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

An article in the UK Timesonline reports that cod are doomed to disappear from the North Sea:

Cod are doomed to disappear from the North Sea because of climate change and not just as a result of over-fishing, researchers have discovered.

In the past 40 years the average temperature of the North Sea has increased by 1C with catastrophic effects on its delicate eco-systems.

Species of plankton, on which cod larvae feed, have moved away in search of cooler waters. The decline in cod stocks has led to an explosion in the populations of crabs and jellyfish, on which the adult fish feed. The shortage of predators at the top of the food chain has had a knock-on effect on flat fish, such as plaice and sole, whose offspring are eaten by crabs.

I just finished reading Song for the Blue Ocean. Back in 1997, Carl Safina chronicled the horrifying demise of the world’s fisheries. How much worse have things gotten since then? How much worse will they get?

John Michael Greer urges us to face the truth – the future won’t be better than the present:

We are not going to have a future better than the present: not in our lifetimes, and not in those of our grandchildren’s grandchildren. We collectively closed the door on that possibility decades ago, and none of the rapidly narrowing range of choices still open to us now offers any way of changing that.

Greer advises embracing ambivalence and accepting “both the wonder and the immense tragedy of our time.” But life is yin yang, both wonder and tragedy. Always has been, always will be.  It’s not just now.

Guy McPherson takes issue with the notion that our way of life is as great as we think.  He writes at The Energy Bulletin about his trip to a family wedding. He observes that the “living arrangements” we’ve made are far from ideal:

Within the span of a couple generations, we abandoned a durable, finely textured, life-affirming set of living arrangements characterized by self-sufficient family farms intermixed with small towns that provided commerce, services, and culture. Worse yet, we traded that model for a coarse-scaled arrangement wholly dependent on ready access to cheap fossil fuels.

Yes, we’ve done that – and far worse, thoughtlessly exploiting Earth’s resources and despoiling Earth’s ecosystems to the brink of collapse and beyond.

And now we’re reaping what we have sown, in the collapse of fisheries and a looming collapse in agriculture. We eat oil – but Hubbert’s peak is now in our rear-view mirror. Shed no tears for the demise of industrial agriculture. McPherson describes what he saw throughout the Midwest:

The entire region, formerly abundant with a multitude of edible crops, currently is brimming with a single commodity: #2 corn. It’s Roundup-ready, at that, just to throw a bucket of insulting acid into the face of reason. Roundup-resistant weeds are popping up throughout the region as we bring Farmageddon to the heartland and eventually to the world. Most of the corn, which is essentially inedible until it is processed (i.e., pummeled with inordinate quantities of fossil fuels), is watered with the last remaining drops of the Ogallala aquifer, brought to the surface with the same finite fluid used to power our trucks and cars. Verdant fields of ethanol dreams are interrupted occasionally by a field of soybeans; without rotations of legumes, the soil would be so depleted of nitrogen by king corn, it wouldn’t support even the great corn desert. The corn fills our bellies with death-inducing faux sugar. But we willingly trade some of that “food” for fuel because the associated dependence on automobiles allows us to burn off the final inches of life-giving topsoil to promote our culture of death in rapid-transit, individualized death-traps. Who could pass up a deal like that?

Contra Greer, McPherson thinks better days lie ahead.

How could they not? In the near future, we’ll return to a durable set of living arrangements.

Greer points out that McPherson’s dreams of “better days” imply a human population as low as 500 million. That’s quite a crash from today’s population of almost 7 billion.  We can’t control how that crash work itself out. Suffering will not be denied. Still, life is durable.

McPherson’s “better days” are seen in some imagined “future.” Better days are here already, all around us, no matter what the political, economic, or ecological crisis of the moment. They’re here in the chipping of a squirrel, in the deep dark of a new moon, in the mist of a September morning. They’re here in a meal of local free-run turkey, fresh garden tomatoes, and copious quantities of home-grown Pinot Noir shared with dear friends. As long as there are creatures on Earth, life will be wondrous – and tragic.

Our farmer neighbors don’t seem to be interested in the debates about whether we expect the future to be better or worse, whether industrial imperialism can be saved or is worth saving. They simply get about the work of raising the best food they can while struggling to make ends meet and doing as little harm as possible. That’s true revolution.

And everybody can participate. As Wendell Berry says, eating is an agricultural act.

Agricultural acts can be revolutionary.

Here’s a brief compendium of news reporting dramatic effects of global warming that are already being felt around the world, from the Arctic to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

Troubling bubbles

In the Canadian arctic, pure methane in massive amounts is seeping out of the boggy soil.

“On a calm day, you can see 20 or more ‘seeps’ out across this lake,” said Canadian researcher Rob Bowen, sidling his small rubber boat up beside one of them. A tossed match would have set it ablaze. “It’s essentially pure methane.”

AP correspondent Charles Hanley reports that air temperatures in northwest Canada, in Siberia and elsewhere in the Arctic have risen more than 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1970 — much faster than the global average. The summer thaw is reaching deeper into frozen soil, at a rate of 1.5 inches a year, and according to the IPCC a further 13-degree temperature rise is possible this century. And that’s without calculating in the added effect of methane released from thawing Arctic soils.  Permafrost, tundra soil frozen year-round and covering almost one-fifth of Earth’s land surface, runs anywhere from 160 to 2,000 feet deep and is packed with carbon from tens of thousands of years of accumulated plant and animal matter. The top 10 feet of permafrost alone contain more carbon than is now in the atmosphere.

The prognosis is not encouraging.

How likely is a major release?

“I don’t think it’s a case of likelihood,” he [Stockholm University researcher Orjan Gustafssons] said. “I think we are playing with fire.”

Great Barrier Reef Said to Face Catastrophic Damage

Australian officials, commenting on a report issued by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, warn that catastrophic damage to the Great Barrier Reef, the world’s most extensive bank of coral, may be unavoidable if global warming continues unchecked.

Queensland state Premier Anna Bligh said today that warming is hurting reefs and that urgent action is needed to reduce run-off of nutrients and chemicals from farms that poses a second threat.

Here’s an excerpt from the Executive Summary of the report:

Almost all the biodiversity of the Great Barrier Reef will be affected by climate change, with coral reef habitats the most vulnerable. Coral bleaching resulting from increasing sea temperature and lower rates of calcification in skeleton-building organisms, such as corals, because of ocean acidification, are the effects of most concern and are already evident.

Change is seen in Atlantic from climate, fishing

The basic makeup of the ocean waters off the Northeast and the mid-Atlantic region has fundamentally changed in the past 40 years because of climate change, commercial fishing pressures and growing coastal populations, according to a new report.

The “new report” referred to is the 2009 Ecosystem Status Report, just released by the Ecosystem Assessment Program at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) of NOAA’s Fisheries Service in Woods Hole, Mass. Global warming impacts include:

• Warming of coastal and shelf waters has led to northward shifts in distribution of some fish species and changes to a warmer-water fish community.

• The community structure of zooplankton, a major food source for whales and many other marine species including fish, has changed, due in part to climate and physical processes acting over the North Atlantic Basin, indicating the importance of winds and atmospheric circulation patterns to the function and structure of this ecosystem.

Here’s the introductory paragraph to the section on climate forcing:

Climate patterns over the North Atlantic are important drivers of oceanographic conditions and ecosystem states.  Steadily increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels can not only affect climate on global and regional scales but alter critical aspects of ocean chemistry. Here, we describe the atmospheric forcing mechanisms related to climate in this region including large-scale atmospheric pressure systems, natural ocean temperature cycles in the North Atlantic, components of the large-scale circulation of the Atlantic Ocean, and issues related to ocean acidification.

Two new studies warn that damage from climate change will last thousands of years.

A study led by NOAA senior scientist Susan Solomon shows that changes in surface temperature, rainfall, and sea level are largely irreversible for more than 1,000 years after carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions are completely stopped. The most important finding is that there will be “irreversible precipitation changes” (that is, drought) in the U.S. Southwest, Southeast Asia, Eastern South America, Western Australia, Southern Europe, Southern Africa, and northern Africa.

My beloved South of France really takes it on the chin.

The findings appear during the week of January 26 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. While the press release is available for free, the study itself isn’t. Joseph Romm at Climate Progress has posted an excerpt:

…the climate change that is taking place because of increases in carbon dioxide concentration is largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop…. Among illustrative irreversible impacts that should be expected if atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations increase from current levels near 385 parts per million by volume (ppmv) to a peak of 450-600 ppmv over the coming century are irreversible dry-season rainfall reductions in several regions comparable to those of the ”dust bowl” era and inexorable sea level rise.

Another new study finds global warming could cause severe ocean oxygen depletion that would leave huge areas of the ocean devoid of fish and seafood. The authors warn that substantial reductions in fossil-fuel use over the next few generations are needed if extensive ocean oxygen depletion for thousands of years is to be avoided.

Continued global warming could persist far into the future, because natural processes require decades to hundreds of thousands of years to remove carbon dioxide produced by fossil-fuel burning from the atmosphere. A 100,000-year simulation indicates that these “dead zones” could endure for thousands of years.

The study, titled “Long-term ocean oxygen depletion in response to carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels“, is published in the journal Nature Geoscience. The full text is behind a paywall. The  abstract is below the fold:

Ongoing global warming could persist far into the future, because natural processes require decades to hundreds of thousands of years to remove carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning from the atmosphere. Future warming may have large global impacts including ocean oxygen depletion and associated adverse effects on marine life, such as more frequent mortality events, but long, comprehensive simulations of these impacts are currently not available. Here we project global change over the next 100,000 years using a low-resolution Earth system model, and find severe, long-term ocean oxygen depletion, as well as a great expansion of ocean oxygen-minimum zones for scenarios with high emissions or high climate sensitivity. We find that climate feedbacks within the Earth system amplify the strength and duration of global warming, ocean heating and oxygen depletion. Decreased oxygen solubility from surface-layer warming accounts for most of the enhanced oxygen depletion in the upper 500 m of the ocean. Possible weakening of ocean overturning and convection lead to further oxygen depletion, also in the deep ocean. We conclude that substantial reductions in fossil-fuel use over the next few generations are needed if extensive ocean oxygen depletion for thousands of years is to be avoided.

A new study conducted in the Pacific Ocean at Tatoosh Island off the coast of Washington finds that ocean acidity has increased more than 10 times faster than had been predicted by climate change models and other studies. The new study is based on 24,519 measurements of ocean pH spanning eight years, which represents the first detailed dataset on variations of coastal pH at temperate latitudes where the world’s most productive fisheries are found.

This increase will have a severe impact on marine food webs and suggests that ocean acidification may be a more urgent issue than previously thought. Many sea creatures have shells or skeletons made of calcium carbonate, which is dissolved by acid. The increased acidity of the ocean could interfere with many critical ocean processes such as coral reef building or shellfish harvesting. The study documented that the number of mussels and stalked barnacles fell as acidity increased. At the same time, populations of smaller, shelled species and noncalcareous algae increased.

The ocean plays a significant role in global carbon cycles. When atmospheric carbon dioxide dissolves in water it forms carbonic acid, increasing the acidity of the ocean. During the day, carbon dioxide levels in the ocean fall because photosynthesis takes it out of the water, but at night, levels increase again. The study documented this daily pattern, as well as a steady increase in acidity over time.

The study, “Dynamical Patterns and Ecological Impacts of Declining Ocean pH in a High-Resolution Multi-Year Dataset,” will be published in the Dec. 2 issue of PNAS.

PacifiCorp has agreed to remove four dams on the Klamath River as part of a broader effort to restore the river and revive its ailing salmon and steelhead runs and aid fishing, tribal and farming communities. If the dams come down it would be the biggest dam removal and river restoration effort the world has ever seen.

The Agreement in Principle released today is intended to guide the development of a final settlement agreement in June 2009 and includes provisions to remove PacifiCorp’s four mainstem dams in 2020, a century after the construction of the first dam, Copco 1. Dam removal will re-open over 300 miles of habitat for the Klamath’s salmon and steelhead populations and eliminate water quality problems caused by the reservoirs.

But the deal came under immediate attack from tribes environmentalists who called it a scheme riddled with loopholes that favor farmers and other allies of the outgoing president. They say it makes no sense to strike a deal with just weeks left before Barack Obama becomes president.

Specific provisions of the agreement include:

• PacifiCorp agrees to contribute as much as $200 million to cover the cost of removing its four dams and restoring the river.  Dam removal funds would be obtained from ratepayers in Oregon and California before removal begins.
• If the costs of dam removal exceed PacifiCorp’s contribution, California and Oregon together would contribute up to $250 million.  Current estimates of dam removal costs range between $75 million and $200 million.
• In accordance with all applicable environmental laws, the Secretary of the Department of the Interior will assess the method and impacts of dam removal, and will make a final determination on the benefits and costs of dam removal by March 31st, 2012. California and Oregon will make similar determinations shortly after the federal government.
• Federal legislation will be required to implement provisions of the initial agreement. The legislation will establish the transfer of the dams to the federal government, although an independent third-party will be identified to actually remove the dams.

This LA Times article (cross-posted at Truthout) quotes Tom Schlosser, an attorney for the Hoopa tribe of Northern California:

“It’s just nutty to commit to this with Bush heading out the door.”

Environmentalists fear PacifiCorp will exploit the agreement as a delaying tactic, arguing that the deal has loopholes that allow the company to back out as late as 2012. The agreement will essentially shut down California’s water quality hearings on the Klamath dams.

PacifiCorp’s four dams produce a nominal amount of power which can be replaced using renewables and efficiency measures without contributing to global warming. A study by the California Energy Commission and the Department of the Interior found that removing the dams and replacing their power would save PacifiCorp customers up to $285 million over 30 years.

The dams, built between 1908 and 1962, cut off hundreds of miles of once-productive salmon spawning and rearing habitat in the Upper Klamath, which was once the third most productive salmon river on the west coast. The dams also create toxic conditions in the reservoirs that threaten the health of fish and people.

The $200 million from Pacificorps for dam removal and river restoration would come from boosted electricity rates for customers in the Pacific Northwest. PacifiCorp chairman Greg Abel said rates could rise as much as 2%. The agreement would give the company protection from liability and time to find replacement power.

Portland-based PacifiCorp is owned by billionaire Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc.