In 1913, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr published his model of atomic structure, known unsurprisingly as the Bohr model. Combining Ernest Rutherford's description of the atomic nucleus and Max Planck's theory about quanta, Bohr explained what happens inside an atom and developed a picture of atomic structure.
As I understand it (and I am not a physicist) Bohr was the first to realize that electrons travel in separate orbits around the nucleus and that the number of electrons determines the properties of an element. He described atoms as being constructed of a small, positively-charged nuclei surrounded by negatively-charged electrons traveling in circular orbits around them. Electrons could move from one level of orbit to another - from one state to another - and when they did so, it was instantaneous.
Bohr's model differed from and improved upon earlier models by positing that electrons move in orbits of fixed size and energy. The energy of an electron depends on the size of the orbit and is lower for smaller orbits. Radiation occurs when the electron jumps from one orbit to another - from one state to another. Instantaneously.
It's a semi-mind bending notion even now. A quantum jump - something moving from one state to another - BLAM! In no time.
How might that apply to climate change - and where in the world does 9/11 come in? More below.
New York City was resplendent on the morning of September 11, 2001. Spring in the city is glorious, when everything is fresh and green and the moist mungy grime of summer hasn't set in yet. Autumn may be even better.
The sky was the blue of Venetian glass, and there was a fresh breeze off the East River. I’d been at my desk on the 16th floor of 180 Water Street for about 45 minutes, and was wading through a database of application forms, when suddenly there was a THUD. It was a deep, heavy, muffled thump, as though something weighty and large, going fairly slowly, had slammed into the side of the building at street level. Bus crash?
I walked over to the window and looked down. Nothing to see - just the usual clot of taxis and food carts and pedestrians rushing in late to work.
I went back to my desk, sat down, and instead of diving right back into work, glanced out the window. It was like looking into a snow globe. Sprinkled everywhere in the bright blue sky were thousands and thousands of tiny specks that, when my brain was able to adjust, abruptly resolved themselves. They were 8.5" x 11" pieces of paper. Countless thousands of them high in the sky, as though a giant had tipped over a filing cabinet.
It was at this point that things began to get a little bit more exciting. Someone in a corner cube piped up, "A plane hit the World Trade Center!"
Even then, the quantum state remained the same. Even then, with a swarm of resumes and intake forms and bills of lading and print-outs of email swirling madly 16 stories up, it was a lovely morning, and everything was fine. Even then, we had no idea. I ran to the window again, craning to see what I could see. Nothing. We were on the wrong side of the building.
My boss, an cheerful, intrepid woman, said, "Hey - let's run downstairs to Duane Reade and get a box camera!"
There’s a certain breed of New Yorker who is ever ready for an accident as a lark, and a spectacle. That kind of New Yorker runs toward danger, just to get a good look at all the excitement. So off we went down the elevator and rushed up the block to the drugstore. We grabbed a box camera and began to make our way across town, jostling through the usual crowds toward the twin towers. It couldn’t have been more than five minutes from that initial ‘thud.’
At this stage, word on the street was that a small plane had accidentally crashed into one of the towers. There was precedent for this, of course. The Empire State Building was hit by a military plane in 1945, and there was a near-miss the very next year. A plane hitting a building could only have been an accident. Anything else was, at that point, literally unthinkable.
As we walked along snapping pictures of nothing much – all we could yet see from our angle was a faint plume of smoke and the tiniest bright spark of flame – men with transistor radios passed out information like hors d'oeuvres at a party. One guy on his cell phone was narrating what someone else was watching on TV. Most people didn’t even know anything was out of the ordinary, and were headed to meetings, or to work.
Then the second plane hit the south tower, and everything changed. This was no accident. Our quantum state jumped – in an instant – from a morning on which an unfortunate accident had happened and we were taking a larky walk to get a look, to a day on which the United States was under attack by an unknown and implacable enemy.
It was that fast, and there was no going back. In my memory the day inhabits two entirely separate spaces, before and after that quantum jump, when things would never be the same.
What do you worry about when you worry about climate change? I worry about quantum jumps, in two flavors. One I fear will happen before we’re ready, and one I believe we desperately need.
Just about a year ago, on July 29, 2014, Dr. Jason Box tweeted “If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we’re f’d.”
He later explained to a reporter at Vice.com just why he was so worried. Per Box, methane bubbles appear to be reaching the surface of the sea, which could heat the atmosphere and speed up the process of climate change.
Methane is more than 20 times more potent than CO2 [carbon dioxide] in trapping infrared as part of the natural greenhouse effect," he said. Methane getting to the surface - that's potent stuff.
We're on a trajectory to an unmanageable heating scenario, and we need to get off it. We’re f**ked at a certain point, right? It just becomes unmanageable. The climate dragon is being poked, and eventually the dragon becomes pissed off enough to trash the place.
Wikipedia defines a climate change tipping point as
… a somewhat ill-defined concept of a point when global climate changes from one stable state to another stable state, in a similar manner to a wine glass tipping over. After the tipping point has been passed, a transition to a new state occurs. The tipping event may be irreversible, comparable to wine spilling from the glass: standing up the glass will not put the wine back.
That’s the quantum jump that we must not allow to happen.
But here’s the trick – how will we recognize it? We don’t seem to know when or if there will be a tipping point, and since we don’t know, we’re acting as though we have time. Every year that “last year we can realistically make an impact on climate change” deadline seems to get pushed out, as scientists re-examine the numbers, throw in ever-more-optimistic assumptions, and make projections that appear to give us some time.
We seem to think that it’s going to be a gradual process as the world warms – but what if Dr. Box is right about all that methane? What if a permafrost meltdown is closer than we know? Or what if something else happens that we don’t know about, and haven’t projected?
Most of us are behaving as if there is plenty of time to ramp up planning, take legislative action, and convince Republican climate change deniers that the “debate” is over. Most of us are not acting like a tipping point might well be nigh. Instead, we’re hemming and hawing, debating, arguing, making some incremental changes, getting excited about “market forces” acting, and waiting for wondrous new technologies to come along that will miraculously save us. We’re lauding the new kick-ass Pope, as if Catholics the world over won’t just cherry-pick the bits of his messaging that they like, and discard anything they don’t agree with, or that’s too hard (like fighting climate change).
What if we wait too long? What if the tipping point arrives like a bolt from the blue – like a plane from a clear September sky – and we don’t see it coming? What if it is already too late?
Then there’s the tipping point we desperately NEED to happen, as discussed here recently in the Guardian.
Here's a taste:
It’s possible we have become so hypnotised by real and serious negative tipping points, that we’ve forgotten that things can turn out unexpectedly well too.
While fish populations and financial markets might suddenly collapse around their complacent human overseers, iron curtains and regimes can fall with just as little warning. Societies can dramatically change course to take collective responsibility, cancel each others’ debts, care for each other and pull together in the face of great challenges. All the political parties in the UK election are fighting over the future of the NHS. It emerged dramatically as a bold new social commitment to mutual care in the immediate shadow of financial market failure and years of brutal conflict. At its weakest point the UK took its boldest step. Beneath the surface, the experience of those years had changed people, making big change possible, acceptable and desirable.
Now, in spite of everything, are we approaching just such a positive inflection point in the face of climate change?
I’m not as sanguine as the author. Thus far, evidence of significant, concerted, coordinated action has been thin on the ground. There is some encouraging movement on a global energy policy, and we shall see what happens in Paris this fall. Costa Rica’s energy system is now powered by 100% renewable energy. Solar has just gotten a big boost from President Obama.
But I worry that this isn’t enough, soon enough. We seem to be relying on a “business as usual” model – that is, allowing market forces to work, allowing incremental legislative changes to be put into place, and allowing progress to be turned back (#ShellNo!) so that for every gain we make, we slide backwards a little bit, too.
Here in the US there are still a significant number of powerful politicians whose intransigence of the face of overwhelming evidence is stunning. These powerful people – John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Jim Inhofe, and others – are planted directly in the way of getting major work done on energy policy, infrastructure, mass transit, or greening the economy in any way. The Arctic is now open for drilling, and oops! There’s already been a problem!
Where’s the quantum jump into action? Slowing or halting additional climate change isn’t something we can do in a half-assed, bumbling, ad hoc way. Where’s the WWII civilian defense service equivalent for climate change?
For a few years now, prominent scientists have been calling for radical action.
Now David King, John Browne, Richard Layard, Gus O’Donnell, Martin Rees, Nicholas Stern, and Adair Turner have co-authored A Global Apollo Programme to Combat Climate Change (yes, they’re Brits).
I quote:
We are in danger
Climate change threatens us with increased risk of drought, flood and tempest,
leading to mass migration and conflict. These dangers can be limited if the rise in
temperature is less than 2˚C above the pre-industrial level. And in 2010 world leaders
agreed at Cancun to act to achieve that limit.
But the commitments made since then have little chance of achieving that target.
Even if every promise was carried out, carbon-dioxide emissions will continue to
rise... By 2035 the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
will exceed the critical level for a 2˚C rise in temperature and on current policies
the temperature will eventually reach 4˚C above the pre-industrial level. This is the
central forecast, implying a 50% chance of still higher temperatures.
We must take action to prevent this, by radically cutting the world’s output of carbon
dioxide... We must reduce the use of energy and we must make the energy
we use clean i.e. free of carbon-dioxide emissions. This Report is about how to make
energy clean.
I encourage everyone to read it. It is bracing, fact-packed, and practical. It may not be the solution - but we've got to do SOMETHING this big. And this, or something very like it, may be the seismic shift – the quantum jump – that we need.