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

Scientists have discovered that the tipping point for Southern Ocean acidification caused by human-induced CO2 emissions is much closer than first thought. The results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

The “tipping point” of acidification - when the acidity of the ocean reaches a level where the shells of calcareous marine creatures start to dissolve - had been predicted to occur when atmospheric CO2 levels hit 550 parts per million, around the year 2060.

The new research shows levels of the carbonate that these creatures need to build and maintain their shells drops naturally in winter, due to natural variations in factors such as ocean temperature, currents and mixing, and pH. This means the tipping point is likely to be reached at far lower atmospheric CO2 levels - around 450 ppm - which also happens to be the current target set by the IPCC for stabilization of CO2 emissions. This concentration is forecast to be reached by around 2030.

Ocean acidification could lead to large scale ecosystem changes, affecting not just plankton at the base of the food chain but other marine life higher up the food chain including fish, whales and dolphins.

The new findings provide additional evidence that 350 ppm should be the maximum target for atmospheric CO2 levels if we are to avoid catastrophic feedback processes that would mean the end of the Holocene era.

The Holocene began around 10,000 years ago. Human civilization - including the invention of agriculture and the domestication of farm animals - dates almost entirely within the Holocene. We may have already entered what might be called the Anthropocene - the “era of man” - characterized by significant human impacts on the Earth. There’s no precedent in human existence for what we have yet to experience.

We do know Earth’s climate system has still to respond fully to the rapid increase in greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere - much more warming is already in the pipeline.  But already we’re  seeing stunning consequences, including species extinctions at a rate unseen in the last 65,000,000 years, unprecedented disappearance of sea ice, and unprecedented droughts, for example in Australia.

450 ppm isn’t a realistic target if we’re to avoid tipping points beyond which there’s no return. We have to aim to get back down to 350 ppm, and the sooner the better.

A new study in Scientific American concludes that climate change threatens the tropics as well as the Arctic.

Ecologist Robert Colwell of the University of Connecticut and his colleagues surveyed more than 1,900 species of plants and insects from sea level to nearly 10,000 feet (3,050 meters) above, along the forested slopes of a volcano near the La Selva Biological Station in northern Costa Rica. The goal was to determine the ranges of currently extant species.

Based on these ranges—and potential further warming of as much as 5.4 degrees F (3 degrees C)—more than half of these plants and insects would need to relocate 2,000 feet (610 meters) farther up the mountainside to maintain the temperatures they enjoy in their present range. For species already occupying the highest elevations, there’s no place else to go.

And because lowland tropical forests are already the warmest forests on Earth, there are no replacement species waiting in the wings to replace the lowland species that move up in elevation.

Plants and animals that don’t have access to mountainsides to serve as a cool refuge face extinction. Their survival would require migrations of hundreds or even thousands of miles to find a suitable cooler climate. Migration would often require the crossing of unsuitable habitats, or habitats utterly changed by human impacts.

Stocks of Alaska pollock have shrunk 50% from last year to record low levels and put the world’s largest food fishery on the brink of collapse. Pollock stocks have been unable to reproduce quickly enough to recover from yearly catch of 1 million tons. Pollock biomass in U.S. waters is now down to 940,000 tons from 1.8 million tons the previous year.

Pollock is a staple of fur seals, whales and the endangered Steller sea lions - and the U.S. fast food industry. It is used in McDonald’s fish sandwiches, frozen fish sticks, fish and chips and imitation crabmeat.

The 2008 catch limit was set at 1 million tons last December, a 28% cut from the 2007 limit.

Greenpeace warns we are on the cusp of one of the largest fishery collapses in history and advises that the catch limit be halved, that fishing on spawning populations be suspended, and that marine reserves be created to protect pollock habitats.

Wendell Berry writes at OrganicToBe.org (also at The Energy Bulletin) that small farms and other locally-run enterprises are failing because the pattern they belong to is failing. The principal reason for this failure the universal adoption of industrial values which see things and places as assets, all relations as mechanical, and competitiveness as the prime human motivator.

Berry lists the values associated with the family farm: conservation, independence, self-reliance, family, and community - values suited to a world lived in by human beings, not to a world exploited by managers, stockholders, and experts.

I think Berry is more right than he knows. We must transform our economy and rebuild it based on the human-scale values he treasures.

“The economy” is no more than an abstraction, a description of how we extract our living from and survive in this world. Valuing it more than the global ecosystem on which it depends is blindness and folly. As we see the world economy collapse around us, the evidence is compelling that industrial values - which place “the economy” above all else - are ultimately destructive of life itself.

Conservation, independence, self-reliance, family, and community: as Berry says, these are the values that offer us survival, not just as farmers, but as human beings. And Berry is right that the transformation that is required cannot be left to others:

“It] cannot be accomplished by the governments, the corporations, or the universities; if it is to be done, the farmers themselves, their families, and their neighbors will have to do it.”

A 13,700-year-old peat bog in the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska shows evidence of the drastic changes afoot due to the Earth’s warming climate: the ground is drying out, and the peat bog is turning into forest. In 50 years, the bog could be covered by black spruce trees. 

Alaska has already experienced the largest regional warming of any U.S. state - an average 5 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius) since the 1960s and about 8 degrees Fahrenheit (4.5 degrees Celsius) in the interior of the state during winter months. Climate change will lead to droughts, forest fires, and infestations of tree-killing insects like spruce beetles and spruce budworm moths.

So even as forests spread to areas where trees couldn’t grow before, our changing climate threatens existing forests with destruction. And new research shows that temperate forests play a much more important role in carbon sequestration than we thought. An article in New Scientist reports:

Pristine temperate forest stores three times more carbon than currently estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and 60% more than plantation forests, according to research in Australia.

The effects of climate change are being felt around the world. Researchers in France have found that the delicate balance of wildlife in different ecosystems is changing up to eight times more quickly than previously suspected, with potentially severe consequences for some species.

One problem is desynchronization. If birds and the insects upon which they depend do not react to climate change in the same way, there’s an upheaval in the interaction between species.

The study showed that the geographic range of 105 birds species in France - accounting for 99.5 percent of the country’s wild avian population - moved north, on average, 91 kilometers (56.5 miles) from 1989 through 2006. Average temperatures, however, shifted northward 273 kilometers (170 miles) over the same period, nearly three times farther. While birds are responding to climate change, the gap with rising temperatures is big and getting bigger.

A study released today by marine biologists Robert Diaz and Rutger Rosenberg finds that ocean “dead zones” are increasing exponentially:

“Dead zones in the coastal oceans have spread exponentially since the 1960s and have serious consequences for ecosystem functioning. The formation of dead zones has been exacerbated by the increase in primary production and consequent worldwide coastal eutrophication fueled by riverine runoff of fertilizers and the burning of fossil fuels. Enhanced primary production results in an accumulation of particulate organic matter, which encourages microbial activity and the consumption of dissolved oxygen in bottom waters. Dead zones have now been reported from more than 400 systems, affecting a total area of more than 245,000 square kilometers, and are probably a key stressor on marine ecosystems.”

The study was published online by the journal Science (subs. recq’d.).

Kevin Drum has posted this graph at The Washington Monthly:

click to view graph

An article about the study in the Washington Post quotes Douglas N. Rader, chief ocean scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund:

“The next big challenge, after global warming, is going to be addressing the massive upset of the world’s nitrogen cycle.”

The chaos in the planet’s nitrogen cycle is not only creating dead zones but also inciting the spread of toxic algae, such as the pfiesteria that has appeared in recent years in the Chesapeake.

Morgan Winters at the Utne Reader points to a recent report (pdf) by the Population Institute noting that global population could increase from 6.7 billion to as much as 12 billion by 2050. Most of this increase is expected to occur in developing countries.

She states we are faced with crises - including global warming and peak oil - because we are collectively using up more resources than the planet can produce. A population that just keeps growing will eventually overwhelm the planet, regardless of consumption.

So a two-pronged solution is needed: reduced consumption and staved population growth. Growth - either in population or in the global economy - is not something to be sought after as the objective of public policy. Growth is the root of our environmental, ecological, and energy crises.

We’ve got to forge a consensus that the present global population is a problem. Then we’ve got to forge the political will to do something about it.

And the best strategy for constraining population growth is empowering women to make their own family-size choices through access to education, economic opportunity, medical care, and family planning services.

Glenn Parton writes at Speaking Truth to Power that our global environmental crisis has its roots in human psychological disturbance. We have lost touch with what it means to be human - with our sanity.

The environmental crisis consists of the deterioration and outright destruction of micro and macro ecosystems worldwide, entailing the elimination of countless numbers of wild creatures from the air, land, and sea, with many species being pushed to the brink of extinction, and into extinction. People who passively allow this to happen, not to mention those who actively promote it for economic or other reasons, are already a good distance down the road to insanity.

Solving the global environmental crisis requires that we regain our psychological balance, our humanity.

“The solution to the global environmental crisis we face today depends far less on the dissemination of new information than it does on the re-emergence into consciousness of old ideas. Primitive ideas or tribal ideas, kinship, solidarity, community, direct democracy, diversity, harmony with nature provide the framework or foundation of any rational or sane society. Today, these primal ideas, gifts of our ancestral heritage, are blocked from entering consciousness. The vast majority of modern people cannot see the basic truths that our ancient ancestors knew and that we must know again, about living within the balance of nature.”

Economists studying the “natural capital” of the Puget Sound region estimate the value of ecosystem goods and services at between $7.4 billion and $61.7 billion a year - and that’s a big underestimate.

Robert Costanza, director of the Gund Institute of Environmental Economics at the University of Vermont, explains:

“We live in a complex, interconnected system, and the environment is one of our huge assets. . . Even though this is a gross underestimate of the true value of ecosystem services, it’s far better than counting them as zero, which is what we’ve done in many policies.”

The report is titled A New View of the Puget Sound Economy: The Economic Value of Nature’s Services in the Puget Sound Basin. 

There’s an interview with Michael Pollen at E360 in which he calls for the environmental movement to move from “wilderness” to “sustainability.” This perspective fits with what we’ve argued before (for example, here, here, and here) - that the environmental movement made terrible scientific and strategic mistakes in focusing on saving isolated bits and pieces of environment rather than on overall ecosystem preservation and health.

I’m going to pull out the relevant bits, but be sure to read the whole interview.

“We’ve had in this country what I call a wilderness ethic that’s been very good at telling us what to preserve. . . Essentially the tendency of the wilderness ethic is to write that all off. Land is either virgin or raped. It’s an all or nothing ethic. It’s either in the realm of pristine, preserved wilderness, or it’s development — parking lot, lawn. . .

“I think most environmentalists have in their minds a belief, and it’s vindicated by a lot of what we’ve seen, that the human relationship with nature is zero-sum — for us to get what we want from the natural world, the natural world must be diminished. But go to a really well run pastured animal farm where they’re rotating crops, rotating species, and you will find a place where a lot of food comes off the land, and the land is improved as a result. That completely flies in the face of our tragic understanding of nature. I think it’s one of the great sources of hope. It suggests that there might be ways that we can figure out how to get what we need and not diminish nature.

“So I think we’re undergoing a sea change. I think that environmentalists are recognizing that as important as wilderness is as a standard, as a baseline, sustainability is a very different baseline. I think our focus is moving from wilderness to sustainability. That’s not to say we have to destroy the wilderness to have sustainability. It’s just that, okay, we did that. That was the project that engaged us for 150 years. The project now is very much more the gardener’s project, or the farmer’s project, which is how to use nature without ruining it.”

It’s now been five days since the oil summit at Jiddah - and today (Friday June 27) crude oil rose above $142 a barrel for the first time, touching a record $142.26 $142.93.

Michael Klare says this is not just a temporary crisis. It is the beginning of the end of the Petroleum Age. Many of the giant fields that have satisfied our massive thirst over so many years are experiencing diminished output. And although the major oil producers are spending more money each year to discover new reserves, they are finding less and less oil.

Luis de Souza at The Oil Drum: Europe reminds us the oil crisis is not about global production.  It’s about global exports, which are already declining even if global production is not.

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Mike Davis at TomDispatch takes an even broader view. Our world, our old world that we have inhabited for the last 12,000 years, has ended.

“[T]he Holocene epoch - the interglacial span of unusually stable climate that has allowed the rapid evolution of agriculture and urban civilization - has ended and that the Earth has entered “a stratigraphic interval without close parallel in the last several million years.” In addition to the buildup of greenhouse gases, the stratigraphers cite human landscape transformation which “now exceeds [annual] natural sediment production by an order of magnitude,” the ominous acidification of the oceans, and the relentless destruction of biota.

“This new age, they explain, is defined both by the heating trend (whose closest analogue may be the catastrophe known as the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum, 56 million years ago) and by the radical instability expected of future environments. In somber prose, they warn that “the combination of extinctions, global species migrations and the widespread replacement of natural vegetation with agricultural monocultures is producing a distinctive contemporary biostratigraphic signal. These effects are permanent, as future evolution will take place from surviving (and frequently anthropogenically relocated) stocks.” Evolution itself, in other words, has been forced into a new trajectory.”

John Michael Greer has a great piece at The Archdruid Report (and the Energy Bulletin) exposing the fundamental error that underlies our thinking about our relationship to nature, that has led to our acting as if we are better than and above the natural world, that it’s there to be exploited as a “resource” to serve us.

He calls it the Silent Running fallacy:

“[I]t’s the mistaken belief that human industrial civilization can survive apart from nature. It’s this fallacy that leads countless well-intentioned people to argue that nature is an amenity, and should be preserved because, basically, it’s cute. That sort of argument invites the response, just as stereotyped and more appealing to our culture’s governing narratives, that hard-headed practicality takes precedence over emotional appeals and nature can therefore be ravaged with impunity.

“Yet nature is not an amenity, and the “practicality” that leads current political and business leaders to ignore the disastrous consequences of their own actions doesn’t deserve the name. If anything, industrial civilization is the amenity, and it’s not particularly cute, either. Nature can survive without industrial humanity, but industrial humanity cannot survive without nature[.]“

New satellite photographs show that the destruction of Brazil’s fragile Amazon rainforest has exploded this year.

Click on photo to enlarge

Brazil’s DETER real-time monitoring system found that more than 430 square miles of forest, an area a bit smaller than the city of Los Angeles, vanished in the month of April, while about 2,300 square miles, larger than the state of Delaware, were destroyed between last August and April. That nine-month total surpassed the entire acreage in the Amazon that was destroyed over the previous 12 months. What’s worse, the satellites couldn’t see about half of the forest in April due to cloud cover, suggesting that actual deforestation likely was much greater.

The Amazon’s dry season, when farmers do most of their burning and clearing, starts this month. That means the 12-month total ending in August will surely climb

Illegal logging, soybean farming, and cattle production are responsible for the destruction. Brazil is the world’s fourth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, largely because of deforestation.

The Brazilian government’s efforts to stop deforestation are proving fruitless.