WORLDFIRE - Chapter 6, Part I

Houston, We Have a Problem

View of Apollo 13’s crippled service module after separation (photo credit: NASA)

“We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent upon its vulnerable reserve of air and soil, all committed for our safety to its security and place, preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave to the ancient enemies of mankind and half free in the liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew, can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the security of us all.” Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965)

Before we venture any further on our journey through the heartland, we need to take a cold, hard look at some climate realities. Any hope of repairing our damaged spaceship Earth and arriving safely home begins with an honest assessment of what is malfunctioning on our crippled craft. Because so many powerful parallels exist between the life-threatening emergency that confronted the crew of America’s heroic Apollo 13 mission and the climate emergency that threatens the crew of spaceship Earth today, we begin our climate reality tour in space.

Step back in time with me, if you will, to April 13, 1970, where inside a Saturn V rocket blasting its way to the Moon were three astronauts: Jim Lovell, Fred Haise, and Jack Swigert. NASA sets the serene scene: “At 55 hours, 46 minutes, as the crew finished a 49-minute TV broadcast showing how comfortably they lived and worked in weightlessness, Lovell said, ‘This is the crew of Apollo 13 wishing everybody there a nice evening, and we're just about ready to close out our inspection of Aquarius and get back for a pleasant evening in Odyssey. Good night.’” Then disaster struck. “Nine minutes later, oxygen tank No. 2 blew up, causing the No. 1 tank to also fail. The command module's normal supply of electricity, light and water was lost, and they were about 200,000 miles from Earth. The message came in the form of a sharp bang and vibration... Swigert saw a warning light that accompanied the bang and said, ‘Houston, we've had a problem.’"

In his gripping book, A Man on the Moon, Apollo historian Andrew Chaikin describes what happened next: “Lovell glanced out the side window next to Jack Swigert and what he saw gave him a queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach. A huge sheet of gas streamed from Odyssey’s side, swirling in the sunlight like cigarette smoke. For the first time he realized the depths of the crisis… The gas was oxygen… the disappointment of losing the mission paled before the realization that they were in danger of losing their lives.” News of the astronauts’ plight riveted the world community.

Not unlike the climate emergency humanity faces today, the crew of Apollo 13 faced a seemingly impossible challenge. In Andrew Chaikin’s words: “Lovell and his crew knew that unless they did something to get back on the free return–and soon, before they went around the moon–they would miss the earth by some 45,000 miles. The only hope was at the other end of the tunnel: ‘Aquarius.’ Its descent engine had far too little power for a direct abort, but it would suffice to get Apollo 13 back on the free return.” In other words, the Aquarius lunar module would have to serve as their sparsely supplied life raft until they could move back into Odyssey’s command module prior to reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere.

Like humanity today, the astronauts even had a carbon dioxide crisis; only their emergency required scrubbing the invisible gas lest they be suffocated. As recounted by Lovell: “After a day and a half… a warning light showed us that the carbon dioxide had built up to a dangerous level.” Because the air filtration canister fittings were not compatible between the two space modules, Ground Control had to improvise a filter on the fly with materials the astronauts had on board: cardboard, plastic bags, and duct tape. It worked. As described by NASA: “One final problem remained—powering up the command module after its seemingly long hiatus from the action. Under normal conditions, the process of writing new procedures would take three months. Houston had three days.” No one knew if the power up would even work and they only had one shot.

Lovell described what it was like in the lunar module as it rocketed its way home to Earth: “The trip was marked by discomfort beyond the lack of food and water. Sleep was almost impossible because of the cold. When we turned off the electrical systems, we lost our source of heat... We were as cold as frogs in a frozen pool... It wasn't simply that the temperature dropped to 38 F: the sight of perspiring walls and wet windows made it seem even colder. We considered putting on our spacesuits, but they would have been bulky and too sweaty.” Chaikin paints the scene in the sky and on the ground as the world collectively held its breath: “The men waited out these last hours in near-darkness, studying the checklist by flashlight, rubbing their hands together… no one, either in mission control or inside the command module, knew whether the electronics to deploy the chutes were still good… Then, the TV camera found the command module: a small dark cone floating out of the clouds on three beautiful orange parachutes. The room erupted in cheers.”

After a perilously long three and a half days of being deprived of heat, water, and sleep, the three intrepid explorers, aided by the tireless and talented men (and one woman, Frances “Poppy” Northcutt) at Mission Control–along with an emergency mobilization of thousands of NASA contractors–defied the odds and made it home alive. Confronted with American ingenuity and determination, tragedy had yielded to triumph. Consider the irony of how desperate those three men were to get home to the only planet in the universe known to support life and how we are now in the process of knowingly rendering that same planet uninhabitable for human life. Really consider it.

The day after splashdown, President Richard Nixon traveled to the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston to present the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the Apollo 13 mission operations team before heading to Hawaii to present more medals to Lovell, Haise, and Swigert. During his Houston remarks, Nixon shared: “There has poured into the White House in these past 24 hours, an unprecedented number of wires and letters and cables… not just Americans but people all over the world, not just people in the free world but people in the Communist world, people of all religions, of all faiths, of all political beliefs, that they also were on that trip with these men. I could read many, many wires today that express those sentiments. I have one that I think perhaps summarizes them as well as any. I read it to you:

‘To the President of the United States:

For the safe return of three astronauts, we express profound gratitude to God, to men of science and to all those who contributed to make this possible.

To Your Excellency and to the people of the United States, we give assurance of deep admiration for the great skill employed and courage shown in the carrying out of this extraordinary undertaking which has held the attention and the hope of the world.

To the heroes of the day and to their families go our joyful best wishes.’

That message expresses the sentiment that runs through all of them. It happens to be from Pope Paul, Nixon said.”

Because of the treasure trove of knowledge gained in rescuing the crew, NASA officially classified the Apollo 13 mission a “successful failure.” Nixon was less circumspect in his appraisal of the celestial enterprise. He viewed it as a miraculous success that had turned “potential tragedy into one of the most dramatic rescues of all time.” Speaking in Houston “for people all over the world,” he proclaimed: “The three astronauts did not reach the moon but they reached the hearts of millions of people in America and in the world. They reminded us in these days when we have this magnificent technocracy, that men do count, the individual does count. They reminded us that in these days machines can go wrong and that when machines go wrong, then the man or the woman, as the case may be, really counts.” Woman indeed. While less celebrated than the men, hundreds of women–including a team of African-American math geniuses–contributed to the success of Project Apollo.

The peril faced by the Apollo 13 astronauts in 1970 is tantamount to the danger humanity faces today, with similarly long odds of survival, yet too few of America’s crewmembers seem to grasp the gravity of our situation. And even if they did, we don’t have a Climate Mission Control to guide us safely home. To the contrary, passive politicians in Washington, DC are sabotaging any chance we might have of rescue. As humanity stares into the dark climate abyss, most Republican lawmakers are whistling past the graveyard pretending everything is just fine, while most Democratic lawmakers are making believe we have all the time in the world to respond. This is worse than a dereliction of duty. It is a crime of aggression against our children, future generations, and all life on the planet.

It is time to send out the transmission: Houston, we have a problem. Today, like then, our survival hinges on acknowledging the severity of the threat we face. Our rescue hinges on the heroism and tenacity of the crewmembers of spaceship Earth. It hangs on the creativity and toughness of a modern-day Ground Control. Like then, we may only get one real shot at saving ourselves, so we have to get it right. Averting disaster requires achieving a green energy moon shot in the same span of time it took to accomplish Project Apollo. The good news is America can do this. The bad news is every day we delay, the odds of a successful rescue grow smaller.

It’s not like we didn’t see this coming. As far back as 1965, a group of presidential science advisors warned President Lyndon B. Johnson that the “continued accumulation of atmospheric carbon dioxide resulting from fossil-fuel burning would ‘almost certainly cause significant changes’ and ‘could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings.’” Acting on this warning, President Johnson became the first U.S. president to speak publicly about the global climate threat. In a Special Message to Congress shortly after his inauguration, Johnson declared: “This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through radioactive materials and a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.” As later reported by Nathaniel Rich in New York Times Magazine, the Johnson administration even “commissioned a study of the subject by his Science Advisory Committee” which “warned of the rapid melting of Antarctica, rising seas, increased acidity of fresh waters – changes that would require no less than a coordinated global effort to forestall.” All of this happened in the 1960s.

As further reported in Rich’s story, Congress was put on notice in 1980 when “Senator Paul Tsongas, a Massachusetts Democrat, held the first congressional hearing on carbon-dioxide buildup in the atmosphere.” Six years later, a group of prominent scientists would testify about the greenhouse effect before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works during two days of congressional hearings convened by U.S. Senator John Chafee (R-RI). Those two days of bipartisan public hearings did not occur in a vacuum. They generated a front-page story in The Washington Post. This was followed by startling 1988 testimony from the world’s most prominent climate scientist, James Hansen, before a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing called by U.S. Senator Tim Wirth (D-CO), who I played a key role in helping elect to the United States Senate in 1986. Dr. Hansen’s warning generated a front-page story in the New York Times with the headline, “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate.”

So we have known about this threat for a very long time. For more than half a century, in fact, we have known that spaceship Earth and her crew were at risk. Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama, Trump, and Biden were all warned. For a sense of just how much danger half a century of ignored warnings has put us in, we descend now from outer space to terra firma, where our climate reality tour continues in the frozen hinterlands of Siberia.

As I labored on this book in the summer of 2014, Russian military helicopters half a world away came upon a deep, dark crater on the ground in Siberia’s Yamal Peninsula. In a region so remote its inhabitants call it “the end of the world,” local eyewitnesses from a village near the crater reported having seen a bright flash of light and smoke rising from the ground. Soon after the helicopter overflight, aerial photos of the mysterious hole went viral. Maybe you saw them. When I saw that gaping hole, I was horrified, for I had a pretty good idea of what it probably meant.

Two weeks after the discovery of that first dark abyss, Indigenous reindeer herders in Siberia stumbled upon two more of the huge holes, almost falling into one. Shortly after that, four new giant craters were discovered in the Yamal Peninsula, with dozens more suspected. Early speculation as to their cause ranged from alien visitors to stray missile strikes to meteorites. Unfortunately for us, their origins are more terrestrial in nature. After rappelling into one of the deep pits to test the air, researchers discovered unusually high levels of methane, leading scientists to believe they were underground reservoirs of methane gas that exploded due to thawing permafrost caused by a rapidly heating Arctic. The Siberian Times reported as many as 7,000 “bulging bumps” spotted on the ground in Siberia, possibly filled with the same explosive methane gas. 52,000 square miles of Canadian permafrost was also reported to be in meltdown mode.

You don’t have to be a climate scientist to see why this is a problem. The Arctic permafrost is no longer permanent or frosted. What makes this a possible end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-type scenario is this: approximately 1.5 trillion tons of carbon are currently stored in permafrost soils below the thawing Arctic tundra. This is roughly twice as much carbon as is currently contained in the atmosphere. 

Scientists project that large portions of Arctic permafrost will thaw if the Earth heats between 1.5°C and 2°C above late 19th century levels for a sustained period. Recent projections indicate Earth could heat 1.5°C as soon as the early 2020s or 2030s, depending on the rate at which greenhouse gas emissions expand or decline (with the exception of a slight dip in 2020 due to Covid-19, emissions keep expanding). This could lead to a dramatic spike of carbon dioxide and methane emissions, further driving up global temperatures. Worse yet is the frightening fact that air temperatures in the Arctic are increasing at up to four times the global rate due in large part to melting snow and ice that would otherwise reflect most of the incoming solar radiation back out into space. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data indicates that early winter emissions of carbon dioxide from Alaskan tundra alone have increased by 73 percent since 1975. In February of 2018, the Arctic was sizzling at 45°F above its normal temperature. In June of 2019, wildfires in Siberia were burning carbon-rich peatlands dried out from the heat. On July 4th of that year, Anchorage hit a record 90°F. Alaska! Later that summer, record-breaking levels of atmospheric methane were observed at a NOAA research site in Alaska. Scientists are now suggesting rising temperatures are turning Arctic ecosystems from a carbon sink into a carbon source. One study predicts this happening as soon as after the mid-2020s. We desperately need to disarm what climate expert Raj Saha describes as a “ticking permafrost bomb.”

In 2017, NOAA’s Arctic Report Card described a “New Arctic” defined by “an environmental transition so extensive that it caught scientists, policymakers, and residents by surprise.” Their 2018 Report Card was even more alarming. It described a 95 percent reduction in the oldest, thickest ice since 1985. In 2019, some of Canada’s top scientists issued a report concluding that Canada is heating at about twice the global rate. That same year, a team of field researchers in Canada uncovered what one of the researchers called a “sleeping giant” of abrupt permafrost thaw “happening faster than anyone predicted.” Another 2019 expedition team was alarmed to discover Arctic permafrost thawing 70 years earlier than expected. This was followed by the extremely rare phenomenon of lightning strikes occurring within 300 miles of the North Pole.

What really surprises me is how more scientists didn’t see more of this coming. I get that most scientists are reticent by nature and tend to err on the side of understatement. But as a layperson who pays pretty close attention to the science, almost all the evidence has been yelling at me for decades that the climate crisis is way worse than it appears. You would think the terrible reality of the permafrost methane threat alone would have sparked a mad dash by governments to deploy the world’s top research teams to the Arctic to investigate, monitor, and coordinate a global emergency response, but you would be wrong. Until recently, alarm bells were not even being sounded in the halls of power. This is the kind of disconnect that often has me feeling like I am living in an alternative universe, one where you can see the train roaring at you down the railroad tracks, while others standing next to you on the tracks see and hear nothing. The Arctic is humankind’s canary in the coal mine, and that canary is teetering precariously on her perch.

You would think the economic costs alone of Arctic meltdown would have governments scrambling to act. In 2015, researchers estimated the cost of allowing the world’s permafrost to thaw from unabated global heating to be a whopping $43 trillion (roughly twice America’s GDP), with the damages stemming from impacts including sea level rise, extreme weather events, increased floods and droughts, decreased agricultural output, and infrastructure damage. In 2017, 90 scientists released a report warning that the melting Arctic would cost the world even more: up to $90 trillion between 2010 and 2100. That’s $90,000,000,000,000.

What is happening in the Arctic is not a good sign for humanity, not good at all. And everything I have shared with you is only what researchers in the field are observing. What all else is happening out there where we are not even looking? It’s enough to give one nightmares.

As if the release of all that deadly methane wasn’t terrifying enough, the melting permafrost is also thawing out ancient bacteria and viruses that have long lain dormant in the frozen soil. As explained by genomics expert in ancient viruses and bacteria Jean-Michel Claverie in a 2017 BBC article: “Permafrost is a very good preserver of microbes and viruses, because it is cold, there is no oxygen, and it is dark. Pathogenic viruses that can infect humans or animals might be preserved in old permafrost layers, including some that have caused global epidemics in the past." Claverie explained how to Vox science reporter Brian Resnick: “The danger here, he emphasized, is not from the slow thawing of the permafrost itself. That is, if the permafrost melts, and we leave the land alone, we’re unlikely to come into contact with ancient deadly diseases. The fear is that the thawing will encourage greater excavation in the Arctic. Mining and other excavation projects will become more appealing as the region grows warmer. And these projects can put workers into contact with some very, very old bugs.” Claverie warned: “We could actually catch a disease from a Neanderthal’s remains.” In fact, researchers studying ice cores from a melting Tibetan glacier in 2020 discovered 28 previously unknown viruses, prompting them to warn that “in a worst-case scenario, this ice melt could release pathogens into the environment." It appears that some pathogens are already rising like zombies from the grave. In 2016, a deadly anthrax outbreak in the Yamal Peninsula, which officials believe was spread by an infected reindeer carcass exposed by melting permafrost, tragically took the life of a 12-year-old boy and hospitalized more than 70 others. While there is no imminent threat of global epidemics from thawing pathogens, they have the potential to wreak havoc.

Of course, the more immediate pathogenic threat to humanity is the spread of modern infectious diseases like malaria, Lyme disease, dengue fever, cholera, yellow fever, and the Zika virus, which is already occurring, spurred on by a planet in rapid meltdown mode. So it is hardly surprising that in 2019, more than 70 U.S. health organizations, including the American Medical Association, American Lung Association, and American Heart Association, called on “government, business, and civil society leaders, elected officials, and candidates for office” to view the climate threat as a “public health emergency.” Not an issue, not a problem; an emergency.

While climate breakdown did not cause the Covid-19 pandemic, there are striking parallels between the two global emergencies. Both threaten the lives of everyone on the planet. Both exhibit growth curves that must be flattened. Both show why science matters. And both demonstrate what strong, and weak, leadership begets. Both emergencies disproportionally affect humanity’s most vulnerable. Both reveal the human cost of government unpreparedness, denial, and delay. And both prove that the longer we procrastinate, the worse things get. For all the pain and suffering the coronavirus pandemic wrought, it also showed how quickly governments, businesses, and civil society can mobilize when convinced of the need for speed.

The pandemic showed that when the stakes are high enough, radical change is possible. Prior to Covid, no one would have dreamed of commercial flights being halted. Before Covid, the idea of long-term sheltering in place and wearing masks in public would have been unthinkable. Like the climate emergency, the Covid emergency demonstrated that we are all in this together, if only more of us had come together. Not since World War II have we seen so clearly how the actions of nations, states, and individuals affect the fate of others, and not since that world war have we failed such a national test. We failed by allowing ourselves to be divided, when lives counted on us being united. But the pandemic also demonstrated just how many are willing to nobly sacrifice to safeguard the health of others during a deadly global crisis. The heroism of countless health care providers and frontline workers, in particular, proved that we still have this selfless ability within us.

As lethal as the coronavirus is, climate-charged disasters have proven even more lethal. Pandemics like Covid-19 are Mother Nature’s way of telling us her biological systems are out of whack. Think of it as a warning shot across the bow, threatening even deadlier pandemics and more human suffering if we don’t make a course correction. Because humanity is already in ecological overshoot, more pandemics are almost certain. Because we remain addicted to carbon-based fuels, more climate disasters will come. We’re waging war on the planet, and the planet is striking back. Mother Earth seeks balance, and she will have it. If she can’t shake us awake, she will eventually shake us off. An intelligent species would view our global response to the immediate emergency of Covid as a dress rehearsal for the longer emergency of climate and ecological breakdown. A smart species would use our global time out to reconsider our addiction to growth. A suicidal species would return to normal and get hit even harder the next time, and harder still the next, and so on, until finally we are gone. Contrary to the popular notion that humans need to save the planet, it is humans, not Mother Earth, that need saving. Given time, Gaia will recover from our abuse. It is Homo sapiens, along with all the innocent species we are taking down with us, that are endangered.

In the prophetic words of Pope Francis, the coronavirus pandemic presented humanity with an opportunity “to learn to understand and contemplate the natural world. We need to reconnect with our real surroundings… let us not file it away and go back to where we were. This is the time to take the decisive step, to move from using and misusing nature to contemplating it.” Contemplate how the drop in noise and air pollution at the height of the pandemic not only helped humans breathe a little easier, but gave the Earth and the wildlife we share this planet with a chance to breathe. Contemplate how transitioning to a non-polluting economy would save lives and make us more resilient to respiratory infections from future pandemics. If we respond wisely to the parallel challenges of pandemics and the climate crisis, we can reinvent ourselves, and civilization, in a way that is Earth-honoring and robust.

For the flip side of the climate emergency is the opportunity for humanity to not just survive, but thrive. This is the side of the coin where Americans join together to make not just peace with the planet, but history. By defying the defenders of the self-defeating status quo, we can replace the tired old story–fed by fear, want, and isolation–with an exhilarating new story grounded in courage, abundance, and community. By prioritizing cooperation over competition, there is no limit to what humans can do. Working together is how nature thrives. This is how humans return to nature, a state of being that is our true nature. This is the new human story I want to help write. This is the paradigm shift I want to help manifest. But getting from here to there requires acknowledging some painful climate truths.

NOTE: The written form of WORLDFIRE is the authoritative version. Any inadvertent errors in transcribing the recordings are mine and mine alone.