Available land

According to this 2005 article of the total of 13 billion hectares of land area on Earth, cropland accounts for 11 percent, pastureland 27 per cent, forested land 32 percent, and urban lands 9 per cent. Most of the remaining 21 percent is unsuitable for crops, pasture, and/or forests because the soil is too infertile or shallow to support plant growth, or the climate and region are too cold, dry, steep, stony, or wet.

These numbers are not static. Forested land is declining (deforestation still outstrips reforestation), unsuitable land is increasing (due to erosion, soil degradation and desertification), urban land is increasing and so, critically, cropland and pastureland is both declining and being forced to rely on more deforestation to prevent further decline. And that's all before we consider sea level rise.

We share one planet between seven billion of us and something like eight million other species. Does my way of life demand more than a fair share?

Symptom, threat, feedback

LA Times: Bark beetles - a climate change symptom, threat and feedback. Due to warmer winters, a parasitic beetle that swarms pine trees in North America is multiplying rapidly across much of the west of the continent and has "already destroyed half the commercial timber in important regions like British Columbia".

Stephen Leahy: Forest fires to double or triple in a warmer world. Another symptom, threat and feedback.

Guardian: Rising seas will put 12 of 19 UK nuclear sites at risk of flooding. Once more, a symptom, threat and (insofar as one form of lower carbon energy generation is put at risk and thereby taken offline) feedback.

Bill McGuire: The surprising link between climate change and volcanoes and earthquakes . Until recently, it was thought that at least a few natural disasters could be considered still "natural". But this geophysics professor claims otherwise. The link is in the weight of melting ice. So much ice is now melting (or is likely to soon be) that the shifting weight on the earth's crusts could spur increased volcanism and earthquakes. Symptom, threat and feedback.

Carbon Brief: Ocean acidification proceeding ten times faster than any point in the last 300 million years. Symptom (of high carbon dioxide levels, if not climate change directly), threat and feedback (insofar as rising acidity reduces the capacity of the oceans to act as an atmospheric carbon sink). The threat here is large. According to this paper, left unchecked, we are likely on course for another marine mass extinction.

Yahoo: A piece of better news. US dream homes turning green. More than half of US homebuyers consider energy efficiency and other environmental considerations to be important in the selection of a potential purchase.

The Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO have published the State of the Climate 2012, an update on climate observations from an Australian context. It is summarised here. A summary of the summary: greenhouse gases, land and ocean surface temperatures and sea levels are all still rising. Australia is still heading towards a significantly hotter, drier and more flood-prone future.

Carbon offsetting: de rigueur or distraction?

A few friends have asked me for advice about voluntary carbon offsetting. Here is an edited and somewhat extended version of what I wrote to one earlier today. I freely admit that my understanding of all the finer points of this field remains somewhat shallow and so I am very open to correction, questions and further discussion (as I am on all my posts).

Voluntary carbon offsetting is the practice of paying money to organisations that seek to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions (usually at a set price per tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent) as a way of reducing our personal climate impact. Voluntary offsets are somewhat distinct from offsets in compliance carbon schemes (such as national or regional carbon markets). The latter probably require their own discussion at some stage.

Voluntary offsetting is most commonly associated with flying, since modern jet-powered aviation is, per hour, the most climate-destructive activity open to the average citizen of the wealthy world.* I plan on posting some thoughts on the impacts and ethics of flying at some point in the future, though let me say here that I don't think that flying is an unequivocal moral evil never to be permitted under any circumstances. I do think that it represents one of the more difficult questions facing contemporary cultural assumptions and habits, not least because, unlike many other activities, few easily substituted alternatives exist.** It also represents, for those who fly more than once in a blue moon, the most obvious point at which significant carbon reductions can quickly be made.
*It may be surpassed by political careers that attempt to thwart responsible climate action, certain kinds of investment banking, or owning factories that produce extreme greenhouse gases such as HFCs, but such activities are not generally available to most people. The main contender for this title, procreation, is a special case since it involves the creation of a new agent.
**Airships anyone?

Some companies or events also choose to pay for carbon offsetting in order to be able to claim that their activities are "carbon neutral" or "zero carbon". Most corporate claims to phrases such as these will be based at least partially in offsetting, since most human economic activities are associated with a carbon footprint of greater or lesser size.

There is a lot of debate around carbon offsetting, some of it around the relative merits of different kinds of offsetting and some about the ethics of offsetting at all.

The tactics of offsetting: evaluating different schemes
Let us first consider the various kinds of offsetting programmes. It is worth noting at the outset that no options are perfect (indeed, some may be only slightly better than nothing, or even worse than nothing), so it remains the case that the only real way of being carbon neutral is avoiding the carbon-intensive activity in the first place. I don't have specific company recommendations (though am happy to receive recommendations in the comments), but I will offer a few thoughts. There are three basic kinds of offsetting:

• Forestry schemes (i.e. tree-planting): The idea here is simple. Trees are made (mostly) of carbon that has been sucked out of the atmosphere, so as trees grow, they reduce atmospheric carbon concentrations. More trees means less atmospheric carbon. Well-managed forestry also has a host of other benefits, from supporting biodiversity and local employment to regulating and enhancing local rainfall. I would also include various soil management schemes here. In the past, some forestry schemes had very poor planning or oversight, meaning trees were planted in inappropriate conditions and without ongoing management and thus quickly died, representing a worse than useless investment. There is generally better accreditation today (or so I am told, though I'm not any kind of expert on offsetting accreditation), which is good, since any planting scheme needs to put appropriate species in suitable locations, rather than just plonking anything anywhere. Nonetheless, from a climate perspective, the benefits from tree planting are generally deferred for decades and are highly vulnerable to future changes. If the forest is cut down, or dries/dies out due to climate change, then the benefit is lost. So a tonne of carbon stored in a forest (or potentially stored in a forest in a few decades) is not the equivalent of a tonne of carbon left safely underground as unused fossil fuel, though it is still better than a tonne of carbon floating in the atmosphere and upper ocean. Technically, the carbon is not removed from the active carbon cycle, just placed in a slightly slower part of it.

• Development schemes (e.g. supplying renewable energy to developing nations, or supporting energy efficiency programmes): These have many of the same benefits and drawbacks of other forms of international development. While the most popular renewable energy schemes often don't actually reduce current emissions (e.g. building a wind turbine for a settlement without electricity actually adds to short-term emissions), they do represent an investment in improving human flourishing (at least potentially, depending on many other factors) in a way that (hopefully) avoids future emissions (compared to a future in which the same development occurred with fossil fuel power). Probably the best kinds of scheme here focus on long term infrastructure investments with ongoing and self-reinforcing benefits. It is not clear to me that the developed world doesn't owe this kind of assistance to the developing world in any case, and so while voluntary support for good projects is worthwhile, I don't see that it equates in any kind of morally useful way with offsetting one's damaging activities elsewhere.

• Permit retirement: These are probably less well-known than other schemes. The idea is for the offsetting organisation to use your money to purchase emission permits in open compliance markets (like the EU carbon market) and then retire them from use, preventing their use by other polluters and so shrinking the total pool of potential carbon use in that market. Though somewhat more abstract than the other options, the benefits are immediate and measurable - as long as the scheme as a whole is working effectively, which is another very complex question for another day (see here for an accessible animated critique of carbon markets).

In general, I would be very hesitant about schemes offered by airlines themselves, who have a vested interest in picking projects with very low prices in order to bolster the idea that the negative impacts of air travel are small. Many airlines have a poor or mediocre track record on selecting quality offsetting schemes. If you are paying only cents or a couple of dollars per tonne of CO2e abatement, then you may well be supporting something that isn't very effective.

The strategy of offsetting: should we be doing it at all?
Second, and more importantly, lying behind questions concerning the relative pros and cons of various offsetting tactics is a more serious strategic debate about the desirability of offsetting altogether in light of its effects on moral culture. On the one hand, offsetting encourages carbon emitters to become familiar with their footprint and take some kind of financial responsibility for it. Yet on the other hand, given that all offsetting options have drawbacks sufficient to render an offset tonne not equivalent to a tonne not emitted in the first place, then the practice of offsetting represents a potential moral hazard insofar as it hides this reality by implying a climatic and moral equivalence between them.

For me, the key question is this: does supporting a culture of offsetting distract members of wealthy nations from the more important tasks of actually reducing our personal footprint and supporting responsible climate politics internationally and in our own backyard?* While I think that offsetting can do some real good and represents a retrieval ethic (trying to salvage something good out of a harmful situation), offsets come a long way down the priority list and if they become anything other than peripheral to our climate strategy then they risk becoming another distracting tokenism from the real challenges. Offsets are not necessary a token effort if people are also facing the hard questions of reducing their personal footprint and supporting responsible politics. But much of the discourse around offsets treats them as get out of gaol free cards, justifying the activity for which the offsets were sought in the first place.
*By responsible, I mean political discourse and policies that take our scientific and ethical situation seriously. This likely means radical changes to our practices (or incremental changes that work in large increments!) in order to minimise radical changes in our climate and biosphere. I know of no major parties in the Anglosphere that hold positions I would consider responsible on this matter. I don't want radical policies; I want deeply conservative policies that aim to conserve the global climate in a recognisable form for our children and grandchildren.

Some have therefore compared offsets to medieval indulgences: a price paid for a clean conscience, which often functions to justify the acts committed in the first place. If my carbon-guilt can be washed away for a small fee later (or even preemptively), then my carbon-intensive assumptions can continue unchallenged.

In sum, I think that probably the best course of action is to reduce one's own footprint as far and fast as possible, to support responsible climate politics, to support thoughtful international development, and then to "sin" boldly (in Luther's phrase) without supporting a culture of modern day indulgences. Nonetheless, I'm not totally opposed to offsetting by those who do so in good faith, via a reputable and accredited organisation. However, this should be done simply as part of one's charitable giving to worthwhile causes rather than in any attempt to assuage guilt or achieve boastful self-righteousness through "carbon neutrality".

Finally, here are some links to other discussions of carbon offsetting that I've found useful (this list may grow in future, especially if people suggest relevant links in the comments).

• Dark Optimism. Building the moral case against offsets, with cartoons.
• African land grabs and carbon offsets. Stephen Leahy outlines one of the dangers of rich countries relying too much on paying poor countries to offset their emissions.
• Cheat Neutral. A thought-provoking spoof on voluntary offsets. It is worth noting that adultery does not equate directly with carbon emissions, which are a cumulative, rather than absolute, evil.

Our ecological crises: Wake up and smell the stats

I'd like to put together a list of credible ecological statistics from reputable sources as a resource. Please post links to any such existing lists you are aware of or add any that have grabbed your attention (please make sure you include a source). To start us off, here are a few off the top of my head and in no particular order:

• Humans now affect over 80% of the world's land, 100% of the oceans and 100% of the atmosphere. Around 40% of the oceans have been "strongly affected" by our activities.

• Half of the world’s tropical forests have disappeared since World War II and roughly another 10 million hectares are being felled each year — the equivalent of 40 football fields every minute. The majority are being cleared by illegal loggers.

• Seventy-seven percent of global fisheries are fully exploited, over exploited or have been depleted. Based on 1998 data, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that global fishing fleets "are 2.5 times larger than needed."

• Marine apex predator numbers (i.e. large fish and sharks) have declined by 90% over the last 50-100 years, mainly due to overfishing (more stats on marine life decline). Another recent study put tuna decline at 60% in the last 50 years.

• Deep-sea trawling damages an area of sea bed twice the size of the contiguous USA each year.

• We're removing 9-10,000 tonnes of fish from the ocean every hour.

• As far as we can work out (and there are wide error margins on this one), species are currently going extinct at something like 100-1000 times the background rate of extinction, faster than at any time since the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. It is likely that somewhere between 5,000 and 30,000 species become extinct each year. All the primary drivers of these trends are linked to human activities: land use changes, habitat destruction, pollutants, invasive species, anthropogenic climate change.

• Twenty-two percent of the world's plant species are threatened, and another 33% have an unknown status.

• Twenty-two species of Australian mammals become extinct between 1900 and 1960. Recently, mammal populations in Kakadu have gone into freefall.

• In the 1950s there were 450,000 lions worldwide and now there are only 20,000. Leopards are down from 700,000 to 50,000, cheetahs from 45,000 to 12,000 and tigers from 50,000 to just 3,000. And in the last forty years, elephant numbers have halved across protected areas in West and Central Africa. Globally, since 1970, wild vertebrate numbers have declined by almost one third.

• One study in 2001 put the annual cost of alien invasive species to the global economy at US$1.4 trillion annually, or about 5% of total GDP.

• Overall, current ecological damage is estimated to cost the global economy US$6.6 trillion annually (yes, with a "t").

• An area of arable land roughly the size of Greece or Nepal is lost to soil erosion and desertification each year. Since 1950, 1.9 billion hectares (4.7 billion acres) of land around the world has become degraded.

• By 1995, humans consumed 20% of global net terrestrial primary production. By 2005, it was 25%.

• Earth overshoot day occurs earlier each year. This is a notional measure designating the point in the year where global consumption exceeds the annual renewable biocapacity of the planet. In 2011, it falls on 27th September. Another way of saying this is that in 2010 the worldwide human population used about 135% of the resources the earth can generate in a year.

• Between 2000 and 2010, the number of cars and motorcycles in China increased twentyfold and there are now between 800 million and one billion cars in the world.

• As we burn 196,442 kilos of coal, 103,881,279 litres of natural gas and 150,179 litres of oil a second, we're dumping 62,500 tonnes of heat-trapping emissions into the earth's atmosphere every minute. Since the industrial revolution, we have increased the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by more than 40% and increased the acidity of the oceans by 30% (a rate faster than anything seen before in Earth's history). The radiative forcing of the carbon dioxide human activities have put in the atmosphere is the equivalent of adding the energy of more than ten Hiroshima bombs every second and is likely the most significant contributing factor in Greenland losing around 9000 tonnes of ice every second (and accelerating), in about 90% of glaciers globally retreating, in precipitating the largest marine migration in two million years due to warming oceans and in ensuring that the last 318 consecutive months have had a global temperature above the 20th century average. The last month with below average temperatures was February 1985.

• Arctic summer sea ice has declined by 40% in extent and more than 75% in volume over the last three decades and 2011 saw new records for lowest extent and volume since records began. Due to increased summer melt, the fabled North West passage through the remote islands of Canada has been open to commercial shipping without icebreakers only four times in recorded history: 2011, 2010, 2008, 2007.

• Nearly 5.5 billion people (about 80% of global human population) live in an area where rivers are seriously threatened.

• The rate at which we are extracting groundwater has more than doubled between 1960 and 2000 and since 1960 18 trillion tonnes of water have been removed from underground aquifers without being replaced, enough to raise global sea levels by an average of 5 cm.

• In 1960, the Aral Sea was the world's fourth largest lake yet by 2000 it had shrunk to 20% of its original size due to over-irrigation on its feeder rivers.

• We put more than six million tonnes of plastic in the oceans annually, which is something like eight million pieces of litter each day, and over 119,000 items floating on every square kilometre of ocean.

• It is likely humanity has had a greater effect on the nitrogen cycle than any other phenomenon for the last 2.5 billion years.

Note that none of these are projections of present trends, they all relate simply to our present condition. This is currently an unsystematic sample; I have not (yet) tried to cover all of the various ecological and resource crises. This post may grow as I continue to gather more information.
I also posted some further statistics back here, though have not had a chance to post links to all the sources of those, and their credibility is something of a mixed bag.

If Brazil has to guard its rainforest, why does Canada/U.S. get to burn its tar sands?

Bill McKibben: If Brazil has to guard its rainforest, why does Canada/U.S. get to burn its tar sands? McKibben has joined with ten other prominent US and Canadian activists and scientists in calling for large-scale civil disobedience over a proposed new pipeline to deliver Canadian tar sands oil to the US.

SMH: The deadliest form of food fight, perhaps the best short piece in a mainstream media outlet on this topic. The Carbon Brief has a useful list of links on climate change and food security (more links are here).

Guardian: At the same time as they put forward a "what peak oil?" report, the UK Government had a second, far less rosy, peak oil report compiled a few years ago. It was not published, until now.

Scientific American: a three part series on the links between climate change and extreme weather. Part One. Part Two. Part Three. Politicians and pundits may pontificate and procrastinate, but the insurance industry takes this very seriously, with more places becoming uninsurable.

Oxford University: Elephant numbers have halved in the last forty years across protected areas in West and Central Africa.

Climate Central: Extreme events related to climate change threaten three US nuclear facilities. Of course, the usual caveats apply to attribution, but the point remains: nuclear has been widely touted as a low-carbon baseload energy solution, yet we are entering an increasing unstable world (climatically, ecologically, and most likely economically and politically). Is it really so wise to build nuclear plants that require rich, stable governments and predictable weather?

CP: Senator Inhofe, perhaps the most outspoken critic of climate science in US politics (a stiff contest), was forced to cancel his appearance at the flagship denier conference due to being "under the weather" after swimming in a blue-green algae bloom exacerbated by drought and a heatwave in Oklahoma. I hope he gets better soon.

Telegraph: warming oceans cause largest marine migration in two million years.

BBC: World's oceans in "shocking" decline. I recently attended a popular open-air lecture by a marine biologist who was presenting unusual creatures from the Norwegian Sea. It was a lighthearted lecture illustrated with a variety of critters and curios in small tanks. During question time afterwards, I asked what changes were evident in the ecosystems she studied. Within seconds of beginning to answer, she was fighting back tears and had to cut short her response.

Ecological responsibility and Christian discipleship I: Human planet

This will be the first in three posts giving a slightly modified version of a sermon I delivered a few weeks ago based on Genesis 1. The three posts are as follows:
I. Human planet: Welcome to the Anthropocene.
II. The Community of Creation: Genesis 1.
III. Recycle or repent? Our response.

Human Planet: Welcome to the Anthropocene
We no longer live on the same planet on which we were born. I’m not just talking about the internet and globalisation, or trends in fashion and music. The chemistry of the oceans and atmosphere, the stability of the climate, the diversity and health of ecosystems are all very different to what they were. Human activity over the last handful of decades has altered the face of the globe in ways so profound that it will be visible in the geological record millions of years into the future. The Geological Society of London, which is the UK national society for geoscience and the oldest geological society in the world, is currently considering a serious proposal to declare that we have now left the Holocene and entered into a new geological epoch, called the Anthropocene, named after anthropos, which is Greek for human, because we humans are having such a extreme effect on all the ecosystems and even geology of the planet. I hardly need to tell you that most of it isn't a positive effect.

Think of the most remote places on the planet, places so wild and desolate that none live there. No matter where you picture, human fingerprints are all over the landscape.

You are probably aware that Arctic summer sea ice is in terminal decline and many of us in this room are likely to live to see a largely ice-free Arctic in summers to come. This winter, while we shivered through a December that was 5ºC below average, parts of the Canadian Arctic averaged 21ºC above their long term mean. Permafrost is no longer looking so permanent and some now call it "tempfrost". As it melts, not only are roads and buildings sinking and breaking, but it is releasing more and more of the methane and carbon dioxide that have been locked away for millennia and which will, of course, only make the melting worse.

If the Arctic isn't pristine, then perhaps the mountains, the high Andes and towering Himalayas? Well, again, you're probably aware of the accelerating glacier melt occurring on 95% of all glaciers, including the most remote. And in many places the melt is accelerated when soot particles land from cooking fires and factories land on the ice, darkening the surface and absorbing more solar energy. Indeed, thanks to Julian Assange, we know that the US State Department was told by the Dalai Lama that addressing climate change is a higher priority for Tibet than independence from China.

What about the deep Amazonian rainforest where there are still to this day dozens of uncontacted tribes? Yet first contact for these indigenous groups is most likely to be with loggers. Although deforestation rates have declined from a decade ago, tropical rainforests continue to be bulldozed at a rate of a football field every few seconds. Eighty percent of the world's ancient forests have been destroyed or degraded, half of that has been in the last 30 years.

What about bottom of the ocean? Even there the human fingerprints are everywhere. Deep sea trawling by commercial fishing fleets drags heavy metal beams over the sea floor, crushing and scattering slow-growing deep corals and other creatures and kicking up plumes of underwater dust that can be seen by satellites. And each year, an area twice the size of the continental United States is bottom trawled, scooping up more fish than the ocean can replenish. Four-fifths of commercial fish species are considered by marine biologists to be fully-exploited, over-exploited or have collapsed. On our current trajectory, no commercially-viable fish stocks will be left by the time my daughter turns 40.

Feeling stressed? Breathe in – breathe out – breathe in – breathe out. Every second breath comes from phytoplankton, microscopic plant-like organisms in the oceans that are the basis of the marine food chain and which are the source of over half the planet's oxygen. And yet, there is evidence that the number of phytoplankton has declined by 40% since 1950. I've already alluded to climate change, but did you know that all the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is also changing the chemistry of the oceans? The planet's oceans are on average 30% more acidic than pre-industrial times, more acidic than they have been for millions of years and changing faster than any known previous shift. And they are getting warmer too. Climate change is first and foremost oceanic change, since oceans absorb more than 93% of the extra energy trapped by our greenhouse gas pollution. Oceanic currents are shifting. Sea levels are rising. The climate is warming: 2010 was the equal warmest year at the end of the warmest decade, which followed the previous warmest decade, which followed the previous warmest decade on record. The last 311 consecutive months have all been warmer than the 20thC average.

Seasons are changing. Plants flowering earlier in Spring, migrations and hibernations patterns are shifting. Our actions are shifting rainfall patterns: stronger droughts, more intense rain and snow.

Human actions are responsible for the extinction of about a thousand recorded species. They are just the ones we're aware of. Our best estimates of how many we've actually bumped off falls between twenty thousand and two million. And this is rising rapidly, causing most biologists to judge that we are currently causing the start of the sixth great extinction event in earth's four and a half billion year history.

Since 1970 we have reduced animal populations by 30%, the area of mangroves and sea grasses by 20%, the coverage of living corals by 40% and large African mammals by more than 60%.

Over 60% of major rivers in the world are dammed or diverted. There is five times as much water stored in dams and reservoirs as all the world's rivers put together. We have directly modified three quarters of the ice-free land surface of the planet and currently move more soil each year than the natural cycles of wind and water.

And I haven’t mentioned heavy metal toxins, soil degradation, aquifer depletion, ocean eutrophification, introduced species, desertification, or the trillions of floating plastic particles found in all the world's oceans.

We no longer live on the same planet on which we were born.

And God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea. And over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."

- Genesis 1.28 (NRSV).

Our passage this morning has been used to justify the patterns of exploitation and acquisition that in our lifetimes have reached such an extent as to have permanently altered the face of the planet. Can we read it again with fresh eyes and see whether it might have good news for us today?
I haven't had time to include links for all these claims, though it's worth noting that they were not first published by Greenpeace or WWF; they are not the scare stories of eco-extremists out to rob you of your fun or set up a world government. These claims appear in highly respected scientific journals – Nature, Science, Proceedings of the Royal Society and so on. Some are still quite fresh and subject to ongoing debate. Most are widely agreed as our best knowledge of our present situation. If there are particular ones you are interested in, I can try to provide relevant citations.

For sale: UK forests?

UK residents may be aware of an issue presently before parliament concerning the proposed privatisation of all or some English forests, a suggestion that 84% of people oppose. I don't currently have to time to offer a full analysis of this issue, but I think it is unwise for numerous reasons. A variety of arguments can be found here.

A critical vote has been scheduled for Wednesday. If you are a UK voter and think this is a bad idea, you can sign a petition which already has some 330,000 names here and from here it is easy to send a message to your local MP.

The logic of the market is all too often that of King Midas' touch. Things may turn into gold, but they die in the process.

In case you're short on things to read

Eric ponders Animality and the Word of God: where to draw the boundaries between human and non-human animals and what the theological import of that relationship is. He also posts one of my favourite T. S. Eliot poems, which happens to be relevant to the discussion.

Kevin highlights the real problem with genetically modified (GM) food. It's not that it might be poisonous to our bodies, but that it is toxic to our body politic.

Dana offers a a case study in scientific integrity. Though this is his first foray into the Guardian, I've read quite a bit of Dana's writing and he knows what he's talking about (he's also now posted a further analysis of the replies to his Guardian piece). RealClimate recently published a piece with a similar theme but taking an example from a very different field.

Richard wonders whether individual action is pointless, given the scale of the challenges we face. His answer: our actions may not make a difference, but our example might. An excellent paper going into much more detail on the inadequacy of merely personal lifestyle changes can be found here.
H/T Chris Taylor.

Mongabay asks "What's so wrong with palm oil?", and answers in great detail.

Greenfyre wonders what if there had been no BP oil spill? He offers a perspective which was later mirrored by The Onion: ensuring that all the oil reaches its desired destinations is also an ongoing catastrophe of an even larger scale.

And Jeremy compares our present need for rapid and radical social change with what was achieved in the UK during WWII:

"There is no underestimating the scale and pace of change that happened during the war. Coal use dropped by a quarter, general consumption fell by 16%, car use dropped 95%. Sacrifices were made, but as people ate less and often ate better, levels of health and fitness rose accordingly. Infant mortality and the suicide rate fell, and spending on entertainment was one of the few areas that grew."

See also this piece by Caroline Lucas MP.

On not seeing the woods for the trees

We now know, thanks to the junior environment minister Jim Paice's frank evidence to a recent House of Lords select committee, that the government is considering the sale of not just "some", or even "substantial", amounts of woodland as the public was originally led to believe, but of all state-owned English trees across the commission's 635,000-acre Forestry Commission estate. This includes many royal forests, state-owned ancient woodlands, sites of special scientific interest, heathland, campsites, farms and sporting estates.

- John Vidal, "For sale: all of our forests.
Not some of them, nor most of them – the whole lot".

Not happy? Sign the petition. Write to your MP.

Scraping the bottom of the barrel

Bottom trawling is a stupidly destructive form of fishing. Done by dragging huge nets weighted with heavy metallic plates across the ocean floor, such trawling leaves a trail of damage and destruction on the ocean floor in its path. It is akin to hunting for wild pigs by bulldozing the forest in which they dwell. And yet trawling is occurring at a rate 150 times faster than deforestation, damaging an area twice the size of the contiguous USA each year. Cold water and deep water corals are very slow growing, taking hundreds or thousands of years to recover from damage that can be done in a single pass of trawling nets.

The EU Council of Fisheries Ministers just passed up another opportunity to do something about this unnecessary and myopic practice.

It doesn't have to be this way.
The obvious picture to go with this post would have been something including a lot of water, but I picked this one instead. It is a hut on the island of Lindisfarne made out of half an old herring fishing boat. The herring trade used to employ thousands of people in the UK and over 30,000 boats were dedicated to the industry on the east coast alone. The industry today has been decimated, at least partly through damage caused by trawling.

Over budget and getting worse

Too much of a good thing: "In fact, no phenomenon has probably impacted the nitrogen cycle more than human inputs of nitrogen into the cycle in the last 2.5 billion years".

Another threat to coral: algal blooms, caused by excess nitrogen, found to kill large areas of coral within weeks.

Plane danger? It turns out you are more likely to die from plane exhaust than in a plane crash.

Water, water everywhere: more water flowing into the ocean due to climate change, an 18 percent increase between 1994 and 2006. Another good summary and some discussion on Skeptical Science.

Birds could signal mass extinction: "Biodiversity loss is arguably much more serious and more permanent than climate change". Which is saying something, since anthropogenic climate change is likely to redefine the planet's living systems and geography for millennia.

Loss of old growth forests continues, albeit a little more slowly: where biodiversity and climate converge (one of many places, but this is perhaps the most critical).

Economy vs ecology? Ecological damage estimated to currently cost the global economy US$6.6 trillion (with a "t") each year.

Drying up: unexpected shift in evapotranspiration across large parts of the southern hemisphere.

Finish your plate: 27% of food in the US is wasted. I assume that is not even calculating all the excess calories that are actually consumed.

A second planet by 2030: current trends in consumption are drawing down on the natural capital of the earth. We're currently about 50% over "budget".

And some good news: deadly virus eradicated in "the biggest achievement of veterinary history".

Give us this day our daily bread

The Coming Famine: The global food crisis and what we can do to avoid it by Julian Cribb. The world has consumed more food than it has produced in nine of the past 10 years and food crises are likely to become more common.

FT: Water in the desert, some Gulf cities are quickly running out. Globally, groundwater depletion rates are accelerating.

NYT: Bleaching is back in fashion, coral bleaching that is, with disastrous effects on already stressed fish populations.

Climate central: Arctic sea ice loss, why does it matter? (though fortunately, there is good news on that front). Rolling Stone also has a good article on the future of ice, including this quote: "If you look at all these dramatic changes, water is doing it all. The vulnerability the ice sheets have to heat from the ocean is the key to all of this. And there's orders of magnitude more than enough heat in the ocean to kill the ice sheet, on whatever time scale the ocean and atmosphere conspire to deliver that heat. It's not at all about subsequent warming or future warming of the oceans. We don't have to warm up the ocean any more at all. The vulnerability is really from climate change altering the atmospheric circulation and how much that's going to alter the ocean circulation. The ice sheets have no defense against warm water. They don't really stand a chance."

Science Daily: Beetle populations responsible for massive pine forest die-off likely to keep rising.

US Clean Air Act has benefits forty times greater than costs of regulation. This Act has some impressive credentials under its belt after forty years, and it inspired a number of other similar bills elsewhere.

Guardian: Good thing the UK has the greenest government in history.

Hot Topic: Have the climate wars begun?

Scared of the dangers of massive untested geoengineering projects? We've been doing them for some time.

SMH: And in Sydney, we've decided to start fracking next to Warragamba Dam. Seriously.

Choking on coal

Washington Independent: coal related health effects cost the US $100 billion each year, including over 13,000 deaths. I imagine that even prior to considerations of climate change, if the public health effects of burning coal are taken into account, renewable energy is more affordable than such dirty combustion. Meanwhile, the head of BHP Billiton has said that Australia needs to move beyond coal. And finally, images of coal ash in China.

Independent: UK government to adapt to inevitable warming, yet without spending any more money.

Mongabay: Amazon.com vs the Amazon: paper trails and deforestation.

Deep-sea trawling damages an area twice the size of the contiguous USA each year.

And just to show that sometimes simultaneous disasters can dilute rather than amplify each other: Scientific American reports on research showing that hurricanes help save thermally-stressed coral reefs by cooling water temperatures; Skeptical Science points out that in New York, higher rainfall doesn't necessarily mean more flooding due to drier soil from higher temperatures; and NASA satellites reveal that the incidence of wildfires is no higher in dead forests killed by mountain pine beetle infestations (which have reached epidemic proportions due to warmer winters enabling more beetles to survive) since green needles of live trees are more flammable than brown needles of dead ones.

These points vaguely remind me of the story of a man who wanted to kill himself and so decided to do a thorough job. He hung himself over a lake after taking poison and brought along a gun to make sure. His shot missed his head and severed the noose, dropping him into the water which diluted the poison. Since all the other methods had failed, he decided he wanted to live after all and so swam to shore and survived. I'm not sure we're going to be so lucky.

Images of Alberta's tar sands

This is for those who look to Canada's enormous (and enormously dirty) tar sands to solve peak oil.

If the world is going to hell, why are humans doing so well?

Scientific American: If the world is going to hell, why are humans doing so well?. This is known as the environmentalist's paradox.

While the precise contribution of anthropocentric climate change to Pakistan's devastating floods continues to be debated, they were indeed made worse by human actions. And the toll continues to rise. You can give online here (or in many other places).

Oil Drum: Nine challenges for renewable energy.

Nature: Not all disruptions associated with climate change involve things getter hotter. A recent anomalous cold snap in Bolivia has contributed to what is possibly the largest short-term ecological disaster in its history.

Water stress in western USA.

New mega-dam in Brazil looks set to go ahead.

The archeological consolations of drought: hundreds of ancient sites revealed in England during a dry summer.

Ecopsychology: BP Gulf disaster and despair.

ABC: West Antarctic ice shelf may be "much less stable than previously thought".

More doom and gloom

Asian floods affecting more people than the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, plus the 2005 Kashmir and 2010 Haiti earthquakes combined says UN.

Russian heat wave unparalleled in 1,000 years and could kill tens of thousands of people. What is the global cost of Russia's heat wave? When you take into account the highest cost of wheat caused by Russia's cancellation of all wheat exports for the rest of the year, it runs into billions.

But before we begin pitying Russians too much, this piece of lunacy is one of the most depressing things I've heard this week.

The largest iceberg seen in almost fifty years recently calved off Greenland. Arctic melt this year is likely to be second or third worst on record, though will very much depend on prevailing weather conditions over the next few weeks. You can follow it here. But a soot cloud from burning Russian peatland could prove to be a wild card.

Fire and rain: how can we tell when extreme weather is linked to climate change?

Commodity speculation: the price of bread depends on the whims of Wall St, not just the productivity of farms. But remember that "for each 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature we can expect a reduction in grain yields of 10 percent".

Big coal will continue to ensure US climate inertia, and without US momentum, the rest of the world will only reach small-scale and thoroughly inadequate agreements.

But at least we are cutting our throat more slowly in the Amazon.

Finally, perhaps the worst news of all comes from the Onion: Ecological disaster as millions of barrels of oil safely reach port.

Deforestation in Australia

The destruction of ancient forests is one of the most polluting, harmful and unnecessary things we do. Ancient forests typically store many times the biodiversity and carbon content of regrowth or plantation forests, as well as generally being more difficult to harvest for timber than plantations. In Australia, with the growth of overseas and local timber plantations, there is an ever decreasing market for the logging of old growth regions.

A national poll commissioned by The Greens and conducted by Galaxy this week discovered that there is strong public support for ending logging in native forests.

• 90% of Australians are in favour of protecting remaining high conservation value forests in Tasmania, Victoria and New South Wales in national parks.
• 77% agree that the Rudd Government should stop the logging of native forests, which contain large amounts of carbon that would be stored by ending forest clearance
• 72% are in favour of the Federal Government assisting logging contractors to take redundancies, retrain or move permanently to a plantation based industry.

What do you think: are there any good reasons to continue logging of old growth forests in Australia?
Image by Celia Carroll.

Is the BP gusher the greatest ecological disaster in US history? No.

"On Meet the Press recently, energy and climate czar Carol Browner said the Gulf spill is 'probably the biggest environmental disaster the country has ever faced.' In a speech this week, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson called the spill 'the largest environmental disaster in American history.'

"Both were eager to show how seriously the Administration is taking this disaster – and both were wrong. America is in the middle of several environmental disasters whose impacts affect not only the Gulf Coast, but all our coasts and everything in between.

"One of the crises, of course, is global climate change – the insidious self-afflicted tragedy whose adverse impacts already are underway, some to be felt for the next 1,000 years according to government researchers.

"Another is freshwater supplies. After surveying water officials around the country in 2003, the General Accounting Office reported that 36 states were expecting shortages of fresh water by 2013, even without drought. Some experts say those shortages are already underway with adverse consequences for energy production, agriculture and peace between neighbors. As the Economist recently noted in a special section on water, we can find substitutes for oil but there is no substitute for water.

"The casualty list goes on: ocean acidification, nitrogen loading, the destruction of wetlands, forests falling to fires and bugs, the decline in soil fertility due to mono-agriculture, the loss of biodiversity, all with very real consequences for our economy, safety and health."

- Bill Becker

The BP oil gusher (it is not an oil spill, which implies a finite container spilling out) is indeed a terrible disaster and will continue for many weeks or months yet. But it is not going to end the world. It will continue to be a very major problem for the Gulf of Mexico, especially the southern states of the US.

Yet as this quote points out, it is neither the only nor the greatest ecological disaster in the US, let alone the world. We just don't hear as much about the others because they don't have sexy pictures of birds covered in oil, occur on timescales of years or decades rather than weeks or months, and because they cannot be easily blamed on a single company or individual.

Although these other disasters might not make as many headlines, this doesn't mean they are smaller or less important. I have previously attempted to list some of the many ecological and resource challenges facing the world (not just the US). It is tempting to pick one of these and decide that it is the most crucial and minimise the others in order to make more political elbow-room for one's favourite cause, but that is ultimately short-sighted. We need to face them all. They may not be equally threatening, but black-and-white thinking that assumes that for one to be taken seriously, the others can or must be ignored is itself one of the great dangers we face.

Indeed, one of the second order problems is that so many of these threats are interrelated. Biodiversity loss is multiplied by climate change. Deforestation contributes to carbon dioxide levels. Peak oil will tempt us to exploit non-conventional fossil fuels, such as tar sands, accelerating the loss of boreal forests. Decline of fish stocks increases pressure on agriculture and soil degradation. Monocultural agriculture creates nitrogen runoff and creates oceanic dead zones. And so on and so on.

Let us not lose the wood for the trees. These connections are crucial to understand so that we don't push down a bump in the carpet only to have it reappear elsewhere. Any response requires joined up thinking that can see patterns and relations. So many of these problems have underlying causes in the rapid growth of human activity associated with the globalisation of industrialism and its evil twin, consumerism. Until we face the roots of these issues, we are merely trying to treat the symptoms, often in ways that could ultimately worsen the prognosis.

Three interesting ecological articles

In today's Guardian:

• Western overconsumption more of a threat than global overpopulation.
• Record atmospheric temperatures, ocean temperatures, Arctic melt: 2010 shaping up to be a(nother) scorcher.
• UN report says eat less meat to reduce water consumption, deforestation and carbon and methane emissions.

On this last one, it seems that a consumerist lifestyle has a double impact: directly through our own consumption and indirectly through emulation in the rising middle class of the developing world.

Ecological and resource crises facing industrial civilisation

Some threats to life as we know itSince my research involves responses to the perception of threats to life as we currently know it, I thought it might be useful to compile a list of some the serious ecological and resource difficulties that have resulted from the spectacular success of industrialism. This is not an exhaustive catalogue (I'd appreciate further suggestions), nor an attempt to rank the various issues, many of which are deeply interconnected. Some of these issues are more pressing than others.

• Climate change: including global warming, precipitation shifts (floods, droughts and shifting agricultural patterns), sea level rise, intensification of extreme weather events, cryosphere shrinkage, and more, including the subsequent risk of various geoengineering attempts (like this one by Bill Gates).

• Fresh water use (aquifer depletion, equity of access, water-borne diseases, local water stress, etc.). Thirty-six US States are predicted to have water shortages by 2015 and rainy London is building a desalination plant.

• Peak oil (and perhaps further off, peak gas and coal): the end of cheap energy. Note that warnings are coming from more and more credible/mainstream sources.

• Biodiversity loss (including extinction, functional extinction, decline in ecosystem complexity and resiliance and loss in genetic diversity within species)

• Destruction of natural habitats (especially forests, wetlands and coral reefs)

• Desertification

• Soil degradation (erosion, depletion and salinisation)

• Ocean acidification

• Fisheries decline and collapse

• Phytoplankton decline

• Toxic pollution: plastics, heavy metals, hormones and other chemicals in the soils, air, oceans, aquifers, rivers and lakes

• Alteration of the nitrogen cycle (with many consequences, including marine hypoxia - "dead zones")

• Invasive species

• Increasing human share of global photosynthetic capacity (primary production), which is also in modest decline

• Radioactive waste

• Pollinator decline

• Peak phosphorus (and a number of other minerals, though phosphorus seems to be the most pressing and crucial)

• Stratospheric ozone depletion and tropospheric ozone pollution

• Antibiotic-resistant microbes (a.k.a. "superbugs")

Are there any here which you hadn't heard of? Any that I've missed? Part of the point of this list is to stress that climate change is but one of many threats, though it is a multiplier of a number of these problems (water access, soil degradation, biodiversity loss, habitat destruction, ocean acidification and so on). The root cause of most of them is the combination of global population growth coupled with growth in per capita ecological footprint, though it is particularly the consumption patterns of the developed world over the last six decades that bear the lion's share of the blame.

For a partial list of some arresting statistics, try this post.