Feedback that Could Decimate our Species

A Case of Reporters’ Negligence

[UPDATE (12/17/19): for the “hydrogen bomb” analogy to explain triggering in positive feedback, click here. NOTE TO READERS: Unlike most, this post contains two short principal essays. Both deal with existential threats to our species, the first (immediately below) with global warming, and the second (further below, entitled “Our Second-to-Last Chance”) with the menace of a second term of Trump’s presidency. Both threats are dire: global warming could extinguish our species, and another term of Trump could impair our species’ chances of reducing it, as well as extinguish the world’s wealthiest and most powerful democracy.]

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Over 6.5 years ago, I wrote a post about positive feedback in global warming. After explaining what the words “positive feedback” mean to an engineer or scientist, I outlined its two major known sources in global warming: the melting of Earth’s ice, and the release of methane from melting permafrost and dissociating methane hydrates in the deep oceans.

Only this week, more than half a decade later, has the concept reached our mainstream press. Andrew Freedman of the Washington Post published a story on it Tuesday, which David Leonhardt of the New York Times picked up in his e-mail opinion newsletter yesterday.

Unfortunately, Freedman muddied the waters by devoting the last half of his story to the fish disappearing from Arctic waters and the far-north native communities suffering from melting permafrost. And David Leonhardt, for some reason, failed to use the key technical term “positive feedback,” instead referring to a “tipping point.”

I consider Leonhardt to be the best of the best of our American journalists. That’s why I subscribe to his “opinion” newsletter (really, superb and superbly succinct analysis), for which you have to sign up specially.

But “tipping point” has become a weak cliché, used for everything from routine business reversals to politics. It also misrepresents the nature of positive feedback as an inflection point rather than a continuous if explosive process. Reporters ought to use the technical term “positive feedback” precisely because it’s unfamiliar to readers without technical backgrounds. Once explained, it might force them to think beyond their comfort zones.

Positive feedback is a nonlinear phenomenon that can force changes in physical systems in impossibly short times. The example most familiar to ordinary people—at least those of my age—is amplifier screech. In the old days, whenever you brought a microphone too close to a speaker driven by its amplified output, you got an instantaneous blast of sound that drove the speakers to their maximum output. The blast of sound occurred far too fast for anyone to stop it by turning the volume down, or to protect their eardrums by covering their ears. The screech continued, limited only by the speakers’ maximum output, until someone moved the microphone away (or disconnected it), or cut power to the audio system.

In global warming, positive feedback is just as nonlinear as in amplifier screech. On a geological time scale, it can occur just as suddenly. But its consequences are infinitely more dire than hurt ears or even impaired hearing. It could decimate or extinguish our species and devastate Earth’s existing biosphere. It could produce an extinction event comparable to the meteoric impact that extinguished the dinosaurs.

Of the several sources of positive feedback discussed in my 2013 post, the release of carbon from melting permafrost is proving to be the most dangerous. But the similar release of methane from disassociating methane hydrates in the deep oceans could prove to be even more menacing once well studied. There are three points about these phenomena that any reporter investigating current research should understand:

First, the positive feedback from melting permafrost alone could rapidly exceed the effect of all of humanity’s emissions of carbon from burning fossil fuels since the dawn of human civilization. Melting permafrost releases not just carbon dioxide, but also methane, which is over ten times more powerful as a greenhouse gas. The methane comes from the decaying of thawed ancient vegetation as microbes begin their work.

As for the quantities of greenhouse gases released from this single source, Freedman got it right:

“There has been concern throughout the scientific community that the approximately 1,460 billion to 1,600 billion metric tons of organic carbon stored in frozen Arctic soils, almost twice the amount of greenhouse gases as what is contained in the atmosphere, could be released as the permafrost melts.”

The second vital point is that this release, and the acceleration of global warming which it causes, could occur unimaginably quickly on a geological time scale. Compared to the steady drip, drip, drip of carbon dioxide from human exhaust pipes and smokestacks, it would be more like an explosion of greenhouse gases. The same point applies, but with much more uncertainty, to the poorly measured dissociation of deep-ocean methane hydrates.

It took over a century and a half for humanity to add to the CO₂ already in the atmosphere (about 300 ppm) to reach the amount present today (407 ppm), which is rapidly heating our planet. Studies of the end of the last ice age suggest that similar positive feedback, from deep-sea methane hydrates, with a release triggered this time by human activity, could cause global average temperatures to rise by as much as 30 degrees Fahrenheit in just “a few decades” (emphasis added).

The final and perhaps most crucial point is uncertainty. While the general phenomena of positive feedback from melting permafrost and dissociating methane hydrates is well understood, their actual geographic extent and magnitudes are not well known.

The problem has nothing to do with the theory of positive feedback from these sources, which is rock solid. It’s simply a matter of lack of data.

The Earth’s rapidly melting permafrost is in sparsely populated and economically unimportant areas like the far norths of Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Scandinavia and Siberia. These places are enormous in area, difficult to reach and difficult, expensive and uncomfortable to work in. The full extent of positive feedback arising from them (which of course affects the entire globe) is unknown for those reasons and no others. (The Antarctic continent harbors nothing similar to melting permafrost because it’s mostly still frozen and surrounded at similar southern latitudes by the Antarctic Ocean, not permafrost.)

As for disassociating methane hydrates, its places of occurrence are even more remote, less accessible, and less studied. They’re at the bottoms of the Earth’s oceans.

So positive feedback in global warming from these sources is the “wild card” of climate change. It’s a gigantic lever that could literally move the Earth into an entirely new climate regime. Its “length” is unknown and poorly studied.

Yet these sources of positive feedback are emerging as the chief accelerants of global warming. In other words, they are the most menacing phenomena of all. They could give our species and most of our fellow creatures on Earth today the coup de grace.

So reporters who cover climate change should be jumping all over these two sources of positive feedback. They should be pressing scientists for answers in every story. They should be reading study summaries like this one, and beating a path to the office of its author.

The dismal state of public knowledge about global warming derives not just from massive disinformation put out by the fossil-fuel barons, the GOP and our president. More subtly, it arises from the rich and the powerful browbeating the scientists who study global warming into making only the most cautions and rock-solid public statements.

But if reporters study what scientists are saying among themselves when not under attack, they will discover emerging truths that are infinitely more horrifying than the most “alarmist” of official reports today. Only if and when they do so will our species have a decent chance of facing the juggernaut of warming that’s coming our way before it’s too late.

Footnote: Today many sound systems have automatic dynamic range control—a form of negative feedback consciously supplied by system engineers. So the phenomenon of amplifier screech is less familiar to the younger generation than to us geezers. But it remains distinctive and unforgettable to anyone who has ever heard it. Just superimpose that auditory mental image on the heating of our planet, and you can get a rough idea of the existential menace that confronts us.

Human Triggering of a “Natural” Cataclysm

For days I’ve been considering how to explain the global cataclysm of positive feedback in global warming without the aid nonlinear mathematics. The best way, I think, is to conceive of human-caused global warming as a mere trigger for a much larger “natural” phenomenon.

The human-caused part of the cataclysm is the steady (and steadily increasing) drip, drip, drip of carbon dioxide from the exhaust pipes and smokestacks of industrialized human civilization. Over the last century and a half, that drip, drip, drip has heated our planet to the point where global permafrost is starting to melt, releasing vast stores of greenhouse gases from decaying ancient vegetation.

Those vast stores of greenhouse gases are both far more voluminous and far more dangerous than the drip, drip, drip of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels. Scientists estimate today that, if all the permafrost melts, the store of “carbon” in the global atmosphere today will approximately double. That means an increase from today’s roughly 407 ppm (parts per million) to 814 ppm, or nearly three times the “normal” i.e., pre-industrial, level of 300 ppm. But molecule-for-molecule, the methane resulting from decomposing, melting permafrost produces ten to twenty times as much planetary heating.

So as all the permafrost melts, we’re talking about an explosion of global warming, from “natural” sources in permafrost, about thirty times the magnitude of the one caused by all the human fossil-fuel burning considered in the official reports on climate change so far.

You can make a good analogy to a hydrogen bomb, which, just so, uses a much smaller artificial trigger for a “natural” phenomenon. Small amounts of conventional high explosives, arrayed around fissionable material, trigger a near-instantaneous fission explosion like that in a conventional “atomic bomb.” That artificial explosion of nuclear fission, in turn, provokes a fusion reaction in heavy hydrogen very much like the “natural” fusion that energizes our Sun every day. The resulting “natural” fusion explosion, triggered ultimately by the artificial one, is millions of times more powerful than the puny explosion of man-made stuff that triggered it.

Just so, the melting of permafrost triggered by the warming caused by humans burning fossil fuels is now creating a much larger “natural” phenomenon like the one that ended the last ice age. The trouble is, whereas the “natural” explosion of warming that ended the last ice age began from a baseline of ice, the similar “natural” explosion of greenhouse gases we are now triggering starts from a baseline of global climate that is already measurably warmer than the one in which we evolved. If the result is global average warming of 30 degrees Fahrenheit in just a few decades, as scientists estimate for ending the last ice age, then human civilization will be unviable except near and beyond the Arctic and Antarctic Circles long before the end of this century.

To put it simply, our burning of fossils fuels is triggering a much larger explosion of greenhouse gases analogous to the “natural” fusion explosion in a hydrogen bomb. And that’s without even considering the additional triggered explosion of greenhouse gases from dissociating methane hydrates in our warming deep seas. That release, which may have actually ended the last ice age, is the most uncertain of the two triggered “natural” positive-feedback phenomena just now coming under serious study.

Our Second-to-Last Chance

This coming Wednesday, when the gavel comes down in the House to announce Donald Trump’s impeachment, the Democrats will have squandered our second-to-last chance to keep our Republic. The very last chance, of course, will come with next year’s general election.

I hope I’m wrong. I’ve never hoped I’m wrong so much. But I have to call things as I see them.

At this moment, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is the Democrats’ acting leader. President Obama, the party’s titular head, holds no office. What’s more, he’s keeping his own counsel. He emerged from silence only briefly, just to call out an obvious political blunder: Sanders’ and Warrens’ endorsement of politically impossible and coercive “Medicare for All.”

Pelosi is the grizzled general in the field. She’s in command. She’s the only real leader that the Dems and normal Americans have got. She’s also the one with the longest, most active and grittiest experience, eclipsing even Joe Biden’s.

Pelosi wants to keep impeachment short, sweet, simple and clean, like the proverbial rifle shot. Apparently, she wants to return the primary and general campaigns to policy and real politics as quickly as possible. She seems to think that “kitchen-table” issues will ultimately prevail and jar Trump’s supporters out of their delusions.

But nothing about Donald Trump or his misrule is short, sweet, simple or clean. As I see it, next year’s political Armageddon will not be about policy or real politics at all. It will be all about a single man, a fundamentally bent but gifted demagogue—a “natural,” if you will. Just as much, it will be about the fundamental, natal flaw of our Republic: the one that engraves popular-minority rule into the stone of our Senate and our Electoral College.

Next year’s election will be all about an Electoral College in which the nine states that hold 51% of our population have—all together—only 46% of the vote. Next year’s trial of and attempt to remove Trump from the White House will be about a Senate in which those same states—all together—have a mere 18% of the vote.

Trump and his Republicans no more intend to make next year’s election about policy and real politics than Trump has done and does in running his perpetual campaign so far. He and his lackeys will base their push for power on division, resentment, hate, and the sort of crude medieval social dominance, backed by violence or its constant threat, that once characterized the age of kings.

If they win, our Republic will be no more. As a good and honest Catholic, Speaker Pelosi ought to know. Catholics attribute to Ignatius Loyola the words, “Give me the child for the first seven years, and I will give you the man.” Their Church has endured for nearly two millennia, through good times and bad, under that principle. By January 2025, when and if a twice-victorious Trump leaves office, he will have had the nation’s children under his spell for eight long years. At least he will in the homes of his avid supporters.

During that time, he will have taught us all that lying pays. He will have inculcated the “value” of an “alternate reality” in politics and public life. He will have replaced the rule of law that once distinguished our nation with loyalty to a single, deeply flawed man.

He will have taught us that politics is entertainment, just as Caesar did with his gladiators’ mortal combat and his public sacrifices of Christians to lions. He will have driven the professionals, experts, and honest public servants out of our federal government and replaced them with snarling, nasty, thoughtless and perpetually angry lackeys like Reps. Collins and Jordan.

No, next year’s election will not be about policy or real politics. At least it won’t be for those voters who count the most: the ones who took a gamble on Trump in 2016 and would now follow him into Hell. Those voters may well fix the outcome of the 2020 election, just as they did in 2016. For the rest of us, the best remedy will be to get them to see Trump as a man.

No one can count on the ever-looming economic recession or depression to save us. Our economy will likely muddle on for a least twelve more months. The long time lag between any change in economic policy and its effect will make sure of that.

And Trump will have policy “triumphs” to boast of and blow out of all proportion. The USMCA no doubt will become law, as it should: it’s only a modest change from old NAFTA, and many of the changes benefit American workers. Trump will also get credit from farmers and workers for reversing the damage that his own suicidal trade war with China has caused. He’ll be like the robber who stabs a victim and then offers to take him to the hospital.

No, policy and real politics won’t win the day, at least not with Trump’s current supporters. Even on health insurance, he will downplay his and his party’s perpetual opposition to any real expansion. He will offer some ginned-up, fictitious plan to expand health insurance, just as Nixon offered his “secret plan for peace” in Vietnam before ramping up the bombing runs.

In my view, the only thing that will win the day for sure is to get a minority of Trump voters to see who and what he is. It may take as few as 10%. But at least some of them have to stop seeing him as their champion. They have to stop adoring him as the sick stand-up comic who validates their darkest and most hostile and hateful dreams. They have to stop seeing politics, which has given them nothing for decades, as mere dark entertainment. They have to have some real hope.

Trump’s own rank and file must begin to see him as the enemy of everything that our nation once stood for. The believers among them must see him as the antithesis of all that Jesus advised, from giving the poor succor to loving one’s neighbors and enemies.

You can’t open their eyes with the corruption of foreign policy for personal gain. That’s far too abstract and remote from most people’s personal lives to hit home. So, for that matter, is Ukraine generally. Ditto obstruction of justice or of Congress.

These things may be anathema to anyone who’s been to law school or who’s had a good course in civics and still remembers it. But the vast majority of Trump’s supporters have done neither. Their infrequent thoughts about politics revolve mostly around pols like Hillary Clinton who backed Wall Street as it left them and their families to twist in the winds of globalism.

So, as poll after poll has shown, the Articles of Impeachment now awaiting whole-House approval will do nothing to change voters’ minds. They are but words on paper. They are weak abstractions in a stark field of broken promises, lost jobs, lost homes, lost communities, deaths from opiate addiction, and dismal personal futures.

With the Articles of Impeachment now proposed, Trump’s acquittal will be a foregone conclusion. The Senate’s trial will be yet another demonstration of the power of popular-minority rule in America. And Trump and his apologists will use the acquittal, quite effectively, as “conclusive” evidence of Trump’s innocence of all wrongdoing.

By taking the “rifle-shot” approach (two shots, in fact: corruption of foreign policy and obstruction of Congress), the House is preaching to the choir. It’s doing nothing to sway Trump’s partisans. Instead, it’s giving them a bold excuse to continue to see him as their noble champion who’s done no wrong and is persecuted merely for being on their side.

What the nation needs now is a very different kind of show. It needs an extended examination of all the myriad ways in which Trump’s sick rule has fallen short of competence, coherence, the rule of law, proper procedure, expertise, his oath of office, and the basic canons of democracy and human decency.

That can’t be done in two fortnights. It can’t be done with “rifle shots” based on legal abstractions that have no direct application to voters’ lives. The Dems need an antidote, in the House proceedings, to the daily show that Trump’s Tweets, public rants and MAGA-hat rallies provide.

Trump’s greatest single skill may be dominating the daily news, on TV, radio, and social media. Without an antidote to that, the Democrats have no chance of stripping away his hard support.

Perhaps Dem-leaning billionaires like Bloomberg and Steyer can pony up the money to level the playing field with paid political advertising, especially on Fox. But the most effective and cheapest expedient would be an expanded impeachment process. That would command the media’s attention daily, just as Trump does, and just as impeachment has already done for several weeks.

In order to work, additional impeachment counts must not be as soporific to ordinary voters as the two now on offer. They must focus on things that matter to real people, not legal abstractions such as obstruction of justice. They must expose the swindling of students and ex-students burdened with debt, the abuse of troops sent to fight in the Middle East without any coherent strategy, and the misuse of tariffs and other economic incentives that destroy, not create, good jobs for our middle class while aiding Trump’s own social class and his personal business empire.

Will any of this happen? Probably not. The die appears to be cast. The Dems will forward their two pale, abstract Articles of Impeachment to the Senate, where they will die a quick death under popular-minority rule and the continued scorn and ridicule of Trump’s GOP lackeys.

If, as appears likely, Trump shuns or severely limits debates in the general campaign, that contest will devolve into paid political advertising, including on social media, and a ceaseless struggle to dominate the “news.” Already Trump has demonstrated consummate skill in news domination, so there can be no assurance of a Democratic victory.

With our Republic at stake, that’s too big a risk to take. There are a few days left for Speaker Pelosi and her House Dems to reconsider and act to reduce that risk. Brand new articles of impeachment, focusing on ways in which Trump’s corruption and lawlessness have made ordinary voters’ lives harder, might just do the trick.

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