Planet on Fire: A Manifesto for the Age of Environmental Breakdown

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He also noted that while he shares Dudley's opposition to nuclear war, "it is totally unnecessary to add to the many good reasons against nuclear war one which simply is not true." The cause of this perplexing phenenenon is still unknown and, of course, the mystery of the missing methane still has astronomers scratching their heads. The Strangest Thing of All?

It is impossible to reach such temperature unless fission bombs or thermonuclear bombs are used which greatly exceed the bombs now under consideration. But even if bombs of the required volume (i.e., greater than 1,000 cubic meters) are employed, energy transfer from electrons to light quanta by Compton scattering will provide a further safety factor and will make a chain reaction in air impossible." The planet's surface temperature is estimated from measurements taken as it passes behind the star to be 712K (439°C; 822°F). [5] This temperature is significantly higher than would be expected if the planet were only heated by radiation from its star, which was prior to this measurement, estimated at 520K. Whatever energy tidal effects deliver to the planet, it does not affect its temperature significantly. [15] A greenhouse effect would result in a much greater temperature than the predicted 520–620 K. [14] Capitalism would create a desert and call it profit." Halfway through Planet on Fire, Mathew Lawrence and Laurie Laybourn-Langton drop this devastating judgement—but they don’t stop at doom. Instead they offer blueprints, rally-points for energies, and chronicles of useful pasts for a decarbonized future. In the end, the climate crisis, they remind us, is not about individual morality or scientific authority but power and politics. This is a handbook for the fights to come. Quinn SlobodianOver the last decade, astronomers have discovered thousands of exoplanets, and it seems like each new discovery is a little bit stranger than the last. Take TrEs-2b, it's a planet made of a substance that's darker than coal. Then there's Gliese 436 b (otherwise known as GJ 436 b). This alien world is located approximately 30 light-years from Earth towards the constellation of Leo. And it is made of excruciatingly hot ice. Wait. What? Reading Planet on Fire feels like traversing a humming, interdependent ecosystem of ideas, porous to the post-crash movements and thinkers shaping today’s progressive environmentalism ... Starkly realistic whilst unflinchingly radical, Planet on Fire is a guidebook of hope for this crucial decade. Flora Parkin, LSE International Development

In August 2022, this planet and its host star were included among 20 systems to be named by the third NameExoWorlds project. [12] The approved names, proposed by a team from the United States, were announced in June 2023. Gliese 436 b is named Awohali and its host star is named Noquisi, after the Cherokee words for "eagle" and "star". [2] Discovery [ edit ] As the Dudley letter gained the attention of the public and appeared to possibly affect future nuclear policy and research in the U.S., it began to invite more scrutiny from other experts. In a classified letter sent to the U.S. Department of Energy, Roger Batzel, the then-director of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, responded to the request to reassess the risk outlined by Dudley by saying: And therein lies the second mystery — carbon monoxide should not be present to this degree, as it becomes scarce when temperatures soar above a certain threshold. Hydrogen nuclei," Arthur Compton explained to me, "are unstable, and they can combine into helium nuclei with a large release of energy, as they do on the sun. To set off such a reaction would require a very high temperature, but might not the enormously high temperature of the atomic bomb be just what was needed to explode hydrogen? If, after calculation, [Compton] said, it were proved that the chances were more than approximately three in one million that the earth would be vaporized by the atomic explosion, he would not proceed with the project. Calculation proved the figures slightly less -- and the project continued." Reignition in the 1970sMoffett Studio, courtesy of AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Weber Collection, W. F. Meggers Gallery of Nobel Laureates Collection