Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming (40 page)

The history of Arctic exploration and the Northwest Passage is covered in
Resolute
by Martin Sandler (New York: Sterling, 2006) and
Dangerous Passage
by Gerard Kenney (Toronto: Natural Heritage, 2006). To understand Canada’s uneven relationship with its own north, I read
Canada’s Colonies
by Kenneth Coates (Toronto: Lorimer, 1985) and
Tammarniit (
Mistakes
)
by Frank Tester and Peter Kulchyski (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1994).

For a month in the frozen Chukchi Sea, scientists and State Department representatives aboard the U.S. icebreaker
Healy
kept me and themselves entertained with informal lecture nights—the source of much of what I have learned about the Law of the Sea, the melting polar ice cap, and the jockeying between various coastal states for control of the Arctic and its oil-rich seabed. Chief Scientist Larry Mayer, the director of the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping at the University of New Hampshire, has been a particular resource. In Russia, Yuri Kazmin provided further insights, as did Canada’s Ron Macnab, Denmark’s Trine Dahl-Jensen, Sweden’s Martin Jakobsson, and other sources in Washington and Moscow who would prefer not to be identified. At the U.S. Geological Survey, Don Gautier, Brenda Pierce, and Dave Houseknecht helped me fathom the potential size of the petroleum prize.

The history of Shell’s scenario planning is covered in
The Art of the Long View
by Peter Schwartz (New York: Doubleday/Currency, 1991) and a follow-up,
Learnings from the Long View
(Seattle: CreateSpace, 2011). Also helpful are Shell’s many public reports and the various writings of Art Kleiner, author of
The Age of Heretics
(New York: Doubleday/Currency, 1996).

To learn about California’s wildfires and their context, I read
The Control of Nature
by John McPhee (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989),
The Phoenix
by Leo Hollis (London: Phoenix, 2009), and
A Discourse of Trade
by Nicholas Barbon (London, 1690). California and the American West’s never-ending struggles against drought are documented in
Cadillac Desert
by Marc Reisner (New York: Viking, 1986),
Unquenchable
by Robert Glennon (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2009), and
California: A History
(New York: Modern Library, 2005), the historian Kevin Starr’s distillation of his seven-part series on the Golden State and the American dream.

Along with current and former U.S. government sources,
Emma’s War
by Deborah Scroggins (New York: Pantheon, 2002),
The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars
by Douglas H. Johnson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), and
Atlas Shrugged
by Ayn Rand (New York: Random House, 1957) were my guides to Phil Heilberg’s patch of Africa. For an overview of global food crises, I turned to
The Coming Famine
by Julian Cribb (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010) and
An Essay on the Principle of Population
by Thomas Malthus (London: J. Johnson, 1798). To understand the history of shelterbelts like the Great Green Wall, I read
Woman Against the Desert
by Wendy Campbell-Purdie (London: Victor Gollancz, 1967).

The amphibious future envisioned by Koen Olthuis is detailed in his book
Float!
(Amsterdam: Frame, 2010), written with David Keuning. The rise of infectious diseases in a warmer world is described in
Changing Planet, Changing Health
by the late Paul Epstein and Dan Ferber (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

I was an early (and always silent) member of a lively Google Group discussing geoengineering that was started by Ken Caldeira, which gave me insight into the characters and motivations that would birth two excellent books as I was wrapping up my own:
How to Cool the Planet
by Jeff Goodell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010) and
Hack the Planet
by Eli Kintisch (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2010).
SuperFreakonomics
by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner (New York: William Morrow, 2009) helped explain the inner workings of Intellectual Ventures, while
Fixing the Sky
by James Rodger Fleming (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010) offered anecdotes and a much-needed reminder that we have always wanted to control the weather.

Geoengineering lectures I attended in 2010 and 2011 at the University of Washington attracted some of the nascent field’s best scientific and ethical minds: Fleming, David Keith, Dale Jamieson, Phil Rasch, Alan Robock, Jane Long, Christopher Preston, Steve Rayner, Ben Hale, and Michael Robinson-Dorn. Often in attendance was University of Washington professor David Battisti, who gladly discussed both the science and the intrigue of geoengineering with me. Stephen Gardiner, a philosophy professor who organized the lecture series, is also the author of
A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). His writings helped me understand that contrary to conventional wisdom, global warming is not a classic “tragedy of the commons” as first described by the ecologist Garrett Hardin—or at least that if it is, some of the metaphorical herdsmen among us have bigger cows.

When I traveled a second time to Alaska’s Chukchi Sea and stayed in the village of Point Hope, I carried with me
The Firecracker Boys
by Dan O’Neill (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), the story of how we nearly detonated six hydrogen bombs to create a new Arctic harbor—a brilliant history I wish I had read long ago.

Lastly, a note on translations: Some in the book are my own. For dialogues originally in Russian or French, I have done my best to capture the speakers’ meaning—but rarely can I capture their eloquence. The few phrases originally in Spanish are better rendered.

INDEX

The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. To find the corresponding locations in the text of this digital version, please use the “search” function on your e-reader. Note that not all terms may be searchable.

Aamodt, Jim, 102

abiotic stress tolerance, 246–47

Acciona, 167

acid rain, 271

activation energy, 63

Acuña, René, 129

adaptation, 10, 111–12, 210–12, 222–23, 229–32, 267

Aedes aegypti
mosquito, 235–36, 237

breeding places, 238, 239

genetically modified OX513A, 236, 239–40, 242, 247, 250–53

producing sterility in, 241–44

spraying, 239–40

Aedes albopictus
mosquito, 236, 244, 250

Affordable H
₂
Ousing, 227

Africa:

deportations to, 174

refugees from, 172–75, 180–84, 191

African Agricultural Technology Foundation, 245

Agcapita, 153

agriculture:

increased growing days, 21, 64, 152, 153

land for, 137, 139–59

and salinity, 195, 198

and water, 87, 90, 148, 205

Agrifirma, 153

Aguas de Barcelona, 21–22

AIG (American International Group), 98, 99, 103–5, 109, 110, 113, 115

alarm fatigue, 52

Alaska:

and Arctic claims, 32, 36

endangered villages in, 19, 65

and lease sale, 49, 53, 55–57, 286–87

and oil, 46, 48–49

water contracts in, 122

Alaska Gas Pipeline Project, 46

albedo, 21, 262, 266

Al-Faisal, Prince Mohamed, 122

Algodones Dunes, 126, 128

All-American Canal, 125–29, 130, 167, 264

All-Assam Students Union (AASU), 190, 191, 206

Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), 215–16, 226

Al Maktoum, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, 227

Alphey, Luke, 241–44, 250–53

Alps, melting glaciers in, 65–66, 79–83, 86

American Enterprise Institute (AEI), 267, 276, 279

American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), 232

American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 243

Andermatt, Switzerland, 80

Anderson, Terry, 132–33

Angus and Ross, 73

Anopheles gambiae
mosquito, 247

Anthropocene epoch, 5, 252

Aquaterra, 222

aqueducts, 125

Aqueous, 124

aquifers, 205

Arad, Elisha, 89–91

Arcadis, 229, 230–31, 233–34

Arctic:

development plans for, 45–46, 47

melting sea ice in, 21, 32, 35, 45, 47, 48, 56, 64–66, 77–78, 118, 194, 203, 284, 287–88

national claims on, 32, 35–37, 38

new shipping lanes in, 16–18, 25–26, 31–32, 54, 284

and petroleum, 16, 31, 32–33, 47, 286

Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, 46

Arctic Council, 194

Arctic Frontiers conference, 45–47

Arctic Ocean, and Law of the Sea, 36

Argentina, land deals in, 153

ARIS (Automatic Rice Imaging System), 248–49

Aristotle, 66

Arrhenius, Svante, 5

Ashkelon, Israel, 88–91

Assam, 189–92, 205–6

Assam Movement, 206

Athabasca tar sands, 21, 52, 58, 263–64

Atkin, Carl, 152, 154

Atmocean, 273

Aurora Flight Sciences, 269

Australia:

drought in, 88, 92, 101, 119, 132, 133, 135, 144, 152, 203, 221, 261

Number 1 Rabbit-Proof Fence, 177

water markets in, 132, 133–37

Austria, melting glaciers in, 79–81

Ayles Ice Shelf, 19–20

Baffin Bay, 63

Bahama Islands, 64, 220

Ballou, Rip, 245

Bangladesh, 189–213

border fence, 190–92, 206–9, 212–13

borders of, 191

crops grown in, 195

cyclones in, 196

and flooding, 64, 192, 196–97, 199, 203, 233, 280

foreign aid to, 212

and India, 167, 190–92, 197, 204–9, 210, 212

population growth in, 204, 209

poverty of, 191

refugees from, 191, 204, 206–12

and war games, 203–4

water salinity in, 195, 198

Bangladesh Rice Research Institute (BRRI), 198–99

Bar, Etan, 92–93, 119

Barbon, Nicholas, 112–14

Barents Sea, 37, 53

BASF, 246–47, 249–50

Bashir, Omar, 147, 149

Bay of Bengal, 191, 195, 196

Beatrix, queen of Netherlands, 229

Beaufort Sea, 36, 48, 49

Beckett, Margaret, 20

Ben-Gurion, David, 84, 87

Bentham, Jeremy, 50–51, 52, 58–59

Bidwells, 152

Bikini Atoll, 216

biofuels, 52, 59