James' World 2

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The goal is simple: save the world. Rob Jackson, climate scientist and author of Into the Clear Blue Sky, is trying to save the world by removing things: removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, removing fossil fuels from our cars, removing everyday pollutants from our homes. Last summer in the Northern Hemisphere felt cataclysmic: the sky in the U.S. Northeast turned burnt orange from wildfires in Canada, temperatures rose higher and higher, and hurricanes caused more and more damage. How do you save the world, when the present and future feel so bleak? Jackson hasn’t lost hope for a green, sustainable future. He has trekked across the world, meeting CEOs, researchers, and field scientists who are working to save our world and our future by removing pollutants, building with greener and better materials, and inspiring the rest of us to never lose hope.

Scientific American spoke with Jackson about his new book and outlook on our environmental future.

You start this book with small but surprising ways the atmosphere affects our lives on Earth. A funny example that I wanted to ask you about was salt forming on Italian frescoes. Can you tell me about that?

It seems like an odd place to begin a climate book, but I was interested in how we think about preserving things for centuries, and the Vatican has a whole office of people thinking about maintaining and restoring items over decades to centuries. For centuries, people lit the chapel with candles, and the burned wax and soot were released into the air and gradually built up on the frescoes. On top of that, they started to see what looked almost like powdery mildew on the frescoes, and that was literally carbon dioxide from people’s breath, almost in the same way that the stalagmites form in a cave. There was too much carbon dioxide in the air. The most amazing thing about seeing the chapel were these little blocks, the Italian word for them translates to “testimony”; they leave these rectangles of dirt on the fresco to remind people of what things were like. I found that to be a very beautiful and moving example of how far they had come in restoring the frescoes.

In addition to carbon dioxide, you talk about the greenhouse gas methane. Can you tell me what concerns you about methane in particular?

I spent so much of my time working on methane because it’s 90 times more potent than carbon dioxide at warming Earth. It’s responsible for an additional third as much warming as CO₂ in recent decades. But methane is also mysterious. We’re still trying to understand why it’s rising: [it] could be the tropical wetlands that I study in the Amazon are starting to release more methane as they warm; it could be that there’s more methane coming from cows or oil and gas wells or other things that we do. The biggest reason for emphasizing methane as much as I do is [that] it’s short-lived in the atmosphere—it lasts only a decade or so. That means that if we could eliminate all methane emissions from human activities, we could restore methane concentration to preindustrial levels in only a decade!

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