Doom with a view? Trap tightens on our diminishing prospects

Posted on May 15, 2012 by John Gibbons

In the current issue of ‘Village’ magazine, editor Michael Smith has explored at length and in some depth the array of formidable challenges that humanity (and all other species on Earth) face in the years and decades ahead. It’s a glimpse beyond the institutionalised cornucopianism of mainstream economics and the pervasive techno-optimism that insists that, whatever the problem, we can collectively ‘fix’ it, by some ingenious combination of innovation and growth.

But what happens when ‘growth’ is not the solution, but an integral part of the problem? What if our dreams of  a future empowered by glittering and as yet undiscovered new technologies turns out to be a fossil-fueled chimera? Us humans are natural optimists. Two centuries of exponential growth of industrial civilisation has utterly inured us to the fact that growth is, at most, a transient phase in the life of any organism – or society. And so we shuffle towards the era of permanent crises and sharply diminished opportunities, ill prepared for the very different future that awaits…

Michael Smith’s article is reproduced below:

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John Gibbons’ article in the April Village called for recognition that we have moved from an environmental problem for which there might have been a solution to an environmental predicament where we have to accept that there is no solution, and prepare; in a fight, not for sustainability, but for survival. Many informed environmentalists, such as the encyclopaedic Gibbons, to whom I am grateful for a long reading list, have become doomsters. Some are almost competitively pessimistic. On this most important issue for humanity should even sceptics accept we are doomed?

THE PROBLEM

Humanity faces significant challenges and crises in the coming years and decades. The effects of Peak Oil, Resource and Biodiversity Depletion and Climate change are beginning to tell. Whereas these problems are often viewed as problems for the future to be solved by another generation (the refrain is always, “we have ten more years”), it is now clear that these problems are already having an impact. We are already in the age of consequences for our own profligacy.

Of course society at large (from the political classes right down to the man in the street – not you, dear reader) is in denial about these problems – desperately hoping for the best and craving a return to economic growth. This denial is unlikely to be shifted until a major crisis, worse than mere crippling austerity, hits. While no one knows the time or order of crises or where they will fall – banking and the Euro are plausible precipitants – preparation for resilience is imperative.

Doomsters tend to centre on the viewpoint adumbrated by Clive Hamilton, author of the fairly doom-laden, Requiem for a Species: “The truth is green consumerism has made virtually no difference and shifts responsibility from the shoulders of the big polluters and governments that need to introduce the policies onto individuals. Individuals as citizens – that is political actors – can be very effective because it is only through far-reaching mandated policy change that we will get anything like the response we need”.

But what is their case?

THE CASE FOR CRISIS

1) PEAK OIL

Peak oil is a concept devised in 1956 by M King Hubbert who correctly predicted that oil output in the lower 48 US states would peak around 1970. “The existing fields are declining so sharply that in order to stay where we are in terms of production levels in the next 25 years, we have to find and develop four new Saudi Arabias”, according to IEA. Of course, there never will be another oil field found as enormous as Saudi Arabia, let alone four.

Highlighting peak oil poses political dangers since arguing that we are running out of oil just gives oilmen a licence to advance all the unsustainable new techniques they’ve been hatching.

The president of Royal Dutch Shell’s US operations, John Hofmeister, points to the large reserves at the US outer continental shelf, which holds an estimated 100 billion barrels of oil and natural gas. As things stand, however, only 15% of those reserves are currently exploitable. The fast-changing Arctic may yield significant volumes of oil. The Canadian oil sands – a natural combination of sand, water, and oil found largely in Alberta and Saskatchewan – are believed to contain one trillion barrels of oil. Another trillion

barrels of “oil shale” are also said to be trapped in rocks in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. The US federal Energy Administration reckons shale could increase the world’s technically-recoverable gas resources by 50%. The Financial Times considers shale in itself calls into question the assumption of peak oil.

Nevertheless, obviously these reserves present major environmental, social, and economic obstacles to recovery. Their production also require significant amounts of energy. Diminishing energy return on energy invested (EROI) will certainly diminish economic growth, in a world that since the second world war has been dangerously oil-dependent. An overall perspective comes from the Economist magazine which cites a study that “based on an expected 0.9% annual increase in production over the next decade, real oil prices will nearly double”, causing damage that is “modest, perhaps 0.2% of global GDP a year. On the most extreme assumptions, it could be 2% a year”.

Dr Christoph Rühl, chief economist of BP, also doubts the peak-oil hypothesis: Climate Change “is likely to be more of a natural limit than all these peak oil theories combined. Peak oil has been predicted for 150 years. It has never happened, and it will stay this way”. According to Rühl the oil difficulty is about price and not the basic availability.

Optimists assume major investments in alternatives will occur before a terminal energy crisis, without requiring major changes in the lifestyle of heavily oil-consuming nations. These models show the price of oil at first escalating and then retreating as other types of fuel and energy sources are used.

On the other hand, a 2010 report from Feasta, the Irish-based Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability argues that energy flows will falter and that: “there is a high probability that our integrated and globalised civilisation is on the cusp of a rapid and near-term collapse”. What this means for countries like Ireland is that “starvation and social breakdown could evolve rapidly”, according to report author, David Korowicz. A 2010 German army report, drawing upon research by The Risk/Resilience Network and also from Feasta, argues, in the event of energy shortage:

“Investment will decline and debt service will be challenged, leading to a crash in financial markets, accompanied by a loss of trust in currencies and a break-up of value and supply chains-because trade is no longer possible. This would in turn lead to the collapse of economies, mass unemployment, government defaults and infrastructure break- downs, ultimately followed by famines and total system collapse. David Korowicz argues on a more fundamental level that “there may indeed be plenty of fossil fuels left in the ground, but following a major systemic collapse, most may remain there” since the capacity to extract them will be destroyed early on.

While Korowicz’ vision is credible it does not seem probable. Surely humankind has the wit to come back from systemic collapse – even if at devastating cost? There is no evidence that our awareness of what it takes to survive is petty.

Scale of problem: 2 (climate change will pre-empt it and technology will delay it).

2) SPECIES LOSS

Of all the ecological problems humans are so casually generating, species loss is the most clearcut and the most under-recognised. No doubt this reflects Man’s Narcissism. The world is losing species at a rate that is 100 to 1000 times faster than the natural extinction rate and the pace is speeding up. The International Union for Conservation of Nature believes that 25% of mammals now face extinction globally. The WWF’s Living Planet Index (which measures trends in biological diver- sity) found that between 1970 and 2007 global biodiversity had declined by an astonishing 30 per cent. The UN Environment Programme con- curs, adding: “The world is currently undergoing a very rapid loss of biodiversity comparable with the great mass extinction events that have previously occurred only five times in the Earth’s history”.

The mass die-off of the Sixth Extinction that has already spelled the end for vast swathes of the natural world has not – yet – impacted directly on the authors of the die-off, humankind. But since we are perched precariously at the apex of a global food chain it is no longer a matter of if, but when, and just how severe it will be.
Mass extinctions of species have occurred five times previously in the history of the world – the Fifth Extinction was 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs and many other species disappeared. Previous periods of mass extinction and ecosystem change were driven by global changes in climate and in atmospheric chemistry, impacts by asteroids, and volcanism.

Extinction is mainly being caused by habitat degradation, whose effect on biodiversity is worsened by ongoing human-induced climate change. A hundred researchers and policy experts from EU countries met in January to discuss how to organise the future UN Intergovernmental Panel for Biodiversity – an equivalent to the UN panel on climate change (IPCC). They concluded: “The biodiversity crisis – i.e. the rapid loss of species and the rapid degradation of ecosystems – is probably a greater threat than global climate change to the stability and prosperous future of humankind on Earth. There is a need for scientists, politicians and government authorities to closely collaborate if we are to solve this crisis”.

Local manifestations of this are ubiquitous. For example a January New York Times article reports on an eight-country investigation of the fishing industry in the southern Pacific shows how jack mackerel stocks “have dropped from an estimated 30 million metric tons to less than a tenth of that in two decades, perhaps foretelling the progressive collapse of fish stocks in all oceans”.

Scale of problem: 8 (the figures speak clearly for themselves)

3) OCEAN ACIDIFICATION

The World’s oceans are acidifying faster than at any time in the last 300 million years, harbinging mass marine extinction .

In a Columbia University review of hundreds of paleoceanographic studies reported earlier this year in Science journal, a team of international scientists found that a steep rise in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide has driven down pH levels

in the oceans by 0.1 over the last century, to about 8.1, a decline ten times faster than the closest historical comparison — a period of acidification 56 million years ago that triggered a massive ocean die-off. The oceans are vulnerable because they absorb excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, turning the water more acidic, which can inhibit organisms, such as oysters and coral reefs, from forming shells.

“We know that life during past ocean acidification events was not wiped out — new species evolved to replace those that died off,” says Barbel Honisch, lead author of the study. “But if industrial carbon emissions continue at the current pace, we may lose organisms we care about — coral reefs, oysters, salmon”.

While acute concern is justified this and other research makes no attempt to assess the probability of oceanic catastrophe. The Science Article is full of ‘may’ and ‘some’.

Scale of problem: 5

4) CLIMATE CHANGE 
The dramatic party-pooping truth is that the rich West needs actually to REDUCE emissions 90% by 2030 to avert a further rise of more than 1.2°C heat which could cause the Greenland icecap to melt and the Amazon forest to die, precipitating runaway global warming. This is feasible if developed countries peak their emissions in 2015 and decline them by eight or nine percent a year afterwards. Developing nations are morally due perhaps an extra decade before they need to undergo the same decline. We can’t mess around with this target.

According to Kevin Anderson, formerly head of the Tyndall Institute, Britain’s leading climate research centre, 4°C, for example “is absolutely catastrophic”. In fact, according to the latest science, he says, “a 4°C future is incompatible with an organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable”. The International Energy (IEA)’s chief economist, Fatih Birol, believes that with current climate policies the world is “perfectly on track” to cascade through this en route for a six degree calamity, “unless there is a shift away from some of the fossil fuel energy now used for electricity generation and transportation”.

Munich Re, one of the world’s biggest insurance firms and hardly a hysteric, quoted in the Insurance Daily in November 2011 argues that the 2°C-over-pre-industrial-levels target that scientists consider the maximum for containing global warming within manageable limits is virtually no longer attainable. We are already up .8 of a degree. A 2010 Royal Society article by Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows summarises: “The analysis suggests that despite high-level statements to the contrary, there is now little to no chance of maintaining the global mean surface temperature at or below 2°C.

Moreover, the impacts associated with 2°C have been revised upwards so that 2°C now more appropriately represents the threshold between ‘dangerous’ and ‘extremely dangerous’ climate change”. According to the likes of David Roberts writing on the blog site, Grist, today the exact same social and political considerations that settled on 2°C as the threshold of safety by all rights ought to settle on 1°C. Emphasising that we have failed to account for likely emissions from India and China, Anderson and Bows go on: “Ultimately, the science of climate change allied with the emission scenarios for [developing and non-developing] nations suggests a radically different framing of the mitigation and adaptation challenge from that accompanying many other analyses, particularly those directly informing policy”.

While almost all political views on the climate crisis must be discounted for the usual time-serving cowardice, a conservative informed view – albeit weakened by the tempering effect of collegiality – is that of the IEA which overall thinks it is still worthwhile trying to counter climate change. Its director wrote in the OECD Yearbook earlier this year: “The door is closing to achieving climate change goals which limit temperature increases to 2°C, and on our current path by 2017 we will have ‘locked in’ long-lasting carbon-spewing infrastructure unless we change the nature of what is being built between now and then”.

Still, the news for optimists, like you and me, is not good. Global carbon emissions in 2010 exceeded worst-case scenario predictions from just four years before, according to the US Department of Energy (DOE). A rise of 6 percent (564 million additional tons) over 2009 levels was largely driven by three nations: the US, India, and China. Emissions from burning coal jumped 8 percent overall. Most climate modelling scenarios, e.g. the Stern Report – which posited emissions peaking in 2015-16 – underplay the current rate of emissions growth, leading to sunnier-than-justified results.

Optimists need to look at the evidence on the ground: a decade ago scientists predicted the Arctic wouldn’t be ice-free in summer until 2100. But summer ice in the North has rapidly shrunk and today covers 70 percent of the area it did in 1979. Now some scientists think the Arctic could be open water within 25 years. Last August, a team led by the University of York published a study showing that plants and animals are moving to higher elevations twice as fast as predicted in response to rising temperatures. They’re migrating north three times faster than expected, they found. As for extinctions, earlier this year two scientists at the University of Exeter paired predicted versus observed annihilation rates. The real-world rates are more than double what the best computer modelling showed: While the studies, on average, warned of a seven percent extinction rate, field observations suggested the rate was closer to fifteen percent.

What can we do?

The longer we delay the emissions peak the heavier and more precipitous must reductions be. Roberts continues: “How about 2020? Of the available scenarios for peaking in 2020, says Anderson, 13 of 18 show hitting 2°C to be technically impossible. (D’oh!) The others involve on the order of 10 percent reductions a year after 2020, leading to total decarbonization by 2035-45. Just to give you a sense of scale: The only thing that’s ever pushed emissions reductions above 1 per- cent a year is, in the words of the Stern Report, ‘recession or upheaval’. Stern considers emissions reductions of three to four percent a year are the maximum compatible with continued economic growth. The total collapse of the USSR knocked five percent off its emissions. So ten percent a year is like … well, it’s not like anything in the history of human civilization.

This, then, is the brutal logic of climate change: With immediate, concerted action at global scale, we have a slim chance to halt climate change at the extremely dangerous level of 2°C. If we delay even a decade — waiting for better technology or a more amenable political situation or whatever— we will have no chance”. 
The problem with climate change is that it is self-accelerating and non-linear.

Positive Feedback

There are many climate feedback mechanisms in the climate system that can either amplify (‘positive feedback’) or diminish (‘negative feedback’) the effects of a change in climate forcing. For example, as rising concentrations of greenhouse gases warm Earth’s climate, snow and ice begin to melt. This melting reveals darker land and water surfaces that were beneath the snow and ice, and these darker surfaces absorb more of the Sun’s heat, causing more warming, which causes more melting, and so on, in a self reinforcing cycle.

Atmospheric Vapour

As the atmosphere warms due to rising levels of greenhouse gases, its concentration of water vapour increases, further intensifying the green- house effect in a self-reinforcing cycle. This water vapour feedback may be strong enough to approximately double the increase in the greenhouse effect due to the added CO2 alone.

Cloud Cover

Clouds are effective at absorbing infrared radiation and therefore exert a large greenhouse effect, thus warming the Earth. Clouds are also effective at reflecting away incoming solar radiation, thus cooling the Earth. Much research is in progress to better understand how clouds change in response to climate warming.

Permafrost

Another feedback is the melting of permafrost in Northern forest regions such as Siberia and parts of North America, resulting in the release of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and CO2 from soil organic matter.

Ecosystems

Increasing temperatures could cause the dieback of high-carbon ecosystems, such as the Amazon flipping these regions from carbon ‘sinks’ into carbon sources.

Tipping point

A recent article by Jerry McManus on tipping points is illustrative: any one of the positive feed- backs “could be dangerous, but taken all together and greatly magnified by feedback delays measured in decades if not centuries then it becomes clear that the crisis we face completely dwarfs the problem of CO2 concentrations alone. We are altering both the chemistry of the atmosphere and the composition of the biosphere at a rate orders of magnitude greater than that seen in the geologic past.

At this point even cutting CO2 emissions to zero would be woefully inadequate, we would still need to take desperate measures in an attempt to restore the previous balance by putting in place global negative feedbacks. Reforestation, carbon sequestration, cloud seeding, all this and more while at the same time we power down and depopulate to levels last seen many decades ago. Unfortunately, given both the enormous challenge of such an undertaking compounded by the very long feedback delays in the climate system we would probably need to have started such a program many years ago. We may have already passed the tipping point of no return”.

Climatic manifestations
 of Climate Change


Looking at the precise consequences of climate change it is projected by the IPCC, with what is described as medium confidence, that approximately 20 to 30% of plant and animal species assessed so far (in an unbiased sample) would likely be at increasingly high risk of extinction should global mean temperatures exceed a warming of 2 to 3°C above pre-industrial temperature levels. The uncertainties in this estimate, however, are large: for a rise of about 2°C the percentage may be as low as 10%, or for about 3°C, as high as 40%; and depending on biota (all living organisms of an area) the range is between 1% and 80%. As global average temperature exceeds 4°C above pre-industrial levels, model projections suggested that there could be significant extinctions (40-70% of species that were assessed) around the globe.

Looking at Ireland, where already six of the ten warmest years since 1890 have occurred since 1995, as an example: predicted changes in Ireland’s climate as a result of climate change include: By 2050 there will be an increase in January temperatures of 1.5°C and in July temperatures of 2.5°C. Changes in rainfall and precipitation patterns: a marked reduction of between 25% and 40% in summer rainfall is possible, according to predictions, as well as perhaps some winter rainfall increases. The frequency of severe storms coming to Ireland from the Atlantic Ocean may increase by about 15%. There will be an increase in extreme weather events: such as floods, droughts, heat waves etc. Also, rapid ice melt in the Arctic region disrupting ocean currents also increases the risk of severe cold snaps in Europe recurring in the medium term.

Non-Climatic Manifestations
of Climate Change


A) Melting Ice and rising sea levels. Some 4.3 trillion (yes, trillion) tons of ice were lost globally 2003-10. The total global ice mass lost from Greenland, Antarctica, and the rest of Earth’s glaciers and ice caps during the period 2003-2010 was about 4.3 trillion tons contributing about 12 mm to global sea levels. The loss is roughly enough to cover the United States in half a metre of water.

In 2007, the IPCC projected that, during this century, sea-level will rise another 18 to 59 cm. The figures do not allow for “uncertainties in climate-carbon cycle feedbacks nor do they include the full effects of changes in ice sheet flow”. Although the IPCC explicitly refrained from projecting an upper limit of total sea-level rise in the 21st century, one metre is well within the range of more recent projections. Research led by University of Arizona scientists on the impact of this in the lower US, for example, suggests that it would result in Miami, New Orleans, Tampa and Virginia Beach losing more than ten percent of their land area by 2100. After 2100 sea-levels could rise a metre every century.

Meanwhile, a study published in Nature in February provides the first comprehensive satellite analysis of Earth’s melting glaciers and ice caps (and chiming with ground-based measurements) has shocking implications for sea-level rise. Taking Greenland, if global average temperatures reach 1.6 degrees C above pre-industrial levels, its iconic ice sheet probably will tip toward irreversible loss. The rate of ice loss expected for warming of 1.6 degrees is slow, occurring over 50,000 years but, with an existing rise of 0.8 degrees C, global average temperatures already are halfway there. Higher climate-change temperatures would accelerate the process.

The ice sheet could lose 20 percent of its mass over the next 500 years from temperature increases associated with so-called business-as-usual greenhouse-gas emissions through century’s end, on its own raising global sea levels by 1.4m. Complete melting of the Greenland ice sheet, whose thickness mostly extends to 2-3km, or of the Antarctic ice sheet would produce 7.2 m or 61.1 m of sea level rise, respectively. The collapse of the grounded interior reservoir of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would raise sea level by 5–6 m.

“The good news”, according to website Grist, is that the last “Great Dying” during the Permian Extinction 250 million years ago – when 95% of marine life and 70% of land families were killed – seems to have happened “faster than scientists thought, but not remotely what you’d call fast. The greenhouse-gas build-up required to accomplish the near-total extinction of the only known oasis of life in the entire universe took something like 20,000 years. So in order to reproduce the Great Dying, we’d have to keep up our current pace of burning fossil fuels for millennia”.

Overall it seems fair to say that we are seeing technically dramatic but small-scale melting – a half an inch increase in global ocean levels in seven years, but that allowing over two degrees would be disastrous. With business as usual, a six-degree increase and a three-metre rise, much of life on earth would be wiped out.

Scale of problem: 8. Will change pattern of life and human settlement on earth – timescale to be decided.

B) As if melting wasn’t enough, Russian scientists sampling the waters of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf have discovered enormous plumes of methane, some more than a kilometre wide, bubbling up from the thawing seabed. In 2010 Semiletov, an oceanographer from the Russian Academy of

Sciences, In 2010, Semiletov estimated that the emissions of methane — a powerful heat-trapping gas — bubbling from the seabed in this region were about eight million tons a year, but he told the UK’s Independent newspaper that the recent expedition has shown that methane releases could be far higher.

Scale of problem: 2

C) A changing climate brings erupting volcanoes and catastrophic earthquakes too. A recent Guardian article claims that Volcanoes, catastrophic earthquakes and tsunamis – caused by climate change “will shake the Earth”. For example in Alaska, where climate change has propelled temperatures upwards by more than 3°C in the last half century, the glaciers are melting at a staggering rate, some losing up to 1km in thickness in the last 100 years. The reduction in weight on the crust beneath is allowing faults contained therein to slide more easily, promoting increased earthquake activity in recent decades. While clearly melting ice – catastrophic for so many reasons – will tend to generate these disasters the science of correlating them to climate change seems primitive.

Scale of problem: 4 (seismological consequences not understood).

SOLUTION: ADDRESS THE TRUTH

These issues are crucial for life, and therefore have generated many competing interests; but it is madness that so many purport to find it impossible definitively to sift science from politics and propaganda. For many, personal disposition – optimism or pessimism – not a scrupulous quest for truth, seems to dictate the nature of engagement with the Science. In fact the preponderance of research work seems to corroborate the doomsters or at least the practical obsessives. The lesson for those who seek lessons is: pre-empt and prepare, but act now not tomorrow.

Posted in Biodiversity, Energy, Global Warming, Irish Focus, Sustainability | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

An interview with Irishenvironment.com

Posted on April 2, 2012 by John Gibbons

Robert (Bob) Hernan is the man behind Irishenvironment.com, an online resource for all things in the environment and ecology field on the island of Ireland. Bob was formerly Assistant Attorney General in the Environmental Protection Bureau, and his professional scalps include successfully litigating over $100 million in damages against a single corporate polluter. He is, you might say, one tough cookie.

Ireland’s answer to Erin Brockovich divides his time between the contrasting settings of rural Donegal and downtown Manhattan. He is also author of ‘This Borrowed Earth: Lessons from the 15 Worst Environmental Disasters Around the World’.

Bob has conducted a series of interviews for his website with folks involved across the spectrum of environmental issues here in Ireland. He came to see me in Dun Laoghaire recently to record an interview about climate change and wider environmental topics (including communications) and how they are playing out in Ireland (see interview below).

He gave a particular focus to some fairly trenchant criticisms on my part about the failure of the media, both print and broadcast, to fulfil what I believe is their key duty to inform and prepare the public for a world dominated by climate disruption, chaotic weather events and deepening energy and economic crises.

That’s a lot of ground to cover, and since the total edited clip only runs to a little over 13 minutes, there isn’t scope to have gone in too deep on any of them. On the upside, since brevity is the soul of wit, best be brief…

Posted in Global Warming, Irish Focus, Media | 2 Comments

To save lives, we must first abandon hope

Posted on March 27, 2012 by John Gibbons

Below, my article, as it appears in the latest edition of ‘Village’ magazine:

Is it a biscuit? Or is it a bar? Does the convergence of a range of environmental, energy and resource crises compound a problem – or a predicament? The question is neither trite nor trivial.

For the last several decades, environmentalists and scientists alike have attempted to frame our ever-intensifying ecological crises in terms of problems that, with a combination of better technology and increased efficiency, could be managed successfully. Hence the oxymoronic ‘green growth’ and ‘sustainable development’.

Self-help books along the lines of ’50 ways to save the planet’ sell alongside volumes on everything from homeopathy and astrology. As long as we define our existential crux in terms of a series of problems that can be managed, this is a perfectly rational approach.

In a crisis, being able to distinguish between a problem and a predicament can mean the difference between life and death. In simple terms, problems have solutions, predicaments have outcomes.

“When faced with a predicament, seeking a solution isn’t just a useless thing to do; it is the wrong thing to do”, argues Chris Martenson, author of ‘The Crash Course’. Critical time and resources “should be devoted to managing the outcome, not trying to do the impossible…by failing to appreciate the nature of our collective predicament, we place ourselves at greater risk, because the longer we dither, less time and fewer options remain”.

The recent sinking of the Costa Concordia is a case in point. The failure of the captain and senior crew to recognise their predicament (i.e. this ship has a giant hole in it) led to fatal delays in evacuating the vessel. Time that might have been spent getting people to safety was instead frittered away in fruitless discussions between the ship’s crew and its owners. Given the botched evacuation, had this disaster happened further from the shore, the death toll could have run into thousands.

All of which brings us to where we now find ourselves. Unsurprisingly, the world has arrived at precisely the position projected by scientists as far back as the late 1950s, but subsequently established beyond any reasonable doubt: Earth is being rapidly forced into a new, hotter, state.

A massive energy imbalance has been accumulating for decades, like a giant rubber band being stretched ever further. System inertia means that, in the shorter terms, these effects are dampened. At a certain point, however, the system either snaps entirely or recoils with a wallop. When that precise moment will occur is impossible to predict; that it will occur is a mathematical certainty.

What that will mean for those of us living in the era of environmental consequences is difficult to predict accurately; we do know it will be deeply unpleasant and quite irreversible. The fuse that is lit and is now fizzing towards the keg is atmospheric CO2. When instrumental measurement of global atmospheric carbon dioxide began back in 1958, CO2 levels stood at 315 parts per million (ppm). By 2011, levels had climbed to 392ppm – that’s an astonishing 25 per cent rise in a little over 50 years. In Earth’s history, only rare events on the scale of meteor impact have so profoundly altered the composition of the atmosphere in such a short timescale.

These CO2 levels are now higher than at any time in at least the last three million years, and the needle is climbing fast.

On the other hand, the freight train that is industrial civilisation needs to run at ever-increasing speeds, burning ever more resources and spewing out ever more pollution – simply to stave off economic collapse. That’s the predicament. All the wishful green thinking and lightbulb-changing in the world counts for naught when set against these realities.

This April marks the centenary of another famous sinking, that of RMS ‘Titanic’ in 1912. It remains a potent metaphor for hubris and nemesis, and an apposite reminder of the hazards of melting ice.

In that disaster, to save lives, passengers and crew alike had first accept the painful fact of their predicament, and then abandon ship. To save lives, we must first abandon hope, for hope is the mortal enemy of resolve, holding out the chimera of easy fixes to our fathomless predicament.

The battle to ‘save the environment’ has ended. The long campaign to save our own skins has now begun in earnest.

John Gibbons is a specialist environmental writer and commentator and is online at Thinkorswim.ie. Twitter: @think_or_swim

Posted in Biodiversity, Global Warming | Tagged | 5 Comments

A warning from history

Posted on March 23, 2012 by John Gibbons

It’s almost 20 years since the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. This led to the ‘Rio Declaration’ and its 27 Principles, signed up to by the nations of the world amid much pomp and posturing. Later that year, a group comprising 1,700 of the world’s leading scientists, including the bulk of Nobel laureates in the physical sciences, issued an appeal, boldly headlined: Warning To Humanity.

Re-reading this warning letter almost 20 years later, and what exactly has changed? Nothing. And everything. Work through the list below and you will struggle to find any measure (with the possible exception of ozone) which hasn’t sharply deteriorated in the 20 years since this document was first issued. ”No more than one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished”, went the statement.

Two decades have already passed, and how have we responded? First, by adding another 1.6 billion humans to the 5.4 billion the Earth had to carry in 1992. Next, instead of throttling back economic activity to reduce the rate of environmental impact, we have ratcheted up global economic output, as well as greenhouse gas and other toxic emissions to the highest levels in all of human history. ” No nation can escape from injury when global biological systems are damaged. No nation can escape from conflicts over increasingly scarce resources…The greatest peril is to become trapped in spirals of environmental decline, poverty, and unrest, leading to social, economic and environmental collapse”, the document warned.

That was then. The world’s most eminent experts served it up straight. We, the people, and our politicians, pundits and economist classes preferred instead to ‘double-down’ on betting that the short term benefits of economic growth were worth trading off the future safety, well-being, prosperity and perhaps, continued existence of humanity.

So, was it worth it? Posterity will make the final call on that, but the omens thus far are not encouraging. Meanwhile, fasten your seat belts, engage your reality-distortion field and prepare to travel back to a time when the future was, well, still ahead of us and making the right choices still seemed possible, even inevitable.

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HUMAN BEINGS and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring about.

The Environment

The environment is suffering critical stress:

The Atmosphere
Stratospheric ozone depletion threatens us with enhanced ultraviolet radiation at the earth’s surface, which can be damaging or lethal to many life forms. Air pollution near ground level, and acid precipitation, are already causing widespread injury to humans, forests and crops.
Water Resources
Heedless exploitation of depletable ground water supplies endangers food production and other essential human systems. Heavy demands on the world’s surface waters have resulted in serious shortages in some 80 countries, containing 40% of the world’s population. Pollution of rivers, lakes and ground water further limits the supply.
Oceans
Destructive pressure on the oceans is severe, particularly in the coastal regions which produce most of the world’s food fish. The total marine catch is now at or above the estimated maximum sustainable yield. Some fisheries have already shown signs of collapse. Rivers carrying heavy burdens of eroded soil into the seas also carry industrial, municipal, agricultural, and livestock waste — some of it toxic.
Soil
Loss of soil productivity, which is causing extensive Land abandonment, is a widespread byproduct of current practices in agriculture and animal husbandry. Since 1945, 11% of the earth’s vegetated surface has been degraded — an area larger than India and China combined — and per capita food production in many parts of the world is decreasing.
Forests
Tropical rain forests, as well as tropical and temperate dry forests, are being destroyed rapidly. At present rates, some critical forest types will be gone in a few years and most of the tropical rain forest will be gone before the end of the next century. With them will go large numbers of plant and animal species.
Living Species
The irreversible loss of species, which by 2100 may reach one third of all species now living, is especially serious. We are losing the potential they hold for providing medicinal and other benefits, and the contribution that genetic diversity of life forms gives to the robustness of the world’s biological systems and to the astonishing beauty of the earth itself.

Much of this damage is irreversible on a scale of centuries or permanent. Other processes appear to pose additional threats. Increasing levels of gases in the atmosphere from human activities, including carbon dioxide released from fossil fuel burning and from deforestation, may alter climate on a global scale. Predictions of global warming are still uncertain — with projected effects ranging from tolerable to very severe — but the potential risks are very great.

Our massive tampering with the world’s interdependent web of life — coupled with the environmental damage inflicted by deforestation, species loss, and climate change — could trigger widespread adverse effects, including unpredictable collapses of critical biological systems whose interactions and dynamics we only imperfectly understand.

Uncertainty over the extent of these effects cannot excuse complacency or delay in facing the threat.

Population

The earth is finite. Its ability to absorb wastes and destructive effluent is finite. Its ability to provide food and energy is finite. Its ability to provide for growing numbers of people is finite. And we are fast approaching many of the earth’s limits. Current economic practices which damage the environment, in both developed and underdeveloped nations, cannot be continued without the risk that vital global systems will be damaged beyond repair.

Pressures resulting from unrestrained population growth put demands on the natural world that can overwhelm any efforts to achieve a sustainable future. If we are to halt the destruction of our environment, we must accept limits to that growth. A World Bank estimate indicates that world population will not stabilize at less than 12.4 billion, while the United Nations concludes that the eventual total could reach 14 billion, a near tripling of today’s 5.4 billion. But, even at this moment, one person in five lives in absolute poverty without enough to eat, and one in ten suffers serious malnutrition.

No more than one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished.

WARNING

We the undersigned, senior members of the world’s scientific community, hereby warn all humanity of what lies ahead. A great change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it, is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.

What We Must Do

Five inextricably linked areas must be addressed simultaneously:

  1. We must bring environmentally damaging activities under control to restore and protect the integrity of the earth’s systems we depend on. We must, for example, move away from fossil fuels to more benign, inexhaustible energy sources to cut greenhouse gas emissions and the pollution of our air and water. Priority must be given to the development of energy sources matched to third world needs — small scale and relatively easy to implement. We must halt deforestation, injury to and loss of agricultural land, and the loss of terrestrial and marine plant and animal species.
  2. We must manage resources crucial to human welfare more effectively. We must give high priority to efficient use of energy, water, and other materials, including expansion of conservation and recycling.
  3. We must stabilize population. This will be possible only if all nations recognize that it requires improved social and economic conditions, and the adoption of effective, voluntary family planning.
  4. We must reduce and eventually eliminate poverty.
  5. We must ensure sexual equality, and guarantee women control over their own reproductive decisions.

The developed nations are the largest polluters in the world today. They must greatly reduce their over-consumption, if we are to reduce pressures on resources and the global environment. The developed nations have the obligation to provide aid and support to developing nations, because only the developed nations have the financial resources and the technical skills for these tasks.

Acting on this recognition is not altruism, but enlightened self-interest: whether industrialized or not, we all have but one lifeboat. No nation can escape from injury when global biological systems are damaged. No nation can escape from conflicts over increasingly scarce resources. In addition, environmental and economic instabilities will cause mass migrations with incalculable consequences for developed and undeveloped nations alike.

Developing nations must realize that environmental damage is one of the gravest threats they face, and that attempts to blunt it will be overwhelmed if their populations go unchecked. The greatest peril is to become trapped in spirals of environmental decline, poverty, and unrest, leading to social, economic and environmental collapse.

Success in this global endeavor will require a great reduction in violence and war. Resources now devoted to the preparation and conduct of war — amounting to over $1 trillion annually — will be badly needed in the new tasks and should be diverted to the new challenges.

A new ethic is required — a new attitude towards discharging our responsibility for caring for ourselves and for the earth. We must recognize the earth’s limited capacity to provide for us. We must recognize its fragility. We must no longer allow it to be ravaged. This ethic must motivate a great movement, convince reluctant leaders and reluctant governments and reluctant peoples themselves to effect the needed changes.

The scientists issuing this warning hope that our message will reach and affect people everywhere. We need the help of many.

We require the help of the world community of scientists — natural, social, economic, political; we require the help of the world’s business and industrial leaders; we require the help of the worlds religious leaders; and we require the help of the world’s peoples. We call on all to join us in this task.

Posted in Biodiversity, Global Warming, Sustainability | Leave a comment

Shadow of a doubt: how they fooled us about a killer habit

Posted on March 10, 2012 by John Gibbons

Below, my article, as it appears in today’s Irish Times. It’s as much about the ‘Tobacco Strategy’ as smoking. There are lessons that may be useful in facing down the climate deniers. At the very least, it’s good to know their playbook…

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Fifty years ago this week the UK Royal College of Physicians published its landmark report entitled ‘Smoking and Health’. It stated conclusively the cigarette smoking was a leading cause of lung cancer and bronchitis, as well as contributing to heart disease. Public reaction to this bombshell was muted. Some 70 per cent of men were smokers at the time, and the habit was widely socially acceptable.

Few wanted to hear that an enjoyable habit could also be so dangerous. Coming to accept the uncomfortable new facts about smoking would mean for individuals, having to decide if it was really worth the risk. At a societal level, a product that was killing as many as one in two of its customers would at the very least have to be subject to strict regulation.

Then again, in 1962, your family doctor quite probably smoked in the surgery, while his female patients may have continued smoking throughout their pregnancies. That’s how widely accepted and poorly understood the consequences of tobacco consumption were just half a century ago.

The toll, for such a seemingly minor vice, has been astonishing. In the 20th century, around 100 million people died prematurely as a direct result of smoking, with millions more suffering non-fatal illnesses. That’s more than the total number killed in both world wars. The World Health Organisation describes tobacco use as “the leading cause of preventable death in the world”. It is a risk factor in six of the eight leading causes of death globally.

In Ireland, smoking kills up to 7,000 people annually, that’s 35 times more than our total road fatalities. Despite the risks, at least one in four Irish adults still chooses to smoke. Tobacco is also a class issue in Ireland; prevalence among lower socio-economic groups is almost double that of professionals. Some 56 per cent of poorer women under 30 are now smokers.

Medical evidence linking smoking to lung cancer first came to light in Germany in the 1930s. Ironically, the world’s first anti-smoking campaign was run by the Nazi government, while Hitler forbade all smoking in his presence. The tarnished reputation of German scientists meant that little wider notice was taken of these findings.

Then, two decades later, US researchers established a direct link between smoking and cancers in 1953. This breakthrough study provoked a firestorm of media coverage. The tobacco industry was plunged into crisis. Marketing a popular, lucrative product that was suddenly found to be inadvertently causing the deaths of millions of your customers is a nightmare scenario for any business.

The rapid accumulation of hundreds more scientific studies throughout the 1950s confirming the dangers inherent in tobacco products left the industry with a clear choice: either accept the science and agree to more regulation and taxes – or wage war on the science itself. Fatefully, they chose to fight.

In what decades later was described by the federal courts as one of the largest conspiracies to commit fraud ever perpetrated in the US, tobacco industry chiefs called in their PR experts and together they devised a plan to undermine the scientific evidence, befuddle the media and lead the public to mistakenly believe that the “science wasn’t settled”. To succeed, they had to create the impression that many scientists disagreed that cigarette smoking was in fact dangerous.

The blueprint for this widescale deception became known as the ‘Tobacco Strategy’. It was brilliantly successful in delaying regulation of tobacco products because it was at heart simple. The PR strategists recognised that the public has a poor understanding about how scientific or medical understanding is developed and advanced, and crucially, so does the lay media.

“Doubt is our product”, wrote an industry memo from 1969, “since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of facts’ that exists in the public mind”. If tobacco causes lung cancer, why are some smokers unaffected? Why do more men than women get cancer? Why are lung cancer levels higher in some cities than others if it’s really tobacco to blame?

The genius of this tactic is that even though the industry knew there were legitimate explanations for all these anomalies, simply ‘asking the questions’ inferred that these were real scientific controversies. The media was drawn into this bogus debate and began to frame its function as ‘refereeing’ between scientists and industry spokesmen in the newly minted “controversy” about whether or not tobacco causes cancer. The New York Times until 1979 had a formal editorial policy of including tobacco industry comment in every article on tobacco and health.

The tobacco industry also channelled enormous sums of money into biomedical research in an attempt to develop explanations – other than tobacco – for a range of medical conditions. This also allowed the industry to directly fund hundreds of researchers, many of whom would later testify as pro-industry expert witnesses in legal actions.

In the book, ‘Merchants of Doubt’, science historian Prof Naomi Oreskes uncovers how a handful of once-reputable scientists, bankrolled by industry funding and channelled through libertarian ‘think tanks’ and phoney grassroots (astroturf) movements have applied the ‘Tobacco Strategy’ blueprint repeatedly to argue against health and environmental regulations on issues from mercury to acid rain, ozone depletion and, most ominously, global warming.

Conservative Yale economist William Nordhaus recently pointed out that while tobacco sales in the US today are under $100 billion, its energy sector is a trillion dollar business. Since addressing global warming would hit fossil-based businesses, he warned of the need for “extreme vigilance to prevent pollution of the scientific process by the merchants of doubt”.

Evidence of this contamination emerged with the recent leaking of internal documents from the Heartland Institute, a libertarian group that has long fought regulations on second-hand tobacco smoke on the false grounds that it is not harmful. The same group is now, with energy industry funding, seeking to corrupt the teaching of basic science to US schoolchildren as part of its larger war on climate science.

The president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) said recently she was “scared to death” by the success anti-science zealots. “We are sliding back into a dark era”, was Nina Fedoroff’s worrying conclusion. The lessons of the ‘Tobacco Strategy’ brings to mind the old proverb: fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

John Gibbons is an environmental writer and commentator, and tweets @think_or_swim and is online at Thinkorswim.ie.

Posted in Global Warming, Media, Sceptics | 14 Comments

When science and special interests collide

Posted on March 4, 2012 by John Gibbons

Below, my column, as it appears on TheJournal.ie...

Do you reckon GPS is a hoax? How about x-rays? Or satellite communications. Or perhaps the Internet, smartphones or germ theory. Or how about evolution? What these seemingly unrelated themes have in common is that they are just some of the rich fruits of a century and more of astonishing advances in real scientific understanding.

Humanity has achieved more progress, in everything from healthcare and life expectancy to transport and communications, since the mid-19th century than in all of previous recorded history. The reason for this bloom of extraordinary breakthroughs has been the primacy of what’s known as the scientific method.

Until the last century or so, much of what passed for knowledge was in reality little more than old wives’ tales. Dodgy dogma, whether promoted by Popes or princes was, until well into the modern age, more highly valued than knowledge acquired through the meticulous, evidence-based method of measurement, experimentation and systematic enquiry.

What makes the scientific method so uniquely effective in advancing knowledge is its dogged pursuit of provable truths and the ruthlessness with which ideas without evidence are cast aside. Rigorous science is the reason why jet aircraft rarely fall from the sky, and for that matter, why someone can click a button on a computer anywhere in the world and instantly access this article. This isn’t magic, it’s science.

Scientific truths frequently collide with vested interests. In the 17th century, Galileo Galilei famously fell foul of the Roman Catholic Inquisition for his heresy in observing that the Earth was not, after all, the centre point of the universe.

Science once again clashed with powerful interests in the 1960s, following the discovery of strong links between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. This triggered a pitched battle between medical science and the tobacco industry.

Adopting what became known as the ‘Tobacco Strategy’, the industry spent millions spreading doubt and disinformation in a bid to discredit medical science and befuddle the public about the risks of smoking. A favourite tactic was recruiting ‘reliable’ researchers to carry out pseudo-science with the sole aim of at creating a phoney ‘debate’ about cigarette safety. The tactic was enormously effective, and it delayed regulation of tobacco products by decades.

During this time, millions died of smoking-related illnesses, unwitting victims of this industry triumph in undermining the medical evidence. “Doubt is our product,” a tobacco executive cheerfully remarked at the time.

While the tobacco wars have largely ended, a far greater conflict between scientific evidence and powerful corporate interests has erupted. The new battleground is carbon dioxide (CO2), the chief by-product of the burning of fossil fuels.

A massive international scientific effort has focused in recent decades on establishing why the Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate. The findings are unambiguous: the heating is driven by the ‘greenhouse effect’ as tens of billions of tonnes of CO2 from human activities accumulate every year in the atmosphere.

The science is extremely robust. For instance, NASA calculated that around two thousand billion tonnes of ice has melted in Greenland and Antarctica in the last five years. That’s the staggering rate of 45 million tonnes of ice melting every hour, during that period.

The message from science is clear: humanity needs to drastically and permanently reduce the amount of CO2 we emit, or face a climate Armageddon this century. These basic facts are perceived as a real threat by the trillion-dollar fossil fuel industries.

Like the tobacco companies before them, Big Energy is now fighting tooth and nail to convince the public not to trust the hard evidence, and to instead place our faith and our future in the word of paid liars and PR shills.

Big Energy is once more resorting to the favourite route of promoting junk science and phoney controversy, while attacking the integrity of real scientists. Industry-funded neoliberal lobby groups like the Heartland Institute do the dirty work of muddying the water, conning the media and convincing the public that the looming climate catastrophe is just some left-wing alarmism.

The Heartland Institute recently suffered a highly embarrassing leak of internal documents (a disgruntled climate scientist tricked them into emailing him the information). The documents reveal the eye-watering cynicism of these lobby groups and their absolute contempt for science. Apart from funding systematic attacks on science, the Institute is also investing heavily in campaigns to get bogus climate science taught on the public school curriculum in the US.

Nina Fedoroff, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) said last week she was “scared to death” by the success of the anti-science zealots. “We are sliding back into a dark era,” she warned.

Junk climate science attracts a faithful following from people who feel threatened by the message that there are real, immovable limits in the path of irresistible economic growth. Climate deniers come in many guises. RTÉ’s Pat Kenny for instance is Ireland’s best-known advocate of bogus science, offering a friendly ear to crackpot theorists and routinely attacking mainstream science as though it were some vast green conspiracy. “We are all born mad”, wrote Samuel Beckett, “some remain so”.

Posted in Global Warming, Media, Sceptics | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Inside the dark Heartland of climate denialism

Posted on February 15, 2012 by John Gibbons

James Brown put it best in a song: “Don’t tell a lie about me and I won’t tell the truth about you”.

A terrible crime has been committed against the libertarian US Heartland Institute. Someone has nefariously gotten hold of emails of a bunch of its internal documents and, I’m shocked to report, passed this confidential, sensitive information on to bad-minded journalists who specialise in reporting on climate change denialism.

The Heartland Institute is very, very upset (click here for the full teeth-gnashing statement). So much so that it is urging reporters and bloggers to remove the documents from their websites and stop quoting from them, since they “have not been authenticated”. So, dear readers, I guess I should stop writing now, since it would be grossly unfair to report on something that came into the public domain by underhand means, irrespective of its truthfulness or accuracy. When that same something allows us to finally shine a light right into the black heart of corporate-funded dirty denialism, I have two words for those who say I should stop now. Yeah, right.

“Disagreement over the causes, consequences, and best policy responses to climate change runs deep. We understand that,” Heartland wrote. “But honest disagreement should never be used to justify the criminal acts and fraud that occurred in the past 24 hours. As a matter of common decency and journalistic ethics, we ask everyone in the climate change debate to sit back and think about what just happened.” Common decency; did someone just put ‘Heartland Institute’ and ‘common decency’ in the same paragraph?

Oddly enough, its interest in due process, legality and, well, common decency, does not seem to stretch back as far as December 2009. At the time of the Climategate controversy, Heartland commented that the theft of those personal emails created “an opportunity for reporters, academics, politicians” to revise their belief in climate change.

Even better: “Those persons who posted these documents and wrote about them before we had a chance to comment on their authenticity should be ashamed of their deeds, and their bad behaviour should be taken into account when judging their credibility now and in the future”. Hmmm. Shame. Bad behaviour. Credibility. Just three terms the Institute wouldn’t recognise if they bit them on the ass.

So, what exactly have we learned today from the Institute’s little leak? (no illegal hacking and deliberate misrepresentation of a couple of phrases selectively culled from thousands of the stolen private emails of individuals, mind you, just a simple “could you email us those files to this address. Thanks, suckers!“). First, we got lots and lots of names of sponsoring individuals and companies who are quietly chipping in millions annually to keep this propaganda factory running.

Some of the names are surprising, even shocking. Microsoft and General Motors both make great play of greening their business, yet here they are, along with banks and pharma companies funding professional deniers to pass off their lies in the guise of official-looking ‘reports’ and ‘position papers’. The Heartland Institute (HI) was set up in Reagan-era 1984, and has been an enthusiastic defender of the freedom of polluters to pollute, the rich to crush the poor and the wholesale capture of America’s political classes by its plutocratic elite.

Among the phony wars waged by the HI includes a smear campaign attacking controls on the indiscriminate use of the potent insecticide DDT in treating malaria. HI took large gobs of cash from the tobacco industry to gallantly lobby against regulations on second hand tobacco smoke, sponsoring its own ‘experts’ to rubbish the overwhelming medical evidence.

The Institute has been most vigorous in promoting hostility to climate science and scientists, pushing instead its own handful of media trained semi-retired semi-scientists to flood the airwaves and newspaper op-ed pages with serious-sounding sophistry which, when examined closely, turns out to be some variation of the industry-sponsored talking points churned out by the HI and similar neoliberal ‘fact factories’ (“we make our own reality”!).

The modus operandi of HI, the Cato and Marshall Institutes were laid bare in the superb book ‘Merchants of Doubt‘. They wrote: “they realised that if you could convince people that science in general was unreliable, then you didn’t have to argue the merits of any particular case – particularly those that did not have any scientific merit”.

More recently, the HI set up a unit which it funds to the tune of $388,000 a year to fund a network of anonymous ‘friendly’ scientists to comb through the vast output of the UN climate body, the IPCC, in an effort to undermine or discredit its findings. Called the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC – geddit?), it makes no effort in funding actual original research, since it knows this would yield only more unhelpful ‘facts’. It is far better value to pour scorn and spread doubt, confusion and disinformation on the efforts, output and personal integrity of thousands of actual climate scientists working every day in the field.

Not content to simply distort and misrepresent facts, the HI has altogether more ambitious plans, as today’s leaks reveal. They are pouring funding into lobbying to have their propagandist version of climate science taught alongside “actual” science. “Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective”, they point out helpfully. And who better than shadowy fossil fuel industry lobbyists and career liars to entrust our children’s science education to?

The cynicism here is breathtaking: on climate change (“whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy”), climate models (“models are used to explore various hypotheses about how climate works. Their reliability is controversial”), and air pollution (“whether CO2 is a pollutant is controversial. It is the global food supply and natural emissions are 20 times higher than human emissions”). A tissue, in other words, of deliberate lies and distortion wrapped up in the weasel words of “teach the controversy” so beloved of their Creationism fellow-travellers.

Interesting, the HI is concerned that the fracking industry hasn’t been chipping in its fair due towards funding pseudo-science and snake-tongued ‘experts’ and they are high up the target list for potential sponsors in 2012.

One sinister figure known only as Anonymous Donor, has personally chipped in a mid-sized fortune (nearly $9 million) to the HI fact factory since 2007.  Much of this loot is specifically earmarked for anti climate science agitprop. What a freedom-loving (shy) patriot he must truly be!

All in all, it’s been a bad start to 2012 for the climate deniers. Last month, the once-respected Wall Street Journal plumbed new depths with a shabby pieced entitled ‘No need to panic about global warming’, signed by 16 scientists of various hues. Common denominator? Murdoch-owned rag giving space to ‘lunatic fringe’ outlier opinions from scientists who are (a) not actively writing in the peer-reviewed press and (b) six of the 16 take a lot of cash from Big Energy.

As this soggy effort was systematically thrashed by real scientists, it quickly emerged that the WSJ had flat refused to run an op ed on climate change signed by no fewer than 255 of the most prominent practising experts in the field. All 255 are members of the National Academy of Sciences, the US’s most prestigious scientific body. Impressive, perhaps, but not apparently when set against a rag tag of non-specialists which include a retired astronaut, former Republican politician and a retired electrical engineer.

In reality, what was shocking about the WSJ piece was just how limp and leaden an effort it was, cobbled together will little skill and less finesse. 2011 has been a disastrous year for freak weather in the continental US. So too was 2010, come to mention it. The sneering from the neoliberal media is beginning to sound increasingly less cocky and just a bit more desperate as it realises that JFK’s old saw about the hazards of fooling all the people, all the time, is starting to catch up with them.

In this context, the HI leaks are another kick in the solar plexus of denialism. Will it go away then? Hell no. You will always find nihilistic old emeritus has-beens who are quite happy to keep taking the money, and equally cynical bloggers like WattsUp are also happy to have their palms crossed with the tainted cash they so love to accuse scientists of craving.

As the BBC’s Richard Black pointed out earlier, “Heartland is not unique. We still have no idea, two years after its formation, of who funds the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) in the UK, nor what the funders’ motives are”. We do know that Richard Tol, the recently departed ESRI economist with a special axe to grind on climate change, is still listed on the GWPF’s ‘Academic Advisory Council’, in the august company of the usual mixum-gatherum of neocon economists, retired engineers and Heartland-funded scientists, like Australian Bob Carter and the ever-dependable energy industry stooge, Prof Ian Plimer.

The Heartland Institute is very werry cwoss about “criminal acts and fraud” in the last 24 hours. The rest of us should be a lot more concerned about 27 straight years of “criminal acts and fraud” foisted on the unwary world by the Heartland’s libertarian wise guys.

I conclude with a line that became ironically associated with our own late, great kleptocrat, Charles J. Haughey. I offer it here in sincere tribute to the unknown person, (Update: the person who engineered the leak was Peter Gleick, a bona fide climate scientist who, frustrated at the constant attacks emanating from the Heartland Institute, spoofed them into emailing internal documents to his email address. He has paid a high personal and professional price for his actions – the mark of a man of genuine courage who found desperate circumstances pushing him into highly risky action) a real American hero, who managed to coax out into the light of public scrutiny some of the cloak-and-dagger methods being used to silently garrote honest public discourse on climate change, what it means and what response it demands from us:

“I have done the state some service, and they know’t. No more of that.”
- Othello, Act V, Scene II

Posted in Global Warming, Media, Sceptics | Tagged , , , | 10 Comments

Media throws in the towel on coverage of climate change

Posted on January 24, 2012 by John Gibbons

Below, my article, as it appeared in last Thursday’s Irish Times (and fair play to the IT for running a piece that is openly critical of its own editorial policy in this area; that’s the true mark of a serious newspaper).

Still, it’s all a far cry from Monday, December 7th, 2009. On that day, the Irish Times joined 55 other major newspapers in 45 countries around the world to publish an unprecedented joint editorial ahead of the opening of the climate conference in Copenhagen. Who could forget the following dramatic call to arms from many of the world’s most respected newspapers, which began: “humanity faces a profound emergency”.

“Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year’s inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world’s response has been feeble and half-hearted.

“Overcoming climate change will take a triumph of optimism over pessimism, of vision over short-sightedness, of what Abraham Lincoln called ‘the better angels of our nature’. The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history’s judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We implore them to make the right choice.”

That was then. The “calamity…that will ravage our planet…which we did nothing to avert” draws ever closer. But the world’s media, having never encountered a story of the magnitude, complexity or civilization-ending consequences, has quite literally capitulated and walked away from what is, without doubt, the story of the 21st century, or any other century you care to name.

From an objective “news” standpoint, this is bigger than Darwin, Newton, Copernicus, Marco Polo, Martin Luther, the Atom Bomb, JFK, Galileo, Hitler, Stalin, Mao and the Black Death – combined. Yet the news media, having briefly come to its senses just over two years ago, has quickly fallen back into its customary stance, so presciently described by George Bernard Shaw: “Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization”.

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GLOBALLY, 2010 was a year of weather-related disasters on an almost unprecedented scale. Last year was worse, with a record $380 billion in economic losses attributed to ‘natural’ disasters, many climate-related, according to insurance giant Munich Re.

Few experts expect to see any break in this upward trend this year, or any time soon. Instead, as record emissions of greenhouse gases continue unabated, the climate system is now behaving precisely as scientists have been projecting for decades. The rapid build-up of energy in the system is the ‘engine’ that is fuelling extremes, from storms and floods to severe droughts.

This time last January, an area of Australia twice the size of France lay submerged. Last summer, over 3,000 monthly weather records were shattered across the continental US. Meanwhile, Ireland, has endured a series of so-called ‘one in a century’ flooding events in recent years.

Whether or not you choose to ‘believe’ in climate change and what is fuelling it, only the most obstinate or delusional persist in denying that it’s real, it’s serious and it’s getting worse.

Of course, none of this is news. But what is news is that it’s not news. At a time of unprecedented weather disasters fuelled by climate change, the media has, both here and abroad, largely walked away from the story. Given what is at stake, this is a truly extraordinary state of affairs.

RTÉ, under its public service broadcasting Charter, is committed to covering a wide range of areas, from news and current affairs to entertainment, religion, children’s programmes, sport, etc. Nowhere in its extensive Charter is there any mention of the environment.

Indeed, since Paul Cunningham left early in 2011 for a new posting, the position of Environment Correspondent has been “suppressed”, a spokesperson told me this week. This means RTÉ isn’t even considering filling it. It’s simply not a priority for a station with 2,000 staff and a £350 million-plus annual budget. And it shows. November 28th last marked the first day of the crucial UN climate conference. Not alone did RTÉ have no reporter in Durban, the COP 17 conference didn’t even make that evening’s TV bulletins.

Nor is RTÉ alone in throwing in the towel. This newspaper’s environmental coverage peaked in 2007 and 2008, with, on average 6.2 mentions per edition of the phrase “climate change” or “global warming”. By 2011, coverage had slumped to around 1.5 mentions per issue – the lowest level since 2004.

Overall, that’s a 75 per cent drop in coverage intensity in just four years (in contrast, the UK Guardian, with twice the circulation of the Irish Times, gave climate issues seven times greater frequency of coverage in 2011).

The situation is much worse elsewhere, with many media outlets, notably those controlled by Rupert Murdoch, engaging in open ideological warfare against climate science.

Globally, the decline in newspaper coverage is flowing from the top down. The number of newspaper editorials on climate change fell by over 50 per cent between 2009-2011, according to monitoring website, Dailyclimate.org.

Eric Pooley of Harvard University framed the issue like this: “Suppose our leading scientists discovered a meteor, hurtling toward the earth… governments had less than ten years to divert or destroy it. How would news organisations cover this story?”

Even in an era of recession and financial distress they would, he argued, “throw teams of reporters at it”. The race to stop the meteor “would be the story of the century”. The analogy is imperfect but useful. The man-made meteor that is climate change is right on target to render much of the planet uninhabitable later this century. The Harvard study pointed to a combination of ‘climate fatigue’ among editors and editorial cutbacks leading to the loss of specialist, science-literate reporters.

Given the complexity of the issues involved, non-specialist journalists are often easy meat to be drawn into spurious ‘debates’ which give unwarranted airtime to contrarians and industry shills (this is known as bias-in-balance). And, as in RTÉ’s case, without a senior correspondent to guide them, the news desk often simply ducks the story entirely. The lone voices in the Montrose wilderness (Duncan Stewart and Met Éireann) have this in common: neither is on the staff of RTÉ.

Analyst and author, Prof Justin Lewis argues that the media is collectively engaged in “one of the most obstinate displays of inertia in human history, a time when, like latter-day Neros, we fiddle while our planet burns”.

Environmental scientist, Prof Robert Brulle adds: “people take their cues about what’s important from what shows up in the headline of a newspaper”. The decline in public understanding of the gravity of climate change is directly attributable, he says, to decisions being made at editorial meetings every day.

It took forecaster Evelyn Cusack to remind us one evening last September: “climate change is not a matter of faith, it’s a matter of physics”.

- John Gibbons is a specialist environmental writer and commentator and is online at Thinkorswim.ie. Twitter: @think_or_swim

Posted in Global Warming, Irish Focus, Media, Sustainability | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments

Weird weather is our ‘new normal’

Posted on January 13, 2012 by John Gibbons

The folks over at TheJournal.ie asked me to do an OpEd on the ever weirder weather that is now featuring in pretty much every other news bulletin. Turns out that this is one seriously busy website. The posting has been viewed over 7,500 times and has attracted 90 user comments, with the usual generous contributions from skeptics/deniers, who swarm like flies on any article or commentary that dares ‘join the dots’ between weather disasters and the larger picture involving the slow death spiral of our gravely damaged biosphere. The piece is below:

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GIVEN THE DRAMATIC slump in media coverage of climate change compared to two or three years ago, you could be forgiven for thinking that it must all have been a bit of a storm in a teacup, rather like the Y2K panic back in the late 90s. This impression, while understandable, could hardly be further from reality.

The decline in public and media concern about climate change is doubly puzzling, considering that extreme weather events are now occurring with a frequency and intensity greater than at any time in the century and a half for which detailed instrumental global climate records have been tracked.

2011 was a year of unparalleled weather extremes, with heatwaves, droughts, flooding and a host of other ‘natural disasters’ causing record damage from Russia to the US, Australia, across Asia and in Europe.

Ireland, thanks to its maritime location, is buffered to a degree against the most severe weather events, yet even here, disasters like the freak flooding in the Dublin area last October that left two dead and the Dundrum Shopping Centre under water are recurring with ominous regularity.

Across the continental US, almost 3,000 monthly weather records were smashed in 2011. Severe weather events cost the US over $50billion last year. Early in 2011, unprecedented floods in Australia covered an area almost twice the size of France.

In fact, the 13 warmest years since global records began in the 19th century have all occurred since 1998. This year will almost certainly continue this trend. Even though 2012 is only a few days old, this can be predicted with a high degree of confidence. I can also predict that 2012 will see another tumultuous year of weather extremes right across the globe. And next year may well be worse again…

Given that Met Eireann struggles to predict the weather here on this one small island more than a handful of days ahead, how can I be so sure about projections months, even years ahead and right around the globe?

‘The economic crisis has blindsided us to a rapidly unfolding tragedy’

The answer is surprisingly simple: global average temperatures are rising rapidly, and human activities are the main driver. Last year, we pumped yet another 30 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2), a powerful ‘greenhouse’ gas, into the atmosphere.

Year after year, tens of billions of tonnes of CO2 arising from burning of fossil fuels make their way into the atmosphere, where they remain for hundreds, even thousands of years into the future. As this layer of invisible heat-trapping gases thickens, so the global temperature rises, slowly but inevitably.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in its landmark 2007 report, warned that if carbon emissions were not quickly and drastically reduced, the world would face ever-worsening weather disasters, leading within decades towards a global environmental catastrophe on a scale not witnessed in recorded human history.

The IPCC’s warnings have gone unheeded, and carbon emissions are now running at levels well beyond the IPCC’s “worst case” scenario figures, which projected a cataclysmic 4C rise in global average temperatures this century.

The obsession among the media and politicians with the economic crisis has blindsided us to a rapidly unfolding environmental tragedy that is on course to demolish the world economy (which depends entirely on natural resources) and plunge billions of us into crushing poverty as well as drastically diminishing biological diversity on this planet for millennia. Unstoppable sea level rises will, in time, wipe most of today’s coastal settlements from the map of the world.

Scientists have a name for all of this: The Sixth Extinction. The very survival of millions of species now hangs in the balance, chief among them the genus homo sapiens, a young species which has enjoyed global hegemony for barely a hundred centuries (the dinosaurs ruled for an impressive 160 million years).

If this all sounds like the plot from a Hollywood disaster movie, keep in mind that these projections are from the world’s most respected scientific experts and organisations. And they don’t do science fiction.

John Gibbons is a specialist environmental writer and commentator and is online atThinkOrSwim.ie. Twitter: @think_or_swim

Posted in Global Warming, Media, Sceptics, Sustainability | 7 Comments

2011 – another year of living dangerously

Posted on December 22, 2011 by John Gibbons

It’s been one hell of a year for the planet, with the meteorological and climatic record books being re-written and in some cases, thrown away. This year ushered the concept of the ‘new normal’ into being, as US scientists simply ran out of superlatives to describe the rate of change being recorded.

John Vidal, the Guardian’s environment editor, has just published a detailed review of the year. It’s well worth reading, with plenty of useful source links, for anyone interested in getting to grips with the ever-quickening rate of acceleration of ‘weird weather’ phenomena. When scattered willy-nilly across the media, it can be difficult to grasp just how fast this subtle freight train of climate destabilisation is now moving.

We are in debt to the Guardian newspaper for its trojan efforts at covering climate, environment and sustainability issues systematically, rather than reactively, as is unfortunately still the norm right across the Irish media (am I correct in thinking that since Paul Cunningham moved to Europe, RTE simply hasn’t bothered replacing the role of Environment Correspondent? If this remains the case, it is a scandal of myopic incompetence and dereliction of its public service remit to rival the Kevin Reynolds fiasco).

This lack of specialist expertise on the environment beat renders media outlets particularly vulnerable to being blindsided by industry-funded spooks like the Global Warming Policy Foundation and a variety of neoliberal ideologues with personal or political agendas passing themselves off as independent experts.

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THE YEAR 2011 was another ecologically tumultuous year, with greenhouse gases rise to record levels, Arctic sea ice nearly equalling 2007′s record melt, and temperatures the 11th highest ever recorded.

It was marked on the ground by unparalleled extremes of heat and cold in the US, droughts and heatwaves in Europe and Africa and record numbers of weather-related natural disasters.

In addition, 2011 saw the world population reach 7 billion, the second worst nuclear disaster and record investments in renewable energy.

The 41 sea, land and air indicators used by the US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to measure sea and land temperatures showed unequivocally that the world continued to warm throughout 2011. In July, NOAA reported that the last 300 months had all been above average temperature and that the 13 warmest years had all occurred in the 15 years since 1997. 2011 was additionally remarkable, it said, because a “La Niña” event was taking place, a naturally occurring oceanic cooling phenomenon that would normally bring temperatures down.

Despite stagnation or economic recession in many industrialised countries, concentrations of CO2, measured at Mauna Loa in Hawaii, peaked at more than 394 parts per million in May and are now 39% above where they were at the start of the industrial era and approaching the point when some scientists say it will be nearly impossible to contain global warming.

In September, Germany’s University of Bremen reported that Arctic sea ice had hit a record low, based on data from a Japanese sensor on Nasa’s Aqua satellite. Days later, the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre, using a different satellite data set, reported that ice coverage in 2011 was marginally greater, making 2011 the second-lowest on record.

Christophe Kinnard, of the Centre for Advanced Studies in Arid Zones in La Serena, Chile reported in November that both the duration and magnitude of the current decline in sea ice “seem to be unprecedented for the past 1,450 years”.

“Everything is trending up – surface temperature, the atmosphere, and it seems also that the ocean is warming and there is more warm and saline water that makes it into the Arctic. The sea ice is eroded from below and melting from the top,” said Kinnard.

While eastern Europe, Russia, Pakistan and the Middle East suffered the most from weather extremes in 2010, it was the turn of North America in 2011. The continent experienced massive flooding along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, record wildfires and a crippling droughtin the south.

More than 2,941 monthly records for extreme heat and extreme cold were broken in all 50 US states in 2011, said the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The costs of weather-related disasters spiralled. The US experienced 14 separate disasters each costing over $1bn. In total, financial losses were estimated at over $50bn.

“In many ways, 2011 rewrote the record books. From crippling snowstorms to the second deadliest tornado year on record to epic floods, drought and heat, and the third busiest hurricane season on record, we’ve witnessed the extreme of nearly every weather category,” said NOAA spokesman Christopher Vaccaro.

2011 was described by many commentators as the “year of the tornado“. Between January and June, 43 major thunderstorms released nearly 1,600 tornadoes in the central, southern and eastern United States. Half happened in April, and 226 of them on April 27.

But 2011 was also the year of too much or too little water. It began with devastating floods in Australia which covered an area the size of France and Germany combined, and ended with tropical storm Washi killing nearly 1,000 people and making 300,000 homeless in the Philippines.

Thailand’s worst floods in 50 years claimed 730 lives, northern China’s drought that started in 2010 continued well into 2011 and was the worst drought to hit the country in 60 years.

Massive droughts affected some of the world’s richest and poorest communities. The worst drought in 60 years gripped more than 10 million people and led to the death of thousands of people and millions of animals in Somalia and the Horn of Africa.

Meanwhile, Texas was badly hit by heatwaves and drought. The city of Austin had 27 consecutive days where the temperature was over 100F and 90 days in total when it reached that level. The Texas Forest Service said the continuing drought had killed 100-500 million trees, a figure that did not include the ones killed in wildfires that scorched around 4m acres of the state.

The year began and ended with drought and record temperatures in Europe. The average temperature for northern Norway in November was 5.3C (9.5F) above normal, the Danube was at its lowest levels in 60 years, and Germany and much of northern Europe had the driest end to a year since recordkeeping began in 1881.

2011 was also an extraordinary year for major earthquakes. In the seven weeks between 1 January and 21 February, Argentina, Chile, Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Tonga, Burma, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, Sulawesi, Fiji and New Zealand were all hit.

But by far the most damaging quake was the one that led to Japan’s deadly tsunami on 11 March. This killed 15,500 people, caused the meltdowns of three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, and led to 160,000 people fleeing the area or being moved away. By the end of the year, it was estimated to have cost around $210bn in lost production and physical damage. Decommissioning the station is expected to cost a further $15bn.

Arguments still rage over the radioactivity levels, but while the industry, backed by some western commentators, played down the consequences, levels of radioactive caesium were shown to have reached 50m times normal levels off the coast. As 2011 ended, it was still hard to accurately gauge the level of devastation, the amount of the meltdown and the exact radiation levels. Last week, the Japanese prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda, said its owners had at last brought the station into a state known as “cold shutdown”.

One clear fallout of the Fukushima disaster has been European countries turning their backs on nuclear power. Most significantly, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said in May that she would bring forward the phase-out of Germany’s nuclear power stations to 2022.Italians voted overwhelmingly against new nuclear reactors and theSwiss government moved to phase out its reactors.

Now for the good news. In July, the UN Environment Programme announced that investments in renewable energy had grown 32% in 2010, reaching a record $211bn since 2004. For the first time, investment in faster-growing developing economies was greater than that in developed economies.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance said renewable energy investments were projected to double over the next eight years and reach $395bn per year by 2020. The bad news is that the International Energy Agency (IEA) says even this will not be enough to stabilise emissions and controlclimate change.

The IEA’s sense of realism was underlined at the UN’s annual climate conference in December. The talks in Durban, South Africa, avoided a major split between big emitters and others, with an agreement between 194 countries to work towards a legally binding deal to cut emissions in the future, leaving only voluntary pledges in the meantime.

“Without much stronger commitments for the next 5-10 years the Durban outcome will stay nothing more than smoke and mirrors – an illusion of ambition with no real targets or clear timelines,” said Nnimmo Bassey, head of Friends of the Earth International.

Negotiators also concentrated on establishing carbon markets for forest protection and transport.

Conservationists battling the worldwide loss of forests welcomed satellite data from Brazil showing deforestation in the Amazon region had fallen to the lowest level for 23 years. However, new laws were passed in December that, if enacted, will allow ranchers to fell more trees near rivers and on mountaintop watersheds.

Tigers and other charismatic mega-fauna appeared to do better in 2011. Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Laos, Burma and Nepal protected a further 2m hectares of land for tigers. India – which holds half of the world’s tigers – estimated an increase in the population from 1,411 in 2007 to 1,706 today. However, the WWF announced that only 18-22 Siberian tigers remained in the wild in north-east China.

Unexpectedly, a significant increase was recorded in the Virunga mountains that are shared between Rwanda, The Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda. A WWF survey counted 480, an increase of 100 since the last count in 2003.

And in a small triumph for conservation, the UN Development programme declared in December that more than $100m had been raised, mostly by Latin American countries, to temporarily leave in the ground the estimated 900m barrels of oil believed to be below theYasuni national park in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

Posted in Global Warming, Sustainability | 7 Comments

Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will

Posted on December 14, 2011 by John Gibbons

Any lingering sense, however slight, that humanity could shake itself from its collective somnambulation in time to arrest the coming twin ecological and resource catastrophes was finally snuffed out this month in Durban.

Here, the nations of the world in essence agreed to defer commencing discussions to frame a roadmap leading to some more discussions that would begin as a matter of the greatest urgency…sometime in the next seven or eight years. Unless of course there is a Republican back in the White House in the coming years, or the Chinese, Indians or Indonesians decide that Kyoto, or son-of-Kyoto is definitely not for ‘developing’ nations.

And on and on the farce goes. Canada’s Environment Minister, Peter Kent explained earlier today that “Kyoto is not the path forward for a global solution for climate change’”. The alternate path proposed by the right-wing government led by Stephen Harper is to ape the Bush-era US position of making vague promises about future commitments, then walking away when these mean actually confronting the issue of limiting carbon emissions.

Canada has had an extraordinary backwards voyage over the last decade or so, from being vocal proponents of strong actions to limit climate-wrecking carbon emissions to joining the ranks of the energy industry’s most vociferous glove puppets.

What changed Canada so utterly was its decision to intensively exploit the massive Athabasca tar sands for oil production. This at a stroke made Canada global player in the energy market, with proven reserves of ‘unconventional’ (i.e. incredibly filthy) oil greater than Saudi Arabia. The IEA estimates Canada to have 178 billion barrels of recoverable oil buried beneath over 140,000 sq km of once-pristine boreal forests and peat bogs. All the wishful thinking and earnest diplomacy in the world will not alter the simple fact that this oil will be extracted and it will be burned, and let the devil take the hindmost.

The reason I labour the obvious is this: the time for optimism has passed. In truth, that light did not go out in Durban; it has in fact been in a death spiral for decades. It’s almost 20 years since the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. The 27 Principles enunciated in the ‘Rio Declaration’ and signed up to by the nations of the world read, in hindsight, like an elaborate prank. Sustainable development, ecosystem protection, poverty eradication, compensation for victims of pollution… the list goes on and on.

The section dealing with the precautionary principle is worth repeating (Principle 15): “In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.”

I nearly skipped past Principle 8: “To achieve sustainable development and a higher quality of life for all people, States should reduce and eliminate unsustainable patterns of production and consumption and promote appropriate demographic policies”.

If you harbour any remaining doubt as to the capacity of the world’s political leadership to talk pious claptrap, even in the face of imminent disaster, the Rio Declaration is as good a place as any to revisit.

“When faced with a predicament, seeking a solution isn’t just a useless thing to do; it is the wrong thing to do”. So argues Chris Martenson, author of ‘The Crash Course’. “Critical time and resources should be devoted to managing the outcome, not trying to do the impossible…by failing to appreciate the nature of our collective predicament, we place ourselves at greater risk, because the longer we dither, less time and fewer options remain”.

Lest this sounds defeatist, let me put it in an oh-so-familiar analogy: you’re on a luxury liner in mid-ocean. It hits a large object, and is badly damaged, but remains afloat, though there are reports of some flooding in the distant lower decks. The ashen-faced chief engineer reports that the ship will in fact sink, even though it may take several hours.

He is rounded on by the drunken financiers and economists at the bar. “Look around you, man, everything’s fine. This ship is too big to fail. Besides, what if you’re wrong, and you frighten all these good people for nothing. Besides, it’s bloody freezing outside, and I’ll be dammed if you think I’m getting into one of those rickety lifeboats…”

To save lives, they must abandon ship. To save lives, we must first abandon hope, for it is hope that is the enemy of resolve, holding out the chimera of ‘renewable’ or ‘sustainable’ fixes to a fathomless predicament we have, clinging to the guard rails of hope, mistaken for a series of manageable problems.

If only. If only most economists weren’t ideologically blinkered morons (“anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist” – Kenneth Boulding, 1933).

If only governments didn’t consist of spineless politicians badly advised by careerist civil servants and beholden to special interest groups and corporate cash. If only gross income inequality wasn’t so especially toxic to society (“An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics” – Plutarch (46-120 CE).

“It could be said that we (in the developed world) all live like kings, but truthfully, even the wealthiest king of times past couldn’t click on a link, order an item made halfway around the world and have it in his hands the next day”, writes Martenson. “That ability is something the ancient Greeks would have recognised as the power of a god, and so it is”.

The folks at Feasta, the Dublin-based foundation for the economics of sustainability draw their analogy not from Greek but rather ancient Roman tragedy. The fruits of much of their recent labour have been drawn together in a powerful volume entitled ‘Fleeing Vesuvius – overcoming the risks of economic and environmental collapse’.

The Vesuvius analogy is apt. The volume would have sounded rather odd if instead it were titled: ‘Stopping Vesuvius Erupting In the First Place’, since any rational analysis would quickly realise the folly of such an undertaking. And so it is with industrial civilisation. We cannot alter its trajectory in any meaningful way. We can however, make some pretty accurate estimates about that trajectory, if we choose to be guided by the abundant available scientific knowledge.

I wrote about a Feasta paper, ‘Tipping Points’ in the Irish Times in April 2010 and found myself quite convinced by author David Korowicz (his chapter on energy in ‘Vesuvius’ is equally compelling). As I read and re-read ‘Crash Course’, Korowicz’s words about industrial civilisation being propelled along by an ever-expanding consumption of readily available, easily affordable high grade (i.e. fossil) energy were ringing in my ears.

What both sources have in common is the belief that the unravelling of our wholly unsustainable exponential debt-based global economic system is likely to be the trigger factor that sets of the shock waves of cascading failures that ripple, then tear apart, the fabric of a system that is both unknowably complex and self-organising.

“What we now require is rapid emergency planning coupled with a plan for longer term adaptation,” counsels Korowicz. It has been one hell of a ride, but the fact remains that this pleasure cruise is over. It’s time to let go of the comfort blanket of false hope and instead make our way, with great reluctance and resolve, towards the lifeboats, while there is still some time, and while relative calm still prevails.

Adjusting to this predicament is counterintuitive; the temptation to continue trying to wish and will this away is overwhelming but, as I’ve argued here, both unhelpful and futile. Once you accept that the coming storm cannot be headed off, then you start planning to seek shelter and learn to survive the storm and its aftermath, in the best way you can, ideally in the company of other ‘early accepters’.

The fact that I desperately want to be wrong about all this only reinforces my conviction that no, this is indeed how it is. Psychologist John Sharry, also writing in Vesuvius, put it thus: “when we consider the scale of the problems we face, it is easy to retreat into denial or wishful thinking or feel despair, helplessness or hopelessness about change”.

Sharry offers us ‘the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will’ in confronting what lies ahead. It’s not a bad way of squaring up otherwise crippling contradictions. “When we take collective, concrete and constructive action, in the process we generate hope and a sense of movement and possibility.” This can also, Sharry concludes, “counterbalance the cynicism, despair and inaction that could hobble the next generation”.

The hour is late, the road ahead unmapped and uncertain. Let us begin.

Posted in Biodiversity, Economics, Energy, Global Warming, Media | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 11 Comments

Ireland after Durban

Posted on December 12, 2011 by James Nix

After Durban, how Ireland will deliver its 20 per cent emissions cut moves centre-stage.

We need to move quickly from the headline figure to a hard-minded sector-by-sector approach.

The new climate agreement reached in Durban is bitterly disappointing for its lack of ambition, revealing a world held back by the continued foot-dragging of the United States in particular. But at least the Durban deal contains a pledge that all the major polluters will put in place legally binding measures to reduce climate change emissions over the next three years.

The EU already has binding measures in place, and under them, Ireland must cut emissions 20 per cent by 2020. Indeed, Minister Phil Hogan told the Durban negotiations that the Irish Government “is prioritising the climate agenda to ensure that we realise our 2020 climate ambitions and position ourselves on a pathway to a low carbon economy”.

EU law does not specify how that 20 per cent cut will apply in Ireland, but the reality is that we must move very quickly to translate our headline figure into real action in all the key sectors. Agriculture, transport, buildings, waste management and domestic fuel use are central to this effort.

Agriculture and transport between them account for around half of Ireland’s emissions. Agriculture alone accounts for 30% and increased by 0.2% in 2010. The government’s current agricultural policy is set out in Food Harvest 2020. This strategy document envisages a 50% increase in milk output by 2020. Clearly, it will be impossible to reduce or even contain emissions from agriculture if the number of dairy cows increases rapidly over the next 8 years.

There are other goals we can adopt in agriculture. There are strong arguments to increase the income of farm families by adding value on the farm – rather than focusing on the volume of goods produced. In this way there is scope to increase farm revenue without damaging our environment and the longer term prospects for food production. Concentrating on massive hikes in production – as Food Harvest 2020 does – is no guarantee of higher income.

Countries such as Austria are following a different vision to Ireland, working to minimise input costs (such as electricity and diesel), adding value at farm level using direct sales, and encouraging multi-product farming. At the centre of this approach is reconnecting farms and local economies, and the first steps in how this strategy could be applied in Ireland have already been documented.* Work is also slow in Ireland in terms of implementing feedmix changes and the use of biomass, and a greater focus here would deliver progress.

More sustainable transport and better agriculture policy are linked, if indirectly. Nothing damages local producers more than massive out-of-town hyper-markets served by vast expanses of free parking. Sadly, a great part of floorspace in these stores tends to be given over to non-Irish produce, or products with limited country-of-origin information.

In 2009 the Government pledged to introduce minimum car parking charges at retail centres, much like the plastic bag levy. It won’t be a popular idea at the beginning – but it does offer long term dividends. Flagged in the Smarter Travel policy document two years ago, the idea would be to collect 20 to 25 cents for every 2 or 3 hours of parking at major retail outlets where parking is currently free. Again the vision is simple, to nudge us to leave the car behind if we can. If we can’t, the charge is not prohibitive – and it does provide much-needed revenue for public transport alternatives so that we can wean ourselves off our over-reliance on imported oil in the medium to long term.

A step-wise approach should be adopted, introducing the levy first at large retail centres which have more than, say, 40 parking spaces available for free. Some revenue would need to go to back the retailer in the initially period to pay for installing the car park charging system, but over time the money would be sent to local government to provide sustainable transport.

All of our cities are struggling to secure funds for bike-sharing. Dublin has ambitious plans to deliver a 9-fold increase in its programme, but lacks the money. Cork, Limerick, Galway and Waterford are all finding it very tough to even start bike-sharing programmes. In rural areas local authorities must do far more to deliver sustainable transport. At the very least councils need to finance structures so that vetted volunteers can offer lifts to people living in isolated areas, and pave the way for county-wide services over time.

When it comes to cutting emissions from the use of energy in new homes, offices and other premises, we should, within a short few years, only construct new buildings that generate as much energy as is required for their occupation – i.e. carbon-neutral buildings.

For the most part, however, Ireland’s work is in retro-fitting existing buildings, with a document published by the Institute of International and European Affairs in September (“Thinking Deeper: Financing Options for Home Retrofit”) pointing the way in this regard. Minister Hogan controls Ireland’s stock of social housing and can lead the way in this area.

Turning to waste management, EU policy has been shifting for some time, but moved decisively in September 2011. From 2020 only material which cannot be recycled should be incinerated according to the European Commission’s “Roadmap to a Resource Efficient Europe”, a new policy that also applies to incineration with energy recovery. Incineration causes far more climate-altering emissions than recycling.

The most effective policy step to ensure recyclables are in fact recycled is to have incinerator levies. Critically, incinerator levies will help to ensure Ireland does not start burning recyclables only to be forced into a costly switch in direction in 8 years time. The Minister will need to change course here but the cost of not doing so is simply too high.

Applying a levy at the rate recommended by the ESRI (and there are strong arguments that this level is too low), waste fed into an incinerator would be charged at €10 per tonne. There is also no sense in having the ash that comes out of incinerators exempt from the landfill levy. For every 4 tonnes incinerated there is roughly 1 tonne of bottom ash which should, in 2012, be levied at the landfill rate of €65 per tonne. Over the course of 2012 the Carranstown incinerator in County Meath is expected to burn 200,000 tonnes of waste. Unless incinerator levies are introduced for next year, €5.25 million will be turned away from near-empty State coffers over the coming 12 months.

Coal and peat are the most polluting fuels. The failure to apply the carbon levy to both is likely to prove contrary to European competition law – and it means that the carbon levy isn’t really about minimising carbon, but is just another revenue-raising tool. Coal and peat need to be brought within the carbon levy from mid 2012 onwards. This will also give a much-needed boost to the wood sector in Ireland. Much of our private forest stock needs to be thinned out (to allow the rest of the timber to mature properly), and applying the carbon levy to the most polluting fuels will deliver job creation right across this sector well into the medium and long term.

The truth is that no sector can be indulged when it comes to emissions reductions. The recent review completed by Minister Hogan’s own department was downbeat about Ireland meeting its climate obligations under EU law. An attempt to give any sector a ‘free pass’ on emissions would compound the pressure on all other sectors. Cutting climate change emissions requires a hard-minded approach across all policy areas – and soon.

Minister Hogan has deferred legislation on climate change in favour of policy reform – but whether there is in fact commitment regarding policy measures remains to be seen. Certainly, come Ireland’s Presidency of the EU on 1 Jan 2013, Minister Hogan will have not have credibility unless it is clear – sector-by-sector – how Ireland will meet its 2020 commitment.

*Sage, Re-imagining the Irish foodscape, Irish Geography, 2010.

Posted in Global Warming | Tagged , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Phoney war ends as military eyes up new ecological foe

Posted on November 25, 2011 by John Gibbons

Late last year, Village magazine carried a cracking article entitled ‘Our deluded ESRI’, which opened as follows: “Patchy and boosterist forecasting, unquestioning neo-liberalism, an unempirical attitude to science and systemic ambivalence to environmentalism taint the performance of this apparently domestically-unassailable Irish institution”.

The author of that piece, Adrian Kelleher, did a particular public service in deconstructing the modus operandi of the ESRI’s Dr Richard Tol, a chameleon figure who is on the one hand presented as a mainstream ‘climate expert’ (usually by himself, admittedly, and mainly in a pseudo-science known as ‘climate economics’). The busy Dr Tol finds time to also be a member of the grandly titled ‘Academic Advisory Council‘ of a right wing climate denialist lobby front called the Global Warming Policy Foundation. It masquerades as a charity so the identity of its energy industry paymasters can be kept from public scrutiny.

Meanwhile, I am delighted that, after an extended absence from the fray, Adrian Kelleher returns today with the contribution below for ThinkOrSwim:

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At the time of writing Google throws up about 1.43 million pages with the exact phrase “global warming alarmism”, so it is already a cliché. The site Wattsupwiththat alone features alarmism no fewer than 15,200 times, alarmist 6,720 times and warmist on 3,610 occasions. Like the question “how long since you stopped beating your wife?” these words are designed to convey an implication but in a way that evades responsibility.

A typical claim is that environmental NGOs exaggerate scientific facts to try and mobilise opinion. Certainly there are some very unsettling scenarios out there. One study speculated that a “world of warring states” will emerge and that “disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life” with many countries driven to develop nuclear weapons if the uncertainty in current climate projections turns out to conceal powerful feedback mechanisms.

Another pointed out that “lack of access to stable supplies of water is reaching unprecedented proportions in many areas of the world”, that the global food supply is in serious jeopardy and claimed that within 15 years “perceptions of a rapidly changing environment may cause nations to take unilateral actions to secure resources, territory, and other interests”. It only got gloomier from there, stating that “scientists are currently uncertain whether we already have hit a tipping point at which climate change has accelerated and whether there is little we can do … Most scientists believe we will not know whether we have hit a tipping point until it is too late”.

It goes on to project a scenario where, in the wake of a weather event of unprecedented severity occurring within just 10 years, the US president writes in his diary that “the scenes were like the stuff from the World War II newsreels, only this time it was not Europe but Manhattan…”. The fictional president is left to regretfully ponder his own failures: “the problem has been our whole attitude about globalization… we have not prepared sufficiently for the toll that irresponsible growth is having on the environment”. American presidents are not known for placing the words “irresponsible” and “growth” side by side, so do these studies reflect extremist NGOs frightening the public with overblown claims?

The two studies quoted originated in reality within different offices at the Pentagon. They represent the fear among military thinkers that threats to peace may loom that cannot be bombed or shot at. The first was a leaked report prepared by the Office of Net Assessment, a blue-skies intelligence and theoretical think tank at the core of the US military headed by Andrew Marshall who has served eight presidents in the post. The second was “Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World” by the National Intelligence Council.

Marshall, a figure whose public reticence belies his centrality to the American military, has been at the core of US strategic thinking since he worked alongside luminaries like John Von Neumann and John Nash (who was portrayed by Russell Crowe in “A Beautiful Mind”) at RAND in the 1950s and 60s, not to mention the real-life model for Dr Strangelove, Herman Kahn. When they weren’t trying to figure out what percentage society could endure of infants mutated in the wake of a nuclear exchange or how to maximise the number of Soviet fatalities, the RAND faculty made contributions of first-rate importance to economics and mathematics.

Marshall was appointed Director of Net Assessment by Nixon in 1973, where people like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were his protegΘes. There, he took charge of “transformation”, something as sweeping as it sounds: a re-imagination of the military as an information-centric institution which Donald Rumsfeld viewed as his crowning achievement. It’s difficult to imagine someone further removed than the ultra-hawk Marshall, who is 90 this year, from the tofu-eating, kaftan-wearing hippie jealous of “wealth creators” that is sceptics’ stereotypical environmentalist.

The National Intelligence Council is described as a “center of strategic thinking within the US Government” and reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence, a four-star general or equivalent and the USA’s highest-ranking intelligence figure.

Global Trends isn’t the only NIC publication that worries about the strains that global warming will place on world peace. It commissioned a series of reports on climate impacts on developing countries. The one devoted to China cautions that within 20 years water stresses “may impact [its] social, economic, and political stability to a great extent”, notes that it has already experienced more extreme weather events of every kind recently than ever before and that these currently have direct costs of around $30Bn annually.

The military is one of the Republican Party’s most reliable voting blocks. The Military Times conducts occasional surveys of serving troops and its most recent one reported that just 8.4% considered themselves “liberal” or “very liberal” compared with 45.8% who replied “conservative” or “very conservative”. More than three times as many personnel reported being Republican as did Democrat. Officers were even more likely than the average to be Republican and it seems reasonable to assume that this pattern holds true of senior intelligence staff.

In recent years the Republican Party has set itself against the scientific establishment not just in relation to climate change but regarding a whole range of issues. The Bush presidency was accused of manipulating scientific data regarding stem cells, AIDS, homosexuality, deforestation and mining as well as fossil fuel use and its effects.

Why has the US intelligence community not succumbed to the Republican Party’s hostility to climate science? Part of the reason is that it has long and bitter experience of political interference, its effects on the accuracy and credibility of its work and implications for national security, a story that also includes RAND.

In the late 1950s, the collegiate world of American intelligence broke down as senior air force figures conspired with certain Republican politicians to exaggerate Soviet strength. The politicians then used the distorted figures to press for more military funding. Political pressure was exerted on other intelligence sources and their work was subject to constant criticism, causing their assessments in turn to become ever more inaccurate.

RAND was entrusted with optimising the size, structure and doctrine of the USA’s nuclear arsenal but as the figures it was fed grew more unrealistic, garbage in garbage out caused its results to become progressively more misleading. The result was serious damage to the strategic security of the United States, not to mention the waste of vast sums of money on poorly-selected weapons. Much of the wasted money ended up in the hands of corrupt defence contractors that were later shown to have routinely paid bribes at home and abroad, and the episode influenced Eisenhower’s famous farewell speech where he warned of the dangers of the “military-industrial complex”.

The entire process was repeated in the 1970s when Republicans including Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld created a special group called Team B which distorted intelligence about Soviet missile strengths, once again resulting in squandered resources and funds being diverted to counter imaginary threats. The mutual incomprehension between the superpowers that was an enduring, dangerous and destabilising feature of the Cold War was thus aggravated during one of its most tense periods in the early 1980s.

In the run up to the Iraq war, Dick Cheney inserted a political team into the top of the CIA called the Office of Special Plans (OSP). Following a familiar script, the OSP laundered intelligence until it suited the objectives of the administration, showing what Bush and Cheney wanted to be true: that Saddam Hussein had secret nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programmes that threatened the world. Colin Powell was then handed a dossier of phoney intelligence and sent to the UN to justify the invasion.

When he found he had been exploited, Powell was embittered. “There were some people in the intelligence community who knew at that time that some of these sources were not good,” he said later, “…they didn’t speak up. That devastated me”.

By this time, however, the trick was getting old and the CIA soon felt the blowback of public outrage. Repeated exploitation as tools of right-wing politicians caused a backlash among staff. One CIA officer went on the record to describe Cheney’s OSP as “a threat to world peace”, adding that it “lied and manipulated intelligence to further its agenda of removing Saddam. It’s a group of ideologues with pre-determined notions of truth and reality”.

Ironically repeated manipulation of intelligence for political ends may have helped inoculate its intelligence agencies against political illusions. Hard-headed and conservative, they are nonetheless aware of how dangerous the manipulation of their work proved over 5 decades.

Since the end of the Bush administration, which discouraged its discussion, study of the political implications of global warming has exploded in US security circles. The recent quadrennial defence review devoted significant attention to the topic. Even the CIA has opened a centre to study its effects, promising to fast-track declassification of satellite imagery of use to geophysicists when it did so.

While the US military is an especially voracious consumer of fossil fuels, its recognition of the problem’s existence provides environmentalists with a gilt edged debating point in arguments with sceptics. By digesting the issue on conservative terms, it suggests ways in which the cross-party consensus on climate that exists elsewhere might be translated to the USA.

It goes without saying that famine cannot be bombed with precision munitions and missiles are of no use against carbon dioxide. The inescapable logic of US long-term intelligence is that spending on the military should actually be reduced and money redirected to emissions control in order to promote stability.

Another logical conclusion is that while models might place a floor under the cost of impacts, any attempt to put a ceiling to the figure is doomed. To the ‘tail risk’ of so-called black swan events must be added the possibility that even much milder climate impacts could have disastrous results due to the interplay of economic, political and environmental factors. History is replete with cautionary examples of societies such as the Maya or the Garamantes which imploded under environmental pressure.

In recognising that economic growth as the sole and paramount objective of governments could prove a deadly trap they demonstrate political courage their civilian bosses would do well to emulate.

Global Trends 2025 also makes an important leap in considering how future leaders will understand the world. GHG pollution continues to be aggravated at an ever increasing rate with no end in sight. It may be that by 2025 it will be apparent that extreme consequences can no longer be avoided. That would alter the perceptions and behaviour of political leaders in ways it’s hard to imagine as benign. “Unilateral actions to secure resources, territory, and other interests” means war plain and simple — and plausibly within 15 years rather than sometime after mid-century.

If the upsurge in interest in climate change indicates anything, it’s the unreality of much of the climate change debate. For example reinsurance rates are soaring to accommodate anticipated climate related costs and if sceptics really believed in what they said, they’d invest in those businesses, undercut their competitors and make a fortune. It says volumes about the sincerity of their purported beliefs that they don’t. Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no sceptics in insurance.

Likewise, while conservative politicians insist everything is fine the military professionals are preparing for dire implications. This isn’t just purely theoretical, for example designs of ships and aircraft are being re-examined and adapted to withstand more severe weather conditions.

In spite of all this it’s important to remember that alarmists really do exist, frightening the public with propaganda to dishonestly advance hidden agendas. Dick Cheney is chief among them. In fact global warming may be the only thing that does not alarm Cheney, a man inclined to fear that every rock in Asia might conceal a terrorist.

During his time in office he pressured the Centers for Disease Control until it edited to his liking a report to Congress on its health effects, deleting six pages. Not for the first time, he forced his “pre-determined notions of truth and reality” down the throats of the professionals.

Posted in Global Warming, Irish Focus, Sceptics | 9 Comments

Hogan’s U-turn on climate is short-sighted and damaging

Posted on November 7, 2011 by John Gibbons

Below, my article as it appears in today’s Irish Times:

WILL THE real Phil Hogan please stand up? On June 16th last, responding in the Dáil to questions from Sinn Féin’s Martin Ferris on whether climate change legislation was being “put on the long finger”, the Minister for the Environment gave a response that left no one in the chamber in any doubt as to where he stood: “Climate change is widely recognised as the most fundamental and far-reaching environmental challenge to humanity, both globally and nationally.”

When in opposition, Phil Hogan was even more passionate. In the Dáil last December, Hogan offered his strong support for then minister, John Gormley’s carbon budget.

However, as a seasoned campaigner, Hogan warned Gormley there would be concerted attempts to wreck this critical legislation. “I know it was not easy for the ministers to pursue this matter through Cabinet because it is an area with many vested and conflicting interests.” Fine Gael would be “as constructive as always in the climate change committee when the Bill comes before it”.

Gormley was at the time under a ferocious two-fronted assault from the farming and business lobbies, specifically the Irish Farmers’ Association and Irish Business and Employers Confederation. The Green Party’s failure to get climate legislation enacted on their watch was, however, primarily down to their own lack of political nous.

Meanwhile, the Phil Hogan who understood not alone the gravity of the climate crisis, but was also wise to the spin and special pleading from an assortment of lobby groups, has vapourised, to be replaced by his Doppelgänger, Phil “the fixer” Hogan.

Early last month, Hogan and his senior officials took part in a behind-closed-doors briefing organised by Ibec. The meeting, according to Ibec chief Danny McCoy, was “a timely opportunity for our members to influence the development of a climate policy framework”. Understandably, McCoy was “particularly pleased the Minister will be joining us”. In private. No reporters, no notes. Oisín Coghlan of Friends of the Earth remarked at the time that Hogan was running the “Galway tent of climate politics”.

The volte-face by Hogan has been stunning. His capitulation to special pleading by IFA/Ibec is testimony to the power of these unelected bodies in “shaping” legislation before it even reaches the public domain.

The damage from Hogan’s apparent solo run may be far-reaching. Ireland’s most senior climate scientist, Prof John Sweeney of NUI Maynooth, described it as “a really short-sighted decision, showing that political expediency, not vision, is driving policy in Ireland”. Hogan has been “undermined by vested interest groups, this is all just rhetoric and hot air, he’s simply kicking the ball down the road”, Prof Sweeney said. He said Hogan’s move would cost Ireland jobs and further damage our reputation.

One of the reasons Hogan proffered for walking away from Ireland’s climate change commitments is his claim that “food security is being ignored”. To grasp what an astonishingly uninformed statement this is, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation reported recently that climate change posed “potentially catastrophic impacts on food production”. The UN organisation called for urgent measures to mitigate climate change as the only way to ensure food security. In other words, the opposite to what Hogan says.

The spectre of climate disruption is no longer confined to far-away places. The growing impacts are hitting home here in Ireland, years ahead of projections. The upsurge in destructive weather events, including the recent massive flood that submerged parts of Dublin, are harbingers of a rapidly warming atmosphere. A deluge of similar intensity in late summer would wipe out most of the Irish cereal harvest. “Food security” without climate stabilisation is oxymoronic.

On the same morning last week that Hogan’s bombshell was dropped, former president Mary Robinson was pointing out that, left unchecked, climate change could reduce global output by a ruinous 20 per cent. As the authoritative 2006 Stern report on climate economics argued, climate change is like a smouldering fire – the most costly and dangerous approach by far is to just ignore it. This “do nothing” agenda is promoted by an influential cabal of neoliberal economists who support economic growth at all costs.

Robinson also pointed out that emissions from developed countries like Ireland are already wreaking havoc in some of the poorest places on earth. Many Irish people would be horrified to think that one Minister was rewriting the programme for government to put special interests ahead of our moral, ethical and legal obligations. In climate change, as in politics, as we sow, so shall we reap.

Posted in Economics, Global Warming, Irish Focus | Tagged , , , , , , | 25 Comments

Population surge difficult to halt and almost impossible to reverse

Posted on October 31, 2011 by John Gibbons

My article, as it appears in this morning’s Irish Times:

Today, just like every day for the last 50 years, around half a million babies will be born. Every 16 days or so, the equivalent of the population of Ireland is added to our burgeoning numbers. Annually, that’s a new Germany.

Astonishingly, the number of human babies born in just one day exceeds the total number of our closest living relatives, the great apes, alive in the world. Almost all our cousin primates are now in in sharp decline, with some in an extinction spiral. All, that is, except one. Our gain is nature’s pain.

To describe us as super-abundant is a heroic understatement. “Humans are 10,000 times more common than we should be, according to the rules of the animal kingdom”, notes biologist Dr Steve Jones.

Right up to the dawn of the industrial revolution, global population never exceeded 600 million – or less than one tenth of today’s level. Fossil fuels changed all that.

Today, human beings, for good or ill, are the greatest single force of nature on the planet. Our sheer numbers, combined with ready access to cheap hydrocarbon energy, mean we are quite literally reshaping the world. The pace, scale and consequences of this colossal endeavour are becoming ever more apparent.

“Science makes clear that we are transgressing planetary boundaries that have kept civilisation safe for the past 10,000 years. Evidence is growing that human pressures are starting to overwhelm the Earth’s buffering capacity”, according to a recent statement from a group of Nobel laureate scientists. “Humans have propelled the planet into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene – the Age of Man”.

Our hegemony has manifestly not been accompanied by a widespread awareness of the limits of our finite world. Twenty, perhaps even 10 years ago, it could still be argued that we simply didn’t truly grasp that human activity could jeopardise the biosphere as a whole.

Over the last two decades, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has confirmed, with ever increasing certainty, that the by-products of the activity of billions of humans, their industries and their agriculture, are drastically altering the chemical composition of the atmosphere.

The scientific evidence is surprisingly unambiguous: the price of persisting with our current twin trajectory of population and economic grown is a near-certain abrupt ending this century of the benign global climatic conditions that have prevailed since the end of the last Ice Age.

Back in the 1950s and 60s, there were repeated warnings that global food production could not keep up with rapid population growth, and large-scale famines could be common by the 1980s. This didn’t happen, thanks in large part to the ‘green revolution’, which combined new high-yield grains with the massive expansion and industrialisation of agriculture. In short, the process of turning oil into food.

In accepting the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in boosting food output, Dr Norman Bourlag warned: “the green revolution has won temporary success in man’s war against hunger…but the frightening power of human reproduction must also be curbed”. Failure to rein in human numbers and impacts, Bourlag added, would mean: “the (21st) century will experience sheer human misery on a scale that will exceed the worst that has ever come before”.

The geometric nature of population growth makes it extraordinarily difficult to arrest, and almost impossible to reverse. The last population doubling took only 40 years. Even if global population growth rate drops to just one per cent, today’s seven billion would swell to an unimaginable 14 billion in 70 years.

This will manifestly never happen. Already, the biosphere is showing signs of acute system failure. The sequestration of vast swathes of the land surface for agriculture has compromised the planet’s self-regulatory systems. Pollution is further crippling the absorptive capacity of these systems.

More humans and ever more unequal ‘economic growth’ mean less and less space for the millions of other species which comprise the complex interdependent web of life. Levelling the rainforests and overfishing the oceans produces short-term profits for some, but at a fearsome cost to our children’s generation. “We are degrading natural ecosystems at a rate unprecedented in human history”, according to the World Wildlife Fund, which has tracked a catastrophic 30 per cent decline in biological diversity on the planet since 1970.

The convergence of crises that threaten humanity and the wider biosphere are the by-products of an unprecedented spasm of growth, in both population and expectation. Neither is sustainable; in combination, they are lethal. What is truly remarkable is not just that there are seven billion people alive today; rather, it’s the lack of any sense of existential awareness of what this actually means for us all.

Decades of economist-inspired cornucopianism, which enshrined impossible growth as somehow normal and desirable, have numbed us to our predicament. As the US satirist H.L. Mencken put it: “It is the nature of the human species to reject what is true but unpleasant and to embrace what is obviously false but comforting”.

John Gibbons is a specialist environmental writer and commentator and is on Twitter: @think_or_swim

Posted in Global Warming, Irish Focus, Sustainability | 22 Comments