Planet Water — Juan Enriquez 3/4

Juan Enriquez says we already poked the weather monster. I ask why solving energy and reaching net zero won’t simply steer us out of trouble. His answer: we misnamed the planet. Most of the heat is stored in the oceans, and water cools slowly.

We get into marine cloud layers, stratospheric geoengineering, factories the size of cities, and the science we need to do before an emergency makes somebody do something stupid. Juan says we still have agency—but we’re running out of it.

Transcript

Juan: And the only answer that's reasonable to that is we already poked the weather monster. The weather monster has woken up. The weather monster is now creating hurricanes off the coast of Mexico that go from tropical storm to category 5 in 24 hours. It's creating stuff in Nepal that are floods like you've never seen, but those similar floods have occurred in Spain and they've occurred in Greece, and they're occurring all over the world. They're occurring in the Grand Canyon this week.

You're looking at stuff which is becoming more and more extreme, and we're like frogs boiling. Except that each event on your phone is getting closer to where you live. The Carolinas thought they were immune to hurricanes because they're inland. Turns out they weren't. We have to be really careful. The thing that gives me hope is we've never had generations with more power and agency than today.

I tell kids, Google didn't exist when I went to college. Cell phones didn't exist when I went to college. They look at me like, "You were born last century."

Pablos: The 1900s.

Juan: That's an accurate statement.

Pablos: You're from the 1900s. That's what my daughter says.

Juan: These kids get up in the morning and they've got more publishing power than Joseph Pulitzer ever had.

Pablos: From their dorm room.

Juan: And they've got the ability to generate a billion-dollar company in two years from their dorm room with ten kids and no factory. That's a superpower that young people can't forget, because we've certainly dented the car. But at the same time they can build at a scale. BYD's new factories: about the size of San Francisco and almost no employees. You're thinking about this very weird world where you're going to have an abundance of cheap stuff. And that gives us the ability to make a lot of people's lives much better.

Pablos: Maybe we could just make BYDs reflective.

Juan: And it becomes an issue of distribution. That's a very complicated debate. If we don't have that, it's going to be forced on the world. And it should be forced on the world.

Pablos: Five years ago we couldn't have a BYD factory the size of San Francisco. Is it really that big? That's fucking huge. I hadn't heard that. If you extrapolate from that, all those billion-dollar companies popped out of the toaster in the last 20 years were all just software companies. Our ability to do things in the physical world cost-effectively, especially in the West, went to almost zero—not almost zero, but depressingly low.

That seems to be course correcting in a bunch of ways, primarily because the software is good enough to help us build physical shit now. That's why we can make BYDs, TerraFabs, all these huge things. Making iPhones at a massive scale made it possible to make Fitbits and Aura rings and all this other kind of stuff because they're drafting off of the intense scale of iPhone production or smartphone production.

We could end up, in something like a decade or so, where we've scaled up our ability to make BYDs, and it makes it easy to do things like geoengineering drones or other things that might not have made sense today because the cost curve is coming down. The marginal cost of solar panels is close to zero. I think, on one hand, it feels like some of these things could get just so cheap and easy to do that we actually do start to take them seriously.

The other side of it is when you look at what's happening in energy. We have a dismal track record in the last few decades, other than improving solar. But where we're going might actually be able to get to net zero on energy production, at the same time scaling up energy production. We have the puzzle pieces coming together to do that.

I wonder: if we never did anything else that was smart and we just fixed energy, how long would it take for us to stop having to worry about these warming effects? Is that centuries or millennia, or could we actually steer out of this? We've got a few extra hurricanes and some heat death in Europe, but we steer out of it by solving it.

Juan: Yes and no. It depends on your time frame. Imagine for a second that I was holding a candle here. Stick your hand above the candle: ouch, almost instantly. Blow out the candle, no issue. I can put my hand right over the candle a fraction of a second after it goes out. Now I put a glass of water here, and I heat the water and heat the water and heat the water. It's thousands of times more energy to heat the same volume of water.

That's why it takes forever to watch a pot when it's boiling. Once it's boiling, I can't stick my finger in. Two seconds after the candle's out, I can't stick my finger in. A few minutes after, it still hurts to put my finger down. What we've done with this planet—we've misnamed this planet. This is now planet water; it's not planet Earth. Earth is a small fraction of this planet. Almost all of global warming has not gone into the air; it's gone into the water.

It takes a lot of energy to heat that water. The water is now acting like a heat emitter. The net effect of that is it's going to take a while for that water to cool. That's why we need some pretty extreme measures now to begin to cool that water, because we're about to wipe out all coral in the world with this El Niño. We're about to have hurricanes in California, which you don't have usually. We're modifying these patterns, and you get these really weird effects.

Because you are heating the world, it's a little bit like those stews you make on the stove. The top of the pot—you pull it out and it's full of water. There's condensation that drops into your stew. That's what's happening as you heat the ocean: you're getting 11% more water into the atmosphere. When water falls, it is so much more extreme.

These rainstorms just drop. It's not drops of water; it's like dropping buckets of water on stuff, right? And you get a year's worth of rainfall in one evening. That's why you're getting these extreme events, because there's just so much more moisture in the atmosphere. Now the flip side of that, which is weird, is the way that moisture gets into the atmosphere from land as it dries it out.

You're getting more and more droughts because you're taking some of that water with the heat out of land, putting it in the atmosphere. And then when it drops, it drops and runs off. Again, don't poke the climate. It's a dangerous thing to do.

Pablos: The only real hope is to reduce the stored energy in the oceans. The only way you could do that is by re-irradiating it into space somehow. The process of re-irradiating is what makes storms and hurricanes.

Juan: Or you could put marine cloud layers.

Pablos: That would keep more heat from coming in.

Juan: It would also begin to cool. For those of us who've been lucky enough to be in San Diego—fabulous place—you're sitting in La Jolla on those cliffs overlooking the hang gliders, and there's a marine cloud layer below you. It's cold on that beach, but you go in two miles inland and it's 100 degrees.

Just having a very long marine cloud layer across parts of the ocean could be effective for a while. Very small droplets of water increase the humidity. You could create a marine cloud layer.

Pablos: But does that draw heat out of the ocean, or does it just reflect sunlight coming in?

Juan: It would create micro cloud layers. If you think of the plume emissions behind a ship, you'd be plume emitting a marine cloud layer using autonomous ships, or sailing ships or something. I think that's less effective than the stratospheric stuff.

But here's the point of the thing: we have to do the science before we have an emergency. Because otherwise, you've got 10 or 20,000 people dead in Europe or the US, and politicians say, ‘Do something,’ and somebody's going to do something stupid. Do the science first. Figure out what's reflective, figure out what it costs, figure out if there's a dual use, and then be ready to deploy at scale if there's an emergency.

Pablos: we were working on it. It was taboo in science. It wasn't okay for scientists to work on geoengineering. That's why we did it, because we weren't a real academic lab. We were private. We could do whatever we wanted. I remember when we would go to research groups at universities and try and get them interested in our ideas. That didn't go very well. But it didn't seem like a legitimate thing to the scientific community. Do you think that probably exists now, or are people taking it more seriously? I'm not really paying attention to it.

Juan: I think the science community—justifiably—is terrified of the stuff, because it's scary stuff like this. Neil Stephenson wrote a wonderful book on the stuff, Termination Shock.

Pablos: That was based on our projects.

Juan: But I think the climate scientists now realize that we've crossed thresholds that are very close to being irreversible. And that methane cycle gets going. That one is going to be very hard to stop. And what history is telling you is this shit happens. You don't have a century. You don't have five centuries.

Once you tip this stuff, it's like that transition point between frozen and liquid. Those phase transitions—you've got to be really careful about that. You see that history again and again: these ice cores.

I think we still have agency, but we're running out of it.

Pablos: We're giving it away.

Juan: Climate scientists: they're getting more and more worried about this stuff now.

There are people with a lot of money who think, I've got a bunker and I will survive this.

Pablos: That turns out to be a no. Very lonely existence.

Juan: The restaurants are bad in the bunkers. Bad idea.

Pablos: That's not a solution.

It does make you wonder. In one sense, I love that we have 190 or some different countries. They're all run differently, they'll eat different food, they have different ideas about what's cool, and none of them seem to have figured it all out and have it right. I think that's great.

But at the same time, the ability to coordinate on something like this seems kind of abysmal. What's the track record of the United Nations? Have they managed to get the world to agree about any important stuff and make a big difference? I'm not following this stuff closely, but it seems like we don't really have a global decision-making process for these things. We might be stuck in a permanent state of indecision.

Juan: I think some of the people who have the highest stake in this are the island nations of the Pacific. And they're sovereign territories, and they've got a lot of ocean around them.

Pablos: That's true, but they're not the economic drivers or decision-making drivers in geopolitics.

Juan: They, in partnership with somebody, could do some stuff.

Pablos: Maybe. I hope that works.

Transcript

Links

Thanks, we need good co-conspirators.