Mitres 2 008su22 - ch1

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Chapter 1

Universal Beginnings

1.1 The (Short) Big Story of Climate Change


The story of climate change, in particular anthropogenic1 climate change, is the
story of energy 2 in our Universe, and it is one of balance. A balance that, unlike
the abstract constructions of human society and culture, is a requirement for
existence. In fact, it is rigidly baked into the physics as the First Law of
Thermodynamics, which states that within a closed system, energy cannot be
created nor destroyed, only converted from one form to another3 . So while
we cannot remove energy from the closed system that is our Universe, we can
absolutely control how and when we use it, and therefore the story of climate
change is also one of competing timescales - exhausting resources faster than
they are replenished can have dire results, as we will soon see.

1.1.1 The First 10 Billion Years


For some context, let us zoom out to the largest timescale we are aware of
- the history of the universe itself - and start by looking at the energy we
have to work with. Going back to the very beginning4 of time itself, some
astrophysicists believe that the Big Bang brought our Universe into existence
1
human-caused
2
We will define energy in all of its many forms in detail later, but for now, your intuitive
understanding will be sufficient.
3
For those of you hip to astrophysics, you may know something about the accelerating
expansion of the Universe and dark energy, but we will be ignoring this topic here, as it is
highly complex and not universally agreed upon by the scientific community.
4
Physicists largely take issue with referring to the origin of the universe as a “beginning”,
as our conception of time and space breaks down at some point as we go farther back in
time.

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from nothing [1, 2, 3]. No energy, no mass, no heat - pure zero. From the nearly
intractable void, all that we now know spontaneously flickered into existence.
While this process is not well understood, one hypothesis attributes this flash of
creation to a random quantum fluctuation, which in general allows “positive”
energy to be created as long as it is paired with an equal amount of “negative”
energy. Curiously, it can be shown that if we look around, the total energy
does seem to equal zero roughly, though this result is still widely debated [4].
Setting aside the disputed ultimate origin story, what we do know pretty
well is that just after the Big Bang, some 13.8 billion years ago [5], there existed
a roughly equal balance between “positive” energy in the form of extremely
hot matter and “negative” gravitational potential energy holding it together.
As the Universe expanded and the dense, homogeneous matter soup began to
cool, it condensed into subatomic particles called quarks, trading some energy
for mass5 , which then coalesced further to form protons and neutrons. These
composite baryons eventually combined to form elementary hydrogen and he-
lium, the first atoms of our Universe, and shortly after, electrons were able to
form and bind to those atoms, making them neutrally charged. Over millions
of years, these single atoms were pulled into clusters under their own grav-
itational attraction, trading gravitational potential energy for kinetic energy
and heat. As these clouds became more and more dense, their temperature
and pressure eventually rose high enough to ignite nuclear fusion, a process in
which atoms combine, losing a small amount of mass in return for a substan-
tial amount of light and kinetic energy. With enough atoms fusing under these
conditions, a chain reaction can initiate to create a massive fireball contained
by the force of its own gravitational self-attraction - a star.
The early universe was - and still is - a constant cycle of birth and death for
stars on timescales ranging from a few million years to many billions of years
depending on how quickly they consume their nuclear fuel. The stars that burn
hot and fast are of particular interest to our story of climate change, as they
help explain the origin of the Earth itself. In general, if it were not for nuclear
fusion in stars, we would be stuck with mostly hydrogen, helium, and some
lithium [6], the first three elements on the periodic table containing 1, 2, and
3 protons respectively. With standard fusion, all stars are capable of turning
these smaller atoms into larger ones, all the way up to nickel, containing 28
protons [7].
5
You may have learned about the conservation of mass as being a rigid fundamental
physical law; however, while this tends to hold true for fluids and solids that we can measure
at the macro scale, at the atomic scale, we can actually trade mass for energy directly.
According to Einstein and rigorously validated by many experiments since, this mass energy
is given as the famous E = mc2 , where c is the speed of light.

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Figure 1.1: All known elements in our Universe and how they were created.
Stellar nucleosynthesis is responsible for the creation of the elements Carbon
through Plutonium. Image courtesy of cmglee on Wikipedia. License CC BY-
SA. This content is excluded from our Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.
For more information, see https://ocw.mit.edu/help/faq-fair-use.

To create even larger atoms, however, a still more explosive approach is


required. One such process can occur at the end of a star’s life, depending on its
initial size and energy content. Instead of simply fizzling out, under the right
conditions, a star can undergo a supernova in which it experiences a sudden
collapse of its core, causing a shock wave that generates the temper-atures and
pressures required for the fusing of even more neutrons than was previously
possible, creating many of the other elements we naturally find in our
Universe[8]. If the remnants of that same star are not massive enough to collapse
into a black hole, they can condense into an incredibly dense neutron star, and
the subsequent colliding of neutron stars is thought to be responsible for the
synthesis of the remaining elements, up through Plutonium, as shown in Fig.
1.1.
So now that the Universe has traded some gravitational potential energy
to create stars, and with them all of the elements that can conceivably be
produced over their lifetime, we can talk about the emergence of planets, which
are the stellar remnants that are too heavy for exothermic6 fusion. Instead
the inert stellar dust collapses to form a molten ball of dense elements that
stays together under the pull of its own gravity. Roughly 4.5 billion years ago,
6
releases heat as opposed to endothermic which absorbs heat

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one such dust cloud formed into what is now the Earth we inhabit. Given
that at the same time, many other planets were forming in much the same
way, this was not a tame or organized process. Indeed, for a long time, the
Earth was bombarded with not just asteroids and meteors, but various other
fledgling planets as well. As we can see now, only a few survived. One such
collision near the end of the Earth’s formation ripped enough material away
from the young planet to form the Moon [9, 10]. Despite the destructive nature
of this process, in a bit of dramatic irony, some of these collisions were with
protoplanets rich in carbon, water, and nitrogen - the seeds of carbon-based
life.
Eventually - roughly 4 Ga7 - the “Late Heavy Bombardment”, as it is re-
ferred to, slowed, giving rise to an environment in which life as we know it
could spring forth and thrive. During that time, on the Earth’s surface, vol-
canism was the norm, as the young planet was still essentially just a super hot
ball of magma from its formation process. Frequent volcanic eruptions and the
occasional extraterrestrial collision produced massive amounts of greenhouse
gasses (carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, methane, etc.), creating an early at-
mosphere that allowed the Earth to retain heat from incoming solar radiation.
This development was incredibly important, because as the Earth cooled and
water started coming in from collisions with icy asteroids and comets, the sun
alone did not have the required power to keep that water in liquid form. Es-
pecially since in the Earth’s formative years, the Sun was 30% dimmer than it
is now, without this atmosphere acting like a thermally insulating blanket, all
of this water would have likely been frozen in what scientists call a “Snowball
Earth” scenario8 . Instead, despite painting a hellish scene on land, the ram-
pant volcanism actually enabled the formation of liquid water oceans, creating
the necessary environmental conditions for life.
So to recap the Big History of the Universe up to this point, let us take stock
of how the energy balance we started with has shifted. Ignoring the controver-
sial exact beginning of the Universe’s origin story (i.e. for t < 10-11 seconds),
we know pretty well that at some point, all measurable energy was contained as
balance between hot matter in the form of subatomic particles called quarks
and gravitational potential energy. As they cooled, quarks formed protons,
which in turn formed various lightweight atoms that later combined with elec-
trons to form the first several elements of the periodic table. From there,
gravitational potential energy was cashed in repeatedly to form larger, hotter
clumps of atoms, which eventually generated the temperatures and pressures
7
Ga = billion years ago
8
see Faint Young Sun Paradox

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Figure 1.2: The abundance of all naturally occurring elements in the Universe
[11]. This image is in the public domain.

to ignite fusion reactions that turned these dust clouds into stars. In nuclear
fusion, rest mass energy (i.e. E = mc2 ) is released as heat and light, which in
turn promotes more fusion, creating a chain reaction that continually converts
some rest mass of hydrogen and other lightweight elements into more heat and
more light.
Depending on its size, a star can undergo a massive explosion at the end of
its life that converts some thermal energy back into mass energy as most of the
remaining elements that are naturally found in our universe are created, at the
same time spreading them out into more massive dust clouds. Again under the
pull of gravity, these clouds reform into more suns or planets now that we have
some heavier elements to play with. In our solar system, this process formed
the Earth, and the residual heat from the solar remnants powered the eruption
of volcanoes on Earth to help create an early atmosphere. At this point, as the
Earth slowly cooled, it also continued to receive an influx of energy as light
from the Sun; however, this energy alone would not be sufficient for keeping
the Earth’s surface temperature above the freezing point of water. With an
atmosphere, our planet began trapping some of this light as heat, keeping the
conditions at just the right temperature and pressure for life to form - the first
instance of climate change and a foreshadowing of what was to come.

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1.1.2 The Inhabited Earth


Back to our story, a hasty several hundred million years into the life of planet
Earth, the stage for life was set. The earliest fossilized records we have show
the emergence of the first self-replicating biological structures happening some-
where between 4.3 and 3.8 Ga, with the earliest self-replicating RNA molecules
deriving their energy for reproduction from hydrothermal vents powered by
thermal energy from the Earth’s core - a remnant of solar energy - and carbon
monoxide. These early molecules used iron and nickel sulfides found inside
the vents to catalyze the various chemical reactions required for building and
sustaining proteins [12]. These free-floating chemosynthetic organisms eventu-
ally found homes within liposomes, small bubbles made from lipids that also
spontaneously began to form in the primordial soup. These protocells, which
from the outside very much resemble our own, could now travel somewhat
farther from their sources of energy, but they still lacked most of the basic
functionality our cells enjoy now. Eventually, about a hundred million years
later (around 3.5 Ga), these cells evolved into the organism that would give
rise to all life presently on Earth, our so-called last universal ancestor.
At this point, we are 10 billion years into the history of the Universe and 1
billion years into the history of Earth, and organisms have evolved another spe-
cial ability - capturing the energy of sunlight directly to make their own food.
To achieve this, our single-celled ancestors evolved the first “solar panels”,
internal structures called chloroplasts that enable the conversion of sunlight,
water, and the highly abundant CO2 in the atmosphere into oxygen (O2 ) and
sugars (e.g. glucose, C6 H12 O6 ) that they could then consume for metabolic en-
ergy and structural material required for growth (i.e. cellulose). Very quickly
the atmosphere filled with oxygen, which at first had many beneficial effects,
the primary of which was that it started reacting under the intense sunlight
to form ozone (O3 ) in the upper atmosphere. This gas absorbed much of the
harmful ultraviolet radiation produced by the Sun, allowing photosynthesizing
organisms to be able to leave the oceans and cover the land without burning.
Over the next billion or so years, however, as more and more oxygen was
generated, its atmospheric concentration eventually rose to toxic levels. Ad-
ditionally, more oxygen meant that more methane in the atmosphere could be
converted to carbon dioxide, a much less potent greenhouse gas by comparison.
Suddenly, the blanket covering the Earth became less effective, temperatures
dropped to -50 °C, and the Earth was plunged into its first major ice age
starting about 2.2 Ga.
Clearly, we can already see that the greenhouse effect is a) essential to
maintaining conditions suitable for life, which would otherwise be impossible

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Figure 1.3: Geological history of the earth. This image is in the public domain.

given the insufficient solar power to heat the earth directly and b) highly
sensitive to atmospheric compositions. When left alone, however, the climate
is kept in check by the carbon cycle. In this process, as we have seen, carbon
dioxide and other greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere trap solar energy as
retained heat. Photosynthesizing organisms take carbon dioxide out of the
air, and when these organisms die, their carbon is either released back into
the atmosphere as methane or sinks to the bottom of the ocean, where under
intense pressure it is turned into molecules made from long chains of carbon
and hydrogen that we harvest today as oil. As we will see in detail later,
the temperature of the atmosphere and oceans also play an important role in

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maintaining this balance, but at a certain point, this delicate balance can be
permanently disrupted (see Venus). In the case of the Earth’s first ice age, it
is widely believed that volcanic activity boosted atmospheric carbon dioxide
supply, once again wrapping the Earth in enough thermal insulation to bring
the temperature back up above the freezing point of water9 .
Over the following 2 billion years (from 2.5 Ga to 0.5 Ga), life continued to
slowly evolve, from single cell prokaryotes to eukaryotes as DNA migrated into
a central cell nucleus and then to simple multicellular life. Major continents
formed and moved around, and the Earth experienced several more ice ages
as the carbon cycle kept getting pushed a bit too far and then recalibrated.
With the end of the last major “Snowball Earth” event came the Cambrian
Explosion, a brief 50 million year period starting around 542 Ma10 , in which
the rate of evolution began to accelerate, producing molluscs, arthropods, ver-
tebrates (including the direct ancestors of many modern fish), trilobites, and
many more. With ozone now protecting land from harmful radiation, many
of these species started moving farther onto land. This migration was helped
by oxygen concentrations being brought down to safe levels by frequent fires
and respiration, demonstrating another advantageous feedback loop within the
carbon cycle. A few major extinction events occurred during this time, but
soon after each, a new diversity of species would invariably spring up.
From a thermodynamics perspective, this development was also remark-
able in that we began to see organisms that cannot make their own food via
chemosynthesis or photosynthesis directly. Instead, these new creatures had
to eat other organisms that could, in the process converting the sugars they
contain into heat and metabolic energy, releasing carbon dioxide as a byprod-
uct. Some animals start eating other animals, but as we get further from the
source, it is important to remember that all life is still, and always will be,
solar powered. The carbon cycle also gets more complex as a result of this
development, since we now have both organisms that can remove net carbon
dioxide from the air and organisms that eat this stored carbon and release it
back. As before, when these organisms die, the carbon that comprises their
bodies is released as methane or slowly gets compressed over millions of years
as it sinks deeper into the Earth. Depending on the conditions, this carbon
can turn into coal or oil stored deep in the crust, where it is effectively removed
from the carbon cycle for millions of years.
9
The climate is also affected by the procession of the Earth’s axis, but it is widely believed
this can still be overpowered by the carbon cycle [13].
10
Ma = million years ago

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1.1.3 Humans and the Control of Fire


At this point, we are at 500 Ma in our story, 4 billion years into the formation
of the Earth, and we are just seeing life that would be familiar to us today. The
500 million years connecting then until now were a blur compared to the rate of
previous development. Plants and animals soon filled the oceans and covered
the land. Several smaller ice ages repeatedly froze the early continents, with
their melting leaving lasting impressions on the landscape, forming lakes and
other terrain that helped to diversify life further. We saw mammals, birds, and
dinosaurs spring into existence around 300 Ma. The dinosaurs in particular
dominated the landscape until 66 Ma when a major extinction event - the
Cretaceous-Paleogene event - occurred in large part due to a massive asteroid
hitting the Earth, resulting in the elimination of 95% of all living species at
the time. Among the survivors were the mammals, however, and they seized
the opportunity to take over, quickly engendering a new diversity. 10 Ma we
saw the first apes11 and roughly 8 million years later we had our first direct
human ancestors. All the while the smaller ice ages continued to help shape
the landscape and guide the movement of animals on land, breeding further
diversification.
Then there was a fundamental shift in how life uses energy around 2 Ma,
when the early humans discovered they could control fire. With this new abil-
ity, they could begin to extract thermal energy from solar energy stored in the
carbon chains of dead plant matter. Very much like organisms that consume
sugars and fats, inhale oxygen, and exhale carbon dioxide, the fires set by early
humans were quite similar, though less complex, chemical reactions that com-
bined some flammable carbon source with oxygen to produce carbon dioxide,
releasing tons of heat in the process. With that, thermodynamics, though we
did not know it at the time, formally began, and a world of possibilities opened
up. Now humans had a new tool to protect themselves against harsher envi-
ronments, which among other things, meant they no longer needed to migrate
with the seasons. Staying put gave rise to permanent societies that could use
agriculture to sustain more and more people. The ability to cook food and boil
water meant that humans could eat a wider variety of plants and animals and
better stave off disease and infection, enabling them to grow larger, stimulate
larger brain development, and live longer. Control of fire also gave humans
control over time in some respect, as they could now make light at will and
see in the darkness. From photosynthesis to eating plants to burning plants
(on purpose), this discovery truly brought us into a new era of being.
It took another 2 million years for early humans to start settling en masse
11
hominids

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in fertile regions, but before that, their new abilities to thrive and multiply in
what were once hostile environments had a profound impact on other species.
In fact, from about 130,000 BCE to 8,000 BCE, we saw the first major ex-
tinction at the hands of humans, the Quaternary Extinction Event, in which
a significant number of animal species were wiped out due to over-hunting, in
particular those in the megafauna 12 [14] group. Their removal had long last-
ing repercussions that reverberated throughout the Earth’s many ecosystems,
fundamentally changing the makeup of life across the planet.
Conveniently in the wake of that mass extinction, which ended roughly
10,000 years ago, the first agrarian societies started cropping up. The first
major civilization was established 5,000 years ago in Sumer in the Middle
East, and with the advent of the first civilization also came the beginnings of
anthropogenic climate change, again forewarning of the dangers of overcon-
sumption. Studies have shown a spike in greenhouse gasses around this time,
likely as a result of humans clearing forests and burning large swaths of land to
make way for farms [15]. The carbon currency that kept the Earth’s climate in
a delicate balance (with the occasional imbalance leading to an ice age), was
suddenly being expended at a rate that was greater than could be replenished
by solar energy in the short term, a theme we will see persists until present
day. With these early civilizations, however, this effect was minimal, as there
simply were far too few humans using fire and repurposing land to make much
of a difference. Early increases in carbon dioxide levels might have also been
balanced by plants growing larger and more verdant during this time.
As civilizations developed, the human population began expanding both
in terms of numbers and geographic area. As early as 3,500 BCE, Egyptians
realized they could harness the power of the wind to propel boats to high
speeds, greatly opening up the amount of territory that could be traversed,
ushering in the age of rapid colonization. A quick aside, wind energy is the
result of thermal gradients caused by, you guessed it, the Sun. So even wind
energy is actually solar energy at its core (sensing a theme here?). The ability
to now harness solar energy in three different forms, food, fire, and wind, led to
the ever increasing ability of humans to manipulate their environment, other
species, and later even members of their own to their own advantage, begetting
more growth and more power.
12
Think large mammals like woolly mammoths.

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Figure 1.4: Historical global mean temperature. © GSF-USA. All rights


reserved. This content is excluded from our Creative Commons BY-NC-SA
license. For more information, see https://ocw.mit.edu/help/faq-fair-use.

1.1.4 The Origin of Thermodynamics as a Tool


In the first century CE, another incredible thermodynamics development oc-
curred, but like with fire, it took some time to catch on - people in Ptolemaic
Egypt realized that heating water inside an enclosed vessel would generate
“wind”, hot vapor that could be ejected in such a way that caused the vessel
to spin. Thus, the first engine, called an Aeolipile 13 was born, though when it
was discovered, it was considered to be just a simple party trick. It would not
be for another 1,500 years that someone had the idea of sticking this engine
in a ship to power locomotion. Fast forward another thousand years, taking
us to 900 CE, when the Chinese discovered a way to harness this “wind” to
make weapons. They realized that powderized charcoal14 could be mixed with
sulfur and potassium nitrate to make it burn extremely rapidly and at high
temperatures. By sticking this powder mixture into a tube that is closed on
one end and has a projectile blocking the other, humans had their first guns.
Suddenly what was once an advantage over other species, was now an advan-
tage over other groups of humans. The same technology that could be used to
warm, cure, and liberate could now be used to threaten, destroy, and enslave.
Human development15 continued at an accelerating rate in centuries that
followed as we kept discovering how to harness available energy in new and
more effective ways. In 1500 CE, which is now extremely recent compared to
the timescales we have been discussing, we saw the first design of a steam-
driven ship, though wind-driven vessels were still the norm. Just 200 years
13
In Greek this translates to “ball of Aeolus”, the god of air and wind.
14
Charcoal is just wood that is heated in the absence of oxygen, leaving only the carbon
behind and is itself highly flammable.
15
from a Eurocentric perspective

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later, steam engines were widely adopted for powering locomotion on land,
around the same time electricity was discovered in the West. Then in the
early to mid 1800’s, the field of thermodynamics as we know it was start-
ing to take shape as several key physical laws, which we will learn about in
detail in later chapters, were discovered and formalized, providing engineers
and technologists with powerful mathematical tools to design more efficient
engines.
Around that same time, in the 1880s, humans started using coal to generate
electricity, at which point we were not only burning plants that had died
recently, but also now carbon from plants that died during the Carboniferous
period - 300 Ma - that would have otherwise remained in the ground for
millions of more years to come. Indeed, the adoption of coal as a widely
used energy source marked a dangerous turning point in the story of climate
change as our energy demands exceeded what could be readily supplied by the
sun, instead causing humans to turn to stores of solar energy that had been
accumulating for millions of years. Somewhat ironically, it was around this
same time that scientists16 discovered the greenhouse effect [16], with some
even noting that the continued excess burning of fossil fuels would have a
profound effect on the climate.
These warnings were largely overlooked, as the burning of fossil fuels also
had a profound effect on technological and thus economic development via the
Industry Revolution. Just 50 years later, in the early 1900’s, vast stores of oil,
which again are the liquefied carbonaceous remains of ancient sea creatures,
were discovered underground, providing humanity with another energy-rich
and carbon-intensive fuel source. Bolstered by numerous major wars and the
rapid economic development in the West that followed, we saw the emergence
of a seemingly runaway cycle of more energy consumption leading to net eco-
nomic development leading to higher energy demands and so on. By the mid
1900’s, now only 50 years ago and about the same time humans demonstrated
their ability to escape the gravitational pull of Earth itself 17 , the ever in-
creasing carbon emissions began to leave their mark on the climate as the
global mean temperature started to rise as a direct result of the pronounced
greenhouse effect [17], proving many of the earliest climate scientists correct.
16
This discovery is often wrongly attributed to John Tyndall but was actually made by
Eunice Foote several years earlier in 1856.
17
see Sputnik and the Apollo Program

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1.1.5 The Anthropocene


This brings us to today, where in 2020 the Earth has warmed a deceptively
substantial 1 °C above pre-industrial temperatures. Looking back, in just
the past 50 years, a span of time encompassing only 0.003% of the history
of humans or 0.000001% of the history of the Earth or 0.000000... - you get
the idea - the culmination of human achievement in science and technological
development has brought about countless advancements18 in medicine, agri-
culture, transportation, communications, computation, and the list goes on.
As was meticulously outlined by the most recent IPCC special report [18], we
are now seeing, however, that this progress has come at cost of the stability of
our climate. The rate of development and the associated energy consumption
has been at direct odds with the timescale on which the Earth’s carbon cycle
regulates the climate, which, works over millions of years. The stress on the
system from just the past 150 years is finally catching up as we begin to see
measurable sea level rise, more powerful and frequent severe weather events,
and beginnings of mass extinctions. What is even more concerning is that,
as Solomon19 et al showed, even if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide today,
these adverse effects are “locked” into the climate response for potentially
hundreds of years [19].
So where do we go from here? The IPCC report also showed a consensus
among the world’s leading climate experts that a 2 °C global mean temperature
rise above pre-industrial levels would cause a catastrophic and irrevocable
disruption to nearly all of the of the Earth’s many interwoven ecosystems
upon which we rely. The best climate models developed to date indicate that
to avoid a safer - but still potentially devastating - 1.5 °C temperature rise,
the atmosphere must absorb no more than 316 Gt of carbon dioxide if we start
counting from July 2020 onward; however, at current rates of consumption, this
budget is set to run out by the end of 2027 [20], just 7 years from now. Needless
to say, the race is on, and just as much as the manipulation of thermodynamic
principles played a central role in the development of this impending crisis,
these same principles - in responsible and conscientious hands - may be the
keys to getting us out of it.
18
enjoyed by a small subset of humanity
19
Susan Solomon is an MIT professor who is famous for her work that helped galvanize
support around repairing the Earth’s ozone layer

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1.1.6 Thermodynamics - A Human History


At this point, you may be wondering just what is thermodynamics anyway?
We have hinted in the previous section’s Big Historical perspective that it has
something to do with heat, engines, and carbon emissions but have left its
definition intentionally vague up until now to avoid getting lost in the finer
details. To start, thermodynamics is a branch of physics that investigates the
relationship between energy in its various forms, in particular how thermal
energy or heat interacts with matter to transform into mechanical energy and
vice versa. For thousands of years, humans tried to formally understand the
visceral sensation of heat, attributing it at first to mythological phenomena
and eventually postulating that it was a unique physical “element” as tangible
as water and earth. Ancient Greek philosophers wrote at length about the
ability of heat to “flow”, likening it to a fluid20 .
In fact, this fluidic theory of heat would persist for nearly another 2000
years, where by the 1700’s the supposed fluid was given the name caloric.
Around this same time, it was also postulated that all bodies had a different
“volume” for this fluid, defined as the body’s heat capacity, which despite being
established using now outdated physics, is still a term we use today. It wasn’t
until 1798 that Count Rumford, a British physicist, undermined this theory
by showing that heat could be generated via friction21 . These observations
were further supported by the research of Antoine Lavoisier and Joseph Black
who concurrently were reporting that heat could be released or absorbed by
chemical reactions or by freezing and thawing water, marking the end of heat
being thought of as a distinct conservative quantity. This theory was instead
replaced by the notion that heat is simply a different form of energy that
can be traded and transformed just like kinetic or potential energy. James
Joule would later show in 1843 that there was in fact an exact mechanical
equivalence of heat22 .
Parallel to these developments, people were observing a peculiar relation-
ship between heat and the motion of fluids. For example, it was also known for
thousands of years that boiling water in a partially enclosed container would
generate “wind” - hot gas that would exit the container with some velocity23 .
Later in the 1600’s CE, scientists like Galileo were observing that a vacuum
20
see Heraclitus, 500 BCE
21
In line with some of the sentiment of the Big Historical context presented here, it is
unsurprising perhaps that he discovered this when he noticed that boring out chunks of iron
to make cannons caused the metal to heat up substantially.
22
Interestingly, nobody believed him at first because his experiments were too accurate.
23
see aeolipile

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chamber had the ability to draw in water from the environment, and soon af-
ter, Irish chemist Robert Boyle showed in 1656 that the pressure and volume
of a gas were predictably correlated. These observations, however, were not
connected until French chemist Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac laid the groundwork
for the famous ideal gas law, which accurately relates the pressure of a gas to
its temperature and density.
From there, another French physicist, Sadi Carnot, the “father of ther-
modynamics”, united the more modern framework of heat and the thermo-
mechanical properties of gasses in pistons into a unified field, which was later
first called thermodynamics by Lord Kelvin. Rudolf Clausius formalized the
concept of energy that is “wasted” to the environment as being proportional
to the quantity of entropy, which was then rigorously related to the statistical
thermodynamics of large groups of particles through the work of James Clerk
Maxwell24 and Ludwig Boltzmann in the late 1800’s. Finally, Willard Gibbs
defined the concept of enthalpy and free energy to quantify the amount of
useful mechanical energy (work ) that could be extracted from a system, and
he finally formally stated the first two laws of thermodynamics in 1873. With
these contributions, and the many that followed from countless other physi-
cists, mathematicians, and engineers, the groundwork for the subject presented
in this book was laid.
There is considerable overlap between thermodynamics and the fields of
chemistry, biology, magnetism, and both classical and quantum mechanics, a
testament to the ubiquity and importance of thermal energy conversion in a
wide array of observed phenomena. For example, combustion - and all forms
of oxidation for that matter - is described by various chemical reactions that
release thermal energy as a result of breaking and reforming covalent atomic
bonds. The heat released acts as a kind of currency that can be captured and
converted into mechanical energy to turn a shaft, as is done in the internal
combustion engines that power a majority of the world’s cars. Thermody-
namics provides us with tools to examine exactly how much heat is released
in these chemical reactions, how much of that heat we can expect to convert
in mechanical energy, and perhaps most importantly for our future discussion
about climate change, how much is “lost” to the environment. These same
physics govern the operation of power plants, refrigerators, jet engines, hot air
balloons, batteries, air conditioners, and the list goes on.
While thermodynamics can help explain how we came to emit enough
carbon dioxide to radically change our environment, it also lays the foundation
for the physics underlying the behavior of our atmosphere and climate itself.
24
who revolutionized many fields over his career

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In particular, thermodynamics dictate how clouds form from water vapor in


the air and then turn into storms, as well as how thermal energy from the
sun in part drives oceanic and atmospheric currents (i.e. wind)25 and the
greenhouse effect. The study of these phenomena provides an analytical basis
for talking about climate change in general, and it even provides some insights
into ways we might be able to manipulate certain feedback loops directly to
undo some of the damage we have already done26 .
Finally, as an appeal to some sort of cosmic aesthetic beauty, it is incredible
(and somewhat unsettling) to reflect on the predictive power of thermodynam-
ics and realize that the fundamental laws, from which virtually everything we
discuss here will be derived, are based solely on observation. Let that sink
in. As far as we know, the three laws of thermodynamics hold true, but they
have never been proven, nor is there a credible procedure for even going about
proving them. Regardless, they have held up over the past two hundred or so
years - through endless experimentation and theoretical development built on
top of them. Even Einstein said of thermodynamics that they comprise “the
only physical theory of universal content, which I am convinced...will never be
overthrown”. Regardless of the context of its many applications, the theories
presented in this subject are truly an achievement in human imagination and
is worth appreciating as we move through this content.

1.2 Summary
The history of the Universe from the Big Bang to the present day spans nearly
14 billion years, the last 4.5 billion of which saw the development of our planet
Earth. Just 500 million after the Earth was formed, the first living organisms
appeared. Over the next 4 billion years, what were originally strands of free-
floating RNA in the depths of the oceans, evolved to create the vast diversity
of life we see today, all the while shaping the climate and the Earth itself along
with it. These persistent cycles of change were not only common, but necessary
for the diversification of life and its ability to survive over the incredible stretch
of time it has - now almost a third of age of the Universe itself.
Something fundamental changed, however, once humans came on the scene
a comparatively short 2 million years ago. Before this time, plants and animals
used energy both directly and indirectly from the sun as it was provided to
25
In reality these phenomena are made much more complex by coriolis forces that arise
from the fact that Earth is spinning and tidal forces from the moon, but thermal energy is
still a major driver.
26
see geoengineering

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1.2. SUMMARY

them, letting the natural rhythm of the seasons and the gradual oscillations
of the climate guide their rates of consumption and therefore their evolution
and development. With the emergence of humans and their ability to control
fire soon after, this pace quickened, as life was no longer subject to the natural
cycles of growth and decay. In the ability to liberate thermal energy stored in
the bonds between carbon atoms that comprise organic matter - energy that
originally came from sunlight - humans suddenly had vast stores of heat and
light at their immediate disposal.
With the control of fire ultimately came the control of ecosystems, driving
more development, expansion, and consumption, and once humans discovered
the even more energy-dense deposits of solar energy stored in the remains of
ancient plants and animals as coal and oil, this cycle accelerated. By the
early 1700’s CE, now just 300 years ago, the study of thermodynamics got its
footing as scientists and engineers learned how to turn thermal energy into
mechanical energy and then into electricity, opening the door for the invention
and adoption of a seemingly limitless number of new technologies.
This progress has come at a cost, however, as the mass burning of carbon-
based fuels results in the re-emission of carbon dioxide at rates greater than
can be absorbed by natural means. Because carbon dioxide functions as the
currency of the Carbon Cycle, its excess has put considerable strain on the
climate’s main feedback loop keeping temperatures within livable conditions.
Coupled with the additional ecosystem destruction from over-development and
pollution that further inhibits the natural uptake of carbon dioxide, the net
effect of our energy consumption has been pushing the Earth towards an un-
precedented warming scenario that threatens to destabilize our many necessary
ecosystems.
The silver lining here is that the field of thermodynamics - which up until
now has led us down this destructive path - has also provided us with many
tools to work towards solutions that prevent a devastating additional 1-2 °C
of warming if we so decide to use them in that way. The purpose of this
text is to tell the story of climate change in greater detail, introducing the
fundamental physics of thermodynamics and the analytical tools that use them
along the way. As we continue this educational journey, be aware of the
perspective you bring to this story and its impact on your motivations to
learn the material. Without this greater context, we get the dangerous and
unchecked push towards progress that got us here. Fortunately for all of us,
the ending of this story is somewhat uncertain, and the proverbial publishers
are still accepting submissions; however, we have little time to waste, as what
we do in the next 10-50 years - just a veritable blip in the grand timeline - will
likely seal this fate.

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