Heat (45 page)

Guy Callendar wrote a number of papers, but I have quoted here from “The Artificial Production of Carbon Dioxide and Its Influence on Temperature,”
Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society
64 (1938): 223–40. In addition to the benefits he associated with warming, he also mentioned that increased carbon dioxide levels would improve plant growth. This is true for some plants but not for others—that is, some plants cannot process the increased concentrations of carbon dioxide currently available, and others can process the concentrations of carbon dioxide currently available and could process even higher concentrations. It seems likely that plants capable of processing more carbon dioxide will have a competitive advantage over those that do not, and this advantage may eventually lead to population explosions of certain species. In fact, this may already be occurring. For example, from an article by Jack A. Morgan and his coauthors in 2007: “A hypothesis has been advanced that the incursion of woody plants into world grasslands over the past two centuries has been driven in part by increasing carbon dioxide concentration in Earth’s atmosphere. Unlike the warm season forage grasses they are displacing, woody plants have a photosynthetic metabolism and carbon allocation patterns that are responsive to CO
₂
, and many have tap roots that are more effective than grasses for reaching deep soil water stores that can be enhanced under elevated CO
₂
.” The full citation is J. A. Morgan, D. G. Milchunas, D. R. LeCain, M. West, and A. R. Mosier, “Carbon Dioxide Enrichment Alters Plant Community Structure and Accelerates Shrub Growth in Shortgrass Steppe,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
104, no. 37 (2007): 14724–29.

In the very brief summary of the history of climate change research, I skipped many important names and important papers for the sake of brevity and (I hope) to avoid sending readers to sleep, the liquor cabinet, or the television. Among these are E. O. Hurlbert’s work in 1931, Lewis D. Kaplan’s work in 1952, Nelson Dingle’s work in 1954, Hans Seuss’s work in 1955, Gilbert N. Plass’s work in 1956, Willard Libby’s work in the 1950s, work by various weapons engineers interested in atmospheric physics during and after World War II, and others. I did not even mention the importance of the development of digital computers, a critical tool needed to understand the complexities of climate change. For readers interested in more information, Spencer Weart offers a remarkable account in
The Discovery of Global Warming
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), which he has subsequently updated. He also maintains an exhaustive (but not exhausting, thanks to his masterful use of links, which allow readers to pursue their own interests at their own pace, rather than being held captive by the author’s interests and pace) website on the topic at www.aip.org/history/climate/index.htm. Weart was trained as a physicist but is known for his work as a historian of physics and geophysics. He worked as director of the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics in College Park, Maryland, before his retirement in 2009. Anyone who aspires to write a book about the history of climate change science, take heed: Weart’s effort will be hard to beat.

Maunder Minimums and the possibility that they impact climate were famously described in John Eddy’s paper “The Maunder Minimum,”
Science
192, no. 4245 (June 1976): 1189–1202.

The description of the cooling of the lava lake at Kilauea Iki comes from an article published by the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory on January 9, 2003, “Kilauea Iki’s Lava Lake Has Finally Crystallized.” The article is available online at http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/volcanowatch/2003/03_01_09.html.

Garrett Smathers and Dieter Mueller-Dombois studied plant colonization of the Kilauea Iki crater. They described their findings in a highly accessible manner in
Hawai‘i, the Fires of Life: Rebirth in Volcano Land
(Honolulu: Mutual Publishing, 2007). The two men, along with a host of assistants and students, watched the crater recolonize for five decades before publishing this book.

The chirpless cricket of Hawaiian lava flows, also called a lava cricket or lava flow cricket, was first described in the scientific literature in 1978, when it was named
Caconemobius fori
. Another cricket within this genus lives in lava caves. Francis Howarth described trapping lava crickets in “Neogeoaeolian Habitats on New Lava Flows on Hawaii Island: An Ecosystem Supported by Windborne Debris,”
Pacific Insects
20, nos. 2–3 (1979): 133–44.

Reliable and consistent measurements or estimates of the core temperature of hydrogen bombs do not seem to be available. Temperatures vary quickly over time and space. The estimated twenty million degrees used here was based on extrapolation between a number of estimates from different sources.

President Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace speech can be found in whole at www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/Deterrence/Atomsforpeace.shtml.

The Red Dog Mine is one of the world’s largest zinc producers. Red Dog has been in operation since 1989, when it was developed through an agreement between an Inupiat Alaskan corporation and a multinational mining corporation. Partly processed ore is stored on-site in winter and shipped out in summer, when the ice clears from the Chukchi Sea. Despite Red Dog’s stated commitment to environmental stewardship, the operation has attracted criticism in part over concerns about soil contamination.

Destructive power in nuclear weapons is often expressed in kilotons or megatons—that is, destructive power is expressed as the weight of an amount of TNT that would be required to generate a similar effect. Kilotons are thousands of tons, and megatons are millions of tons of TNT. A one-hundred-kiloton shot, such as the Sedan shot, has the explosive power of one hundred thousand tons of TNT.

It is all but impossible to read about the development of nuclear weapons without coming across quotations and stories by and about Edward Teller. No matter what one thinks of nuclear weapons, Teller is an undeniably interesting character and a man whose intelligence and drive (as well as his often dark obsessions) are evident even in the shortest of statements by him and about him. I encountered many of the quotations and stories used in
Heat
in Gerard J. DeGroot’s wonderful book
The Bomb: A Life
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). Another very important source was Dan O’Neill’s brilliant book
The Firecracker Boys
(New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1994), which also introduced me to, educated me about, and eventually drew me to Point Hope and Cape Thompson.
The Firecracker Boys
was especially important as a secondary source for Teller quotations about Project Chariot and Alaska. O’Neill and many other journalists suggest that Teller’s interest in Plowshare projects was driven by his desire to test bombs, but Teller, like most people, was driven by a complex set of motivations. O’Neill also suggests that Teller knew that there were no funds for harbor development other than those that would support the blasting work, but it is possible that Teller assumed appropriate public works funding would be forthcoming once the geography of the harbor was in place.

Information on the bombing of Hiroshima is, of course, widely available. John Hershey’s short but powerful
Hiroshima
(1946; republished by Vintage Books in 1989), based on interviews of survivors, offers a particularly horrific viewpoint. I found it difficult to research and write about the bombing of Hiroshima. It is impossible to separate an intellectual understanding of World War II and a technical understanding of the atomic bomb from the horror that occurred when the bomb was dropped on a city.

Edward Teller’s
Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics
(New York: Basic Books, 2001), written by Teller with Judith L. Shoolery, provides fascinating insights to a brilliant but complicated man who lived through very interesting times. Teller’s memoirs do not express a tremendous interest in, or concern for, environmental issues. Also, for a man of his brilliance and interests, his knowledge of basic northern biology is appalling. A footnote in his memoir reads, “Work on the North Slope [oil fields] was flourishing and so were the caribou, which had multiplied impressively near human habitation. Because the caribou’s two enemies—fires and polar bears—were limited near the settlements, the caribou had benefitted.” Although it is true that caribou numbers increased in the years following development of the Prudhoe Bay oil fields, Teller’s belief that fire was an important enemy of the caribou was incorrect, as was his belief that polar bears—which in general live on the sea ice, feeding on seals and seldom encountering caribou—are an important enemy of caribou.

G. Peter Kershaw, Peter A. Scott, and Harold E. Welch assessed the heat value of seal oil lamps (
kudliks
) in traditional snow igloos in their article “The Shelter Characteristics of Traditional-Styled Inuit Snow Houses,”
Arctic
49, no. 4 (1996): 328–38. According to the authors, a seal oil lamp fueled by the fat of a single seal (presumably a ringed seal,
Phoca hispida
) could heat a small igloo for 6.3 days, while a larger igloo required the fat of a single seal every 3.7 days. Outside temperatures during the experiment were around minus thirty-five degrees Fahrenheit.

Eric Jay Dolin’s
Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2007) offers a wonderful history of whaling. Among other things, Dolin describes the influence of whaling on the opening of Japan to the West. In 1845, three years before Captain Roys sailed north of the Bering Strait, a Sag Harbor whaler called the
Manhattan,
under the command of Mercator Cooper, was among the first whale ships to sail to Japan. Although Japan was a forbidden coast at the time, Cooper had stumbled on eleven shipwrecked Japanese sailors at St. Peter’s Island and felt justified in returning them to their homeland. The Japanese graciously welcomed Cooper, but they also welcomed his departure. Eventually interactions with whalers—some of them shipwrecked on Japanese shores and then imprisoned—contributed to Commodore Matthew Perry’s 1853–54 expedition to Japan and the subsequent treaty that opened Japan to the West. In 1851, Herman Melville wrote, “If that double-bolted land, Japan, is ever to become hospitable, it is the whale ship alone to whom the credit will be due.” Melville, of course, does not comment on the Gokoku Shrine—the shrine that was built in the memory of those who died in a civil war related to the opening of Japan, and the shrine that became ground zero for the atom bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.

Oil from the sperm whale was a superior product for lighting—it burned a clean white light, almost smokeless, bright enough for use in lighthouses and sometimes said to have lit the lamps of the Enlightenment. In contrast, oil from bowhead whales, sometimes sold as “brown oil,” did not burn as well, but by the 1860s bowheads were easier to find than the heavily hunted sperm whales. In addition, the bowhead, while a large and potentially dangerous whale, would have been easier and safer to hunt than the sperm whale.

The quotation “They don’t like the cold iron,” as well as the anecdote about whales responding to the sounds of whaleboats against ice, was reported in J. R. Bockstoce,
Whales, Ice, and Men: The History of Whaling in the Western Arctic
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986).

The captain’s comment about the rapid decimation of bowhead stocks came from an anonymous letter written in 1853 and reported in the
Whaleman’s Shipping List
(New Bedford, Mass.), May 3, 1853. It was mentioned in the report by J. R. Bockstoce, D. B. Botkin, A. Philp, B. W. Collins, and J. C. George, “The Geographic Distribution of Bowhead Whales,
Balaena mysticetus,
in the Bering, Chukchi, and Beaufort Seas: Evidence from Whaleship Records, 1849–1914,”
Marine Fisheries Review,
2005. The comment on bowhead stocks comes from an 1852 journal entry mentioned in the report. The journal is in the Old Dartmouth Historical Society Collection (no. 145) at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, New Bedford, Mass.

Jörg Freidrich’s
The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940–1945
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2002) describes the impact of firebombing on Germany during World War II. The author also narrates part of the 2003 documentary
Firestorm: The Allied Bombing of Nazi Germany
(directed by Michael Kloft), which offers a sickening glimpse of the realities of firebombing.

Early versions of jellied gasoline used rubber as a thickening agent. Later, after the Japanese cut off supplies of rubber, a mixture of aluminum naphthenate and extracts from coconuts was used, leading to the name “napalm.” Still later, new methods were developed using polystyrene mixed with gasoline and benzene, but “napalm” stuck. Napalm was first used in World War II in the bombings of Tinian, in the South Pacific, and later at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Napalm was also used in the Korean War and the war in Vietnam.

Haney’s words about the firebombing of Kobe come from his book
Caged Dragons: An American POW in WWII Japan
(Ann Arbor: Sabre Press, 1991). Ray “Hap” Halloran’s memory of praying during the firebombing of Tokyo come from Mari Yamaguchi’s article “Museum Recalls Tokyo Firebombing,” Associated Press, March 10, 2002.