ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

Amazingly, there’s one remaining, more or less intact stand of primeval forest left in Europe: the Bialowieza forest, which straddles the border between Poland and Belarus.

Not surprisingly, that remnant 580-square-mile stand is under threat. Only 17% of the forest is protected as national park.  The rest is subject to selective logging, which proponents excuse as “good for the forest”.

The Bialowieza forest hosts a number of endangered species, including the European woodland bison, which lives nowhere else in the wild. The forest also provides habitat to wolves, boar, tarpan (a species of wild horse), badgers, moose, lynx, eagles and woodpeckers.

Greenpeace Poland is working to halt logging in the Bialowieza forest until new forest management plans are drawn up which would limit logging to the minimum required for local residents and ban it during the bird nesting season. Wish them luck.

Scientists predict in a new study that fewer than one in five of the plants and animals which currently live in the world’s rainforests will still be here in 90 years time. The culprits? Climate change and deforestation.

The study, “Correlative and mechanistic models of species distribution provide congruent forecasts under climate change”, is published in the June edition of Conservation Letters, an open-access journal. Here’s the abstract:

Good forecasts of climate change impacts on extinction risks are critical for effective conservation management responses. Species distribution models (SDMs) are central to extinction risk analyses. The reliability of predictions of SDMs has been questioned because models often lack a mechanistic underpinning and rely on assumptions that are untenable under climate change. We show how integrating predictions from fundamentally different modeling strategies produces robust forecasts of climate change impacts on habitat and population parameters. We illustrate the principle by applying mechanistic (Niche Mapper) and correlative (Maxent, Bioclim) SDMs to predict current and future distributions and fertility of an Australian gliding possum. The two approaches make congruent, accurate predictions of current distribution and similar, dire predictions about the impact of a warming scenario, supporting previous correlative-only predictions for similar species. We argue that convergent lines of independent evidence provide a robust basis for predicting and managing extinctions risks under climate change.

By 2100, climate change and deforestation could have altered two-thirds of the rainforests in Central and South America and about 70% in Africa. The Amazon Basin alone could see changes in biodiversity for 80% of the region.

A U.K. Telegraph article about the study quotes Daniel Nepstad, senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center, which studies climate change in Massachusetts:

This study is the strongest evidence yet that the world’s natural ecosystems will undergo profound changes including severe alterations in their species composition through the combined influence of climate change and land use. Conservation of the world’s biota, as we know it, will depend upon rapid, steep declines in greenhouse gas emissions.

The Land Institute near Salina, Kansas has been crossing selected strains of wild intermediate wheatgrass grain with annual wheat varieties to breed a commercially practical perennial grain. Gene Logsdon at OrganicToBe.org reports that pancakes made with flour (trademarked Kernza ™) from the resulting grain is pretty tasty.

The flour makes a light dough and the pancakes taste just a tad sweeter than ordinary wheat flour.  * * * It is exceptionally high in some nutrients known to be important to human health and deficient in many modern diets: Omega 3 fatty acids, calcium, lutein, and betaine. It is particularly high in folate, important for preventing stroke, cancer, heart disease and infertility. Folate is also believed to be important for maintaining good mental health in old age.  My mind generally glazes over when reading about nutrient values of various foods so that folate might come in handy. To me the important thing is that for once something that is good for me tastes good too. Kernza ™ does not have enough gluten in it to use alone for leavened breads, but as more and more crosses are made with it and regular wheat, all things are possible.

Being able to grow grain without plowing up millions of acres of soil every year would cut down on erosion and help build soil tilth while enabling farmers to cut way back on fuel and greenhouse gas emissions – saving farmers both time and money in the bargain.

But the search won’t be over until researchers come up with a good perennial bread flour.

Matthew Stein identifies six trends which he says are “converging on collapse”.

• Climate change: Even if we implemented the most stringent greenhouse gas limits currently proposed, it is quite likely that our world’s climate will warm by 6.3F or more over the next century, leading to disastrous crop failures in most of the world’s productive farmlands and “breadbaskets”.
• Peak Oil: Our global economy and culture are built largely upon a reliance on cheap oil. Even the U.S. military now believes that by 2012 surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015 the shortfall in output could reach 10 million barrels per day.
• Collapse of the World’s Oceans: The world’s major fisheries, zooplankton, and coral reefs are all either in collapse or in danger of collapse.
• Deforestation: Over 50% of the world’s forests have already disappeared, and much of the rest is in threatened. Deforestation contributes approximately 25% of all global greenhouse gasses, nearly double the 14% that transportation and industry sectors each contribute. Additionally, the forests of the world are a critical part of the weather cycle as well as the carbon-oxygen cycle – loss of forest results in “desertification”  down wind.
• The Global Food Crisis: For the first time since the “green revolution” started, our world is producing less food each year, even as population continues to rise.  We’re loosing top soil and arable land, water for irrigation is becoming more and more scarce – and climate change is just beginning to kick in.
• Over Population: In the mid 1980s our world first overshot its capacity to provide for its human population, yet population continues to grow. The world’s population is projected to reach 7 billion in the year 2012, meaning that between the start of the year 2000 and the end of 2012  more people will have been added to the population of our world than lived on the entire planet just two hundred years ago.

The picture drawn by Stein is an illustration of what happens as Earth’s inherent limits to growth are approached and then exceeded. As a population grows, at some point it begins to exhaust the ecosystem’s sources of food and energy while at the same time its excretions begin to overwhelm the ecosystems sinks, its ability to absorb wastes.

Imagine a fermentation tank, flush with freshly crushed Pinot Noir. Now add yeast. The little critters feast on the abundant sugars, excreting alcohol. After a few generations of exponential growth, the yeast colony is thriving – some are undoubtedly ascribing their prosperity to a yeasty capitalism and free markets. A few more generations, and the once-cocky yeasts are now in a panic:  will we run out of sugar before we succumb to alcohol poisoning?

Are we smarter than yeasts? Can we behave other than as an organism thrown blindly into the world?

As Stein implores, we have no choice but to act individually as if we can collectively change the universe.

In the United States, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of honeybee colonies have failed to survive the winter.

As an article in the U.K. Guardian explains, if honeybees are in terminal collapse the world could be on the brink of biological disaster:

The decline of the country’s estimated 2.4 million beehives began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies. Since then more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died and scientists are no nearer to knowing what is causing the catastrophic fall in numbers.

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The collapse in the global honeybee population is a major threat to crops. It is estimated that a third of everything we eat depends upon honeybee pollination, which means that bees contribute some £26bn to the global economy.

Scientists believe that some subtle interactions between nutrition, pesticide exposure and other stressors are converging to kill colonies.

Losses in some commercial honeybee operations are running at 50% or greater. Continued losses of this magnitude are not economically sustainable for commercial beekeepers.

The Guardian article includes a litany of the catastrophic consequences of honeybee colony collapse:

Flowering plants require insects for pollination. The most effective is the honeybee, which pollinates 90 commercial crops worldwide. As well as most fruits and vegetables – including apples, oranges, strawberries, onions and carrots – they pollinate nuts, sunflowers and oil-seed rape. Coffee, soya beans, clovers – like alfalfa, which is used for cattle feed – and even cotton are all dependent on honeybee pollination to increase yields.

In the UK alone, honeybee pollination is valued at £200m. Mankind has been managing and transporting bees for centuries to pollinate food and produce honey, nature’s natural sweetener and antiseptic. Their extinction would mean not only a colourless, meatless diet of cereals and rice, and cottonless clothes, but a landscape without orchards, allotments and meadows of wildflowers – and the collapse of the food chain that sustains wild birds and animals.

Stuart Staniford at Early Warning mines the data contained in Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States (a U.S. government report we covered here) and concludes that all the work environmentalists have done to protect species and habitats is doomed to be in vain:

All the work that’s been done over the past century to preserve some wild ecosystems in national parks etc, is going to be mostly subverted.  The park may still be there, but what grows in it will, in most cases, be nothing like the thing that we were originally trying to save.

As the impacts of global warming manifest themselves over the coming century, warming temperatures and changing precipitation patterns will result in just about every landscape in the country changing radically.

Staniford’s piece exposes the flaw in the approach environmentalists took in the 70s, the approach (taken by Oregon’s statewide planning Goal 5 , for example): identify a “significant” resource, draw a line around it, and protect it from conflicting uses. Protecting a living resource requires much more than drawing a line around it.  Rather, you have to maintain the health of the ecosystem within which it is embedded.

Within a global climate system wildly disrupted by human greenhouse gas emissions, how could we possibly expect that more local ecosystems could remain unaffected?

Chris Martenson used to be a corporate honcho with a big expensive house in the suburbs on the Connecticut coast. Now he’s downsized, is living in a rural community, has traded in his twin-engine fishing boat for a kayak – and travels the country giving lectures on why we’ll never see a “recovery” from our economic throes. What happened, and why?

In a speech before the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Martenson lays out the hard facts:

• There are 70 million more people on the surface of the planet this year than last year.
• Each of these new humans consumes some amount of resources such as food, oil, air, soil, water, copper, coal, or timber.
• Someday, perhaps already, maybe a little later, the global flow rate of oil coming out of the ground will peak and then decline inexorably thereafter.
• From 2000 to 2008, eight short years, the total amount of debt in this country doubled while no net jobs were created and median incomes actually went backwards.
• During the industrial revolution, humans have consumed vastly more energy each decade. During the lifetime of a 22-year-old, humans will have burned more than half of all the oil ever consumed throughout history.
• Oceanic fish stocks, ancient aquifers, and topsoil are all being depleted at unsustainable rates.

Martenson goes on to explore the implications of these realities. To summarize:

All these facts share a single common feature: they are tied to exponential growth in some way. There’s nothing inherently wrong with exponential growth, as long as you have unlimited room and unlimited resources. We live on a finite planet. Time runs out in a hurry towards the end of any exponential growth system, forcing hurried decisions and severely limiting options. And there are clear signs that several key resources on our planet are in their final minutes.

Just as higher prices for fish will not cause more cod to come from the depleted fisheries, oil fields will yield their treasures in accordance to geological limits and not because our economics textbooks say they should.

Adapting to a future of less and less oil will take decades of preparation – but we’ve not yet even begun. TIME is a critical factor. SCALE is an issue. And then there’s COST.

COST – now there’s the economic rub. Every dollar in circulation was loaned into existence, with interest. The effect of loaning all of our money into existence, with interest, is this: there is always more debt than money floating around in the system. Always. And the amount of debt will compound over time – that is, it will grow exponentially. To service the debts that are growing exponentially, the economy must also grow exponentially.

See the problem?

An energy crisis rooted in resource limits will quickly translate into an economic crisis unlike any other. Consequently, the era of growth is ending and what Martenson calls “an exciting new chapter” is about to begin.

Why the optimism? Martenson sees our challenge as not to find vast new resources to exploit, but to undertake the far more sophisticated and worthwhile task of using what we’ve got more wisely. A life with less pollution, more free time, meaningful jobs, more happiness, less stress and greater connection to each other as well as to nature are all within the realm of the possible.

As Martenson says, the longer we fiddle around the more our options shrink. Let’s hope it’s not already too late.

Dr. Dennis Meadows, one of the authors of “Limits to Growth” and its subsequent updates, has a powerpoint presentation and podcast of a recent talk available at the Population Institute site.

Most interesting is his view that the end of growth does not come directly from depletion, but indirectly from rising capital expenditures as the costs of exploiting resource sources and dealing with saturating sinks rise exponentially. And as he points out, that’s what we’re beginning to see already:

Most people assume that the major global difficulties would occur after the end to growth.

This is not correct.

The globe’s population would experience the most stress prior to the peak, as pressures mount high enough to neutralize the enormous political, demographic, and economic forces that now sustain growth.

We are in the early phases of that period now.

Meadows’ presentation finishes up with a chart showing CO2 emissions as a function of four factors:

1. Number of people.
2. Number of units of capital per person, which is a surrogate for living standards.
3. The amount of energy required to build and operate that capital.
4. The fraction of that energy that comes from non-fossil sources.

Meadows points out the key to our climate change predicament lies in reversing population and consumption growth. If we can’t change those, technology can at best only prolong the agony.

Gail the Actuary at The Oil Drum transcribes his finishing words:

So far, our concern about climate change had manifested itself through efforts to improve efficiency and to implement alternative energy sources–the so-called technology options. I will just close by pointing out that as long as we ignore demographic and cultural issues, the growth in the first two factors will continue to offset all of the improvement we make in factors 3 and 4. And so until we can understand how to begin reducing the growth in the first two factors, climate change is a foregone conclusion.

Richard Heinberg also has his presentation posted at the same site. Heinberg focuses on how peak oil and the consequent end of growth led to the financial crisis, one that will not be resolved in the way to which we have become accustomed. The end of growth means we have entered a new era.

Even as the climate change talks begin today in Copenhagen and as EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announces the U.S. will begin regulating greenhouses gases regardless of what the House and Senate do, some are warning: what we are considering doing, won’t be enough.

Consider that economic infrastructure now being installed around the globe is locking in future increases in fossil fuel consumption. Take China, for example.

In 2008, less than nine million cars were sold in China. In 2009, car sales will rise to between 12 and 13 million. By 2015, car sales are expected to reach 16 million – an increase of 44% over 2008 levels. The cumulative increase in cars on the road in China cannot do other than increase future demand for oil, as gasoline and diesel.

At the beginning of 2006, China had an estimated 350 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity in operation. An additional 600 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity (net of retirements) is projected to be brought on line in China by 2030 – an increase of 42% over 2006 levels.

Not to pick on China. The U.S. is responsible for 29% of carbon dioxide emissions over past 150 years, triple China’s share. But assigning blame for greenhouse gas emissions is irrelevant to crafting a solution to the climate change crisis.

Even while a new study published in Nature Geoscience (abstract here) reports that over the long term Earth’s temperature may be 30-50% more sensitive to atmospheric carbon dioxide than has previously been estimated, the decade of the 2000s will go down as the warmest on record – and climatologists warn warmer weather is on the way.

In a speech to delegates at Copenhagen, IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri went down the list of impacts from global warming, some of which we are already beginning to see:

• More heat waves and heavy rainfall events
• Increase in tropical cyclone intensity
• Disappearance of Arctic sea ice
• Decrease in water resources in semi-arid areas, such as the Mediterranean Basin, western United States, southern Africa and north-eastern Brazil
• Elimination of the Greenland ice sheet and a resulting contribution to sea level rise of about 7 meters
• Species threatened with extinction
• Greater stress on water resources from population growth and economic and land use change, including urbanization
• Significant future increase in heavy rainfall in many regions, with greater flood risk, while other regions dry up
• More than two billion people will live in areas threatened by flood
• Increasing threat to low-lying island nations and coastal cities and deltas from rising seas Seas are already rising because of melting glaciers and icesheets as well as expansion of the oceans as they warm

The good news may be that the scenarios spun out by the IPCC are fantasies when it comes to potential future fossil fuel consumption. The fossil fuels – oil, gas, and coal – simply will not be physically available to generate the greenhouse gas emissions projected in the several IPCC scenarios. Even the IEA, in its recently released World Energy Outlook 2009, is admitting its projections of future energy availability are nothing more than “faith based”, conceding the majority of oil production in 2030 will be coming from “fields yet to be developed or found” and that “output at existing fields . . . will drop by almost two-thirds by 2030.”

The bad news is, the science keeps getting increasingly gloomy. Every new study seems to report that Earth’s climate is more sensitive than previously believed and that “tipping points” are fast approaching, if not already exceeded.

And the good news is pretty dismal, for business-as-usual. If peak production of fossil fuels is near enough to ensure that climate catastrophe will not occur no matter what emissions policies we adopt, that in turn means that our energy policies are hopeless when it comes to transitioning to a social and economic system based on renewable energy resources that in any way resembles the industrial society we have come to think of as normal and desirable.

We cannot avoid the reality that any possible solution to our energy and climate predicament requires that we invent an entirely new economic model, one that doesn’t strive for or depend on economic growth but instead is based on the ecological principle that we must learn to find happiness within limits imposed by the natural systems within which we all live.

Unfortunately, economic growth remains the official ideology at Copenhagen. How to continue on that path is the agenda.

Earth’s carbon dioxide ‘sinks’ are not keeping up with the amount of the greenhouse gas being produced. That’s the conclusion of a paper published in Nature Geoscience:

In the past 50 years, the fraction of CO₂ emissions that remains in the atmosphere each year has likely increased, from about 40% to 45%, and models suggest that this trend was caused by a decrease in the uptake of CO₂ by the carbon sinks in response to climate change and variability.

Carbon released by fossil fuel burning (black) continues to accumulate in the air (red), oceans (blue), and land (green). The oceans take up roughly a quarter of manmade CO2, but evidence suggests they are now taking up a smaller proportion. Credit: Samar Khatiwala, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

The oceans play a key role in regulating climate, absorbing more than a quarter of the carbon dioxide that humans put into the air. The first year-by-year accounting of this mechanism during the industrial era suggests the oceans are not keeping up with rising emissions – a finding with ominous implications for future climate.

The researchers estimate that the oceans last year took up a record 2.3 billion tons of CO₂ produced from the burning of fossil fuels. But with overall emissions growing rapidly, the proportion of fossil-fuel emissions absorbed by the oceans since 2000 may have declined by as much as 10%.

The study also found that a 29% rise in carbon emissions between 2000 and 2008 can be attributed to a large extent to burning coal and the growth of ‘emerging economies’. The use of coal as a fuel has now surpassed oil.

Developing countries now emit more greenhouse gases than developed countries – but a quarter of their growth in emissions is from producing stuff for export to developed countries.

In spite of the global economic downturn, emissions increased by 2% during 2008.

The press release summarizes the main findings of the study:

• CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels increased by two per cent from 2007 to 2008, by 29 per cent between 2000 and 2008, and by 41 per cent between 1990 and 2008.  1990 is the reference year of the Kyoto Protocol.
• CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels have increased at an average annual rate of 3.4 per cent between 2000 and 2008, compared with one per cent per year in the 1990s.
• Emissions from land use change have remained almost constant since 2000, but now account for a significantly smaller proportion of total anthropogenic CO2 emissions (20 per cent in 2000 to 12 per cent in 2008).
• The fraction of total CO2 emissions remaining in the atmosphere has likely increased from 40 to 45 per cent since 1959. Models suggest this is due to the response of the natural CO2 sinks to climate change and variability.
• Emissions from coal are now the dominant fossil fuel emission source, surpassing 40 years of oil emission prevalence.
• The financial crisis had a small but discernable impact on emissions growth in 2008 – with a two per cent increase compared with an average 3.6 per cent over the previous seven years. On the basis of projected changes in GDP, emissions for 2009 are expected to fall to their 2007 levels, before increasing again in 2010.
• Emissions from emerging economies such as China and India have more than doubled since 1990 and developing countries now emit more greenhouse gases than developed countries.
• A quarter of the growth in CO2 emissions in developing countries can be accounted for by an increase in international trade of goods and services.

Add the Atlantic bluefin tuna and maybe the caribou to the list of species threatened with extinction.

Google News has an article about the bluefin tuna:

An international fisheries group set up to protect Atlantic tuna has done the opposite and driven one species of the fish, the bluefin, to the edge of extinction[.]

ICCAT [the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas] has for decades set quotas above what its own scientists have recommended for bluefin tuna. Those quotas are systematically exceeded by industrial fleets, which over-fish the species.

Combined with illegal fishing, this has caused the population to decline by more than 85 percent in the eastern Atlantic and by more than 90 percent in the western Atlantic.

The article quotes Susan Lieberman, director of international policy at the Pew Environment Group:

Enough is enough, it’s time for a zero quota; we’re going to put the brakes on this fishery. If we had any terrestrial species that had declined this much, this quickly, we would have said we have to shut this down, we have to let them recover.

So what about those terrestrial species? Google News has another article about caribou:

Once, caribou wandered over the Arctic tundra in herds that took days to pass. . .

Today, scientists fear caribou are the new cod. . .

Biologists say 15 of the world’s 23 herds are shrinking. Only six herds, generally the small ones, are growing.

Concern has been building for years. But this summer, survey results carried a distinct whiff of impending catastrophe.

N.W.T. biologists estimated the Bathurst herd of the central barrens had fallen from over 120,000 animals in 2006 to 32,000 – a 75 per cent implosion representing the loss of nearly 90,000 caribou in only three years.

The news was even worse to the east, where scientists studied cow-calf pairs in the Beverly herd.

Aerial survey teams couldn’t even find enough pairs to get statistically valid data. A herd that numbered 280,000 animals only 15 years ago was simply gone.

“Collapse. I think that’s a good term,” said Ross Thompson of the Beverly-Qamanirjuaq Management Board.

Scientists blame a combination of factors: climate change, aboriginal hunting and industrial development. Climate change is degrading forage quality; producing heavier, icier snow that makes it more difficult to get at food; and improving conditions for the biting, bloodsucking flies that drive caribou crazy and impair their ability to breed by preventing them from building their strength. Caribou are now preyed upon from snowmobiles and pickups rather than by dogsled. Then industrial development – diamond mines, oil and gas exploration and intensive mineral prospecting – on or adjacent to calving grounds not only disrupt caribou movement between winter and summer ranges and calving grounds; caribou tend to avoid coming near such sites, and so their range is reduced.

The Nasca people, best known for giant geoglyphs etched into the surface of a vast desert plain, once flourished in the valleys of south coastal Peru. About 500 AD their civilization collapsed into a bloody resource war and then vanished.

Photograph: Kevin Schafer/Corbis, published in the UK Guardian

What happened? Archaeologists from Cambridge University say the Nasca brought about their own demise by ruining the fragile ecosystem that supported them. Their study was published in the journal Latin American Antiquity.

Over the course of many generations, the Nasca cleared areas of forest for agriculture. The huarango tree, which once blanketed what is now desert, was gradually replaced by crops such as cotton and maize.

But the short-term agricultural gain came at a high price because the trees were the critical component of the ecosystem. Dr. Beresford-Jones explains what happened:

The huarango is a remarkable nitrogen-fixing tree and it was an important source of food, forage, timber and fuel for the local people. Furthermore, it is the ecological ‘keystone’ species in this desert zone, enhancing soil fertility and moisture, ameliorating desert extremes in the microclimate beneath its canopy and underpinning the floodplain with one of the deepest root systems of any tree known.

In time, gradual woodland clearance crossed an ecological threshold – sharply defined in such desert environments – exposing the landscape to the region’s extraordinary desert winds and the effects of El Niño floods.

In the absence of huarango cover, when El Niño did strike, the river down-cut into its floodplain, Nasca irrigation systems were damaged and the area became unworkable for agriculture. Infant mortality rose, while average adult life expectancy fell. The crops that had been cultivated by the Nasca for generations disappeared, and the area fell victim to a severe drought.

There are now no undisturbed ecosystems in the region, and what remains of the old-growth huarango forests is being destroyed in illegal charcoal-burning operations.