Can we destroy creation? Hubris and self-destruction

We can't destroy creation. Alpha Centuri is going to be just fine, climate change or not. We can't even destroy the planet. It's survived meteors, tectonic upheavals and ice ages. It's a pretty durable lump of rock.

Nonetheless, I frequently see people claiming that it is arrogant to think that tiny little humans are having such a large impact of the functioning of planetary-scale systems as is implied by the mainstream science of climate change, ocean acidification, soil degradation, biodiversity loss and so on. Sometimes this objection has a dose of piety injected: God is in charge of the world; we can't damage it (at least, not more than superficially or locally).

But isn't it arrogant (and historically ignorant) to think that our capacity for destruction does not extend to wiping out entire ecosystems? We have done so on colossal scales in recorded history. Vast forests have disappeared in the face of the axe and bulldozer; seemingly endless prairies have all but disappeared under the plough. Haven't we grown to seven billion and rising, spreading into every continent and visibly altering huge tracts of the earth's surface? Why would we be surprised at anthropogenic climate change or ocean acidification or biodiversity decline when we consider our collective effects in a wide range of areas? Aren't our nuclear arsenals capable of obliterating the vast majority of life on earth at a moment's notice? Haven't we fundamentally altered the appearance, behaviour and distribution of species through millennia of domestication and exploration? Haven't we sent thousands of recorded species (and likely tens or hundreds of thousands of unrecorded species) extinct? Haven't we damned and/or diverted the majority of the world's great rivers, and even (almost) dried up what was previously the fourth largest lake in the world? Haven't we flung craft into orbit that can monitor many of these changes in astonishing detail?

If human civilisations (even ones who considered themselves Christian) have risen and fallen in the past, why would we assume that ours will be immortal? And if human actions have contributed to historical collapses, why would we rule out such influence today?

If we have done all this, then if we have also dug up and burned over 300 billion tonnes of fossil hydrocarbons, might not here, as in so many other places, our capacity for altering our surroundings be manifest? If we have changed the chemical composition of the atmosphere and oceans in measurable and statistically significant ways, might not these changes have far-reaching consequences and implications for life (human and otherwise) throughout the atmosphere and oceans? If we can measure the changes in radiation that occur as a result of these alterations, if we can measure shifts in the timing of flowerings, growing seasons, hibernations and migrations, observe massive and alarmingly rapid alterations to the frozen places of the planet, notice systematic and unprecedented shifts in humidity, precipitation, temperatures over land and sea (and in the waters) and rising sea levels - if we can observe these changes occurring and have an excellent theory that accounts for all the data and which has withstood every criticism levelled against it, seen off all competing explanations and gained the acceptance of every single relevant scientific body of national or international standing in the world, then what is to be gained by withholding judgement? And if we have good reason to be deeply concerned about the already manifest and likely future consequences of the observed, modelled and projected trends, if these consequences threaten the habitability of the planet and its ability to provide sufficient food for our societies and habitat for all our fellow creatures, if our neighbours are deeply vulnerable to these changes, if the most vulnerable are also those who have done least to contribute to the problem (the poor, future generations and other species), then might not Christian discipleship embrace humble acceptance of our predicament and an earnest search for responses that express repentance, care and prudence?

Furthermore, if many of the social and personal changes required are not simply consonant with, but already actively required by, Christian discipleship due to the rejection of idolatry, greed and consumerism, if the infrastructural changes are both affordable and viable, if those most vocally opposed to these changes have a history of engaging in less than honest advocacy and have a business practice that currently kills millions of people annually, then might we not have a strong case for prophetic witness in defence of the goodness of the created order, in pursuit of justice for the suffering, in the hope of wise care for our children's future?

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.

Winning battles, losing the war

"Today, we have more environmental groups and less forests, more 'protected areas' and less species, more carbon taxes and greater carbon emissions, more 'green' products and less green space."

- Rex Weyler, Nature: A system of systems.

Fewer forests, fewer species. "Less" qualifies mass nouns; "fewer", count nouns. Less sloppiness; fewer errors. Less pedantry; fewer readers. Sometimes, no matter how many times I correct grammatical confusions, I think I'm waging an unwinnable war. But I pick myself up and fight on. What else can one do?

A world without beaches?

Having been reading various papers and reports on climate change for some time now, I thought I had a pretty good grasp on the range of negative effects associated with the unprecedented rate of change our actions are causing in the planet's atmosphere and oceans: higher temperatures, changing patterns of precipitation, more frequent heat waves and bushfires, more intense storms and floods, habitat destruction, biodiversity decline, cryosphere melt, reduced agricultural yields, increased water stress, increased area affected by drought at any one time, ocean acidification (which is not directly related to climate, but has the same cause: rising carbon dioxide levels), modified vector borne disease spread (such as dengue and malaria), exacerbation of respiratory health issues associated with ground-level ozone (smog), human migration patterns (refugees), desertification, shifting ocean currents, warming oceans, coral bleaching and mortality, poleward movement of the tropics, destabilisation of permafrost, shifts in the timing of annual events such as flowering, hibernations, migrations and peak river flows, sea level rise and the consequent threat to infrastructure during storm surges as well as salination of coastal water tables. All these I've read a fair bit about over the last couple of years. But only recently I have come across an implication that I hadn't heard before, one with a high visual and emotional impact for many people, but which, as far as I can tell, is not yet widely known.

Much has been said about sea level rise, and I don't intend to give a full account here. But quite apart from the risk of flooding, rising seas mean coastal erosion. I had not grasped how significant this could be. A rule of thumb used by some researchers is that, roughly speaking, for each centimetre of sea level rise, coasts will erode by one metre. When we are looking at a likely sea level rise between 50 and 200 centimetres by 2100 (and continuing thereafter for some time), you quickly get a sense of the scale of this particular issue. Sea defences can be built to minimise this impact, but they are only partially or temporarily effective (or extremely expensive), especially against the scale of change we are looking at.

Where the public at large are likely to particularly notice this, especially in Australia, is in its effect on beaches, many of which are likely to be progressively stripped of sand over the coming decades. The processes involved are complex and only partially understood, and there may be much local variation in how sea level rise affects coastal areas. Nonetheless, loss of sand is already a major (and costly) headache for many beaches and the best estimates are that this will generally get worse.

Many of us are likely to live to see a world virtually free of summer Arctic sea ice; our children may see the last of the great coral reefs die; our grandchildren may need an explanation of what a sandy beach was.

On thin ice

Guess the graph competition answer
Last Wednesday, I posted this graph and asked for guesses as to what it represented. Aside from a few humorous suggestions, most answers were in the right ballpark, suggesting it had something to do with our melting cryosphere. This is perhaps one of the best known effects of climate change (or that part of climate change known as global warming), yet there is widespread confusion about the details.

The correct answer is that the graph represents the Arctic sea ice volume over the last few decades. The worrying downward trend is accelerating, but, unlike the graphs for Greenland or Antarctica, which are also heading down, the number on the y-axis are absolute figures. That is, while Greenland and Antarctica are losing increasing amounts of ice, compared with their total volumes, the amounts currently being lost are miniscule. For them to completely melt would be catastrophic, raising sea level tens of metres, but this is likely to take centuries, if not longer. However, the Arctic Ocean is getting seriously close to "ice-free" in summer,* an event most of us are likely to see within our lifetimes, and which we may well witness this or next decade, according to some experts. Certainly, extrapolating those trend lines points to an early grave for our planet's white top. The lines are unlikely to simply follow that curve, for various reasons, but scientists can identify no reasons to think the trend will reverse anytime soon.
*As long as Greenland still has significant amounts of ice, a residual amount of sea ice is likely to survive. "Ice-free" is usually qualified as largely ice-free. This is different again to an ice-free North Pole, which simply means that there is no sea ice cover at the North Pole, while there might still be some polar ice cap remaining.

What is Arctic sea ice?
It is important to highlight that we are talking about sea ice, that is ice that floats on top of the Arctic Ocean and which expands in winter and contracts in summer. It is generally not nearly as thick as people imagine (averaging just a metre or two) and any given piece of ice is unlikely to be more than a few years old, since it is constantly in motion due to wind and ocean currents and each summer much of it melts. Nonetheless, there has been permanent sea ice cover on the Arctic Ocean for at least somewhere between the last 700,000 and 4 million years, allowing the evolution of unique and endemic species (i.e. not found elsewhere). Since the ice is floating, the concern is not that melting will directly raise sea levels, both because the actual volume of ice is pretty miniscule compared with Greenland and (especially) Antarctica (for comparison, while Arctic sea ice is generally at most a few metres thick, Greenland's ice sheet is generally more than 2 km thick, and over 3 km at points. Antarctica is about ten times greater in volume again) and because floating ice displaces an almost identical volume of water to that contained in the ice (melting ice in a glass of water doesn't cause it to overflow).

Why are people worried?
Concern about the loss of Arctic sea ice is eightfold.

First, it is a canary in the goldmine: a visually dramatic sign of temperature changes that is relatively easy for the public to grasp.

Second, it threatens the unique and endemic Arctic biota (of which polar bears are of course the poster child).

Third, this in turn undermines the way of life of various indigenous groups in the Arctic, who rely on hunting and on the existence of sea ice for their livelihood.

Fourth, less floating white ice means more exposed dark water, which absorbs more solar radiation, increasing the total heat budget of the planet, and specifically of the Arctic Ocean.

Fifth, a warming Arctic Ocean and atmosphere speeds the melt of permafrost in Canada, Siberia and Alaska, not only threatening infrastructure built on it, but also releasing stored methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas that degrades into carbon dioxide, making it both a short term climate nasty and a long term headache.

Sixth, and perhaps of even greater concern, warmer waters increase the rate at which vast submarine deposits of methane clathrates destabilise and are released to the atmosphere, giving a further kick to warming. There is some debate about whether this process is likely to be slow and gradual or whether it might occur relatively suddenly, a process somethings colloquially called a "clathrate gun".

Seventh, the warmer the Arctic Ocean gets, the warmer Greenland is likely to get, and the faster its glaciers slide and melt into the sea. No one is entirely sure how long this will take, but it is a process that once it is underway in earnest, is likely to have a momentum of its own, meaning that our descendants will be committed to ever rising sea levels for centuries to come. Altogether, there is enough frozen water in Greenland to raise global sea levels by more than seven metres.

Eighth, an increasingly ice-free Arctic opens up a geopolitical minefield as nations scramble to take advantage of the resources previously locked away under the ice. The starter's gun for this race has well and truly fired (see video below).

Area vs volume
Another crucial distinction to keep in mind (apart from the difference between wafer-thin and highly vulnerable floating sea ice and gigantic land-based ice sheets that are both more stable and yet ultimately of greater direct threat) is between sea ice area/extent on the one hand and volume on the other. Area/extent is the easiest metric to measure with a satellite image (there is a slight technical difference between these two terms, but they are both basically concerned with a two dimensional account of how much of the Arctic ocean is covered with floating sea ice). Extent has been dropping at a slower rate than volume, which means that the remaining ice is getting thinner. Those only looking at the numbers for area or extent might be fooled into thinking the decline is only worrying, rather than alarming. While summer minimum extent has dropped by about a third over the last thirty years, volume is down by more than three quarters. And human activities are largely to blame.

The road ahead
The Arctic is one of the places where the climate change is already hitting the road. The transformation of the landscape is not merely a computer projection, but observable today. Its consequences are already negative, but the trajectory is even worse. What kind of path are we walking? And where will we find the courage and humility to turn around if we don't like where it is going?
The video at the top of the post is from a recently broadcast BBC programme, covering some of the implications of this story, which also appeared on the BBC news site.

The Pope and climate change

The Pontifical Academy of Sciences at the Vatican has just released a new report titled Fate of Mountain Glaciers in the Anthropocene. The report was written by a diverse group of glaciologists, climate scientists, meteorologists, hydrologists, physicists, chemists, mountaineers and lawyers and examines the causes and consequences of the widely observed phenomenon of glacial retreat occurring on about 95% of glaciers around the world.

The report doesn't particularly break new ground scientifically (or so I am told), but it is a good example of scientists communicating the realities of climate change in an explicitly moral framework. To get a sense of the reports conclusions and recommendations, here is a taste from the opening:

"We call on all people and nations to recognise the serious and potentially irreversible impacts of global warming caused by the anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants, and by changes in forests, wetlands, grasslands, and other land uses. We appeal to all nations to develop and implement, without delay, effective and fair policies to reduce the causes and impacts of climate change on communities and ecosystems, including mountain glaciers and their watersheds, aware that we all live in the same home. By acting now, in the spirit of common but differentiated responsibility, we accept our duty to one another and to the stewardship of a planet blessed with the gift of life.

"We are committed to ensuring that all inhabitants of this planet receive their daily bread, fresh air to breathe and clean water to drink as we are aware that, if we want justice and peace, we must protect the habitat that sustains us. The believers among us ask God to grant us this wish."

I would love to hear opinions on how the Pontifical Academy of Sciences is perceived amongst Catholics and whether a report like this might, for instance, have any kind of significant influence on prominent Catholic leaders who deny or minimise the dangers of anthropogenic climate change (such as Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney).

Dying birds

Some people have been getting excited about some unexplained mass avian deaths recently. Thousands of birds apparently dropped dead out of the sky. Could it signal the end of the world? Perhaps not. The likely explanation is much more prosaic: new years fireworks startling sleeping birds into flight leading to disorientation and a fatal collision in the dark.

It may turn out to be something more disturbing and newsworthy than this, but such events need to be kept in context. Human actions kill billions of birds each year, primarily through domestic cats, collisions with buildings and habitat destruction. Our collective activity represents the largest threat to other living things on the planet for millions of years.

Sometimes, we are so keen to find things that are new that we get used to living with ongoing catastrophe.

In other news, six more Australian bird species were recently declared extinct.

The real elephant in (or disappearing from) the room

The first rule of biodiversity is, you don't talk about biodiversity.

This is your life and it is ending one species at a time.

Yes, ok, so Edward Norton was recently(ish) appointed UN goodwill ambassador for biodiversity and this gives the possibility of all kinds of Fight Club quips. Fight Club remains one of my all time favourite films, but unlike his character in the film that redefined IKEA, this time Norton seems to have worked out who he is and what he wants to say. He has written a Guardian piece worth reading.

I've said many times before that climate change is not the greatest moral challenge of our time. Indeed, I don't even believe it is the greatest ecological challenge (and not just because putting in the basket labelled "environment" can make it seem like a luxury cause for the rich). Out of all the ecological crises we face, some are more pressing than others. Yet there are (at least) three ways to measure threats: how soon they will really begin to hurt, how much hurt they might do, and how long they will continue to hurt. In other words, their proximity, scale and duration.

From what I've read, biodiversity loss "wins" as the real elephant in (or disappearing from) the room. Perhaps not on proximity - other issues may well cut into human well-being sooner - but in terms of both scale and duration biodiversity losses have all kinds of potentially enormous (and largely unknown) knock-on effects. Most biologists agree that we are currently at the opening of the sixth great extinction event, that, viewed in retrospect, the present era will likely be visible as on a par or worse than most of the cataclysmic biological events on geological timescales. Humanity has become a force of nature.

And it is not just extinctions, but the loss of genetic diversity with species and of the functions that species decimated but not yet extinct no longer play in the web of life.

Haven't species always gone extinct? It's true; we don't see many dinosaurs around today. Indeed, based on fossil records, only about ten percent of all the species to have existed are still around today. Yet the current rate of loss is likely to be between one hundred and one thousand times the background natural rate, and all the primary drivers of these trends are linked to human activities: land use changes, habitat destruction, pollutants, logging, over-exploitation, invasive species and anthropogenic climate change.

Why do we care? Once again, if our undoing of God's creation isn't enough to make us sit up and take notice, there remains naked self-interest. Biodiversity loss has been likened to flying in a plane and watching the rivets pop out, one by one. Each one may not cause the failure of the plane, but cumulatively, things will get far less stable once enough rivets are lost.

And yet public awareness of biodiversity is poor. Campaigns in the past have focussed on individual charismatic megafauna. But while whale or rhinos might steal the headlines, the real losses are occurring all over the complex webs of interdependence that hold ecosystems (and the services they provide human society) together.

Currently underway in Japan is a major international Convention on Biological Diversity. A previous convention in 2002 set targets for 2010 that have been missed by a wide margin, according to a major biodiversity report published earlier this year.

Disappointingly, Australia hasn't really bothered to take the present meeting seriously, sending neither PM nor even environment minister, though over 100 heads of state or environment ministers from around the world will be present during the final days of the convention.

This too is part of our world today. Unless we begin to understand the effects our idolatries have on our planet as well as our souls, then we will remain enslaved to self-destructive patterns of life.

Looking ahead: anticipation and prudence

We are generally not very good at responding to long term threats. We are wired to focus on the immediate. Warnings that smoking or obesity might cut years off one's life all too often fall on deaf ears. Or even where the veracity of the claim is acknowledged, there remains a disconnect between this acknowledgement and remedial action.

Many ecological crises share this structure: incremental changes (often as the result of pursuing certain immediate objectives that may well be good or pleasurable in their own right) lead to unforeseen consequences “in the pipeline” that may take years, decades or longer to become fully manifest. Examples include declining biodiversity, habitat loss, soil degradation, ocean acidification and overfishing. Climate change may represent the most complex and difficult example.

The distance between the actions that cause harm and the suffering of that harm is widened in climate change to be not only temporal, but also spatial and relational, meaning that there is no immediate or proximate visibility to the consequences of actions that are only become highly problematic in a cumulative manner. Thus, there are a raft of distraction techniques that can dilute the fierce urgency of now. We can point out the relative size our tiny contribution and the inefficacy of reducing it by ourselves; we can question the consequences that are as yet only forecast; we can lower our ethical horizons to include only what is visible in my neighbourhood.

The problem is that we are used to making our ethical decisions as though we were walking, where avoiding a pothole or canine faecal incident is only a matter of looking a step or two ahead. But we are no longer walking. Our greater agency through soaring population and technological innovation means that our actions have greater consequences, affecting a wider sphere over a longer period of time. Our consumption and production don't just satisfy our immediate needs and wants but have unforeseen knock-on effects that extend much further than they used to. We are no longer walking. When you drive, you need to look further ahead, observing and anticipating events over a wider field of interactions and responding well ahead of time to possible threats. "Too late" happens surprisingly early. In driving, you need to look further ahead and further afield than when we're walking because the consequences of your actions are so much greater. A mistake while walking means bumping into a stranger and perhaps meeting a new friend. A mistake while driving could mean sending a tonne of metal travelling at superhuman speed into a brick wall, or under a fifty tonne truck coming the other way.
H/T mustakissa for suggesting this analogy.

But we are not even driving. Perhaps a more appropriate image for the scale of our agency and our consequent need to anticipate threats is flying.
Image by Ruth Brigden.

Two attitudes towards extinction

You may know that biodiversity loss, while difficult to measure, is thought by a significant majority of biologists to be occurring at an alarming rate, possibly somewhere between 100 and 1000 times the "background" rate of extinction (taking a very long term view of such things). The causes are many, but almost exclusively anthropogenic (i.e. we're to blame): habitat destruction, hunting and poaching, the introduction of non-native species, pollution and climate change. You may also have heard even more startling predictions such as this century being witness to the extinction of between a quarter and a half of all currently living species (how such estimates are calculated).

With this in mind, compare and contrast these two quotes:

"But biodiversity losses of small inedible species often provoke the response, "Who cares? Do you really care less for humans than for some lousy useless little fish or weed, like the snail darter or Furbish lousewort?" This response misses the point that the entire natural world is made up of wild species providing us for free with services that can be very expensive, and in many cases impossible, for us to supply ourselves. Elimination of lots of lousy little species regularly causes big harmful consequences for humans, just as does randomly knocking out many of the lousy little rivets holding together an airplane."

- Jared Diamond, Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed, 488-89.

"The sadness which overcomes us when we hear about the extinction of hundreds of kinds of butterflies on a faraway continent has nothing to do with a loss of something useful. It doesn't even have anything to do with a reduction of aesthetic pleasure, since, more than likely, we would never have had a chance to see this type of butterfly. Nevertheless, we are poorer through its disappearance, since our own being is fulfilled in reference to every reality which we ourselves are not. Delectatio in felicitate alterius [delight in the happiness of others] - this formula of Leibniz overcomes the opposition between anthropocentrism and love of nature "for its own sake". To love something for its own sake is the specific form of human realisation.

- Robert Spaemann, Happiness and Benevolence, 118.

How do they each make you feel? Which strikes closer to home for you? Why?

In both cases, the author makes use of a narrative of loss, but where Diamond fears for our survival, Spaemann speaks of us losing part of our identity. Spaemann is convinced that survival (whether individual, societal or as a species) is not a particularly important goal. For him, there are more important things; I might save my life and yet lose my self.