• At the annual meeting of the Society of Environmental Journalists last month in Miami, the chair of the University of Miami’s Geography department, Harold Wanless, told a packed auditorium that “we should think about putting things we don’t want to lose—like national archives—safely away from the coast.” We’ve put so much CO2 in the atmosphere, Wanless said, that “we’re probably looking at sea level rise of 20-40-60 feet before the climate equilibrates.  And it’s happening faster than we thought it would.  It’s possible that we’re already seeing the beginnings of it now, with rapidly accelerating ice loss in Antarctica and Greenland.”

Four years ago, the 194-nation Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecast sea level rise of at least six inches to two feet by the year 2100, but Wanless believes we may instead see “rapid pulses of the 1-10 meter range”—that’s 3.3 to 33 feet—in this century.

• Wanless’s warnings, and those of veteran climate researchers like NASA’s Jim Hansen, are based on the excess carbon dioxide that’s already been emitted into the atmosphere and projections for future emissions.  But reports in the last two weeks from the International Energy agency and the US Department of Energy both found that global emissions of CO₂, the most important greenhouse pollutant, continue to defy projections, and reached record levels in 2010.  The head of the DOE’s Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center told the Associated Press that the latest figures put global emissions higher than the worst case projections from the IPCC just four years ago.

•The IEA report suggests that given the lack of progress in controlling greenhouse emissions so far, the world has just six years in which to take drastic action to reduce greenhouse emissions sufficiently to avoid a rise of at least 2° C, the upper limit of what’s considered “safe”.  The report found that 80% of the total energy-related CO₂ emissions that would lead to that temperature rise are already “locked in,” and that with the rapid economic growth of the developing world the other 20% will be locked in by 2017. That means any further emissions after 2017 put us over the edge into the danger zone.  (Of course many researchers argue that the threshold for dangerous warming is actually much lower.)

•A draft summary of the IPCC’s latest major report obtained by Agence France Press states that the impact of climate change on weather events and rising sea levels are already measurable and “very likely”—that is a probability of 90% or greater —to become worse or even intolerable.  The same report forecasts a rise in average global temperatures of up to 5° C (9° F) by 2100.

Taken together, what’s emerging from this and other news is a new and extremely scary understanding of what we’re doing to the global climate.  Climate change isn’t something that’s going to happen mostly in some far distant future—it’s happening now.  It’s not something that will happen gradually and smoothly—it’s going to unfold in dramatic fits and starts.  And it’s not something we have the luxury of time to deal with later—the window of opportunity to avoid dangerous climate change could be closed well before the end of this decade.

And yet the only global mechanism for doing anything about this real and present danger—the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, often referred to as the Kyoto process—has virtually ground to a halt, with little more than face-saving agreements coming out of the last two summits in Copenhagen and Cancun, and little hope for anything more at the upcoming Durban meeting, largely because the world’s top two greenhouse polluters—the US and China—have been unable to come to grips internally with the challenge. 

The political system in the US is gridlocked on the issue, and despite huge investments in solar and other renewable energy technologies, China shows no signs of being able to dampen its ever-growing appetite for coal.  Until the governments in Washington and Beijing can muster the political will to make extremely tough domestic decisions, and agree to move ahead together in making a quick transition from fossil fuels, no part of the above outlook will change significantly.

And for that to happen, it might just have to get a lot hotter and stormier.

Petermann Glacier in northwestern Greenland (left image July 28; right image August 5)

A massive iceberg broke off Greenland this week. It’s the largest break in Greenland in 50 years, setting off alarm bells among climate watchers. Anchor Jeb Sharp speaks with Dr. Robert Bindschadler, one of NASA’s leading climate scientists, about the break.
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JEB SHARP: The death toll has topped 1,100 today from flooding and landslides in China. The grim milestone comes amid reports of continuing floods in Pakistan, and an unrelenting heat wave in Russia. Scientists say none of this extreme weather can be directly linked to global warming. But they say it all does fit into the models of what a warmer future might look like. Meanwhile there’s another bit of news raising climate-related alarms. The break-off this week of a massive iceberg from Greenland. Robert Bindschadler is a glaciologist with NASA. He says the location of the ice collapse makes it especially troubling.

ROBERT BINDSCHADLER:  This is happening right at the northern tip of Greenland, so what it tells us is that these dramatic events have extended from the southern part of Greenland where we’ve seen them before all the way to the northern limits. So all of the Greenland ice sheet is now involved in this dynamic.

SHARP:  One of the concerns often about these kinds of events is rising sea levels. Is there any reason to think this one iceberg could contribute significantly to rising sea levels?

BINDSCHADLER: It likely will in a fairly small way and the way it will is that before it calved it was part of an ice shelf. A floating ice tongue connected to the ice sheet and because it’s been removed, there’s less resistance to the flow of the ice sheet into the ocean, so as a glaciologist I would expect the glacier to speed up a little bit and that will contribute a modest increase to sea level rise.

SHARP: And in terms of other impacts I think one of the things that really scares people is the idea that this huge chunk of ice could hit ships or oil rigs.

BINDSCHADLER: It doesn’t move too fast, but you don’t want to get in its way. It’s likely to get caught up in the circulation in the Arctic Ocean and move around for many years.

SHARP: How do you think of the future of the arctic when you think about it? If there’s more ice melts and that means more human activity up there in terms of exploration, numbers of boats. Do you have a kind of nightmarish picture of too much stuff all going different directions and one bumping into the next?

BINDSCHADLER: Yes, I would say it’s disturbing to think about what the near-term future is of the arctic because it’s really chaotic up there. So everybody in the world should kind of keep an eye out on how disruptive climate change is to the northern societies because that’s a harbinger of things to come for everybody on the planet.

SHARP: Dr. Robert Bindschadler is a senior fellow at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

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• Video: BBC coverage
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• Extreme weather in Asia and Europe
• Russia battles devastating fires

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KATY CLARK: I’m Katy Clark and this is The World. Wildfires continue to burn in central and western Russia. Economists suggest that the fires could reduce the country’s national output by up to 1%. The smoke and pollution has become unbearable for many in the capital, Moscow. And so, as Jessica Golloher reports, many are getting out of town.

JESSICA GOLLOHER:  Patience is wearing thin as everyone from babyshkas to kids cram onto an already packed express train. Destination, Domodedova Airport. Many of the passengers say they’re headed out of the pea soup like acrid smoke of Moscow for better, cleaner and more breathable air. American Charlotte Turner is one of them. She says she’s ecstatic to be finally headed home to Boston after spending time in what she describes as Smogeddon.

CHARLOTTE TURNER:  It’s like walking through a campfire. Everywhere is just smoky. You can’t see. Before I left, it wasn’t as bad. I came back last night and it’s been just hard to breathe and really terrible. Can’t even see 100 yards. It’s like smoking a pack of cigarettes on the street for four hours.

GOLLOHER: Standing outside the United check-in at Domodedova Airport in a Northwestern Law t-shirt, Derek Linkous looked relieved to be going back to Chicago. He says the Moscow smog ruined his vacation. He even tried to go home early, but everything was booked.

DEREK LINKOUS: There was just nothing to do in Moscow cause you would just – there’s nothing to do. You just sort of sit in your hotel room, maybe run out to the cafe and hope the cafe isn’t too smoggy. But I mean if you’re just going to sit in a hotel room you may as well just go home.

GOLLOHER: Muscovites commonly flee the city during the summer months. They take vacations just like everyone else. But aviation officials say people this season were desperate to leave. More than 100,000 people flew out of Moscow on Sunday. The highest volume so far this year. Travel agents reported package tours to destinations popular with Russians such as Egypt and Turkey were completely sold out. And an online check found that nearly 95% of trains from Moscow to St. Petersburg were completely sold out over the weekend. Lena Ivanova lives in the Moscow region. She says she’d love to get on a plane or take a vacation to get away from the toxic chemicals, but she can’t afford it. So she and her husband have packed up the car instead.

RUSSIAN SPEAKING

GOLLOHER: She says it’s dangerous here. It’s like we’re at war. She says we can’t breathe, we’re really frightened and we’re going to get out of here. Despite Ivanova’s readiness to flee the smoke and toxic fumes, her neighbor Vasiliey Ivanovich says he’s not budging.

RUSSIAN SPEAKING

GOLLOHER:  He says it’s my home. I’m not going anywhere. Where would I go? I’m not scared of anything. I know these firefighters are working around the clock to get these fires under control. I know the fires will stop soon. And with that, Ivanovich turned on his heels and walked into his house, disappearing through a cloud of thick smoke. The government may need more than Ivanovich’s positive approach. Officials have recently acknowledged that they can’t get the blazes under control and President Dmitry Medvedev has accepted aid such as planes and troops from several other countries. Some forecasters predict that the giant cloud of smoke covering the Moscow region won’t abate for at least several days. Making matters worse, temperatures are expected to remain near 100 degrees for at least a week with no rain in sight. For The World, I’m Jessica Golloher in Moscow.

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MARCO WERMAN:  I’m Marco Werman, this is The World.  Scientists know of serious threats to frog species across the globe.  They’re vanishing from many areas, though the exact cause is in question.  It could be disease or habitat destruction.  Now a study published by the Journal of Science suggests the world’s lizards are in peril because of climate change.  The World’s Science Correspondent, Rhitu Chatterjee has the story.

RHITU CHATTERJEE:  The European common lizard is a slender creature with a brown back and brightly colored belly.  And as its name implies, it’s found across Europe.  In the 1980′s scientists had documented the lizards in many parts of the Pyrenees mountain range in France.  But when ecologist Barry Sinervo of UC Santa Cruz went back to those locations in the 1990′s, he was surprised by what he found.

BARRY SINERVO:  I was in fact shocked.  They were extinct at many locations.

CHATTERJEE: Sinervo couldn’t find an obvious reason why the lizards had vanished from these areas.  The lizards do still live in some parts of the Pyrenees and the sites where they went extinct were pristine; undisturbed by development.  But there was something different about the areas that had lost their lizards.

SINERVO: They were all concentrated in the southern part of the range and at low elevation.

CHATTERJEE: In other words, these were relatively warm areas at the edge of the species range.  Maybe these areas were getting too warm.  Sinervo wondered if these lizards were dying off due to global warming.

SINERVO: So I thought well that’s interesting but it’s not like a global pattern.

CHATTERJEE: Then in 2006 Sinervo went to Mexico.  And he found the same pattern of local extinctions.  Mountain dwelling lizards were disappearing from the warmer edges of their ranges.  But was it really the heat that was killing them off?  Biologist Donald Miles of Ohio University examined that question.  He measured the air temperature of the sites where the lizards had vanished.  And indeed, for part of the year, these places were too hot for the lizards to survive.

DONALD MILES:  The extinct sites were thermally inhospitable so we got the smoking gun.

CHATTERJEE: Miles, Sinervo and their team wondered what these findings meant for lizards worldwide.  They scoured the literature for data on other lizards.  They applied what they had learned in Mexico and combined it with projections of future temperature increases.  And from that they made some predictions.  If nothing is done to curb global warming, nearly a fifth of all lizard species may go extinct by 2080.  Raymond Huey is a herpetologist at the University of Washington.  He calls the new study solid and important.

RAYMOND HUEY:  This is the first major paper to show that extinctions of lizards are not just for the future, but they’re here now.  I don’t think anyone had an appreciation of that on a global scale.

CHATTERJEE: And scientists say that it’s not just the lizards that are in trouble.  The problem is many species live in mountain ranges.  And as the temperature warms, these animals will have to move higher and higher up the mountains to find a more comfortable climate.  And soon, they could be left with nowhere else to go.  Stuart Pimm is a conservation biologist at Duke University.  He says the planet could warm by two degrees Celsius or more in the coming decades and that could cause large scale extinctions.

STUART PIMM:  The very substantial fraction of species around the world, maybe 25%, live within two degrees of their nearest mountain top, and that means those species are going to be in very serious trouble and it’s a very significant fraction of the world’s biodiversity.

CHATTERJEE: For now, these are only projections.  The big unknown is what the world will do to control the emissions that scientists say are already threatening species and entire ecosystems.  For The World, I’m Rhitu Chatterjee.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Music this week by Spunkshine. Don’t forget, we’re aiming for 1,000 fans on Facebook by the end of May!

This week’s tech podcast starts by giving you a bird’s eye view on nukes. In the wake of the new treaty signed last week by President’s Obama and Medvedev, and the Nuclear Security Summit now happening in Washington, we wanted to find out how you keep track of nuclear developments worldwide. Well, one way is with satellites. We have an extended interview with with Kevin Pomfret, Executive Director of the Centre for Spatial Law and Policy. Kevin talks about GeoEye satellite images of nuclear, and supposedly nuclear, sites around the world. Well worth a look.

Here are some more helpful links from this week’s show:

• GeoEye website
• BBC: More from their special series of reports on the global Internet
• BBC profile of “Jihad Jane”
• Discovery Tech Online: Turning CO2 Back into Fuel
• Video: Jim Lovell remembers Apollo 13
• Romeo and Juliet: Such Tweet Sorrow
• The World’s Tech Podcast on Twitter

Remember, you can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes, or RSS. You can also sign up to receive the podcast each week via email.

Also, tell five of your friends…or enemies…about the ‘cast.

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• Environment stories on The World
• IPCC

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DAVID BARON: I’m David Baron, and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH Boston. The secretary general of the United Nations has begun a review of the way the UN’s climate science panel works. The inter-governmental panel on climate, or IPCC is a collaboration of thousands of scientists from around the globe. It won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for its work. But recently some people have been questioning its credibility. The World’s Katy Clark has more.

KATY CLARK: The IPCC’s massive 2007 report has been hammered by critics in recent months. They’ve seized on a number of small errors to challenge the credibility of the entire agency. In announcing the review yesterday, UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon made it clear he believes that the science behind climate change remains solid.

BAN KI-MOON: The threat posed by climate change is real. Nothing that has been alleged or revealed in the media recently alters the fundamental scientific consensus on climate change. Nor does it diminish the unique importance of the IPCC work.

KATY CLARK: But the secretary general acknowledged a few errors that had undermined public confidence in the IPCC. For instance, the agency failed to pick up a mistake in its estimate of how quickly the Himalayan glaciers are melting. So Ban Ki-Moon is turning to an independent panel to evaluate the IPCCS’s operations in hopes of avoiding such mistakes in the future. IPCC chairman R.K. Pachauri says he welcomes the review.

R.K. PACHAURI: In recent months, we have seen some criticism. We are receptive and sensitive to that, and we are doing something about it.

KATY CLARK: The review will be led by the head of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Robbert Dijkgraaf.

ROBBER DIJKGRAAF: What we have been asked to look at is the general way in which the IPCC works. So it’s processes and procedures, and management structure, the way it deals with peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed literature. How it communicates. So, it’s actually a very broad task. And we also have been asked to see how the approaches towards errors, how they can be avoided. All in all it will be future looking review.

KATY CLARK: That all sounds good to Roger Pielke Junior.

ROGER PIELKE JUNIOR: I guess I’m in the unique position of being one of researchers who publishes in the peer-reviewed literature who has seen his work misrepresented by the IPCC.

KATY CLARK: Pielke is a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He says the IPCC’s last report came to erroneous conclusions on the links between rising temperatures and the costs of natural disasters. Pielke doesn’t want to speculate why the IPCC didn’t correct its mistake.

ROGER PIELKE JUNIOR: The reasons for the breakdowns in process don’t matter so much as that they’re recognized and changes are made to the policies and procedures of the institution, so they don’t happen again. It’s inevitable that there will be mistakes in a report as massive and as ambitious as the IPCC, but if the institution’s incapable of responding in an effective manner, then institution has some credibility problems.

KATY CLARK: Pielke says he’s cautiously optimistic that the review will address those problems. Oceanographer Katherine Richardson is a climate advisor to the Danish government. She’s also happy that a third party will be reviewing the IPCC’s work. But she harbors no illusions that the review will satisfy people who believe climate change isn’t real.

KATHERINE RICHARDSON: There’s still people saying same thing about evolution. So it would be naïve to believe that this discussion is going to go away simply because we do look at the way IPCC works.

KATY CLARK: The review panel will try to finish its work by August. That would give the IPCC time to implement any recommendations before it begins work on its next report. For The World, this is Katy Clark.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

In Dhaka the best form of transportation is often a bicycle rickshaw.

Grossman: Bangladesh is crowded. It has a population greater than Russia’s crammed into a space the size of Louisiana. And water is never far away here. The nation sits on a broad coastal plain that’s just above sea level. Civil engineer Ainun Nishat says the country’s geography puts the dense population at risk.

Ainun Nishat: “Bangladesh is nature’s laboratory on natural disaster. We have floods, we have droughts, we have heat waves, we have river bank erosion, we have storm surges, we have cyclones. “

Grossman: And global warming will make things worse, he says. Sea level is expected to rise two or three feet this century. To complicate matters, while the sea is rising, the land is sinking. You see Bangladesh sits on a big delta. This land was built up over thousands of years by sediment washing down the region’s major rivers to their mouths at the Bay of Bengal. But those rivers don’t deposit the sediment on land as they used to. They’ve been constrained by earthen embankments that force the sediment, about a billion tons a year, directly to the sea. Geographer Maminul Haque Sarker says without fresh sediment building up on land, the soil is compacting – it’s sinking – and the country is becoming even more vulnerable to sea level rise.

Maminul Haque Sarker: “If you can manage the sediment better — better way, then it can mitigate some of your losses due to climate change.”

Grossman: That’s what some in Bangladesh are now trying to do… manage the sediment better.

Boats of all sizes and shapes are the used for transport and commerce throughout the waterlogged delta.

Grossman: A heavy-set man in pressed pants and a polo shirt is driving his car through the outskirts of Khulna, the third-largest city in Bangladesh. Shafiqul Islam is director of a small college, a former locally-elected official, and founder of the Pani or water-committee, a grassroots farmers’ rights group. He’s riding an a straight road on the crest of a dike along one of thousands of small rivers that criss-cross the delta. The water is murky, rich with soil washed down from the Himalayas.

Shafiqul Islam: “You need to understand, this is the river, and that is the farmland. Now you can see that the river is full of sediment.”

Grossman: The area around the river was once a mangrove forest. And though more than 50 miles from the sea, it’s so low and flat that the tide used to overflow the low banks of natural channels and flood nearly the entire region with mucky water. In the 1960′s, at the behest of the government, international aid organizations began constructing a system of dikes to create permanent river channels and stop the natural flooding. Islam says it was an attempt to protect farmers who grow rice here.

Shafiqul Islam

Shafiqul Islam: “Because in our country we always think that the Western countries’ manners are very good and they are very knowledgeable, they know everything. But we are very poor countries, we don’t have vast knowledge, we don’t have good engineers here and therefore we have to invite engineers from outside.”

Grossman: But channelizing the rivers robbed the surrounding land of fresh soil. In a matter of decades, once-productive rice paddies had sunk so low they could no longer be drained into the river, which is necessary to farm rice. So the paddies became stagnant and infertile. People had no food.

Shafiqul Islam and others proposed a radical idea: cut the dikes, and let silty water flow onto the farmland for a few years to replenish the depleted paddies. Water officials rebuffed their suggestion. So in 1997, a band of frustrated farmers defied the government and did just that – breached the embankment.

Shafiqul Islam: “There were many police and government officials present while we cut the channel. But thousands and thousands of people were there to help us, and we did it.”

Grossman: As an estimated 20,000 farmers watched, a team of men hacked a hole in the dike with shovels.

Shafiqul Islam: “A huge amount of water went to the wetland side with silt. After the high tide is in full, the water remains stagnant for about 15 or 20 minutes, and at this time, the silt is deposited in the wetland.”

Grossman: The plan to save the paddies outside the city of Khulna worked. In three years the land had collected four feet of new silt. Rice flourishes here once again. Government officials now agree that selectively opening dikes for a new dose of sediment is a good idea. They’ve done it themselves in other areas.

Ainun Nishat: “This is something which is working. And we are champion of it.”

Grossman: Civil engineer Ainun Nishat, who has advised Shafiqul Islam, says although the purpose of cutting the dike in 1997 was to improve agriculture, his country could use the same method to raise the level of the land and protect it from the slow advance of the sea.

Ainun Nishat: “We are pushing the government to do it more effectively. We find the government not doing it with the proper enthusiasm it should receive.

Grossman: Bangladesh does plan to breach more embankements. And other low-lying regions are also exploring this idea. Earlier this year the state of Louisiana announced that it will try restoring sinking wetlands by redirecting sediment from the Mississippi River. But Sheikh Nural Ala, an official with Bangladesh’s Water Development Board, says this technique alone won’t save his people from rising seas.

Sheikh Nural Ala

Grossman: A permanent solution, Ala says, will likely involve a mix of techniques – including selective flooding of some areas, and using accumulated sediment to build higher dikes. And a new study says such measures are urgently needed. The study found that most of the world’s major deltas are sinking… and as the sea rises, flooding in these areas could increase 50% this century – putting tens of millions of people at added risk.

For The World, I’m Daniel Grossman, Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Daniel Grossman’s reporting in Bangladesh is part of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting’s climate change initiative. It was supported by the Kendeda Fund, Alicia Patterson Journalism Foundation, Barbara Smith Fund, Whole Systems Foundation and Abby Rockefeller & Lee Halprin and 7th Generation Incorporated.

Attention is likely to focus on Chinese President Hu Jintao, who is expected to unveil new steps to tackle emissions. The summit in Copenhagen is aimed at approving a global climate change treaty. Negotiators are trying to agree on a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol to limit carbon emissions. The World’s Alex Gallafent reports

• BBC coverage
• Summit on Climate Change

• CO2 fixation in basaltic rock in Iceland
• Fighting Global Warming by Turning CO2 into Stone
• BBC animated guide to climate change

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World. In the past year Iceland has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. First the banks collapsed, then the economy, and then the government. But here’s something that survived – a research project aimed at removing excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it beneath the earth’s surface. CO2 emissions contribute to climate change and rising sea levels and many countries, including the US, are investing millions to develop so-called CO2 sequestration technology. The project in Iceland is especially promising as Ashley Ahearn reports.

ASHLEY AHEARN: Driving southwest from Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital, the land looks like crumbled Oreo cookies – miles and miles of them strewn beneath a steel-gray sky. The volcanoes that formed Iceland spewed out hot magma which cooled into a porous black rock known as basalt. Iceland is 90% basalt and scientists here think all that rock might be as good as gold in the fight against global warming. The key – like so much else on this volcanic hot spot – may lie underground.

ALMAR SIGUROSSON: [SPEAKING ICELANDIC]

AHEARN: Almar Sigurosson is driving me up a rocky slope toward white yurt-like structure surrounded by workers in hardhats.

SIGUROSSON: Actually they’re drilling and tapping off energy from the volcano and the heat has been here for thousands of years and we can expect the heat to be here for other thousands of years.

AHEARN: So we’re driving up a volcano right now essentially?

SIGUROSSON: Yeah. Last eruption here was for two thousand years ago so don’t worry.

AHEARN: Sigurosson works forks for Reykjavik Energy. The company taps the steam and boiling hot water that surged through the rocks beneath this volcano to produce enough electricity for two thirds of Iceland’s population. We’re heading towards what’s a bore hole.

SIGUROSSON: This is bore hole that goes down three kilometers. And from these [INDSICERNIBLE] there comes mixture of steam and water and the steam then goes to the power plant and turns the turbines.

AHEARN: This is the kind of clean geothermal energy that environmentalists love. But along with the steam this plant also releases a small amount of naturally-created carbon dioxide, a key greenhouse gas. That led company officials to start thinking about how they might be able to capture and store that CO2 to keep it from adding to the global warming problem. The answer, they realized, might lie in the very rock that harbors the steam and hot water – Iceland’s ubiquitous basalt.

JUERG MATTER: When these types of rocks are exposed to air then they react with the air and with rainwater and the process is called weathering. And the minerals – they get decomposed because of that weathering process.

AHEARN: That’s Juerg Matter. He’s a geologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. The weathering process he’s describing is important because basalt doesn’t just decompose. The minerals in the basalt bond with CO2 to form new carbonate rocks transforming the CO2 from a gas to a solid in the process. The reaction is exciting for scientists and CO2 emitters alike because it keeps CO2 out of the air virtually forever. And there’s more good news. Basalt is the most common rock on earth. Juerg Matter says there’s potential to capture a significant amount of CO2 by pumping it from power plants into underground deposits of basalt around the world.

MATTER: We could basically sequester – the estimates are – a billion tons of CO2.

AHEARN: And the project backers say the potential could be much greater. The reaction between basalt and CO2 happens extremely slowly in nature. But Matter hopes the deep injection process will help speed it up. That’s where the geothermal plant in Iceland comes in. It’s the first real-world test site of this sequestration concept. Holmfriour Siguroardottir takes me down another road near the plant’s main buildings to see where the sequestration magic might happen. Siguroardottir works in Reykjavik Energy’s Innovations Department which has partnered with Juerg Matter and other scientists on the project.

HOLMFRIOUR SIGUROARDOTTIR: Right now we are approaching the injection wells where we have been doing all this preparation work. You can’t so much on the surface. Everything is happening below the surface.

AHEARN: A couple of white tubes stick out of a patch of brown earth – only a hint of the giant science experiment that’s about to begin beneath our feet. Starting this weekend Siguroardottir says her company will begin pumping a mixture of ground water and CO2 from the geothermal plant 600 meters down the white tubes into the porous basalt below.

SIGUROARDOTTIR: That will seep into the basaltic rock where it will react with the minerals in the rock and we are aiming at forming carbonates – carbonate minerals – where it will fixed. It will be there as a mineral not as a gas.

AHEARN: That’s important because the big criticism of other carbon sequestration schemes is that the carbon would be stored as a gas which could escape back into the atmosphere. About 200 meters away from the injection tubes two other bore holes will allow researchers to take samples of groundwater downstream. They’ll analyze the water to find out how much CO2 has bonded with the rock; how much new rock is being produced; and how fast the reaction is taking place.

GORDON BROWN: So that’s a major step in the right direction – to be able to actually monitor what’s going on in time.

AHEARN: Gordon Brown is a geology professor and Stanford University. He’s been studying the problem of CO2 sequestration for 40 years. That’s loner than most scientists have even recognized that rising levels of atmospheric CO2 are in fact a problem. But Brown takes heart in the possibility that the Iceland research could lead to a breakthrough.

BROWN: It’s an old problem and it’s exciting to me that finally we’re starting to actually do things that might lead to some solution. Ultimately we need to fix this problem and I’m beginning to see the hope that it might actually be fixed within my lifetime.

AHEARN: Of course this CO2 solution isn’t yet set in stone. Knowing how the basalt reaction works in the real world is only a small part of the puzzle. Among the big questions are how to minimize the need for large amounts of water as well as the possible seismic and ecological impacts of altering the rocks that make up the very ground beneath us. But many in the field think this kind of research has a lot of promise. Reykjavik Energy has invested $11 million in the project here in Iceland which it calls CarbFix. Another team of scientists is working on a similar project in the Columbia River Basin of eastern Washington. Holmfriour Siguroardottir of Reykjavik Energy says basaltic rock isn’t hard to find. In fact, as the most common rock on the plant it’s conveniently located beneath some of the most densely populate places.

SIGUROARDOTTIR: A big part of India is made of Basaltic rock. So perhaps in the future we can use the [INDISCERNIBLE] as component to a coal power plant they are using there.

AHEARN: Anyone who figures out a safe and reliable way of locking up CO2 emissions could be in a position to make a lot of money as countries start to crack down on greenhouse gas pollution. Siguroardottir says that’s also part of the company’s thinking.

SIGUROARDOTTIR: Of course in the back of our head we look at it as a business opportunity. But let’s see how it works out.

AHEARN: The first tests of Iceland’s CarbFix experiment are scheduled to begin this weekend. For The World I’m Ashley Ahearn outside Reykjavik, Iceland.

WERMAN: Carbon sequestration is just one of the many kinds of stories we bring you every week on our World Science podcast. In this week’s podcast we’ve got the latest news on warming temperatures in the arctic. You’ll also hear interviews with two scientists who are sailing the Pacific as part of their research. One’s digging through the ash of volcanic island in search of insect life. The other is, well, rummaging through something called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. You can find the podcast at The World dot org.

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