The Scream Piercing Through Nature
An ever growing body of research is pointing to the catastrophic consequences of global heating for life on Earth. This is what scientists refer to as irreversible climate change.
I follow James Lovelock in preferring the phrase ‘global heating’ to ‘global warming’. Warming implies a rather cosy, snug future for us all. Heating articulates the harsh, uncomfortable, suffocating reality much more accurately. Global heating also gives us an apposite acronym for the age of Anthropogenic Global Heating – AGH!!
In August 1883, the Symbolist painter Edvard Munch witnessed an unusual blood-red sunset over Oslo. He wrote that he 'felt a great, unending scream piercing through nature'. The event disturbed him and was the inspiration behind his most famous painting The Scream.
To Munch, that disturbing blood-red sunset he witnessed indicated that something was badly wrong at the heart of nature. The theme cropped up in other paintings by Munch.
Anxiety, fear and melancholy pretty much describe the human condition in face of an approaching eco-catastrophe that everyone seems to know is real and about to get worse, but no-one seems able to avert. Munch’s Scream is our reaction to global warming – an impotent howl of despair when confronted with the facts of what we have done to Nature. If, instead of ‘anthropogenic global warming’ or AGW, we refer more accurately to ‘anthropogenic global heating’ we get the acronym AGH! Most appropriate. It’s Munch’s Scream.
The cause of this scream lies in our instrumental assault upon Nature.
The central character in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World is Professor George Edward Challenger, described as ‘a mad and pugnacious scientist blessed with a supreme faith in his own intellectual capabilities.’ In 'When the World Screamed', Doyle has Challenger propound the Lovelockian view that 'the world upon which we live is itself a living organism, endowed ... with a circulation, a respiration, and a nervous system of its own'. (Arthur Conan Doyle 1995 The Lost World & Other Stories). However, as a ‘mad and pugnacious scientist’, Challenger fails to respect this Gaian insight and use his knowledge to show human beings the way to be at home on Earth. On the contrary, Challenger resents the idea that the living, sentient Earth could be so oblivious to the presence of the clever human creatures crawling over her surface, and so determines to 'let the earth know that there is at least one person, George Edward Challenger, who calls for attention—who, indeed, insists upon attention'. That’s science as an act of maniacal self-importance. So Challenger orders a pit be dug through the crust in the Sussex countryside. Eight miles down, Challenger then orders a sharp, hundred-foot drill to be positioned just above the soft, organic body of the Earth, which is then 'shot into the nerve ganglion of old Mother Earth'. At which point, the Earth screamed. 'It was a howl in which pain, anger, menace, and the outraged majesty of Nature all blended into one hideous shriek.' You can work out the symbolism for yourself. Doyle writes of 'the mighty achievement, the huge sweep of the conception, the genius and wonder of the execution, broke upon their minds'. Professor Challenger thus takes his bow. 'Challenger the super scientist, Challenger the arch pioneer, Challenger the first man whom Mother Earth had been compelled to recognize.'
The artist Edvard Munch knew better. He knew what that ‘hideous shriek’ let out by Mother Earth meant - human intellectual arrogance and monstrous technological stupidity.
In scientific terms, ‘global warming’ and ‘global heating’ mean the same thing. Given the widespread use of global warming and the acronym AGW, it may be better to stick with these terms rather than confuse matters further. The content is more important than the form. As expressions, however, global warming and global heating convey something different, ‘warming’ suggesting something cosy and balmy, ‘heating’ something harsh and unliveable. The latter gives a truer picture of the reality of climate change. Anthropogenic global heating gives us the acronym AGH, the scream at the heart of nature.
That ‘great, unending scream piercing through nature' which Munch spoke of and painted in Scream is still being heard. The violation of the planet continues. The extraction is carrying on. “Japan extracts 'fire ice' energy resource from its seabed in 'world first'” reads one celebratory headline. The topic is particularly relevant to the hydraulic fracturing or "fracking" debate.
Alongside headlines like ‘Fracking-triggered quakes rock Lancashire’, we now read that pressure from 1990s fracking may have been the cause Oklahoma's biggest quake. A team of geologists has published a paper in the journal Geology suggesting that the injection of wastewater in Oklahama's Wilzetta oilfields going back to the 90s caused a 5.7-magnitude quake to occur in 2011. Wastewater injection from drilling operations has been linked to seismic events in the past. These, however, have typically been much smaller quakes and have tended to occur in the first weeks or months of injection. The study in Geology goes much further in suggesting that "induced seismicity" can occur years after wastewater injection begins.
Whilst the wastewater implicated was from conventional oil drilling, the issue has clear implications for ‘fracking’. What is fracking? ‘Fracking’ is hydraulic fracturing, the process of drilling and injecting a highly pressurised mix of sand, water and chemicals into the ground at a high pressure in order to penetrate or fracture shale rocks to release natural gas inside. Wastewater from this and other energy extraction methods is also disposed of in the same manner. Critics of the practice say that it risks causing seismic events and contaminating groundwater.
Compare this graphic on fracking to the scene in Conan Doyle’s When the Earth Screamed when Prof. Challenger orders a hundred-foot drill to be 'shot into the nerve ganglion of old Mother Earth'. The Earth screams. 'It was a howl in which pain, anger, menace, and the outraged majesty of Nature all blended into one hideous shriek.'
Whilst the potential long-term risks of fracking have been consistently denied, this new research gives cause for concern. Wastewater was first injected into Oklahoma's Wilzetta oilfields, near the town of Prague, in 1993.
Over the years the wastewater, a byproduct of local oil extraction, was continually injected into sealed wells for disposal. As the water was continually pumped into the wells it increased in volume. The pressure exerted on local fault lines after 2006 prompted series of quakes in November 2011 that included three of magnitude 5 or greater, and then a series of strong aftershocks, the ripples of which were felt across 17 states.
It was the biggest earthquake in Oklahoma's history, destroying 14 homes, but was declared the result of natural causes by the Oklahoma Geological Survey. The paper's authors, geologists from the University of Oklahoma, Columbia University and the US Geological Survey, disagree. "The tip of the initial rupture plane is within 200m of active injection wells and within 1km of the surface; 30 percent of early aftershocks occur within the sedimentary section."
The research published in Geology adds to an increasing body of evidence that the injection of wastewater is correlated to an increase in seismic events. A National Academies report concluded that "the process of hydraulic fracturing a well as presently implemented for shale gas recovery does not pose a high risk for inducing felt seismic events". Critics of the practice say that it risks causing seismic events and contaminating groundwater. Fracking creates wastewater that is injected underground, as in conventional drilling, a practice that has been implicated in seismic events.
A report in 2012 by the US National Research Council confirmed that fracking can indeed cause earthquakes, adding that they are not strong enough for people to feel. The earthquake that fracking caused in Lancashire was certainly strong enough to be felt, with a magnitude of 2.3. The links between fracking in Blackpool and tremors in the region led to a government ban on the practice. This was lifted at the end of December 2012, but doubts remain.
A comprehensive review in 2012 by the US National Academy of Sciences found that "injection for disposal of waste water derived from energy technologies into the subsurface does pose some risk for induced seismicity". The report nevertheless claimed that the number of such documented events was small compared to the overall number of operations carried out.
But things are changing rapidly. In April 2012, a study by scientists at the US Geological Survey of the interior of the US found that events of magnitude 3 or greater had "abruptly increased in 2009" from 1.2 per year in the previous 50 years to more than 25 per year. Whilst a number of gas and oil extraction methods may be implicated in the rise, that is still a substantial rise.
For the scientists behind the new research in Geology, the significantly larger and delayed events in Prague "necessitate reconsideration of the maximum possible size of injection-induced earthquakes, and of the time scale considered diagnostic of induced seismicity". Co-author Geoffrey Abers of Columbia University argues that "there's something important about getting unexpectedly large earthquakes out of small systems that we have discovered here." Abers adds ominously that "the risk of humans inducing large earthquakes from even small injection activities is probably higher" than had been believed.
The research in Geology is likely to raise concerns. Over the years, millions of barrels of fracking byproduct wastewater has been injected back into the rocky depths in the US, largely unregulated by the state. Concern over water contamination finally brought greater regulation - in Illinois, for instance, wells have to meet safety standards and be tested every five years.
There have been increasing concerns that increasing spates of seismic activity in the US ‘midcontinent’ the past decade are linked to underground wastewater disposal. There have been at least 50 minor earthquakes, of magnitudes less than the Lancashire quake, attributed to ongoing fracking.
Seismologist Austin Holland of the Oklahoma Geological Survey accepts that the study shows a potential link between the earthquake and wastewater injection, but nevertheless states that "it is still the opinion of those at the Oklahoma Geological Survey that these earthquakes could be naturally occurring".
However, the research presented in Geology suggests that the initial quakes may be triggering additional seismic activity as they disturb other highly pressurised wells. If this is the case, then it would corroborate the claim made last year by a US Geological Survey research team that this increasing seismic activity is "almost certainly" humanmade.
So, despite the denial, it seems highly likely that we have already had earthquakes due to the storage wells of waste water from Fracking. Those who claim that fracking is safe are gambling away the future for a present private gain. By the time people with be confronted by the issues arising from fracking, business will have done what business has always done – it will have taken the money and ran. The dash for gas is a hit and run operation. The loggers behind deforestation have a phrase for that. Private profits for the gas and oil companies, contaminated water, earthquakes and toxic air for the rest of us. I can’t put it better than one of the locals on the receiving end of fracking.
Give me a brake. If you don't think fracking is dangerous and ruins our precious water supplies, than get a hold of the peoples who's lands are being fracked. They can light a lighter and hold it to their facet and it ignites. One third of our country is being fracked at an alarming speed. So fast that the courts can’t intervene in time for the people. It gets appealed and put off till they are done. Thousands of people had to walk away from their homes for fear of exploding. The oil companies do everything they can to keep it from the public, but who is going to save us when the water is no good, and the crops die and the livestock die and we have to abandon our homes. This is no joke, and you promoting propaganda makes you a part of the lie. Check out people on u tube who tried to warn us.
In the end, hydraulic fracking produces approximately 300,000 barrels of natural gas a day, but at the price of numerous environmental, safety, and health hazards. Large gains for the private sector, little gain for the people, at a massive long term cost to all of us.