) It seems likely to promote the growth of toxic algae. It will impact photosynthesis — many plant species will benefit from elevated CO2 levels — and it will alter the compounds formed by dissolved metals, in some cases in ways that could be poisonous.

While many species will apparently do fine, even thrive in an acidified ocean, lots of others will not. Emiliania huxleyi, for example, is a single-celled phytoplankton. It is common at certain times of year and it forms the base of many marine food chains. Limacina helicina is a species of pteropod, or “sea butterfly,” that resembles a winged snail. It lives in the Arctic and is an important food source for many much larger animals, including herring, salmon, and whales. Both of these species appear to be highly sensitive to acidification. 

As with many aspects of climate change, the speed of CO2 release is the problem. CO2 levels have changed in the geologic past, with several  episodes being severe, but none with such speed of CO2 release as currently taking place. A useful comparison can be made to alcohol. Just as it makes a big difference to your blood chemistry whether you take a month to go through a case of alcohol or an hour, it makes a big difference to marine chemistry whether carbon dioxide is added over the course of a million years or a hundred. 

If we were adding CO2 to the air more slowly, geophysical processes like the weathering of rock would come into play to counteract acidification. But things are moving too fast for such slow-acting forces to keep up. As Rachel Carson once observed,  “Time is the essential ingredient, but in the modern world there is no time.” By burning through coal and oil deposits, humans are putting carbon back into the air that has been buried underground for  hundreds of millions of years.