Glimmers in the gloom: 10 signs of climate progress

It is easy (and pretty apt) to get depressed about the climate situation. As records keep tumbling and feedbacks kick in and polluters continue to throw their political weight around, the momentum on our trajectory into ever greater disaster can feel overwhelming. Yet it is also apt at times to remember some glimmers of good news amidst the gloom. Here are the ten signs that most encourage me about places where progress that has been made since this image was taken a handful of years ago.

•  In five years, the value of the four largest US coal companies has plummeted from $45b to $200m, a drop of more than 99.5%. A string of major financial institutions have declared the coal industry to be in structural decline.

• For the last two years, China has reduced its coal consumption without being in recession. This included shutting down hundreds of smaller, dirtier coal mines.

• For the last few years, new renewable electricity generation capacity has exceeded new fossil fuel + nuclear capacity. Both wind and (especially) solar have seen their costs drop dramatically in the last 5-7 years.

• ExxonMobil faces the possibility of real legal consequences for their decades of lies and misinformation. And by extension, other fossil companies too.

• Fossil fuel divestment continues to expand rapidly, with now trillions in funds under management having divested in part or whole, or having committed to doing so.

• Mass civil disobedience against the causes of climate disruption is increasingly becoming a reality. Australian efforts such as the #LeardBlockade and #PilligaPush and #BentleyBlockade and #LockTheGate have seen the largest campaigns of civil disobedience since the Franklin River in the early 80s.

• Leaders with large followings in the UK and US are speaking openly and repeatedly about corruption, plutocracy, inequality and corporate hegemony - and drawing the links to climate change.

• Public opinion in the English-speaking world on the need for taking climate action is at its highest for almost a decade. While fickle and related most closely to recent weather as much as anything else, this nonetheless presents new opportunities.

• The compromised and weak Paris Agreement nonetheless represents the most ambitious step forward in international negotiations thus far, with every nation signing on to the need to participate in emissions cuts to keep warming to less insane levels.

• The US Republicans - the only major party in the developed world to embrace an official policy of climate denial - look increasingly likely to nominate an unelectable and divisive figure who could demolish their gerrymandered Congressional stranglehold on his way down.

• The most recent papal encyclical, Laudato Si', was a stirring call with implications that were nothing short of revolutionary, whose effects continue to reverberate throughout the global Catholic (and catholic) church.

And the final encouraging sign is that I sat down to try to write a list of ten and came up with eleven.

"By leaves we live"

Ice sheets: A new study confirms with greater accuracy than ever before that world's major ice sheets are melting at an accelerating rate. This is why sea level rise is happening 60% faster than was expected in the most recent IPCC report.

Coal boom: 1200 new coal plants planned. Three quarters of the new plants are to be located in China and India. A breakdown of the countries is available here. Though India's expansion plans need to be taken with a grain or two of salt.

Extinction is forever: Tim Flannery reflects on the challenges facing Australian biodiversity and suggests that the current approach isn't working. With a reply from David Bowman. Perhaps how do we triage conservation priorities?

Coal seam gas: Recent measurements (yet to be peer reviewed) suggest coal seam gas production may have significant "fugitive emissions" of methane that render the claims of the gas industry to be somewhat less bad for the climate questionable. Some have suggested that natural gas is methadone to coal's heroin.

Fracking: Stories from the front line in the US. In the UK, academics have just advised the government that it is "categorically clear" that pursuing a shale gas dominated energy strategy is incompatible with legislated UK climate targets. But it looks like they are going to do it anyway.

Big cats, small space: Only 25% of the original African savannah remains undeveloped, leaving less and less room for the iconic megafauna that call it home. Lion numbers are plummeting and they may soon be listed as endangered.

IPCC: The IPCC has been repeatedly wrong on climate change, frequently underestimating the rate and impacts of change.
Note that the first link makes an embarrassingly obvious mistake in its opening claim, confusing carbon with carbon dioxide and so getting the numbers hopelessly muddled.

Trees: All around the world, ancient trees are dying at an alarming rate.

Twenty Nile rivers, and other stories

Water stress: By 2025, to feed growing populations, the world will need to find extra fresh water equivalent to the flow of twenty Nile rivers.

Extreme weather: Bill McKibben ponders just how strange this year has been.

Junk food: George Monbiot concludes that a possible link between Alzheimer's and poor diet might be more than sensationalist media spin.

Heat: 2013 tipped to break more records. With a good chance of an El Niño forming in the coming months, combined with the ongoing warming trend from greenhouse gases, next year could be one for the record books. At least until the next El Niño...

Mangroves: Per hectare lost, mangrove destruction is three times worse for greenhouse gas emissions than deforestation.

NB The following articles are eighteen months out of date, but I neglected to post them earlier and they are interesting.
Malthusians beware: Blame the World Bank and IMF (amongst others) for famine in the Horn of Africa, but don't blame overpopulation.

Deep sea fishing: Is any deep-sea fishing sustainable? The short answer is "almost none". Deep-sea fisheries tend to regenerate very slowly, given the small amounts of energy entering the system. Many of the creatures down there are older than your grandmother.

Organic farming: It can be more profitable than conventional farming over the long term, even if organic premiums drop by 50%.

Climate panic: What we can all be doing about climate change. The Onion nearly always hits the key issue on the nose.

Cooling in a warming world, and other stories

Air-con: Cooling a warming world. Air-conditioning's role in the energy demand that leads to climate change is increasing. While the US has long used more air-con than the rest of the world combined (indeed US air-con uses more electricity than the total electricity demand of Africa), rapidly industrialising countries are catching up quickly.

Oz gas hub: Walmadan or James Price Point, a remote headland on the coast of Western Australia, is the proposed site of the second largest natural gas hub in the world, a mega project costing AUD$34-40b. Described by the state premier Colin Barnett as "unremarkable", the piece of coast in question has been recommended by various government agencies for National Park status on no less than six occasions over the last five decades. The environmental impact report for the proposed development has left a lot to be desired. Once again, the impact of dumping hundreds of millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide and methane pollution into the atmosphere are not even included in the assessment process.

Sea shock: Marine extinction risks. "Life in the world's oceans faces far greater change and risk of large-scale extinctions than at any previous time in human history, a team of the world's leading marine scientists has warned." Original article is here.

Fracking: Sean Lennon summarises the arguments against the US increasingly relying on fracking for natural gas: climate (natural gas is still a fossil fuel), climate (methane leaks make fracking perhaps as bad as coal), water use, water pollution, land seizure and industry spin (from the PR firms that brought you safe cigarettes).

Genetic effects: A new study has found that certain plastics (such as BPA) have effects at a genetic level. Exposure to the BPA begins in the womb and has effects that last generations.

Gaza water: Gaza strip will soon be unliveable (even more than it already is) due to water crisis. On current trends, the aquifer supplying water to the 1.6 million inhabitants will be ruined and undrinkable by 2016. Water drives considerably more of the conflict in Israel/Palestine than is widely recognised and there are huge disparities in access.

Bugs: Twenty percent of invertebrates are at risk of extinction. Invertebrates include 97% of the world's animals.

Tropical fish in Tasmania, and other stories

Australian waters: Climate change is measurably affecting marine ecosystems in Australian waters, including tropical fish being seen near Tasmania.

Ocean health index: The health of the global oceans has been rated, and given a 60/100. That's (still) a pass, but not very impressive, and most of the indicators are heading south. I'm not persuaded by every aspect of this study (the tourism section, for instance, just seems daft), but mainly it is about trying to set a baseline against which future ocean health can be measured. So the absolute score is probably less important than whether it rises or falls in future.

Carbon and farming: Australian farmers leading the way? I admit I still don't have much of a handle on the details of agricultural practices and carbon sequestration. Yet my impression is that it can only ever be a sideshow, since any carbon sequestered remains in the active carbon cycle, albeit in a phase of slightly reduced activity when compared with the carbon in the upper oceans and atmosphere. Whatever the place of agricultural practices, the centrepiece of any carbon strategy has to be leaving the vast majority of fossil hydrocarbons buried deep underground. This is the only place where excess carbon can be safely stored more or less permanently.

Food crisis: Letter from Jeremy Grantham, a fund manager with his finger on the pulse of where the real threats to the global system lie. Hint: they converge in the stomach.

Flooding: 750 million to be vulnerable to flooding by 2025 in rapidly developing Asian cities, according to the Asian Development Bank.

Hot water: Thermal power stations need cooling water to operate, yet they return that water to its source at a higher temperature than they take it. This means that when rivers and lakes get too warm for marine creatures to live, plant operators and regulators face a choice between power cuts and dead fish (and potentially ruined ecosystems). Even plants using ocean water are not immune. This is a growing problem in a warming world. Solutions include moving away from thermal power plants (thermal plants are those that rely on a source of energy being used to boil water in order to drive turbines and so include coal, gas, oil, nuclear and solar thermal) or building air cooling towers so that the heated water is not returned to the waterway.

Economist vs physicist: A dinner conversation. I linked to this piece in a recent post on growth, but it's worth mentioning again on its own.

Overfishing: Plenty more fish in the sea? The NEF has calculated that the UK has just exhausted the annual productivity of its domestic fisheries and effectively relies on imports of cod and haddock for the rest of the year...

Overconsuming: ...on almost the same day that humanity exhausted its annual budget of global resources.
H/T Donna.

Designed for yesterday's climate, and other stories

Climate adaptation: Trillions of dollars of infrastructure is designed for yesterday's climate (and sea level, for that matter). In warmer temperatures, railways buckle, highways crack, asphalt melts, cooling ponds overheat, electrical grids overload. "In general, nobody in charge of anything made of steel and concrete can plan based on past trends".

Groundwater depletion: Almost one-quarter of the world’s population lives in regions where groundwater is being used up faster than it can be replenished".

Arctic sea ice: Sea ice decimated by huge Arctic storm. There are all kinds of things going on here and the full effects of the week-long storm in the Arctic are yet to become apparent. Why do we care about a storm in the Arctic? Haven't they happened before? Yes, but not with sea ice this thin. Arctic sea ice is considerably thinner than at any time in recorded history, being up to 70% thinner during the summer months than it was back in the 70s. Thin ice is able to be broken up and moved around by large storms more easily. Without the protective cover of ice, storms also churn up the water more, mixing the very cold, fresher surface water (colder and fresher since it is just under the ice) with the warmer, saltier water further down. Warmer, saltier water is much more effective at melting ice.

Biofuels: George Monbiot laments once more the crazy logic of biofuels, which take food out of the mouths of the poor in order to make the rich feel less guilty about a problem to which it is probably a net contributor, rather than any genuine help.

US Drought: The future of drought. "Indeed, assuming business as usual, each of the next 80 years in the American West is expected to see less rainfall than the average of the five years of the drought that hit the region from 2000 to 2004."

Extinction: North American freshwater fish are going extinct at 800 times the background rate.

Whistling in the dark

Coral reefs: More than 2,600 marine biologists have signed a Consensus Statement on Climate Change and Coral Reefs, warning of the unprecedented challenges faced by coral reefs from warming, acidifying and rising oceans (due to CO₂ emissions), overfishing, sedimentation, pollution and habitat destruction.

Coral reefs (again): A world without coral reefs is coming, probably much sooner than you think, according to ANU ecologist Roger Bradbury, who thinks the statement mentioned above is a form of collective denial. "It’s past time to tell the truth about the state of the world’s coral reefs, the nurseries of tropical coastal fish stocks. They have become zombie ecosystems, neither dead nor truly alive in any functional sense, and on a trajectory to collapse within a human generation."

Perverse incentives: Why the US Farm Bill just encourages more of the same mistake.

US Drought: the largest agricultural disaster area ever declared, covering more than half the lower 48. This US summer has been off the charts, but on our present trajectory even the hottest summers of the late 20thC will be cooler than the coolest summers of the mid-late 21stC in much of the inhabited world. And you don't want to know what the 22ndC then has in store, since if we get that far, warming is unlikely to stop there.

Chernobyl: It's not over yet. Half the exclusion zone around Chernobyl is forest, mainly highly flammable pine forest, radioactive flammable pine forest. A major fire could send radioactive particules high into the atmosphere and across much of Europe. Again.

UK floods: It didn't take much foresight to see that cutting the budget for flood defences was not a smart move in a nation predicted to get wetter. And the victims are not confined to dwellers in low-lying houses.

Australia in denial: Joe Romm's popular climate blog highlights the precarious position of Australian climate policy, where the tiny baby steps so far made could soon be undone. From one perspective, the current climate legislation might actually be functioning as a distraction, given its lack of ambition yet the tepidness of popular support for anything stronger. But I suspect that the repeal of the legislation would only shift public opinion further into the sand.

Test tube hamburgers, and other stories

Artificial meat: closer than you think? Would you eat meat grown in a test tube? If not (and you eat meat), are you satisfied with your knowledge of how your meat is produced?

Air Con: As the world warms, we'll just crank up the air con, right? Wrong. Since 1987, new air conditioners are no longer a threat to stratospheric ozone, but the replacement for ozone-destroying CFCs have been a range of climate-disrupting alternatives, each far worse than CO₂ molecule for molecule: "The leading scientists in the field have just calculated that if all the equipment entering the world market uses the newest gases currently employed in air-conditioners, up to 27 percent of all global warming will be attributable to those gases by 2050."

Land grab: An area of agricultural land larger than Texas in developing nations (80% in Africa) has been bought up by foreign governments and corporations over the last few years, according to a new study from the Worldwatch Institute. Some of this has been European corporations keen to make a profit from biofuels regulations, some has been from large nations with serious and growing domestic food security issues, such as China and Saudi Arabia.

Flatter highlands: At least in biodiversity terms. Climate change is flattening the biodiversity found in the Scottish highlands.

China: The fastest growing economy in the history of humanity is not making a happy nation.

House sizes: Australians have some of the largest houses per occupant in the world. This is a significant part of the reason why we have the highest per capita carbon footprint in the OECD.* Large houses not only require more energy-intensive building materials (concrete and steel are both associated with very high emissions), but - all other things being equal - have larger energy needs than smaller dwellings. It doesn't help that we have one of the most coal-reliant electricity systems in the world.
*And that's even before we consider our imported manufactured goods or our exported coal. We export more coal than any other nation.

Solved: Four significant ecological issues have been adequately addressed since 1992. Only another eighty-six to go.

Fracking: the real danger. I wholeheartedly agree and am glad to finally see someone in the mainstream press pick up on this. There are all kinds of legitimate questions about the safety of fracking shale for non-conventional gas, but the biggest one is most rarely addressed, namely, tapping into this resource massive expands the available pool of fossil carbon we will be moving from safely underground and into the active carbon cycle where it can mess with ocean pH and the climate.

Endangered species: The International Union for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) Red List is widely regarded as the most authoritative attempt to account for the level of extinction threat faced by the world's species. Species are categorised according to the degree of severity - Least Concern, Vulnerable, Endangered, Critically Endangered, Extinct - yet of all the world's species, the IUCN estimates it has only assessed 4% so far. Of the dangers faced by the other 96% we have as yet little clear idea.

I will show you fear in a handful of dust

Groundwater depletion. A new study has calculated that the biggest single contributor to sea level rise over the last fifty years has not been melting ice from Greenland or Antarctica, nor melting glaciers, nor even the expansion of the oceans as they warm, but groundwater depletion. This helps to plug a previously puzzling hole between the observed rate of sea level rise over recent decades and estimated contributions from these other sources. Of course, there is an even bigger problem in many places that results from taking groundwater at a rate faster than it is replenished: running out. For three decades, Saudi Arabia used to export wheat grown in its deserts with water extracted from fossil aquifers (i.e. groundwater that fell as rain thousands of years ago and unlikely to be replaced anytime soon). In the last few years, its wheat production has collapsed and is expected to cease entirely by 2016. As a result, it is buying up productive land in Africa, which results in various other problems: dispossession of traditional owners (who may lack adequate documentation of land ownership), corruption of government officials involved in a lucrative business, reduction of local food stability and so on.

Economic collapse? An update to the 1972 Club of Rome study done by researchers at MIT predicts global economic collapse by 2030 on our present unsustainable trajectory. Much discussed, debated and derided at the time, the computer predictions of the 1972 publication The Limits to Growth, have been tracking well with historical data over the last few decades and their timeframe of very serious ecological and resource problems by 2030 do not need to be substantially revised, according to the new study.

Australian droughts and floods: A land of (more extreme) droughts and flooding rains? This is an excellent intro to the hydrological effects of climate change on Australia and is the first in a recent series on hydrological changes in Australia. Parts Part Two, Three and Four.

Biodiversity decline: EU farmland bird numbers have dropped by 50% over the last thirty years, largely due to farming policies.

2011 CO2 emissions update: John Cook outlines IPCC and IEA scenarios for different emissions trajectories we could follow. Note that the very best (and most difficult) ones still involve major disruption and difficulty in a harsher and less predictable world. They are also likely out of reach without radical and rapid shifts in the global political and economic climate.

UK Climate Policy: George Monbiot traces the latest watering down of UK climate legislation. The UK's Climate Climate Act passed in 2008 with very close to unanimous support, making it the first piece of national legislation setting targets for greenhouse gas emissions reductions in the world. When originally introduced in late 2007, the bill called for a 60% reduction by 2050, but this was increased to 80% on the urging of NGOs, church groups and a Royal Commission.

Great Barrier Reef: The UN has warned that the reef's World Heritage status will be downgraded to "in danger" if Queensland goes ahead with a slew of further port developments to expand the coal and natural gas industries. This article helps to lay out the political context and puts the debate in context, distinguishing between short and long term threats to the reef. It is quite possible to lose the wood of carbon emissions for the trees of maritime traffic. While a major accident would be a disaster, having an increasing number of coal ships successfully reaching their destinations ensures a long term catastrophe through warming and acidifying oceans. Australia's recently announced major marine reserve expansion, while praiseworthy, will do little to save the reef.

WA Forest collapse: "ecosystem change can be sudden, dramatic and catastrophic". Western Australia is rapidly losing its (remaining) forests. The south-west of Australia has experienced some of the most obvious changes in precipitation anywhere in the continent, with a fairly sudden step-change occurring around 1970: "Groundwater levels have fallen up to 11 meters in some forested areas, with larger decreases in populated areas."

Cane toads: A new development with the potential to start turning the tide against Australia's second most destructive introduced species. H/T Mick.

People and Planet: a new report and other stories

Royal Society report (Summary and recommendations) calls for both population stabilisation and big cuts in consumption to avoid "a downward spiral of economic and environmental ills". This is a significant contribution to the discussion of the relationship between population and consumption (which I discussed back here). I haven't had a chance to read the full report yet, but the conclusions seem to be broadly consistent with the points I made: that both population and consumption need to be addressed, but the latter can be addressed faster, further and with fewer ethical conundrums and so ought to be the primary immediate focus.

Guardian: IEA warns of 6ºC rise. It is hard to get a handle on just how catastrophic 6ºC would be. Let's just say that if we get to 6ºC, I don't think we'll be doing cost-benefit analyses anymore. David Roberts reflects on whether 6ºC is alarmist or realistic and points out that science alone can't tell us how bad climate change will be - because the most important unknown is just how we are all going to act and react over the next couple of decades. Those who think that 6ºC by 2100 is entirely unrealistic implicitly assume either (a) massive global co-ordinated action to mitigate through aggressive emissions reductions across the board or (b) global and long term economic collapse arriving sooner rather than later.

Mongabay: Organic agriculture has lower yields than industrial farming, according to a new study in Nature, especially for grains, though that is not the whole story, since there are various downstream costs of industrial agriculture that reduce yields elsewhere (and elsewhen).

ScienceDaily: Plastic in ocean underestimated by at least a factor of 2.5 due to the effects of wind pushing pollution beneath the surface, rendering measurements and calculations based on skimming the surface inaccurate.

SMH: India's border fence. Not with Pakistan or China, but the 4,000 km militarised fence on the border with Bangladesh, in the face of a rising tide of people fleeing, amongst other things, a rising tide. Though speaking of that rising tide...
H/T Donna.

ABC: Australasia at hottest for (at least) 1,000 years (also in the Guardian and the original study is here). This is a significant finding since most temperature reconstructions have focused on the northern hemisphere, where a greater number of proxy records mean more data is available.

Science: Some good news from Greenland. A review of ten years of satellite data appears to indicate that we are not on track for the "worst case" (i.e. 2 metre) sea level rise by 2100. Of course, "good" is relative; even a rise of a few feet will lead to massive headaches, but multi-metre rises probably mean infrastructure vulnerabilities worth trillions. Sea level rise is one of the most serious long term effects of climate change, though I suspect that over the next few decades it is not going to dominate in comparison with, for example, concerns over food security.

Grist: What would it look like for media to take climate seriously? A very interesting conversation between two journalists about media coverage of the climate threat.

Good news, bad news

SMH: The good news is that the US National Intelligence Council thinks "a water-related, state-on-state conflict is unlikely during the next 10 years". The bad news is that after ten years, all bets are off: "as water shortages become more acute beyond the next 10 years, water in shared basi[n?]s will increasingly be used as leverage [...] The use of water as a weapon or to further terrorist objectives also will become more likely beyond 10 years". Full report here.

CP: March Madness. The recent North American heatwave is breaking a record-breaking number of records. Between the 9th and 19th of March more than 4,000 US heat records were broken, and only something like 113 cold records, a ratio of about 35 to 1 (the average ratio since 2000 in the US is 2.04:1). Some places set March records higher than April records, some had daily low temperatures that broke previous daily highs, and some had old records broken by as much as 17ºC.

HuffPo: 21stC oil will break the bank and the planet.

Asian Development Bank Says Climate Migration Poses Growing Threat: "In a new report, the bank says more than 42 million people in the region were displaced by environmental disasters over the past two years alone. In 2010, it said, more than 30 million people were displaced, some permanently, primarily by devastating floods in Pakistan and China."

NYT: OECD warns of ever-higher greenhouse gases. This is what we're headed towards without a significant change of direction.

CP: Do trees have rights? Revisiting The Lorax.. In a certain sense, they already do, at least under US law.

SEI: Valuing the oceans: "climate change alone could reduce the economic value of key ocean services by up to 2 trillion USD a year by 2100". I'm more than a little sceptical about such attempts to place an economic value on ecological realities, since they obscure the fact that the economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment. The damage we are doing to the oceans is not simply to be measured in missing dollars, but in broken lives, lost species, a weeping Creator.

Wit's End: Tropospheric ozone - blighted trees, breathing difficulties and pernicious corruption of science. The atmospheric pollution you probably haven't heard much about. This is not the "ozone layer" (stratospheric ozone), in which ozone molecules are precious and save our bacon from frying, but surface level ozone, which is an altogether different and nastier beast: "health costs due to global ozone pollution above pre-industrial levels by 2050 will be US$580 billion (year 2000$) and that mortalities from acute exposure will exceed 2 million."

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.

Peak when? We've already passed it

ArsTechnica: When is peak oil? We've passed it. Welcome to the downslope.

CP: How much of recent global warming has been caused by human activities? Most likely more than 100%. How can we have caused more than 100% of something? Without human activity, it is likely that we would have experienced a slight cooling trend and so our activities are primarily responsible for both overcoming this natural trend and the observed warming.

NYT: A case study in overfishing - the collapse of jack mackerel in under a decade. A single super-trawler theoretically has the capacity to catch more jack mackerel annually than the most optimistic estimate of the global sustainable catch. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimated (based on 1998 data, now hopelessly out of date) that global fishing fleets "are 2.5 times larger than needed." The latest estimate of total global subsidies for fishing fleets (back in 2003) was US$25 billion to $29 billion per annum (mainly in fuels). Let us therefore choose between fish and the fishing industry; we cannot save them both.

Physorg: Wheat can't stand the heat. A new study published in Nature Climate Change found that "a 2.0 Celsius increase above long-term averages shortened the growing season by a critical nine days, reducing total yield by up to 20 percent."

NASA: Greenland, the world's northern mirror, is rapidly growing dimmer, with some areas seeing a drop in reflectivity of almost 20% in a few years.

Stephen Leahy: Toxic pollution is a public health problem on a similar scale to malaria. A new study claims that more than 100 million people have their productive life span shortened by an average of 12.7 years. Some of the causes may be encircling your finger, resting in your pocket or illuminating your eyeballs right now, though the victims may well live on the other side of the world.

Onion: Scientists reveal how to achieve sustainability overnight, though wisely leave open the policy questions.

Not with a bang but with a sustained leak

Real Climate: Why Arctic methane release is bad, not catastrophic. This is a very important post. Many have been deeply worried about the possibility of a so-called "methane gun" in which truly staggering volumes of frozen methane clathrates that sit on and under the ocean floor of the Siberian continental shelf are released in a runaway feedback as the Arctic Ocean warms. Since methane (CH₄) has something like 100 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide over a twenty year period, it has been hypothesized that a rapid release of large volumes of stored methane could cause a sudden and likely catastrophic surge in global temperatures. A variation or accompaniment to this scenario is the rapid release of methane from thawing permafrost in Siberia. In the linked post, a senior climatologist argues that it is far more likely that methane release will be chronic rather than acute, and given methane's relatively short atmospheric residency (about ten years), this will lead to a dangerous (though not immediately catastrophic) rise then stabilisation of methane levels, supplementing but not overwhelming warming from carbon dioxide. However, since atmospheric methane gradually degrades to carbon dioxide in the presence of oxygen, a slow release would not only give a bump to methane levels but would also see carbon dioxide levels continue to rise. Unlike methane, carbon dioxide is basically forever, with about half of any increase in atmospheric concentration we experience likely to remain for centuries and about a quarter likely to remain for at least ten thousand years. So a relief (of sorts) for us. It's a bit like finding that the Nazis don't, as feared, have a nuclear weapon, but they do have twice as many conventional forces as was thought.

CD: A recent NASA study suggests that climate change may modify 40% the earth's surface from one biome (e.g. forest, savanna, tundra, etc.) to another.

ABC Religion and Ethics: The New Evangelicals: How Christians are rethinking Abortion and Gay marriage. Despite being published by the ABC, this piece (an extract from a new book) has its eyes on the US scene. How applicable are the trends it identifies elsewhere amongst evangelicals?

Guardian: More farmers needed. Feeding seven, eight, nine, ten billion without strip-mining the soil, using the atmosphere as a carbon dump, squeezing out biodiversity, depleting finite fuels or overloading rivers, lakes and oceans with nutrients requires more organic poly-cultural farming, which can often be more productive per unit of land overall than present industrial monocultural farming. However, it is less productive per unit of labour, meaning more people employed (again) in growing food, which probably means higher food prices and a greater share of incomes devoted to food. This in turn may help address obesity, though at the risk of increasing malnutrition associated with poverty. Hence, addressing inequality is also critical.

Peter preaches on the parable of the talents (Matthew 25.14-30). This passage is often used as a key plank in a justification of usury. There are elements in the narrative and context that suggest a very different reading. Peter highlights the key theological question lying behind this hermeneutical issue: which kind of God do we serve?

McKibben: On being hopefully naïve about getting corporate money out of US politics and why being cynical is hopeless.

Guardian: What have trees ever done for us?

NYT: My Guantánamo Nightmare. There are good reasons due process has come to be highly cherished in all civil societies.

Monbiot: The limits of vegetarianism, in which George changes his mind and shifts to ethical semi-vegetarianism. The Conversation publishes an even more provocative piece against ecological vegetarianism, and a very interesting discussion in the comments ensues.

SMH: Energy and water. In the 20thC, global energy use increased thirteen-fold and water use increased nine-fold. The two are related and any future has to consider our water habits, which might be less about having short showers than having cold ones, since energy production is one of the most water-intensive things we do (though conversely, where water is scarce, desalination is one of the most energy-intensive things we do).

2011: Some reviews

At the end of last year, I posted links to the twelve doomiest stories of 2010 and fifty doomiest graphs and photos. Desdemona again offers his summary of 2011 with the fifty doomiest graphs and images and this time fifty doomiest stories of the year.

Not to be outdone, the ApocaDocs have compiled their 100 top news stories of 2011 relating to our global predicament.

The Conversation sums up the year in energy and environment news, containing links to dozens of interesting and significant stories throughout the year. They also summaries of their other major news headings.

And if all this is a little too bleak for your New Year's celebrations, then check out Charlie Brooker's take on 2011 available on BBC iPlayer (for UK residents only, I'm afraid). It's still somewhat bleak (it was that kind of year), but at least it has a few jokes.

Feel free to post links to other reviews of the year that are worth reading.

Mongabay: Top ten environmental stories of 2011.

May 2012 bring renewed hope, patience and illumination to face the gathering gloom.

Obama is as bad as Bush

Guardian: Obama is as bad as Bush at watering down or blocking environmental regulation.

UTS: Australian news coverage of climate change is seriously unbalanced. No prizes for guessing the worst culprit.

Monbiot: EU farm subsidies continue to give tens of billions to the wealthy, which isn't a problem because Europe is of course swimming in cash at the moment.

New Matilda: What is happening at Sydney University? Nothing other than one battle in an ongoing war for the soul of the university occurring in most societies dominated by current economic orthodoxies.

UN: New FAO report says that 25% of the world's land area is "highly degraded" from human activities.

Independent: The dying Dead Sea.

Guardian: UK government secretly supporting Canadian tar sands - yet another piece of disconnected thinking from the "greenest government ever".

Gittins: What does it profit a corporation to gain the whole world and lose the souls of all its employees and customers? Gittins thinks Michael Schluter from the Relationships Forum is a genius.

Is the fish on your plate older than your grandmother?

The Conversation: The real cost of taking fish out of the water. This excellent piece gives a good snapshot of overfishing (the carbon footprint of fishing was something I didn't realise until reading this). It also suggests one of the ways we can be part of the solution: by eating less fish, and eating smarter, which means either checking sites like Good Fish Bad Fish (an Australian version; UK readers can use the Good Fish Guide) or asking questions of potential fish meals such as: "Are they older than your grandmother? Did catching them kill tonnes of other innocent species? How much carbon was used to get it onto your plate?"

Al Jazeera: Overpopulation is not to blame for famine. The causes are famine in the Horn of Africa are complex. Simplistic analyses that blame a single factor do not help.

Guardian: Salty rice is not so nice - rising seas, rising salt in the Mekong. Concerns about sea level rise are not limited to infrastructure damage or coastal erosion; salination is the big issue in many places and especially for the densely-populated Mekong delta.

Grist: The great oyster crash. This is where ocean acidification is starting to bite.

CP: S&P Downgrades Planet Earth and Humanity. This will only make sense if you have been following recent US economic news.

Larry Elliott: The global economy is not in good shape. The crisis from 2008 has not gone away; it has simply shifted form.

Mongabay: Conflict correlates with warm weather, at least in the tropics. This isn't good news in a warming world.

Guardian: One billion cars. "Between 2000 and 2010, the number of cars and motorcycles in China increased twentyfold. In the next 20 years it is forecast to more than double again, which means there will be more cars in China in 2030 than there were in the entire world in 2000."

Twenty seven planet Earths by 2050

AlterNet: Do we need a militant movement to save the planet (and ourselves)? Three writers say yes. By this, they mean a committed small minority willing to go beyond even civil disobedience to direct destructive action against key industrial infrastructure. While such ideas remain on the fringe today, I suspect that the coming decades may well see debates shift from "do we have a problem?" to "just how radically and rapidly do we need to change?".

IPS: Growing Water Deficit Threatening Grain Harvests. This isn't a problem confined to one area. Water stress is already affecting agriculture in parts of the USA, China, India, Middle East, Mexico, Pakistan and large areas of Africa.

Mongabay: Protected areas not enough to save biodiversity (a.k.a. life on earth): "Humans now impact over 80 percent of the world's land and 100 percent of the oceans. Around 40 percent of the Earth's surface has been 'strongly affected' by our consumption. [...] According to recent estimates, about 1.2 Earths would be required to support the different demands of the 5.9 billion people living on the planet in 1999 [...] if global society continues down the road we are on, we will need 27 planet Earths to sustain our consumption by 2050. [...] We're talking about losing 50 percent of species in the next half century—that's faster than any previous mass extinction event—and anybody who thinks we can go through a mass extinction and be perfectly fine is just deluding themselves." This is perhaps the most seriously dark paper I have come across in some time. And that is saying something.

Scientific American: Will 10 billion people use up the planet's resources? "The human enterprise now consumes nearly 60 billion metric tons of minerals, ores, fossil fuels and plant materials, such as crop plants and trees for timber or paper. [...] Hundreds of millions of people in Europe, North America and Asia live a modern life, which largely means consuming more than 16 metric tons of such natural resources—or more—per person per year. If the billions of poor people living today or born tomorrow consume anything approaching this figure, the world will have to find more than 140 billion metric tons of such materials each year by mid-century. [...] Between 1980 and 2002, the resources required to produce $1,000 worth of consumer goods fell from 2.1 metric tons to just 1.6 metric tons and global per capita income has increased seven-fold. The bad news is that trend will not necessarily continue and—in absolute terms—resource consumption has increased 10-fold since 1900 [...] already it takes three times as much total mining material to produce the same amount of ore as 100 years ago [...] Nor is it clear that "decoupling"—rising economic growth paired with reductions in resource consumption—actually is now taking place; most gains to date, such as those in Germany or Japan, may simply have been achieved by outsourcing resource-intensive manufacturing and the like abroad to countries like China."

NYT: Profile of a (very rich) Cassandra: "The prices of all important commodities except oil declined for 100 years until 2002, by an average of 70 percent. From 2002 until now, this entire decline was erased by a bigger price surge than occurred during World War II. Statistically, most commodities are now so far away from their former downward trend that it makes it very probable that the old trend has changed — that there is in fact a Paradigm Shift — perhaps the most important economic event since the Industrial Revolution.”

MWH: Ten things you didn't know you owned.

DD: Unemployment in the USA. A scary graph.

Mongabay: The glass is half-full: conservation has made a difference.

Every second of every day

Greenland is losing around 9,000 tonnes of ice every second. But we're doing our best to mitigate this problem by removing 9-10,000 tonnes of fish from the ocean every hour. And, of course, by dumping 62,500 tonnes of heat-trapping emissions into the earth's atmosphere every minute. 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.

Climate Central: Extreme events related to climate change threaten three US nuclear facilities.

Guardian: UK oil and gas rigs creating spills at least once a week in 2009 and 2010. Remember, the UK claims to have some of the world's highest standards in regulation of off-shore drilling safety. Now take these operations into freezing Arctic waters, where microbes won't be so quick to deal with spills as there were in the tropical waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and where extreme conditions prevent the kind of response available there. Arctic drilling is doubly suicidal: It brings new risks to relatively untouched ecosystems and ensures more greenhouse gases in our atmosphere for thousands of years. And the only reason these waters are opening up to this exploitation is the decline of the sea ice caused by the combustion of fossil fuels in the first place.

Grist: In the worst drought in Texas history, 13.5 billion gallons of water used for fracking. Fracking is the controversial process used to exploit reserves of shale gas, a fossil fuel touted in some circles as a cleaner alternative and as a silver bullet solution to US energy security, but which is worse than coal or conventional oil when gas leaks are included (since natural gas is a very potent greenhouse gas and degrades over time into more carbon dioxide), has been associated with the poisoning of groundwater, and which may well prove commercially unviable much faster than expected according to a recent NYT report (while Stoneleigh offers an even bleaker outlook).

Independent: The plight of the big cats. According to Dereck and Beverly Joubert, leading big cat conservationists, "There were 450,000 lions when we were born and now there are only 20,000 worldwide. [...] Leopards have declined from 700,000 to 50,000, cheetahs from 45,000 to 12,000 and tigers are down from 50,000 to just 3,000."

CP: Food prices hover at historic highs.

IPS: Rising temperatures melting away food security. The impacts of climate change on food production are not limited to heat stress on crops (which may suppress global yields by 5-10% per degree of warming), but also include disruptions to precipitation patterns (i.e. floods and droughts), inundation (or salination) by rising sea levels, loss of glacial melt water (a critical factor, according to this article), increased erosion and shifting distribution of pests and invasive species.

Yale360: Wasting phosphate. "It takes one ton of phosphate to produce every 130 tons of grain, which is why the world mines about 170 million tons of phosphate rock every year to ship around the world and keep soils fertile. [...] We could hit “peak phosphorus” production by around 2030. [...] Presently, there simply are no substitutes for phosphorus."

Reuters: As CO2 levels rise, land becomes less able to curb warming, claims new study in Nature.

Mongabay: The unexpected effects of removing top predators. Another new Nature paper claims that "The loss of these animals may be humankind’s most pervasive influence on nature".

Energy Bulletin: Dilithium crystals and tomorrow's energy needs.
Image by CAC.

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.