Mitres 2 008su22 - ch1
Mitres 2 008su22 - ch1
Mitres 2 008su22 - ch1
Universal Beginnings
10
1.1. THE (SHORT) BIG STORY OF CLIMATE CHANGE
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.
11
OCW V1
1.1. THE (SHORT) BIG STORY OF CLIMATE CHANGE
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.
12
OCW V1
1.1. THE (SHORT) BIG STORY OF CLIMATE CHANGE
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
13
OCW V1
1.1. THE (SHORT) BIG STORY OF CLIMATE CHANGE
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.
14
OCW V1
1.1. THE (SHORT) BIG STORY OF CLIMATE CHANGE
15
OCW V1
1.1. THE (SHORT) BIG STORY OF CLIMATE CHANGE
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
16
OCW V1
1.1. THE (SHORT) BIG STORY OF CLIMATE CHANGE
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
17
OCW V1
1.1. THE (SHORT) BIG STORY OF CLIMATE CHANGE
18
OCW V1
1.1. THE (SHORT) BIG STORY OF CLIMATE CHANGE
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.
19
OCW V1
1.1. THE (SHORT) BIG STORY OF CLIMATE CHANGE
20
OCW V1
1.1. THE (SHORT) BIG STORY OF CLIMATE CHANGE
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
21
OCW V1
1.1. THE (SHORT) BIG STORY OF CLIMATE CHANGE
22
OCW V1
1.1. THE (SHORT) BIG STORY OF CLIMATE CHANGE
23
OCW V1
1.1. THE (SHORT) BIG STORY OF CLIMATE CHANGE
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
24
OCW V1
1.2. SUMMARY
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
25
OCW V1
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.
26
OCW V1
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bibliography
[1] Marcelo Samuel Berman. On the zero-energy Universe. International
Journal of Theoretical Physics, 48(11):3278–3286, 8 2009.
[6] David Tytler, John M. O’Meara, Nao Suzuki, and Dan Lubin. Review
of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis and Primordial Abundances. In Particle
Physics and the Universe, pages 12–31. WORLD SCIENTIFIC, 3 2001.
[9] Der Chuen Lee, Alex N. Halliday, Gregory A. Snyder, and Lawrence A.
Taylor. Age and origin of the moon. Science, 278(5340):1098–1103, 11
1997.
[10] Robin M. Canup and Erik Asphaug. Origin of the Moon in a giant impact
near the end of the Earth’s formation. Nature, 412(6848):708–712, 8 2001.
27
OCW V1
BIBLIOGRAPHY
[14] Christopher Sandom, Søren Faurby, Brody Sandel, and Jens Christian
Svenning. Global late Quaternary megafauna extinctions linked to hu-
mans, not climate change. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological
Sciences, 281(1787), 6 2014.
[16] Eunice Foote. ART. XXXI.–Circumstances affecting the Heat of the Sun’s
Rays. American Journal of Science and Arts (1820-1879), 22(66):382,
1856.
[18] IPCC SR15. Global Warming of 1.5 C an IPCC special report on the
impacts of global warming of 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels and related
global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening
the global response to the threat of climate change, . IPCC Special Report
October, 6:2018, 2018.
[19] Susan Solomon, Gian Kasper Plattner, Reto Knutti, and Pierre Friedling-
stein. Irreversible climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions. Pro-
ceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of
America, 106(6):1704–1709, 2 2009.
28
OCW V1
BIBLIOGRAPHY
29
OCW V1
MIT OpenCourseWare
https://ocw.mit.edu
For information about citing these materials or our Terms of Use, visit: https://ocw.mit.edu/terms.