18
Dissonance
(if you are interested)
leads to discovery.
—William Carlos Williams, Paterson
The Middle Ages saw a slowly dawning awareness that there was “something in the air,” something invigorating, distinct from the invisible entirety moving through and around us. The first time the word “atmosphere” (literally, “vapor sphere”) appeared in the English language was in 1638, but it was in reference to the moon, which goes to show how poorly the concept was understood. Any insight into Earth’s atmosphere, its life-giving properties, or what it might be composed of would have to wait for another century. Its revelation, fueled in part by coffee, appeared in the Western consciousness at the same time as the American Revolution and a prototype for the spark plug.
That there were elements of the intangible void surrounding us that could be altered, added, or isolated was discovered almost simultaneously by a Swedish-German apothecary named Carl Scheele and a “furious free-thinker,” Unitarian minister, and polymath from Birmingham, England, named Joseph Priestley. Both men had the exhilarating and increasingly rare experience of finding something new under the sun, a feat Priestley performed repeatedly, discovering nine new gases, among his many other remarkable accomplishments. But what to call this invisible spirit-like essence that seemed to energize fire and animals alike? Scheele settled on the German brandluft—“fire air.” Priestley, building on the work of his contemporary Joseph Black, went with a Greek-derived English variant: “dephlogisticated air,” a mouthful that meant virtually the same thing. Both Scheele and Priestley understood that there was a close relationship—a kind of codependency—not just between oxygen and fire, but between oxygen and life itself.
In the summer of 1771, Priestley began a series of experiments with live mice, putting them into an inverted bell jar, which he sealed by immersing in a shallow pan of water. The mice died quickly in this environment, sometimes in a matter of seconds. But why? “Once any quantity of air has been rendered noxious by animals breathing in it,” Priestley wrote, “I do not know that any methods have been discovered of rendering it fit for breathing again.”
He followed this with an astonishing corollary intuition:
It is evident, however, that there must be some provision in Nature for this purpose, as well as for that of rendering the air fit for sustaining flame; for without it the whole mass of the atmosphere would, in time, become unfit for the purpose of animal life [and also for fire].
Like his remote colleagues, Priestley was, in his off time, using secular means to fathom the deep space of their immediate surroundings—the invisible, intangible mysteries previously relegated to the clergy and to God. If his neighbors didn’t consider these inquiries actively heretical, then many considered them pointless; after all, there was, literally, “nothing to see here.” Priestley summed up this paradox in his observation on Isaac Newton: “He had very little knowledge of air, so he had few doubts concerning it.”
Despite the fact that there is no tangible barrier between the human eye and the remotest visible star, Priestly perceived that our atmosphere was not only malleable but finite: if it wasn’t a closed system, it was a very restricted one, much like his glass bell. Wondering how other living creatures might fare in “putrefied air,” he introduced a mint plant into a sealed jar recently vacated by one more suffocated mouse. The mint plant lived—for days, and then for weeks, in what had been lifeless, “phlogisticated” air. Priestley continued, this time introducing a mint plant into a jar where a candle had smothered. Again, the mint continued to grow. That the same conditions which killed mice and smothered candles would have no adverse effect on a plant left Priestley to speculate on what was happening inside those sealed jars, in plain view yet out of sight. After a week, he placed a mouse inside the jar with the mint. Instead of dying immediately like all the others, this mouse lived long enough for Priestley to observe it, retrieve it, and put it into a second sealed vessel filled with mouse-polluted air, where it promptly died. Then he put a candle in with the mint and it, too, burned longer than the candles had in empty jars. “This observation,” he wrote later in his seminal work, Observations on Different Kinds of Air, “led me to conclude, that plants, instead of affecting the air in the same manner with animal respiration, reverse the effects of breathing, and tend to keep the atmosphere sweet and wholesome, when it becomes noxious.”
Using equipment cobbled together from his wife’s kitchen and the potting shed, and methods a resourceful twelve-year-old could master, Priestley was, solely by the brute force of his curiosity and powers of deduction, systematically linking the responses of fire, plants, and animals in a series of connections that led, inevitably, toward oxygen and, by extension, to carbon dioxide.
Priestley claimed that the motive behind his provocative experiments was “exciting the attentions of the ingenious.” Of all the ingenious thinkers active in the late eighteenth century, it is hard to name one whose attentions were more excitable than Benjamin Franklin’s. By a wonderful coincidence, Franklin visited Priestley’s home in June 1772 while he was refining his mint experiments. Following his visit, he wrote to Priestley, “that the vegetable creation should restore the air which is spoiled by the animal part of it, looks like a rational system,…The strong, thriving state of your mint, in putrid air, seems to show that the air is mended by taking something from it, and not by adding to it.”
Franklin, running on a potent mix of intuition, raw data, and his caffeine-powered encounters with Priestley, was already halfway to photosynthesis: it was a “rational system,” and the mint had indeed “mended” the air “by taking something from it”—carbon dioxide. Narrowly eluding Franklin’s grasp was the fact that the mint further mended the air by adding something: oxygen. Priestley, meanwhile, was close enough to smell it. Beneath those small glass domes, so much like our own atmosphere, Priestley was, tumbler by tumbler, cracking the safe that held the secrets to life on Earth. Not only had Priestley managed to simulate Earth’s atmosphere in microcosm, he understood—250 years ago—that it was both contaminable and restorable, that human intervention could render it lethal or life-sustaining.
Our atmosphere envelops the cosmic sand grain of Earth just as Priestley’s glass bells enveloped his mice, just as bitumen envelops a grain of bituminous sand, just as our skin envelops our own bodies: relative to what they are covering, each of these insulating layers is gossamer-thin. The vertical distance from sea level, where most humans live, to icy suffocation at Camp 4 on Mount Everest is less than five miles—a mere .06 percent of Earth’s eight-thousand-mile diameter. Put another way, your skin is ten times thicker, relative to your body, than the habitable portion of the atmosphere is relative to Earth. This gaseous membrane is all that separates us from the lifeless oblivion of deep space, and neither we nor fire could survive without it.
That our atmosphere is malleable and sensitive to changes may be hard to grasp in the abstract, but it is easy in microcosm and, in this sense, we’re as sensitive as Priestley’s mice: if you are traveling in a car and a fellow passenger releases methane, you will know in seconds. Likewise, bacon, wood smoke, roses, or gasoline. The same is true for heat: the reason Arctic bush pilots travel with candles is because, in the event of a crash, it only takes one or two of them burning in the fuselage of a small plane to make a night at -40°F survivable. Our atmosphere is acutely sensitive to subtle changes, and so are we.
Despite the fact that we are protected by a formidable combination of ozone, gravity, solar radiation, magnetic fields, and life-enabling gases, our atmospheric “living room” remains as fragile as a fish bowl—and as easily contaminated. The idea that our atmosphere could be changed—by us—is not something we have ever, in our entire history, had to consider seriously until a single lifetime ago, which is about as long as we have had to seriously consider the automobile.
The Petrocene Age has enabled ordinary people to command energy in ways kings and sultans could only dream of, and with an ease hitherto unimaginable. Behind the wheel of a Chevy Silverado, a one-hundred-pound woman can generate more than six hundred horsepower as she draws a six-ton trailer at sixty miles an hour while talking on the phone and drinking coffee, in gym clothes on a frigid winter day. Prior to the Petrocene Age, only a king or a pharaoh could have summoned such power, and its equivalent would have required hundreds of enslaved people and draft animals. Today, with cheap and plentiful oil at our disposal, everyone’s an emperor. Every time we get in a car, on an airplane, or on a ship, we are traveling with a vast invisible retinue that multiplies our potency even as it multiplies our emissions. During this first century and a half of the Petrocene Age, as we have harnessed, democratized, and amplified fire on demand, we have also unleashed some unintended consequences: a by-product of becoming a petroleum-based society—in other words, a fire-based society—has been the superheating of the atmosphere.
Fort McMurray, founded at the dawn of the Petrocene Age, has grown into an unlikely flashpoint in this collision between the rapid expansion of our fossil fuel–burning capacity and the rigid limitations of our atmosphere. Here, in this city’s fire and the events leading up to it, can be seen the sympathetic feedback between both the headlong rush to exploit hydrocarbons at all costs, in all their varied forms, and the heating of our atmosphere that the global quest for hydrocarbons has initiated, and that is changing fire as we know it.
Reckoning with the negative aspects of oil and gas is a responsibility that duplicitous marketing, short-term governance, superb engineering, and a certain amount of willful blindness have enabled us to keep at bay for a century. In addition to being extraordinarily flammable, petroleum is lethally toxic, both in its liquid and vapor forms. In light of this, it is almost spooky how comfortable we are traveling with powerful, poisonous bombs positioned directly behind our children’s car seats. There is a palpable dissonance between this and the auto industry’s recent preoccupation with “safety” that only intensifies when you consider a car’s emissions. Exhaust fumes, like the atmosphere they flow into, are mostly invisible and easy to keep out of mind, but if that Silverado’s tail pipe were directed back into the vehicle, the driver and all her passengers would be dead in minutes. If the Silverado’s exhaust were piped into the driver’s living room, she and her family would be dead in an hour. But somehow, when we run our cars “outside,” in our shared atmosphere, all the soot and toxic gases magically disappear.
When we cast a vote, we do it believing that it will combine with others and add up to something transformative, and it often does, even if we don’t like the result. Combustion works the same way: every fire we light, whether we see it or not, is a vote for the transformative power of carbon dioxide. Every ton of coal, every barrel of oil, every tank of gas is a genie; once the command is given—once that fire is summoned forth—CO2 is released and its heat-trapping properties are activated. Once in the atmosphere, CO2 will persist for centuries. Meanwhile, methane, the main ingredient in “clean” natural gas, retains heat at least twenty-five times more effectively than CO2. A by-product of fracking, gas flaring, bitumen processing, livestock raising, heating, and home cooking, methane (CH4) remains active in the atmosphere for years after its initial release.[*1] Earth’s atmosphere may be huge and invisible, but it is also as finite as a room: what happens in it stays in it. Unless we send it into deep space by rocket, nothing we make, or emit, ever truly goes away.
This is hard to remember, or even believe, when we gaze skyward through our domed, transparent ceiling, past our lone moon and lonelier sun, toward the legions of luminous pinpricks beyond it. From our tiny vantage, it’s nearly impossible to truly apprehend that we exist inside a closed container—together with every other living thing, every fire, and every molecule of our cumulative emissions. And it is even more difficult to accept the possibility that humans could conjure up an insult large enough, or noxious enough, to impact the integrity of something so apparently limitless and vast. If you think about it, it is amazing that anything survives here. Compared to the vastness of our solar system, our galaxy, or the universe, Earth’s atmosphere is too insignificant to register—a soda bubble drifting in the dark. Seen in this way, it becomes unnervingly clear that we are here by a strange and precarious grace.
Earth as seen from Saturn’s orbit, 900 million miles away (Cassini Probe, NASA)
We evolved close to the ground, in small communities, and we remain parochial by nature. When it comes to our atmosphere, this hardwired trait really shows. Even though both the causes and effects of greenhouse gases are as clear as the causes and effects of poor hygiene, many remain surprised by the impacts they are having, while many others cannot or will not accept that human activity plays a leading role. The comparison of manufactured greenhouse gases to personal hygiene is not an arbitrary one. Both are closely tied to the Petrocene Age. The first time a Western doctor recognized the connection between handwashing and patient survival wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century. In 1847, the Vienna-based obstetrician Ignaz Semmelweis noticed that births attended by midwives seemed to result in fewer infections than those attended by physicians. Wondering why this might be, Semmelweis observed that, while doctors in his hospital handled all manner of sick and septic patients, including cadavers, midwives focused solely on mothers and babies. Ruling out other possibilities, Semmelweis concluded that the doctors’ hands were the one consistent link between sick or dead patients and birthing mothers. Semmelweis broke this link by washing his hands in a systematic way before attending births. The incidence of infection dropped dramatically among his patients, and he made handwashing standard practice.
Convinced of the connection though unable to explain it, Semmelweis tried to persuade other doctors to follow his example and wash their hands. Lacking an understanding of microbes (despite access to microscopes), and convinced of their own methodology, Semmelweis’s male colleagues dismissed him, resulting in the unnecessary deaths of many more mothers and infants. Semmelweis persisted, but his peers ostracized him and he was forced to leave Vienna. As the years passed, he grew increasingly frustrated, strident, and, ultimately, irrational. In late July 1865, eighteen years after discovering the link between handwashing and natal health, he was lured under pretense to a Viennese insane asylum, where he was beaten and incarcerated. He died two weeks later, allegedly from sepsis resulting from a wound incurred during the beating.
Ignaz Semmelweis would not be vindicated until the 1880s, when, thanks to breakthroughs made by Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur, germ theory gained acceptance in the larger medical community. Since then, handwashing has become second nature to virtually every member of functioning societies around the world. Had handwashing become politicized, or had there been a profit to be made by encouraging skepticism toward the existence of microbes, public health would look very different today. Prior to 2020, we might have laughed at such a suggestion, but resistance to elementary public health precautions during the coronavirus pandemic offers a real-time example of the individual and societal costs incurred by politicizing science and rejecting solid evidence. Carbon dioxide proliferation is even more preventable than germ spread, and the failure to control it has induced its own “pandemic fever.” The relationship between the heat-trapping properties of carbon dioxide and the warming of our atmosphere was understood, in principle, decades before Dr. Semmelweis began washing his hands. And it was explored and demonstrated in granular detail well before the adoption of germ theory.
Trucks, buses, and SUVs—the direct descendants of Étienne Lenoir’s revolutionary Hippomobile—are what enabled ninety thousand citizens to safely flee Fort McMurray in a matter of hours. And it was the need to fuel such vehicles that drew those people there in the first place. There is in our codependent relationship with petroleum an element of Stockholm syndrome, and the image of shiny new $600-a-month pickups, dead in the median awaiting Samaritans with jerry cans while smoke and flames soared skyward in the background, became an iconic image from this fire. It suggests, on the one hand, a kinder, gentler, Canadian Mad Max in which gas has become the only relevant currency and, on the other, the serpent Ouroboros swallowing its own tail. The Ouroboros, you could say, is the literal embodiment of a “feedback loop.”
The creative explosion that set this loop in motion represents a segue between the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, both of which were as pivotal for fuel, propulsion, and mass production as they were for art and philosophy. Less well known is how momentous this transitional period was for climate science. Simultaneous with the introduction of the steam engine in the mid-eighteenth century was the dawning awareness that Earth’s atmosphere had heat-retaining characteristics analogous to a greenhouse. Solar energy reaches Earth in the form of radiating waves, most of which are reflected back into space. During daylight hours, some of these waves are absorbed by earthly objects, including the oceans, which cool down again at night, and even more so during the winter months—much the way a frying pan heats up on a stove and then cools down after the stove is turned off. But just as a frying pan does not cool all the way down to outdoor temperatures because it’s inside an insulated house, the planet does not cool all the way down to the temperature of outer space because it’s insulated by our atmosphere—specifically, water vapor and carbon dioxide. This is the “greenhouse effect,” and it is critical to life on Earth.
The power of solar heat is, literally, as clear as day, but how that heat is retained, reflected, and, in some cases, amplified, is less obvious. “It is difficult to know how far the atmosphere influences the mean temperature of the globe,” wrote the French scientist and climate pioneer Joseph Fourier in 1824. “It is to the celebrated traveller, Monsieur de Saussure, that we are indebted for a capital experiment, which appears to throw some light on this question.” In 1824, this “celebrated traveler” had already been dead for twenty-five years. Horace Bénédict de Saussure was a natural philosopher of the same vintage as Joseph Priestley, and equally brilliant. Born into a wealthy family in Geneva, Saussure quickly distinguished himself as a polymath whose expertise ranged from botany and geology to the physics of heat. He was also a mountaineer, recording a number of first ascents in the Alps where he conducted some of the first experiments on atmospheric changes at altitude.
One of Saussure’s many lines of inquiry involved a device he invented called a helio-thermometer—in essence, a portable greenhouse equipped with a temperature gauge. On a sunny July day in 1774, Saussure packed his contraption up Mont Crammont, a nine-thousand-foot peak in the Italian Alps. After exposing the glass surface of the box to the afternoon sun, he noted its internal temperature before descending five thousand feet into the valley below. Even though the outside air temperature was more than 30°F warmer there than at the summit, the temperature achieved inside the insulated box (190°F) was almost identical. Saussure deduced that, while the power of the sun was relatively constant, the outside air retained more heat at lower elevations—almost as if there were a pane of glass over it. “The more dense the air,” Saussure wrote, “the more it is humid, and the more it is warm…Here I agree with [Pierre] Bouguer, in the reflection of the Sun’s rays by the surface of the Earth.”[*2]
Fifty years later, Joseph Fourier, a true Renaissance man[*3] who, in addition to being a gifted scientist was also a baron, a colonial governor, and a mathematician, expanded on this seminal idea in his 1822 magnum opus, Analytical Theory of Heat, an exhaustive tome described by Lord (absolute zero) Kelvin as “a great mathematical poem.” By focusing on temperature changes between night and day, and across the seasons, Fourier calculated that Earth was much warmer than it should be if it were dependent only on sunshine and residual heat from the planet’s core. Something else, he concluded, must be heating it—or insulating it. The term “greenhouse effect” would not be coined until much later, but now it was only a matter of time.