It’s a race to the bottom – we’re winning as the oceans die

Posted on July 9, 2012 by John Gibbons

To me, nothing says summer down-time quite like finding a shady spot on a warm day and settling in for a great read. This year, I had the good fortune of picking two exceptional books – ‘The Ocean of Life’ by marine scientist Callum Roberts and ‘The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars’ by Penn State palaeoclimatologist, Michael Mann. (I’ll post a separate detailed review of the latter presently, and thread it with an intriguing recent appearance on NewsTalk to take part in the eternal: ‘climate-change-is-it-real-at-all-at-all’ debate that continues to rage in the minds of many Irish journalists).

The two styles contrast sharply, yet their conclusions, from widely different part of the scientific spectrum, are eerily similar. While the denial and denigration of science is at the heart of Mann’s book, it also forms a notable undercurrent for Roberts.

“Over the years I have come across spectacular levels of denial among fishing industry representatives…I have seen them dig their heels in to resist regulations that could help fish stocks recover”. Politicians play along to the well-organised fishing lobby. “The relationship between politicians and the fishing industry in the EU has become like that of a doctor assisting the suicide of a patient”, is how he put it. I sincerely hope Simon Coveney reads this too.

World fisheries is now a globalised Ponzi scheme, with the fishing industry wiping out one area after another in pursuit of short term profit, then simply moving further and further afield in pursuit of new stocks. “Over time, fisheries have eaten up their capital stocks rather than lived within the limits of annual production. But fisheries are now failing (globally) because, like in a Ponzi scheme, they are running out of new capital”.

Overfishing and chronic pollution are just two of the threats to the world’s oceans. Global warming is now reaching into some of the remotest corners of the planet, and thousands of feet below the ocean’s surface. Air temperatures on the Antarctic Peninsula have risen an astonishing 11F in the last 50 years, leading to a 90% decline in populations of Adélie penguins on this peninsula.

Roberts explains lucidly how susceptible the seemingly mighty ocean is to surface warming. Much of the deeper oceans contain very little oxygen, and life there depends of mixing of the oxygen-rich surface waters, but the greater the temperature difference, the less mixing occurs, leading to the spread of low oxygen zones, which are deadly to almost all marine life. “Mass die-offs of marine life will become a regular feature of future oceans unless climate change can be halted”, he warns.

The last great warming period to rival 21st century projections occurred at the end of the Permian era 251 million years ago. Runaway global warming meant that “life in the sea suffered the one-two punch of anoxia and high carbon dioxide. It took five million years to recover”.

Ocean acidification is rapidly emerging as a threat to the marine world every bit as potent as global warming is for the land. He recalls the very human story of US marine biologist, Joanie Kleypas, a coral reef expert. While attending a meeting on climate change in 1998, Kleypas suddenly came to the full realisation that the world’s coral reefs could be obliterated by the end of the 21st century. She was so shocked she rushed out of the meeting to be sick in the bathroom. A simple doubling of CO2 levels from today’s values is sufficient to commit the world’s coral reefs, which have survived more or less intact for tens of millions of years, to destruction. We can actually trigger this apocalypse under an IPCC low emissions scenario.

Ocean of Life also gives us a glimpse into the wonders of the oceans. Viruses are the most numerous marine life-forms, outnumbering all other life-forms by 15-1. In total, there are an estimated 4 nonillion viruses in the sea. That’s a four, followed by 30 zeros. If all these individual viruses could somehow be placed end to end, “they would form a thread less than one two-hundredth of the thickness of the finest spider gossamer that would stretch for two hundred million light years.” The thread would stretch beyond the Milky Way and by some 60 adjoining galaxies and countless billions of stars.

As if surface warming, gross overfishing and acidification weren’t enough, the world’s oceans have become giant dumping grounds for millions of tons of plastic and other of our wastes. Plastic doesn’t go away, it just breaks down slowly over time into ever-smaller particles, many of which end up being ingested by various forms of marine life.

Phthalates, polystyrene, PCBs, styrene and mercury (mostly from coal burning) are among the many pollutants that find their way in quantity into our oceans. Some are endocrine disruptors, which are strongly implicated in a range of birth defects (in humans as well as other animals). Noise pollution from shipping, military sonar as well as deep sea surveying is another potent threat to cetaceans in particular, as they depend heavily on sound to communicate, feed, hunt and find mates.

If humanity had consciously sat down to draw up a plan to wipe all life from our oceans, we could hardly have accomplished our task more thoroughly. Species including turtles and sharks that quite literally shared the oceans with the dinosaurs, and who have weathered many disasters over tens of millions of years are proving no match for the most voracious and indiscriminate marine predator in all Earth history, homo sapiens.

Here’s one egregious example: “The carnage wrought by bottom trawling and dredging is multiplied from coast to horizon, and beyond. Virtually nowhere above three thousand feet is spared. Some places get hit once every five to ten years, while places where trawling is unusually intense can be trawled five times in a year”. This translates into almost unimaginable carnage: “more than 15,000 square miles of damaged, dead and dying bottom life every day” Annually, that’s a submarine area one and a half times the size of Europe wrecked. Why? Because we can, and because, for now, it’s profitable.

The scale of our ignorance of the multiplicity of connections in the fabric of life is breathtaking, says Roberts. “It would take a thousand lifetimes of research to figure out all of the ways in which we are affecting the species in an ecosystem of even moderate complexity”, he observes darkly.

The world is, he cautions, living on borrowed time. “We can’t cheat nature by taking more than is produced indefinitely, no matter how fervently politicians or captains of industry might wish it…in essence what we have done in the last few decades is to mine fish, bringing them in at rates faster than they can replace themselves”. The price for today’s greed will be tomorrow’s hunger.

The mind-sets propelling these and related environmental disasters, including the unfolding calamity of climate change, present formidable challenges to any effort to put humanity on path towards sustainability. “We have Palaeolithic emotions, Middle Age institutions and God-like technologies” is how Harvard biologist EO Wilson pithily put it.

Defending nature is critical, even if only to protect our own narrow interests. “Nature conservation is too often perceived as a luxury, a view that has become embedded in attitudes and policies…climate change is exposing the folly of our neglect for the ecological underpinnings of life”, argues Roberts. Phrasing this in more human terms, he suggests that if life were a multinational company, “many o fits subsidiaries would have gone under by now as a result of lost productivity. The whole business would be at risk of failure”.

The crushing irony for the fishing industry is that it is busy putting itself out of business by overexploitation and needlessly destructive and wasteful practices. Saving the fishing industry from itself is almost as formidable a task as wider marine conservation. A World Bank Report confirmed the utter lunacy of current fisheries policy and practice by pointing out that the world’s major fish stocks would produce 40% more if we simply didn’t insist on fishing them to the edge of extinction.

The UN Convention on Biological Diversity set a 2010 target to turn 10% of the world’s oceans into protected areas. To date, the figure is 1.6%. Roberts estimates that, to have any chance of allowing a recovery of our oceans, some 35% of the world’s oceans need to be off limits to untrammelled exploitation.  That puts that paltry 1.6% figure into its correct perspective.

The Ocean of Life is a masterly survey of the systems that comprise more than two thirds of our planet, yet are misunderstood and abused in almost equal measure. Roberts, a professor of marine conservation at York University is a skilled communicator who, unlike so many of his scientific colleagues, is able and willing to connect the dots, rather than simply beavering away at his own favourite sub-specialty.

What this survey reveals is disturbing, even distressing, but rest assured, the Irish public won’t have been unduly disturbed. Total coverage of this landmark publication to date in the Irish Times, Irish Independent, Evening Herald, Daily Mail, Sunday Independent, Sunday Business Post and on RTE radio or television: zero. Among the Irish media I’ve reviewed, only the Irish Examiner and Sunday Times found it worthy of editorial coverage.

As Roberts concludes: “You can’t cheat nature, however good you may be at spinning a story”.

Posted in Biodiversity, Global Warming, Habitat/Species, Media, Sustainability | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Life on Earth now under threat as never before

Posted on June 7, 2012 by John Gibbons

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

WHEN WE put our mind to it, it’s amazing what we can learn to forget. Rio de Janeiro in June 1992 hosted one of the most important international conferences in history, now remembered as the Earth Summit. Some 172 governments were represented in Rio, from all ends of the political spectrum –Fidel Castro and George H. Bush were among the 108 heads of state who took part in this groundbreaking environmental congress.

The conference heard a remarkable address from a 12-year old Canadian girl, Severin Suzuki. She reminded delegates that, as adults, “you teach us how to behave in the world. You teach us not to fight with others, to work things out; to respect others, to clean up our mess. Not to hurt other creatures; to share and not be greedy – then why do you go out and do the things you tell us not to do?” On environmental damage, her message to world leaders was simple: “if you don’t know how to fix it, please stop breaking it!”

The guilelessness of a child’s earnest appeal captured the zeitgeist and helped shape the tone for the 27 Principles of the Rio Declaration, a bold document drawn up to guide humanity onto a sustainable path with the natural systems upon which we depend. Environmental protection was finally to be placed as a key pillar of all future human progress.

Later in 1992, a panel of 1,700 senior scientists issued a public appeal, headlined: ‘Warning to Humanity’. Humans and the natural world are, they warned, “on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment…if not checked, many of our current practices… may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life as we know it”.

The world, it seemed, had at last awoken to the severe ecological threats and was prepared to confront them squarely.

Then, as the years passed by, something truly astonishing happened: absolutely nothing. “Men occasionally stumble over the truth”, Winston Churchill once observed, “but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened”. Yes, UN institutions were built and treaties signed, but in reality the battle between the forces touting bare-knuckle economic growth and those arguing for planetary stewardship for future generations has been a rout.

What followed instead were two decades of relentless resource plunder, habitat destruction and pollution. This unprecedented, prodigal evisceration of the rich diversity of life on Earth has been celebrated as an era of record “economic growth”.

Fast-forward 20 years to 2012. The Rio+20 conference is now just a pared back three-day affair, with little of substance on the agenda and a clear lack of appetite for action, given that growth, at all costs, is being sold as the panacea for our (growth-induced) woes.

A leaked draft agenda for Rio+20 pointed out that: “unsustainable development has increased the stress on the Earth’s limited natural resources and on the carrying capacity of ecosystems. Food insecurity, climate change and biodiversity loss have adversely affected development gains.”

Many of the world’s leaders, from Barack Obama to Angela Merkel, are expected to snub the event. Ireland, which yesterday unveiled a pre-Rio document entitled ‘Sustainable Future’ (long on aspirations, short on binding commitments) is dispatching our accident-prone Minister for the Environment, Phil Hogan to Brazil.

We may as well have sent Jedward. That at least might have persuaded RTÉ that this event was actually newsworthy. Despite its extensive recent coverage of a song contest in Azerbaijan and daily reports from a court case in Mauritius, the station – which last year scrapped the position of Environment Correspondent – confirmed to me that it has “no plans” to cover Rio+20, citing budgetary constraints. It is not about budgets, it’s about priorities.

So what exactly is at stake? A major paper in the science journal ‘Nature’ argued that Earth is on the cusp of one of the greatest ever die-offs. “When we kick over into a mass extinction regime, results are extreme, they’re irreversible and they’re unpredictable”, said Dr David Jablonski of the University of Chicago. Prof Stuart Pimm of Duke University added: “we are living in geologically unprecedented times. Only five times in Earth’s history has life been as threatened as it is now”.

The fact that human activities are propelling this extinction event is in no way reassuring. Just because you pull the trigger doesn’t mean you can stop the bullet. For example, the Greenland ice pack is now losing an average of 250 billion tonnes a year in mass. Beyond a rapidly-approaching tipping point, that entire ice sheet is committed to melting over time, and no force on Earth can prevent it.

A large-scale 2009 study from MIT in Chicago projected, in the absence of policies to drastically reduce CO2 emissions, average global temperature increases this century of 5.2C (with a 90 per cent probability range of 3.5–7.4C). These numbers vary in likely impacts from widespread chaos to an epic extinction event sweeping away most living things.

But are there alternative paths? “Economic growth is mistakenly seen as synonymous with well-being”, according to the prime minister of Bhutan, Jigmi Thinley. “The faster we cut down forests and haul in fish stocks to extinction, the more GDP grows.” Worldwide, fossil fuel subsidies are worth over $400 billion annually, six times more than global spending on renewable energy. Tackling this perverse incentive to polluters alone would be an enormous step towards stabilising the climate system.

Mistaken ideologies and distorted politics make a resolution of our ecological crux all-but-impossible within the prevailing growth-fixated paradigm. “The current political system is broken”, according to the UK government’s chief science advisor, Dr Bob Watson. “Nothing has changed in 20 years, we are not remotely on a course to be sustainable”. In the same 20 years, Ireland’s average temperature has increased by 0.75C, exactly in line with a projected 4C calamity this century.

Tragically, there is little on the table for Rio+20 capable of putting a dent in our trajectory towards global system failure in the coming years and decades. And not only is humanity failing to act, we in Ireland don’t even want to talk about it.

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

Posted in Global Warming, Habitat/Species, Media, Sustainability | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

Pollutant Release and Transfer Registers: A crosscutting international instrument for advancing sustainability

Posted on May 31, 2012 by Mark Keenan

The current global ecological situation is perilous to humankind. Accumulated releases of greenhouse gases (GHGs) are causing climate change and eco-toxic releases are significantly impacting the environment and human health. Global eco-systems and resources are in decline. There is a tool called the Pollutant Release and Transfer Registers (PRTRs) which could provide policymakers with key indicators for measuring progress in advancing sustainability and a green economy. Since its entry into force in 2009, the Kiev PRTR Protocol offers a solid legal framework for enhancing public access to information and for pursuing international cooperation on PRTRs.

The Irish PRTR created by the Ireland’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is available at http://prtr.epa.ie/ and Ireland’s PRTR interactive map is available at http://prtr.epa.ie/map/default.aspx

1. Introduction – environmental degradation caused by industrial processes

Modern industrial society alters the biosphere and causes environmental degradation in three significant ways:

1. Society mines and disperses materials faster than they are returned to the Earth’s crust. Industrial societies have extracted pollutants that were previously stored for millions of years as fuel and mineral deposits.  The extraction and combustion of fossil fuel deposits, such as oil and coal, results in GHG emissions, which contribute to climate change. Many of the mineral deposits are toxic for example mercury and cadmium, basic elements that cannot be broken down into less toxic components.

2. Society produces substances faster than they can be broken down by natural processes and many manmade substances cannot be broken down at all. The chemical industry has created tens of thousands of new man made chemical compounds that are released and leak out into natural systems. The Earth is a critical closed system with respect to matter and in which matter disperses. A number of these chemical substances being released are damaging to humans and to environmental systems. Industrial society is producing persistent artificial compounds and the global eco-system had not previously confronted these substances throughout billions years of evolution. Natural evolution has not equipped humans to deal with these new artificial substances and the significant health risks associated with them. Many of the substances are organic compounds of chlorine, fluorine and bromine and include polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), dioxins, and chlorofluorocarbons. Man made chemicals such as PCBs that do not break down, accumulate in the body and stay there. The term persistent organic pollutants (POPs) refers to substances that are not part of nature, that interfere with organic systems and are not degraded by physical, chemical or biological processes. Even in low concentration POPs can harm humans. The slow movement of pollutants, the accumulation of toxins in the food chain, the emission of chemicals from products and waste, and interactions between artificial and natural compounds can result in uncontrolled environment degradation and significant public health risks. Exposure to chemical pollutants has been documented as playing a major role in determining children’s health. (US EPA, 2002b).

3. Society depletes or degrades resources faster than they are regenerated (for example, through deforestation and overfishing), or by other forms of physical degradation of ecosystems (for example, paving over fertile land or causing soil erosion). As a consequence of the physical destruction of the environment the restorative capacity of eco-systems is being reduced, while the outputs of industrial wastes are increasing. (Broman et al., 2000).

This article describes how Pollutant Release and Transfer Registers (PRTRs) significantly address the points 1. and 2. by offering an established, proven multi-stakeholder mechanism capable of providing periodic and reliable data on releases and transfers of pollutants, including GHGs, heavy metals and toxic chemical compounds. The Protocol on Pollutant Release and Transfer Registers to the Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters (Aarhus Convention), is the first legally binding international agreement on PRTRs and can therefore be regarded as a cross cutting instrument for addressing climate change, heavy metals and eco-toxic chemicals management.

2. Toward ecological sustainability

The conclusion is unavoidable we must transform our industries and align societal processes so that they function in harmony with scientific conditions for sustainability in the biosphere.  To do this we must ensure:

1. Nature is not subject to systematically increasing concentrations of substances extracted from the Earth’s crust.

2. Nature is not subject to systematically increasing concentrations of toxic substances produced by society.

3. Nature must not be subject to impoverishing physical manipulation or over-harvesting.(Web-1) (Web-2)

Material flows must be such that the concentrations of GHGs, heavy metals and toxic chemical compounds produced by society do not systematically increase in the whole biosphere. (Broman et al, 2000). Currently the volume of GHGs, heavy metals and toxic chemical compounds produced by society outweighs nature’s capacity to absorb those materials, see diagram below. Eco-innovation can have the following aims: societal biological flows of matter must be incorporated into those of ecosystems; societal technical nutrient flows of matter must be kept separate from eco systems or societal technical nutrient flows of matter must be gradually reduced in order to enable ecosystems to process them. The volume of natural eco systems should therefore be increased (e.g. planting trees; establishing protected zones).

Balancing material flows with nature’s capacity. The balance of material flows can be influenced upstream by choices regarding designs and production volumes, by societal competence in safeguarding toxic substances and by international cooperation under legally binding international instruments, such as the PRTR Protocol, and the other agreements, such as the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, the Rotterdam Convention on the Prior Informed Consent Procedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade, and the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal.

3. PRTRs for monitoring and publishing data on polluting material flows

In addressing the above challenges the role of scientific monitoring of pollutants and the publication of relevant data on these releases is critical. Information about the amounts of hazardous chemical substances, GHGs and pollutants released to air, water and soil, and transferred off-site for treatment or disposal from industrial facilities and other sources arising from anthropogenic activities is available through national pollutant inventories – PRTRs. The PRTR Protocol to the Aarhus Convention, is the first legally binding international instrument on PRTRs with the objective “to enhance public access to information through the establishment of coherent, nationwide PRTRs”. (Web-3)

What is a PRTR? A PRTR is a publicly accessible register providing periodic and reliable data on emissions and transfers of pollutants, including greenhouse gases (GHGs), heavy metals and toxic chemical compounds.

At the national level, each individual shall have “appropriate access to information concerning the environment that is held by public authorities, including information on hazardous materials and activities in their communities”, and that States shall “facilitate and encourage public awareness and participation by making information widely available”.

Releases and transfers of at least 86 pollutants are covered by the Protocol, including greenhouse gases, acid rain pollutants, ozone-depleting substances, heavy metals, pesticides, PCBs, and certain carcinogens, such as dioxins. Data from point sources and diffuse sources can be entered into the register and is typically gathered and reported annually. Parties to the Protocol are required to work towards convergence between PRTR systems.

Although regulating information on pollution, rather than pollution directly, the Protocol is expected to exert a significant downward pressure on levels of pollution, as no company will want to be identified as among the biggest polluters. The existence of a PRTR can serve as a major driving force for pollution reduction throughout many sectors of the economy. In fact, dissemination of PRTR data has led to competition among generators of hazardous chemicals and/or pollutants to reduce their releases. After all, no one wants to be perceived by the general public as a wilful spoiler of the environment or contributor to possible adverse health effects.

As of 18 August 2011, there were 27 Parties to the PRTR Protocol.  Many more countries are in the process of developing their national PRTR. The Protocol requires each Party to establish a PRTR which is:

  • publicly accessible through Internet, free of charge
  • searchable according to separate parameters (facility, pollutant, location, medium, etc.)
  • user-friendly in its structure and provide links to other relevant registers,
  • presents standardized, timely data on a structured, computerized database;
  • covers releases and transfers of at least 86 pollutants covered by the Protocol,
  • covers releases and transfers from certain types of major point sources
    (e.g. thermal power stations, mining and metallurgical industries, chemical plants, waste and waste- water treatment plants, paper and timber industries);
  • accommodates available data on releases from diffuse sources (e.g. transport and agriculture);
  • has limited confidentiality provisions; and
  • allows for public participation in its development and modification. (Web-4)

PRTRs perform major functions, for example:

  • regularly gather data for major pollutants;
  • reduce costs to government and industry from a coordinated reporting system;
  • hold and manipulate data to allow updating/tracking of releases;
  • provide a portal for information to civil society;
  • provide comprehensive data for reporting on releases and tracking of hazardous chemicals and GHGs and for identifying priority chemicals management areas in national action plans;
  • trigger cleaner production initiatives in industries.

4. PRTRs benefit Governments by enabling Governments:

  • to review the compliance of local facilities with their permit conditions;
  • to track the release of hazardous chemical substances and pollution trends over time;
  • to examine progress in reducing emissions;
  • to monitor compliance and national progress with international commitments;
  • to set priorities for reducing or even eliminating the most potentially damaging releases;
  • to identify priority industrial sectors for eco-innovation;
  • to use PRTR results as one input for assessing risks to human health and the environment;
  • and to help achieve pollution prevention, lessening the burden of control regulations, which require a large bureaucracy to monitor and enforce.

PRTRs also reduce costs to Government and industry by providing a coordinated reporting system.

5. PRTRs benefit industry and eco-innovation. PRTRs benefit both management and workers, through stimulating improved environmental management. For facilities, the exercise of monitoring or estimating pollution levels, as well as their mandatory publication, can encourage efforts to improve efficiency and reduce pollution levels and associated costs. The existence of a PRTR can serve as a major driving force for pollution reduction and eco-innovation throughout many sectors of the economy. PRTR data listing specific industrial processes that produce large quantities of both GHGs and eco-toxic substances helps to identify potential sectors and facilities that may be starting points or priorities for the introduction of technologies for cleaner production, eco-innovation and synergistic processes to reduce co-emissions of both GHGs and eco-toxic substances. Dissemination of PRTR data also enables similar industries to benchmark their environmental performance with other companies in the sector and to reduce releases, thereby saving money.

6. PRTRs serve the general public, citizens’ organizations, researchers and academics by providing access to information on local, regional or national pollution. PRTR data is accessible via the Internet and searchable according to individual facility, owner/operator, type of pollutant and type of activity and environmental medium (air, water, land). The public can use PRTR information to learn about releases and transfers occurring in their communities and to become better informed about the environmental performance of individual facilities and economic sectors. Health professionals can use the information in public health decisions. PRTRs can be a valuable tool for environmental education. Researchers and academics can use PRTR data for modelling or other studies, and the financial sector for evaluating investment proposals or for considering insurance or sustainability issues.

7. International policy frameworks and activities for PRTR development

PRTRs are mentioned numerous times in the Strategic Approach to International Chemicals Management (SAICM) Global Plan of Action, adopted at the first session of the International Conference on Chemicals Management (Dubai, 4–6 February 2006). Specifically PRTRs are mentioned under work areas addressing knowledge and information, work areas addressing governance, and works areas addressing capacity-building and technical co-operation. In addition, the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants endorses the multi-stakeholder approach of PRTRs as an effective mechanism in achieving goals of the Convention.

International cooperation of activities in PRTRs has been extensive through groups such as the OECD Task Force on PRTRs, the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation, and the Working Group on PRTR Protocol to the Aarhus Convention established by the first Meeting of the Parties to the Protocol (Geneva, 19-22 April 2010).

Furthermore, the International PRTR Coordinating Group has been set up to improve coordination between international organizations, governments and other interested parties in their ongoing and planned efforts related to the further development and implementation of PRTR systems.

8. PRTRs as an informational tool for monitoring GHGs

The principles underlying the Aarhus Convention and its PRTR Protocol have special relevance to the achievement of the objective established by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) treaty. The UNFCCC sets an overall framework for intergovernmental efforts to tackle the challenge posed by climate change. The Kyoto Protocol to the UNFCCC establishes legally binding commitments for the reduction of four greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, sulphur hexafluoride) and two groups of gases hydro-fluorocarbons (HFCs) and perfluorocarbons (PFCs). Parties to the UNFCCC treaty and its Kyoto Protocol annually submit to the Secretariat of the UNFCCC their inventory of national greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) of CO2, CH4, N2O, SF6, HFCs and PFCs.

In some countries, the GHG inventory is a comprehensive top-down national assessment of national GHG emissions, and they use top-down national energy data and other national statistics (e.g. on agriculture) to prepare their annual reports. To achieve the goal of comprehensive national emissions coverage for reporting under the UNFCCC, most GHG emissions are calculated via activity data from national-level databases, statistics, and surveys. The use of the aggregated national data means that the national emissions estimates are not broken-down at the geographic or facility level.

The PRTR Protocol, by contrast, requires Governments to collect annual reports on major GHG emissions (among other pollutants) by industry on a facility-by-facility basis and to share this information with the public. All of the substances identified in the UNFCCC and Kyoto Protocol are also contained in the PRTR Protocol’s Annex II list of threshold pollutants.

National registers created under the PRTR Protocol can help countries meet the objectives of the Climate Change Convention in three ways:

  • where GHG emissions data are directly incorporated into a national register, the data can be used to supplement information needed to calculate the national GHG inventory;
  • PRTR GHG data provided on a facility-by-facility basis can be used to cross-check data derived from other sources, and help identify data gaps;
  • GHG data incorporated into a national PRTR can raise public awareness of major emitters of GHGs, and contribute to the demand for improved environmental performance from industry and other sources.

9. Eco-toxic thresholds and the pre-cautionary principle

The concentrations of substances that can be accepted in environmental systems without putting human health and economy at risk in the longer term depend on properties such as eco-toxicity and bio-accumulation.

Annex I of the PRTR Protocol (Web-3) lists Employee thresholds referred to in Article 7  paragraph 1(b) of the Protocol. Annex II of the Protocol lists thresholds referred to in article 7, paragraph 1 of the Protocol for releases to air; to water; to land; for off-site transfers of pollutants; and for manufacture, process or use. Where a threshold is exceeded reporting is required with respect to the facility in question, for those parties that have opted for a system of reporting pursuant to article 7, paragraph 1.

It can be difficult to foresee what concentrations will lead to unacceptable consequences. Due to delay mechanisms the ultimate consequences of the increasing concentrations of the toxic substances in the biosphere are difficult to predict. The pre-cautionary principle is of relevance where there is uncertainty of ecological limits/eco-toxic thresholds.

10. Synergistic solutions that address both GHGs and eco-toxic substances

By identifying through access to reported information, PRTRs help to identify industrial processes (or hotspots) that contribute most significantly to both climate change and eco-toxicity. Utilizing PRTR data to identify the specific industrial processes that produce large quantities of both GHGs and eco-toxic substances helps to identify potential sectors and facilities that may be starting points or priorities for synergistic processes to reduce co-emissions of both GHGs and eco-toxic substances. Eco-innovations, production volumes and societal competence in safeguarding these substances are relevant in reducing concentrations of GHGs and toxic chemical compounds produced by society.

11. Applying PRTRs to track mercury releases and transfers

PRTRs provide information on primary and to a lesser extent secondary anthropogenic emissions of mercury, including fossil fuel combustion installations, non-ferrous metal, cement and pig iron and steel production, waste incineration, primary mercury production, crematoria and mining operations.  Health effects from high levels of exposure to elemental mercury includes damage to the stomach and large intestine and permanent damage to the brain and kidneys.

PRTR data can help identify potential areas and facilities that could be important as examples for reducing mercury releases. Mercury is a natural constituent of coal and there are therefore co-benefits of emissions mitigation measures involving mercury from any sectors that utilise coal to generate energy.

UNEP Governing Council Decision 25/5 (III) specifically requests that an International Negotiating Committee (INC) be convened with the mandate of developing a global legally binding instrument on mercury. The INC should consider inter alia provisions to reduce atmospheric emissions of mercury, to address compliance, to address mercury containing waste and to increase knowledge through awareness raising and scientific information exchange. The INC should also consider prioritization of the various sources of mercury releases for action, as well as the need to achieve cooperation and coordination with relevant provisions contained in other international agreements and processes. Specifically looking to a global legally-binding instrument on mercury, PRTRs offer the potential to:

  • enhance and consolidate national mercury emissions inventories;
  • provide reliable information on anthropogenic mercury emissions at the facility, state (regional) and national level;
  • inform on location and quantities (measured and/or estimated) of mercury used and mercury wastes;
  • identify hot-spots on mercury emissions;
  • provide information on emissions trends over the years;
  • facilitate access to updated information on mercury emissions;
  • facilitate stakeholders involvement through the inherent participation of stakeholders in the PRTR development process;
  • assist countries to comply with foreseen reporting requirements of the treaty; and
  • serve as a practical basis from which the effectiveness of voluntary and regulatory actions intended to decrease mercury emissions can be assessed.

PRTRs do not address natural mercury sources and currently do not comprehensively capture mercury emissions arising from product use and disposal, although efforts have begun on the issue of hazardous substance releases during product use.

With respect to transfers, a fundamental PRTR function is to provide information on movements of mercury from one holder to another, such as from a facility generating mercury wastes to one designed for long-term waste storage.    PRTRs can be foreseen as an integral part of the eventual mercury-emissions reporting and tracking which would be an anticipated element of a global instrument on mercury. (Web-5)

12. PRTR is an indicator for sustainability and the success of a green economy

National PRTR systems monitor and publish data on pollutant releases and transfers for substances of critical importance in sustainable development, such as GHGs, heavy metals and eco-toxic chemical compounds. The PRTR data therefore could be utilized as a science-based indicator for measuring the success of sustainability and a ‘green economy’.

Published data on material flows that are in violation of scientific conditions for ecological sustainability are key indicators for a ‘green economy’ to be truly ecologically sustainable. An indicator set for a “green economy” should be aligned with scientific data on environmental sustainability as a sustainable environment and resource base is required for a sustainable economy. Governments, academia, research institutions, the public, and business driving eco-innovation can utilize the PRTR as a common indicator to inform their strategic goals.

The PRTR Protocol facilitates and requires development toward compatible PRTR systems in different countries. PRTR data are therefore a valid option for inclusion in an indicator set for measuring the success of those ‘green economies’.

Parties to the Protocol on PRTRs recognize that the objectives of an integrated approach to minimizing pollution and the amount of waste resulting from the operation of industrial installations and other sources are to achieve a high level of protection for the environment as a whole, to move towards sustainable and environmentally sound development and to protect the health of present and future generations.

The author Mark Keenan is an Irish environmentalist and Sustainability Consultant. He has worked with the Sustainable Development Council, Ireland and has conducted postgraduate studies in Sustainable Development and Climate Change, and PhD research in National Sustainability Strategy.

References

Broman G., Holmberg J., and Robèrt, K-H. (2000). Simplicity Without Reduction – Thinking Upstream Towards the Sustainable Society. Interfaces: International Journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. 30(3).

US EPA. (2002b). Priority PBTs; Mercury and Compounds. Persistent, Bioaccumulative and Toxic Chemical program. Office of Pollution Prevention. Available at http://epa.gov/pbt/mercury.htm

Web-1: http://www.sos2006.jp/english/rsbs_summary_e/ScienceOnSustainability2006.pdf, consulted 5 March. 2012.

Web-2: http://www.naturalstep.org/~natural/the-system-conditions, consulted 5 March. 2012.

Web-3: http://www.unece.org/env/pp/prtr/docs/prtrtext.html, consulted 5 March. 2012.

Web-4: http://www.unece.org/env/pp/prtr.guidancedev.html, consulted 5 March. 2012.

Web-5: http://www.chem.unep.ch/mercury/WGprep.1/Documents/k10_2%29/English/WG_Prep_1_INF2_PRTRs.doc, consulted 5 March. 2012.

Posted in Global Warming, Irish Focus, Sustainability | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

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 , , , | 9 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 | 9 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