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Dan Brown’s Inferno

Thursday, June 6th, 2013

Dan Brown’s Inferno is now at the top of best seller lists wherever it has been published. A lot of people are going to read it.

Dan Brown’s Inferno could influence millions (wikipedia.com)

Apart from its loving detail of Dante, art, museums, Florence, Venice and Istanbul to support the chase and adventure, it has a very serious central theme: we are rushing toward a catastrophic end to human society as we know it. The amazingly intelligent characters in the book who are worrying most about all of this conclude that human over-population is the underlying cause.

A hard-to-read graph in the book condenses the evidence. It is a compilation of graphs of the acceleration of pretty well everything in the past 50 to 250 years, originally published in The New Scientist on Oct 12, 2008 as a Special Report, entitled How Our Economy is Killing the Earth. You may need library access or a subscription to read the whole report but the link lets you see some of the underlying data. It is certainly worth looking at, for it bears no good news:

Color version of the graph from Inferno (newscientist.com)

To help you read it where the print is too small:
Time runs along along the bottom or x axis – 1750 on the left with 50 year increments to 2000 on the right. The scales on the vertical or y axis are all relative to a low starting point on the left, but of course vary immensely depending on what is being measured, so no numbers are included.

12 measures are graphed, 5 starting in 1750, 4 in 1900, and 3 in 1950. Some graph global data, some are restricted to the USA.

Starting in 1750, and working down, are Northern hemisphere surface temperature (orange), Global population size (red), CO2 level in atmosphere (blue), GDP (dark red), and Loss of tropical forests and woodland (green).

Starting in 1900, and again working down, are Water use (blue), Paper consumption (yellow), Species extinctions (green), and Number of motor vehicles (black).

And starting in 1950, Tons of fish caught (blue), Foreign investment (light grey), and Ozone depletion (dark grey).

Obviously this is an odd graph, for the scales on all of the measures have been adjusted to make the lines coincide as much as possible. But the essential point is still a valid one – all measures increase rapidly, on their own scales, at about the same rate, at about the same time, and none show signs of slowing down.

Although Brown’s characters are convinced that the causal, driving force is the growth of the global human population, the reality is of course a lot more complicated, for consumption and capitalism also do a lot of the driving.

A famous view of Earth, a reminder that population and consumption are only loosely correlated (earthlights.com)

While we wait for the human population to finally level off, we could do a lot to reduce the rate of growth of almost all of the other measures.

Meanwhile, the graph should worry us all. If it looks like we are generally out of control, we are. With luck, some of the people now in power will read Inferno and become infected by its sense of urgency.

Tags: Brown's Inferno, graph in Inferno, human over-population
Posted in Books, Movies and One Aquarium, Global warming, International Affairs | Comments Off

The Revolution Movie

Monday, April 29th, 2013

Rob Stewart has now made another movie, Revolution. He started out intending it to be about save the oceans, but realized the issues were greater than that, and shifted his intent to saving the planet.

Revolution, the new movie by Rob Stewart, (therevolutionmovie.com)

He describes the death of coral reefs, the threat of ocean acidification, the endless use of carbon fuels, the destruction caused by the Alberta Tar Sands, the impact of deforestation, the increase in coastal dead zones, and the occurrence of ‘death by climate change’. He joins and films the growing recognition by people, particularly young people, that action is needed now.

Rob Stewart, film maker and now activist (therevolutionmovie.com)

If you are new to some of this, then Revolution is worth seeing. It certainly has heart. It has won best documentary and audience favorite documentary at film festivals, and it is attempting to have a life in commercial theaters now.

Scattered through the film are some truly unusual and beautiful sequences – a spectacular and poisonous cuttlefish, delicate seahorses clicking their way around a branch of coral, Madagascar lemurs running in their bizarre sideways gallop, reminders of all that we stand to lose.

But a film about saving the planet is the hardest of all to make. The topic is huge, the possibilities for enticing narrative are very limited, the target audience difficult to identify, and the opportunities for depth and insight are limited. Even Al Gore’s famous film Inconvenient Truth struggled with the same problems.

Sharkwater, Stewart’s first movie (sharkwater.com)

Better to focus, I think, on an issue that perhaps represents the whole, but makes story telling possible, and allows time to dig into the issue. Stewart’s first film, Sharkwater, was like that, showing us the beauty of sharks and the ugly practice and devastating impact of shark-finning. It helped, and continues to help, in the efforts to regulate and ban shark-finning, even though the harvest goes on, and sharks remain under threat of extinction. Limited in scope, it is an effective film.

At the end of Revolution Stewart films some of the young people protesting the formal, closed meetings of the climate change conference, COP 16, held at Cancun in 2010. Their concerns were real, justified, and ignored, and emotions ran high.

COP 16 had many thousands of delegates, and no impact (cop16.com)

This was just another protest, however, and not the beginning of any bottom-up revolution. The world continues with business-as-usual, unconvinced that catastrophe lies ahead, irritated with unpragmatic environmentalists.

Except that the predicted human upheaval and global insecurity associated with climate change are now worrying military and intelligence communities, as well as The World Bank. They are considering the probable yet somehow unthinkable consequences of the global temperature rising by 4 degrees, which is where we are headed unless major reductions are made in our CO2 emissions. This is an odd kind of hope – top-down ‘revolution’ is hardly an attractive prospect.

Placard at COP16 – frustration with inertia

The best advice remains, as Will Rogers once said, and Bill McKibbon quotes concerning our current carbon-fueled rush toward a 4 degree increase: If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

Tags: climate change movie, Revolution movie, Rob Stewart, Sharkwater
Posted in Books, Movies and One Aquarium, Global warming, Mitigating climate change | Comments Off

Mitigation Still Has a Pulse

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2013

Finally, in his inauguration speech, President Obama spoke some of the words we so badly need to hear from him: “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.”

Given the Congress he has been dealt, there is little that he can actually do that requires Congressional approval. But those working at other levels of government should feel reassured.

And there are critical initiatives at other levels, planning various efforts to mitigate climate change, not just adapt to it with fortifications.

The principle of cap-and -trade is simple. Making it work in the real world can be very complicated (climatepedia.org).

Both the State California and the Province of Quebec have now instituted cap-and-trade policies to try to curb carbon emissions. Cap-and-trade may not be everyone’s preferred approach to mitigation, but it is a start, and the two jurisdictions are attempting a concerted effort – in itself an important event.

Governors of some states – New York and New Jersey, so battered by Hurricane Sandy come to mind – are determined to protect their coasts from the predicted greater storms accompanying climate change, and they are also exploring mitigation, seeking ways to reduce carbon emissions.

Hurricane Sandy was the largest hurricane yet seen (telegraph.co.uk)

But what if a state governor or provincial premier provides no leadership, or even worse, like Governor Rick Scott of Florida, still denies that climate change is human-caused? The four counties of southeast Florida provide us with a remarkable model for response.

The counties are Monroe (includes Key West and the Everglades), Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach. Five million people live there, responsible for 37% of the state economy. Political leaders from both political parties have formed the Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact, ratified by all four counties in late 2009 and early 2010. Last month they held their 4th annual meeting.

Using the best science available, they are responding to what is already happening and preparing for what’s ahead. Rising sea level, salt-water intrusion into underground aquifers and increased violence of storms bashing the coast are their major concerns. And they should be concerned – all the maps of rising sea level indicate that southeast Florida is one of the most vulnerable regions in the US.

Southeast Florida is particularly vulnerable to sea level rise

Although adaptive engineering (raised and rerouted roads, pumps on canals, protected buffer areas to create resilience) understandably dominate their plans, they also plan to reduce carbon emissions and to create and encourage rapid public transit. Most importantly, though, they show us that significant action can occur at the county level.

Probably the most effective of all the initiatives are occurring at the city level. The World Mayors Council on Climate Change emphasizes initiatives to reduce carbon emissions. At their meeting three months ago, chaired by the mayor of Seoul, they said the appropriate things, but many of the 260 cities represented are small, and real action is limited. Still, the Council is an important one if only for political reasons.

The most impressive global organization though is C40 Cities Climate Change Leadership Group. Membership in C40 depends on the existence of actual action to mitigate carbon emissions. The mayors of the 63 included megacities and innovator cities share efforts to reduce carbon emissions, providing models for other cities and national governments. This month Vancouver, Oslo, Venice and Washington,D.C. were invited to join.

As NYC Mayor Bloomberg points out, city government has the ability to be ‘nimble’, able to take action quickly.

Adaptation to climate change of course remains essential everywhere on the planet. But mitigation of carbon emissions is not a futile hope. President Obama may not be able to deliver Congressional action to reduce carbon emissions, but he can encourage nimbleness at the state, county and city level. His endorsement can only help.

Now we have to find some way to encourage Canada’s Prime Minister Harper to say something helpful.

Tags: C40 Cities Climate Change Leadership Group, California cap and trade, mitigation of climate change, Quebec cap and trade, reducing carbon emissions, Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact, World Mayors Council on Climate Change
Posted in Adapting to climate change, Global warming, International Affairs, Mitigating climate change | Comments Off

Chasing Ice

Friday, December 21st, 2012

At the culmination of the documentary movie Chasing Ice there is a striking time-lapse sequence, covering three years in a couple of minutes, of glaciers retreating and collapsing.

Almost all the glaciers on the planet are in retreat – we’ve known this for years – but still the images are impressive, and those of the collapse are new. The glacier lying before us appears to deflate, leaving a pile of dirty rubble on the ground.

Huge icebergs break off from the Greenland ice sheet, while the glaciers retreat at an ever faster rate (chasingice.com)

Chasing Ice has played in theaters in many North American cities throughout the autumn and will continue to do so through much of the winter. James Balog, who made this movie, thinks – hopes? – that seeing his images will make climate change appear more real to us, and maybe even prod us into action.

Will anyone not already convinced of the reality of a warming planet go to see the movie? I hope so.

Melting glaciers in Tibet will result in short-term flooding and then long-term drought in China and northern India (the hindu.com)

Chasing Ice isn’t quite a great movie, though it is long-listed for an Academy Award. It lacks the rich data and fine graphics of Al Gore’s Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth that upset so many people. It also lacks the human drama of Ric O’Barry’s Oscar-winning The Cove. But it is interesting enough, and some of it is quite arresting. It is worth seeing.

If we experience evidence of global warming directly, as many did with the wave surge of Hurricane Sandy, perhaps then we will be convinced to act. In Chasing Ice we follow one man’s obsession with showing some of the other evidence of global warming. Like most documentary movies it was made to try to disturb us, to engage us more emotionally.

Seeing it happen on film is not the same as experiencing it, of course. On the other hand, watching a glacier retreat in real time is less than a gripping experience. Seeing it in time-lapse turns it into the real drama that it is.

This movie can only help.

Even a single picture can have a powerful impact: in 2012 the Arctic ice cap melted further than ever on record, to half of what it was 20 years ago (wunderground.org)

Tags: Chasing Ice, Global warming, retreating glaciers
Posted in Arctic Issues, Books, Movies and One Aquarium, Global warming | Comments Off

Hurricane Sandy’s Sea Change

Tuesday, November 6th, 2012

Now, after Hurricane Sandy, some of our political leaders are finally speaking up more clearly about the impact of climate change.

The conversation is not just about restoring all that was damaged along the shores of New Jersey, Connecticut and Long Island, and in lower Manhattan and in the surrounding boroughs.

It is also about preparing for more storms like Sandy, adapting to the new reality of higher sea levels, warmer sea surface temperatures, bigger storms, and more frequent ones. Finally.

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said more than a year ago that he recognized that climate change is real and that human activity plays a role in these changes.

This week he said “I don’t believe in a state like ours, where the Jersey Shore is such a part of life, that you just pick up and walk away.” But then he still raised the possibility that homeowners in hard-hit coastal areas could decide to sell their property to the state for conservation.

Surfers Point, Ventura, CA is now protected by ‘managed retreat’(noaa.org)

Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, in response to Sandy said “…I think part of learning from this is the recognition that climate change is a reality. Extreme weather is a reality. It is a reality that we are vulnerable.”

And Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of NYC, wrote concerning Sandy: “Our climate is changing. And while the increase in extreme weather we have experienced in New York City and around the world may or may not be the result of it, the risk that it might be — given this week’s devastation — should compel all elected leaders to take immediate action.”

Sea walls, levees and beach sand replenishment are temporary solutions at best, and building offshore walls and storm gates are hugely expensive.

Drawing of possible sea gates to protect Staten Island – intriguing but so very expensive (cdmsmith.com)

Bloomberg again: “I don’t think there’s any practical way to build barriers in the oceans. Even if you spent a fortune, it’s not clear to me that you would get much value for it.”

There are many possibilities besides building levees, sea gates and walls. Constructing buffering oyster beds, sand dunes and wetlands are real options instead. Managed retreat – moving homes, businesses and roads out of the harms way is now as well an essential consideration.

Imagine a grassy network of parks and wetlands extending around lower Manhattan, with tidal marshes to absorb waves. (aro.net/#/projects/risingcurrents)

Or imagine oyster beds growing on reefs of rock and shell, buffering and absorbing storm surges (scapestudio.com/projects/oyster-tecture/)

No one thinks that climate warming necessarily caused Hurricane Sandy – but it likely influenced its size and its path. The melting and warming Arctic has modified the flow of the Jet Stream which in turn influenced the path the hurricane took veering into the east of North America instead of out to sea.

Now it appears that the Arctic melt is proceeding even more quickly than any of the models have predicted. The sea will continue to warm and rise, and storm surges will be ever higher.

So now we have an opportunity to face reality, not just to rebuild what has been lost but to adapt in many ways to what is coming. With strong and non-partisan leadership emerging, we can prepare ourselves.

We may need to nourish these voices.

Tags: adapting to climate change, Bloomberg and climate change, Christie and climate change, Cuomo and climate change, Hurricane Sandy
Posted in Adapting to climate change, Arctic Issues, Global warming | Comments Off

Tatoosh and Ocean Acidification

Wednesday, October 31st, 2012

Long-term studies are rare – the costs in time, effort, enthusiasm, persistence and funding are all formidable. But they are as valuable as they are rare.

One such study, stretching back five decades, is the research on the intertidal community of Tatoosh island, off the northwestern-most point of Washington State, at the mouth of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Like other long-term studies it has depended on the initial and long-term research of a particular scientist and then his graduate students, and then theirs. In this case Robert Paine started the work, Timothy Wootton and Catherine Pfister are among his graduates students, and their graduate students continue to work with them on the island.

Tatoosh Island from the air – an old lighthouse, some steep cliffs, a few trees, and an extensive and accessible intertidal studied intensely since the 1960s (pbase.com)

The research on Tatoosh has given us insights into how predation and competition structure a community of species, including the concept of keystone species. Recently it has also provided critical evidence of current ocean acidification and correlated changes in the intertidal community.

Because the community has been so well studied for so long, changes in distribution, occurrence and sizes of individuals within populations are possible to recognize when they occur. For more than a decade now Pfister and Wootton have also measured ocean pH levels in great detail. What they are seeing is very troubling.

The intertidal of Tatoosh Island. Cape Flaherty on the Washington mainland is in the background (esa.org)

Concerning ocean pH, they have found that there is considerable diurnal and seasonal variation, a result of variation in sunlight (photosynthesis), darkness (respiration), temperature, phytoplankton abundance, and upwelling of the coastal waters, all of which modify CO2 levels, and hence pH, of the water. This in itself is really interesting, for the extent of the variation is certainly unexpected.

But they also have found a declining trend in ocean pH levels over the eight years of the initial study – 2000-2007. Allowing for the various sources of CO2 variation, and applying some sophisticated statistical tests, they have concluded that the decline in pH is correlated only with increased levels of atmospheric CO2.

In fact, pH dropped 0.045 units over the 8 years, 2.5 times faster than simulation models had predicted. Not good news, but good data, and the first of its kind outside of the tropics.

Species with calcareous shells or skeletons are particularly vulnerable to erosion as ocean pH drops. Over the same time period, several well-studied intertidal species with calcareous shells or skeletons – two species of mussels, and goose barnacles – declined in abundance and mean size, while non-calcareous algae increased in abundance.

Blue mussels Mytilus californianus have declined in abundance and size in the past decade, correlated with the decline in ocean pH (eeb.ucsc.edu)

Why the drop in pH is so great remains unexplained, but further research has addressed the question of whether such a drop in pH is just natural variation, or whether it is new. Mussel shells can last a long time after the animal inside dies, and their age can be determined. They also carry in them a record of the pH of the water they formed in. They provide an extraordinary record to compare with the present changes, dating back not just to the 1960s but as much as 1340 years ago to the middens left by the Makah who fished from the island in summer.

Shells of the intertidal shield limpet, Lottia pelta, though more difficult to analyse, confirm what the mussel shells have shown (wsu.edu)

And the conclusions? For the past decade the ocean waters around Tatoosh are acidifying at a rate faster than predicted. Nothing like this has occurred in the past 1300 years. We clearly don’t know enough yet about the causes, but the only strong correlation is with increased atmospheric CO2.

With the long-term studies of Tatoosh, we have a chance to detect such changes in water chemistry and community structure, and predict their occurrence elsewhere. That’s good science.

Meanwhile, we are warned once again. The emerging new world is going to look a lot different.

Populations of sea birds – murres and gulls – nesting on the cliffs of Tatoosh have also declined by 50% over the past decade (nytimes.com)

Tags: Mytilus californianus, ocean acidification, Tatoosh Island
Posted in Global warming, Ocean acidification | Comments Off

ExxonMobil The Evil Empire

Saturday, September 29th, 2012

After waiting years to get permission, Royal Dutch Shell finally began drilling its first exploration well in the Chukchi Sea off the northwest Alaskan coast this past summer. Tests of its safety equipment have not gone well, and wind-driven sea ice has threatened the operation. Any further drilling of the exploration well has now been postponed until next summer.

Shell’s Noble Discoverer drilling rig on the Chukchi Sea, seen from the deck of the Tor Viking icebreaker. (Royal Dutch Shell, latimes.com))

This has been a benign season in the Arctic, and still the result is failure. This does not bode well for Arctic drilling, but if we can be sure of anything in this uncertain world, we can expect Shell, and BP, and Chevron, and the biggest of them all, ExxonMobil – as well as the Norwegian and Russian oil companies – to explore the Arctic and then to drill it over the next decades.

A recent book, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, by Steve Coll tells the tale of ExxonMobil from the catastrophic spill by the Exxon Valdez in 1989, through its rise in reach, power and wealth to become the most profitable of global corporations, to its present belated enthusiasm for fracking. It is an extraordinary tale of bald self-interest and cynicism.

Steve Coll’s book, published in 2012, is long, detailed, short on reflection, and frightening (nytimes.com)

Over the past 20 years, ExxonMobil has moved slowly and reluctantly through a series of attitudes about climate change. Of course it denied the reality of global warming for as long as possible, and funded the research of the skeptics. Then, eventually, it agreed that burning carbon-based fuels was in fact warming the planet – but its own analysis determined that the global demand for energy is growing so fast that even if alternate sources are available, they will only fill a small part of the need. We will remain dependent on ExxonMobil and the other oil companies for oil and natural gas for the next decades.

Seeing how the wind is now blowing in the US, ExxonMobil now supports the call for energy independence and even says that it could tolerate a carbon tax – but it believes in neither taxes nor the need for US energy independence.

ExxonMobil is a huge global corporation whose products are natural gas and oil, and whose sole motive is profit. It is present in 200 countries, extracting oil and gas from dozens of them. It is resistant to any action that might decrease its global access and profit. Its influence in US flows through through the efforts of lobbyists working on congressmen, cabinet members, and presidents. Access is never denied.

No government can resist the oil companies, not even the US. Coll’s book is very sobering.

Meanwhile, despite the Deepwater Horizon spill of 2010, offshore exploration and drilling is expanding around the world. Taking the risks, especially in the Arctic, is madness. Unfortunately, the oil companies, in their endless quest for more profits from more exploitable oil and gas deposits, remain indifferent to the long-term impact of what they do.

ExxonMobil has drilled a well offshore California that extends more than six miles horizontally and more than 7,000 ft below sea level. It was drilled from the Heritage platform using the company’s Fast Drill technology. (drillingcontractor.org)

The only concern ExxonMobil and the other oil companies express is that at some point the nations of the planet finally will become really afraid of the effects of global warming and agree to take concerted, major action.

Our challenge then is to bring that about now, not decades from now. We can start with the current US election – although neither party talks about climate change, at least President Obama understands that it exists and that it poses great dangers. In Canada we can try to constrain the development of the Alberta oil sands and the exploration for oil and gas in Canada’s Arctic.

And we can push back against the oil companies. They need our encouragement to do the right thing.

As do our governments.

Tags: Arctic oil exploration, book Private Empire, drilling in the Arctic, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell in Arctic, Steve Coll
Posted in Arctic Issues, Books, Movies and One Aquarium, Energy sources, Global warming, International Affairs | Comments Off

Self-inflicted Heat

Thursday, August 9th, 2012

An astonishing event has occurred. The Wall Street Journal just ran a regular column acknowledging that the climate is getting warmer, and that the warming is caused by humans.

The record-breaking and devastating heat and drought across America may be the immediate reason for this change in point of view, but a political consensus may be emerging in the US that global warming is real. Not of course on what to do about it, but it’s a start.

Another reason for the possible shift in thinking is the recent research of atmospheric scientist Richard Muller. An out-spoken climate change skeptic in the past, he has received a lot of attention this year because he has changed his mind. His own careful analysis of global temperature data has convinced him that in fact the Earth is warming after all, and that human-produced greenhouse gases are the cause.

Nothing is more convincing than a scientist who looks at the evidence and changes his mind. His impact is huge.

Muller’s analysis of temperature data (the red Berkeley line on the graph, which ignores the data that Muller has been so skeptical about, still shows the same increase in global temperature. He concludes that global warming is real, and human-caused. (ibtimes.com)

Climate change skeptics, though, have continued to argue that any increase in levels of CO2 in the atmosphere is a natural phenomenon, not caused by the increasing burning of fossil fuels.

So a more remarkable contribution is the research of a NOAA-funded a team of atmospheric scientists at the University of Colorado at Boulder led by John Miller and Scott Lehman, and published a couple of months ago.

In this study, atmospheric gases along the northeast coast of the US were sampled by aircraft every 2 weeks for 6 years. The team then analysed the CO2 in the samples for the presence of Carbon 14. While CO2 from biological sources such as plant respiration is rich in C14, CO2 from burning fossil fuels has no C14, for its half life is only 5700 years, and fossil fuels are of course many millions of years old. So the less C14 in the sample, the greater the contribution of CO2 from burning fossil fuels.

The half life of C14 is 5700 years. CO2 emitted by the burning of fossils fuels, all of which are many millions of years old, has no measurable amounts of C14 left. (yellowtang.org)

Their results: the increase of atmospheric CO2 from the 280 ppm of the early 1800s to the current level of 390 ppm can only have come from sources lacking C14, and the only sources are the fossil fuels we have burned.

So what are the facts?
- CO2 levels have risen from 280 ppm in early pre-industrial 1800s to 390 ppm currently.
- That increase is human-caused, the result of burning ever increasing amounts of fossil fuels.
- Global temperatures over the same period have been increasing, and the increase is highly correlated with increasing atmospheric CO2 levels.

For the past 400,000 years, global temperature atmospheric CO2 levels have been tightly correlated (atlas.nrcan.gc.ca)

The correlation of global temperature and atmospheric CO2 increases in the past century are also tight. (skepticalscience,com)

- The correlation between increasing global temperature and atmospheric levels of CO2 is so tight that it is almost certainly causal.
- The planet is going to continue to get warmer.
- Fossil fuel companies have proven reserves sufficient to drive CO2 levels and global temperatures to frightening levels (check out Bill McKibben’s recent essay in Rolling Stone).
- Fossil fuel companies a show no inclination to curtail exploitation. We’ll adapt, they say.

We’re screwed.

Tags: atmospheric CO2 levels, Global warming, John Miller, Richard Muller
Posted in Global warming | Comments Off

How Resilient Are Coral Reefs?

Thursday, August 2nd, 2012

On the Pacific coast of Panama, coral reefs exist in a fairly narrow band of tropics compressed between cold water currents that flow south along the California coast and north along the Peruvian coast. Not exactly the extensive coral reefs of the South Pacific, but still, they are there.

Sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific. That’s supposed to be Central America in the upper right, Indonesia in the lower left. Blue indicates cool water, red to yellow increasingly warm water. The ocean currents compress the tropics in the Eastern Pacific compared with the Western Pacific (pord.ussd.edu)

An elegant piece of research published last month in Science indicates that reefs may be resilient, able to cease growth during harsh times, and then regrow once conditions improve. The Pacific Panama reefs are about 7000 years old, but from 4000 years ago to about 1500 years ago, they quit growing. Then they started to grow again.

The 2500 years of no growth is correlated with a long period of intense El Nino and La Nina activity. If the greater stress of these events caused the reefs to stop growing, then the same should have occurred broadly around the tropical Pacific. This appears to be true.

How does a dormant or dying reef reef recover? In the case of the Panama reefs, it is very likely that as conditions improved, the reefs were recolonized from remnants of reefs that had survived in sites less affected by the stressful times.

Cauliflower coral, Pocillopora damicornis, dominates the coral community of the reefs off the west coast of Panama. According to cores made into several of the reefs, growth of this species ceased for 2500 years (loiczsouthasia.org)

A reasonable conclusion is that if we now just stopped – and reversed – the increase in CO2 emissions that our current coral reefs could recover.

But that’s the kicker, isn’t it? CO2 emissions continue to rise every year, and we have no reason to think they will stabilize, let alone reverse, in any political future we can see.

Earlier this summer, 2000 coral reef biologists got together for one of their regular international meetings. They produced a Consensus Statement that they are all signing, and it is a clear, concise and grim summary of the predicament that coral reefs face as ocean temperatures rise, ocean acidification continues, and other stresses of over-fishing and pollution continue relentlessly. The only hope for coral reefs is for CO2 emissions to be reduced.

This is part of the statement (and here’s the full statement)
“CO2 emissions at the current rate will warm sea surface temperatures by at least 2-3°C, raise sea-level by as much as 1.7 meters, reduce ocean pH from 8.1 to less than 7.9, and increase storm frequency and/or intensity. This combined change in temperature and ocean chemistry has not occurred since the last reef crisis 55 million years ago.”

Coral reefs will not survive what we doing to the planet.
As I and many others have written before, that is beyond sad. We have evolved in a complex, beautiful and who knows how unique world, and we are wrecking it.

Tags: Consensus Statement on coral reefs, coral reef resilience, coral reefs and climate warming, Panama coral reefs
Posted in Coral reefs, Global warming | Comments Off

The Open Arctic

Thursday, June 14th, 2012

Everyone is preparing for an Arctic Ocean open for business at least through the summer months.

Seasonal shipping is increasing, and ports are growing, especially along the Russian coast.

The North Pole, April 2004: HMS Tireless, a nuclear sub, measured sea ice thickness of the melting ice cap (seaice.org.uk)

The Arctic rim countries – Canada, Norway, Denmark, Russia and the US – are under some pressure to agree to a moratorium on exploiting the Arctic fisheries at least until enough is known about the ecosystem to do so sustainably.

Beluga whales feed on a school of Arctic cod (the dark streak), a species of potential commercial value but about which we know very little (arkive.org)

The tension over who if anyone owns any of the international waters in the huge center of the Arctic continue to grow, with Russia planning to reopen long closed Soviet bases, Canada considering using drones to monitor the region, and the US getting increasingly nervous about not having a vote in the UN negotiations concerning international boundaries.

The international water of the Arctic Ocean (red lin e)(oceansnorth.org)

Meanwhile China and South Korea are building icebreakers and intend to be players in the search for Arctic fish and other resources.

And then there are the oil companies.

The huge BP Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010 is largely forgotten. Canada, the US and Norway are all inviting oil companies to bid for licenses to explore for oil and natural gas along their Arctic coastlines from Alaska and the Beaufort Sea to the Barents Sea. After a relentless, seven year campaign, Shell begins to drill on the Alaskan North Slope this summer, with Greenpeace watching closely. All the companies are eager to drill in international waters when that becomes possible.

Canada opens the Beaufort Sea for bids for drilling licenses

They are preparing to work in the cold, in darkness, in sea ice a long way from any supportive infrastructure. Still they claim development can be done sustainably.

In fact, nine of the major oil companies, including Statoil, Total, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Shell, have launched a research program where they will assess how spills flow in the Arctic, how to track them remotely, and how to recovery spilled oil. They will do this with ‘controlled’ spills.

Missing from this initiative are the Russian companies, Gazprom and Rosneft. No one seems confident that they will comply with regulations that the others accept. The Gazprom rig that capsized off Sakhalin last December, killing 50, is not reassuring.

Actually, no company is ready for offshore drilling in the Arctic Ocean, for no proven method for clean-up there exists.

Resistance to drilling has failed. The US sees the Arctic resources as part of its route to energy independence. Norway needs to replace its lucrative but depleted offshore southern oil fields with new northern ones. Canada wants to sell its resources to anyone who will buy them. Russia is Russia.

We hoped the rules of the game might be different in the Arctic as it opens up, based on all that we have learned over the past few decades. In fact they look exactly like they always have: power wins; the idea of endless economic growth remains unchallenged; resources exist to be exploited; environmental concerns are recognized and then largely ignored.

As elsewhere in our modern world, our response has become not to stop it, but at best to try to make it less bad.

At the least, a vigilant and activist press is increasingly critical – reminding us of past initiatives and failures, of the importance of evidence and precaution, and of the fragility and vulnerability of our natural world.

Walruses meet to debate the future of the Arctic Ocean (washingtonpost.com)

Tags: Arctic development, Arctic fisheries, Arctic oil exploration, Arctic shipping
Posted in Arctic Issues, Energy sources, Global warming, International Affairs, Sustainable fisheries | Comments Off

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