Brains & Climate

Thanks to upsetting our climate with a series of low-tech practices such as cutting down forests, tilling the soil, and—worst of all—burning fossil fuels, we are now facing a use-it-or-lose-it intelligence test.

The outlook is for a higher fever, with droughts that just won’t quit. Extreme weather will keep trashing the place. Tipping points may lead to demolition derbies, as when the Amazon rain forest burns or major cities are inundated.

Absent effective treatment of climate disease, the students of today will face an unpleasant, chaotic future—not merely hotter summers. Unless we get our act together very quickly—the next ten years—and on a global scale, our legacy could be genocidal downsizing.

Yet all we hear about is a low-carbon energy diet over the long haul: conserve energy, emphasize renewable energy, fill the car’s tank less often, and substitute clean solar, wind, nuclear, and geothermal for the fossil fuels.

Are such measures quick enough? No. Reliable enough? No. Can they head off the developing world from repeating our mistakes? No. (more…)

David Houle at EvolutionShift.com:  In this fourth installment of our on-going series of interviews with some of the leading thinkers and scientists on the subject of energy, we interview William H. Calvin, PhD.< I had the good fortune to meet Bill at the Future of Energy conference hosted by the Foundation for the Future several months ago.  I have also had the pleasure to read excerpts of his upcoming book “Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change”, a book that could well become a classic as it frames the conversation and offers up a strategy and vision to effectively deal with Climate Change. He is the author of a dozen books, mostly for general readers, about brains and evolution. The latest is A Brief History of the Mind: From Apes to Intellect and Beyond .   

1.  Evolutionshift.com:  Bill, thank you for sending me a chapter of your new book: “Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change”. When will it be published?

I’ll put that comparing-solutions chapter up on the web at Global-Fever.org. The book itself will be out in February by the University of Chicago Press. They did my other climate book (A Brain for All Seasons) which won several book awards..  What prompted you to write this book?The urgency of the situation. I figured that, as a newly emeritus medical school professor who has been following climate science since 1984, I could afford taking the three years to write it. Better that than taking a real climate scientist away from research and teaching time. And I felt that I had the right skill set. A Ph.D. in biophysics makes it easy for me to dig into both the physics and the biology involved. And thanks to talking shop with the neurosurgeons every day for twenty years, I do know something about when you can afford to wait and when decisive action is needed. 

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The timetable is really 2020?  That means that we must truly accelerate efforts on all fronts.  What can we do as individuals?
You can’t enjoy the long run unless you do the right things in the short run. We’ve only got a decade to make a big dent in fossil fuel use or deploy new carbon sinks in equivalent numbers. Anything slower means a disaster for today’s students.I don’t think we can advance on all fronts, given our 2020 emergency; we’d be better off spending our money on plug-in hybrids than on new rapid transit, for example. Reforming drivers worldwide takes too long.

A major makeover in a decade requires a lot of people working together, not separately. Individuals cannot do very much, in time for 2020, but they can–and must–persuade politicians to either get moving or retire.  (more…)

Please talk about Geothermal or, as you call it Hot Rock Energy.
  I find it fascinating and, quite frankly, have not heard much about this source of energy.  

It’s because “geothermal” has an image problem rather like electric cars once had. It took the success of a 1997 gasoline-electric hybrid called the Prius to help people think ahead to an all-electric car without defaulting to an image of a golf cart of limited utility, not suitable for the freeways. Hearing geothermal, we often pop up a mental image of a sulfurous hot spring and wrinkle our nose. Too many people think that geothermal is just piping near-surface hot water around to heat some buildings—say, Idaho’s State Capitol buildings in Boise. This in turn makes you think that geothermal electrical power is a special case, nice for Iceland but not more generally. That, however, is your grandfather’s notion of geothermal, badly out of date. See the report put out by a panel of eighteen experts that MIT assembled in 2006 to evaluate Hot Rock Energy as an industrial-strength solution for C-free electricity. The experts said it could yield a thousand times more than our present overall energy use. How polluting? Close to zero. (more…)

11. What do you think about nuclear energy? Is it safe? How can it be utilized to reach your timeline goals?

Nuclear power generation is currently the major C-free energy source. It is over fifty years old, with an excellent safety record. It’s hundreds of times safer than hydro (dams fail) and thousands of times safer than fossil fuels. Unlike the other expandable C-free sources, most of the beginner’s mistakes have already been made. It took three decades before the efficiency doubled.

France has switched to nuclear for 78 percent of its elect­ric­ity. Hydro gives France another 13 percent. So France is 91 percent clean, 9 percent dirty—and Texas is the exact opposite. Texans now get 91 percent of their electricity from fossil fuels, almost twice the national average. Switzerland is 1 percent dirty and the U.S. is at 60 percent (electricity only; about 85 percent dirty counting transportation energy needs too).

If France and Switzerland switched their vehicles over to electrical power, they would serve as even better C-free energy models for the world. Much as I admire Denmark’s style of distribut­ed cogeneration and the move to renewable wind and solar energy, there simply isn’t time to scale that up around the world before 2020, given how many coal trains and oil tankers need to be retired. (more…)