Out of proportion: Carbon infographic from the Guardian

The Guardian newspaper has an infographic on the carbon footprint of countries around the world. It's a world map which distorts the size of different countries to represent relative population size, energy consumption, carbon emissions, and so on.

It's cool to see the familiar world map blobber and change as you click on the different buttons, but chilling to think about what it represents: how unequal is the human condition around the planet. It also shows very clearly how the affluent world hogs most of its resources and produces most of its pollution.

On most world maps you can't even see Singapore, but play around with this interactive graphic for a while and see when our little dot starts to pop.

Planet Earths' debt ceiling

You may have not noticed it amid all the news on the economy, but on Tuesday we've gone into ecological debt for the year. 27 September was this year's Earth Overshoot Day (via Discover), the day when human consumption and waste emission for the year has exceeded the Earth's annual productivity and ability to absorb waste. The organization responsible for this announcement is the NGO Global Footprint Network, which seeks to raise awareness of environmental sustainability. They've issued a media packet explaining the concept here (pdf). The idea was originally mooted by the UK-based new economics foundation (they do their name in lowercase) in the 1980s as Ecological Debt Day.

From Global Footprint Network website

It sounds like a straightforward calculation of income minus expenditure, but the reality of course is quite complicated. Most of the parameters, such as crop productivity and human greenhouse gas emissions, have to be estimated, so the date is not an exact one. Despite the uncertainties, the calculated date is actually be on the more generous (to humans) end of the scale.

What's scarier is that the date has been moving forward every year: from sometime in early November in 2001, to late September now, about 3 days a year. Even scarier, this ignores the cumulative effect of previous times when we've gone into debt. This crisis mirrors the financial one: in some heavily indebted countries, politicians are happy to report when they've simply slowed down the rate of debt increase.

This is a good way of getting people's attention, because of all the headlines that the poor economy has been grabbing lately. Even non-economists, like myself, have become acquainted with concepts like debt ceilings, defaults, and bailouts (though what a "tranche" is still remains opaque to me). Environmentalists and sustainability scientists are also working on figuring out how to put an economic price on ecosystems and the environment, to make the importance of preserving the environment more "real" to those who think in dollars and cents, such as policymakers and industry. Examples include factoring in the cost of ecosystem services into environmental impact assessments, or selling carbon credits, or swapping habitat protection for debt forgiveness. All of these schemes have their critics, but I like to think of them as experiments in progress, as people try to figure out what's a workable way to account for the environmental impact of our economic decisions.

Who's a climate scientist?

Climate science researchers appear in a video produced and aired by the Australian satirical TV show Hungry Beast, titled "I'm a Climate Scientist." Among their reasons for doing so was to "[highlight] the issue of unqualified opinions on climate science by politicians, economists etc. in the media." (Source)

A sample of the lyrics:

Who's a climate scientist?
I'm a climate scientist!
A penny-farthing cyclist?
Not a climate scientist!
A Fox News journalist? -- No!
A paleontologist? -- No!
A clean coal lobbyist? -- No!
A cashed-up alarmist? -- No!

The video is embedded below, but warning: loud music and strong language. Via an article on scientist-turned-activist James Hansen in the Guardian.

German nuclear shut-down - what next?

Germany has recently announced that it will shut down all its nuclear power plants by 2022. This comes in the wake of the disaster at Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant, and election gains by the German Green Party in the key state of Baden-Württemburg. The Green Party is a major player in German politics, and supports the cause of denuclearization.

What does this mean for the politics of energy production in Europe and beyond? On the one hand, we want to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Existing sources will eventually run out, and the carbon dioxide released by burning them is believed to be the key factor driving climate change. On the other, are nuclear power and renewable energy may be inadequate to meet the shortfall. Nuclear power, in particular, is fraught with difficulties. Not only are people fearful of potential disastrous accidents ('Fukushima' may eventually become a cultural keyword in the same way that 'Chernobyl' is now), but there are practical concerns regarding the disposal of nuclear waste. If we forgo the nuclear option, will wind, solar, wave, and other so-called 'renewables' be enough?

This seems like a good time to introduce an important book on the issue, Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air, written by David McKay, a physicist at Cambridge University. The whole book is available for free online, in addition to a 10-page synopsis for those who want to get the gist of it quickly. An even shorter summary has been written by him for the BBC website.

McKay's analysis, which is essentially a straightforward, but necessary, accounting of the relevant figures and facts, shows that relying exclusively or heavily on renewable energy sources would be hugely disruptive and intrusive to both our existing way of life and, ironically, to the environment. The main fact is that wind farms, solar farms, and the like are not energy 'dense' - they require large tracts of land to produce the same amount of power as a conventional or nuclear power plant. Given existing levels of energy consumption (the book focuses on the UK but other industrialized nations are comparable), there would be hardly any land left for other purposes!

Wind farming projects around the world, for example, are already running into opposition from local citizens who find the windmills, and the electrical pylons required to connect them to the grid, hugely unsightly. Their constant whir is also a form of noise pollution. Biofuels and solar energy harvesting, two commonly-proposed alternatives, would possibly squeeze out farming and natural woodland. Even so, they would not yield very much. The figure below, from Without the Hot Air, shows to scale the quantity of land required for biofuels, wood harvesting, and other forms of renewable energy, required to meet the UK's current demand (the last five symbols in the legend are not to scale, but the rest are).

Therefore, if nuclear were out of the question entirely, it seems unlikely that renewable energy, in the state of technology that is available now, would be able to carry the day. Realistically speaking, it is likely that the Germans will find that after the closure of their nuclear plants, the supply of energy from renewables will not be able to keep up and they will be forced to revert in some degree to fossil fuel, or to importing energy from neighboring countries.

Nuclear energy is something even Singapore has to take into account. Even if our country decides that the risks are simply too high for our island-state, we still have to consider the possibility that neighboring countries will adopt nuclear power. It is important to have a frank discussion of the risks and realities now, than to be enveloped in doubt and fear later. 

Thailand Closes 18 Coral Reef Diving Sites

Dive sites in 7 national parks across Thailand have been closed in response to coral bleaching that has affected up to 80% of corals surveyed.

According to the Bangkok Post, the sites affected are:

Hat Chao Mai National Park in Trang, Mu Koh Petra and Tarutao national parks in Satun, Mu Koh Chumphon National Park in Chumphon, Hat Nopparat Thara-Mu Koh Phi Phi National Park in Krabi, and Mu Koh Surin and Mu Koh Similan national parks in Phangnga.

The bleaching is attributed to elevated sea temperatures in past years. Closing the sites off to tourists will certainly reduce damage from irresponsible divers and waders (see this photo (via NYT) for something horrifying), but it will not do anything about the coral bleaching itself.

Melting Glaciers Reveal Plane Wrecks in Andes

A bizarre and somber side-effect of retreating glaciers in the Andes mountains: decades-old aircraft wrecks and dead climbers, as well as older Inca mummies and 'icemen', are being revealed by the thaw:

"Some discoveries are personal, allowing families closure after years of mourning loved ones who appeared to have vanished. Others have added alluring clues into the history of human migration, diet, health and ethnic origins..."

Read more (NY Times)

Wilderness Parks May Change Beyond Recognition

Climate change may cause changes to national parks in the US that will alter their very identity, according to scientists and conservationists interviewed by Nature magazine. It's not all about glaciers melting, either. Warm winters in the past few years have allowed populations of the mountain pine beetle to boom in Yellowstone National Park, where they previously were kept in check by winter cold. As a result, stands of dead trees killed by the beetle, which bores into the wood of living trees, are now a common sight. Park managers and conservationists

"... are coming to terms with the idea that the historical remit of most parks systems — to preserve a piece of land in its 'natural' state — is untenable. 'You can't fight the climate,' says Ken Aho, an ecologist at Idaho State University in Pocatello, who studies non-native species at Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. 'Eventually you have to throw up your hands,' he says."

Aldo Leopold, author of A Sand County Almanac, and an influential pioneer of wildlife management in America, opined that "a national park should represent a vignette of primitive America." On the other hand, the very idea of an "untouched wilderness", as something apart from human civilization, and to which we should have recourse when we wish to seek Nature (with a capital N), is a recent invention.

It's an unrealistic idealization because there's really nothing that has escaped the human hand, being only a matter of degrees. Environmental historian William Cronon reflects on this in a thought-provoking 1995 essay entitled "The Trouble with Wilderness; or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature" (reprinted 2005 in Guernica magazine).

The concern about the fate of Yellowstone and other iconic American parks reminds me of a research talk I attended a long time ago; unfortunately I can't remember who gave it and when. It was about the gazetting of marine reserves, and the speaker pointed out that the fact of accelerated climate change meant that our intuitions about what to preserve are often wrong. Instead of drawing park boundaries only around the prominent patch of pristine reefs, which with rising temperatures and bleaching will eventually become an ugly dead zone, we should include in large part those areas which are less picture-perfect, but which contain communities which are more robust to change and which the future ecosystem will still rely upon.

The overall message is that we can no longer afford to think of nature as 'timeless', especially with the prospect of further anthropogenic change.

"Natural Security" in a world of scarcity

The US military is starting to plan for potential future conflicts based on scarcity of natural resources such as water, arable land, mineral resources, and environmental degradation due to climate change. Policy makers have coined the term "natural security", and warn that these future scarcities can represent "triggers for conflict".

One would assume that the military would not have an ideological stance for or against acknowledging climate change, because there's no inherent reason to do so, if their mission is simply to protect their country's security interests. So it's interesting to watch the military essentially taking climate change into account in their plans, while some civilian politicians can still win votes by refusing to even consider the possibility that human activity can have global impact on the physical world that we live in.

Lost in the Clouds - Blog Action Day 2010 "Water"

Blog Action Day is an annual event on 15 Oct (since 2007) that brings together bloggers around the world to write on a certain topic of pressing importance. This year's theme is "Water", and it ties in well with something that I've been meaning to write about for some time.

A week ago, I was fortunate to hear Dan Janzen, the ecologist and conservationist known for his work in setting up the Guanacaste National Park in Costa Rica, speak in person. His talk was great - you could tell that he's a no-nonsense personality who speaks his mind and is frank about his opinions on conservation. One very small part of his talk was a series of three photographs that he showed, of one of the cloud-forest mountain peaks in that park. In the first picture, taken in the 1970s (if I remember right), it's shrouded in a permanent fog. The next picture, taken a few years later, shows much sparser wisps, and the most recent one is completely bone-dry. The sky is blue and totally clear. Rising temperatures have lowered humidity and lifted cloud cover above the level of the mountains. The cloud forest has lost its cloud.

When we think of water issues and the environment, we tend to think about pollution in rivers, about salinization of groundwater, or eutrophication in lakes. This is water that we can see flowing or pooled up, that people can drink from, swim in, and fight over. But that's just one part of the water cycle we all learn about as children, when we drew arrows in our textbooks going from the ocean to the fluffy white clouds and back down as rain to the green fields below. In cloud forests, declining humidity has a strong biotic impact. They have been implicated in population crashes of frogs and other animals. As the fog rolls across these peaks, though, they also drip into streams and rivulets that feed waterways down below: a direct impact of climate change on water availability for both nature and people.

It's not just something that only affects picturesque spots far away in the exotic tropics, either. A major part of the water supply to the state of California comes from the spring thaw of the snowpack on the mountains of the Sierra Nevada range, which form part of the mountainous backbone that runs up the Western half of North America. Winds blowing in humidity-laden air from the Pacific is forced up the slopes of the Sierra Nevada, where it condenses in the cold upper reaches of the mountains and falls as precipitation; in the wintertime this is in the form of snow that accumulates until the thaw. This is also why Nevada is such a dry place - it sits in the 'rain shadow' of the range. As temperatures rise, however, the quantity of condensation and precipitation will decline and likewise the water that can be supplied to the inhabitants of California, both human and non-human. This water stress will force choices to be made between serving people and preserving the environment, as described in my previous post.

In the grand scheme of things, though, the environment will bounce back in some form. The Sierra Nevada is a relatively young mountain range, formed by uplift less than 10 million years ago. As they rose up, they cut off the formerly extensive lakes inland in the Great Basin behind them from the rivers that had led from them to the coast. The lakes eventually dried up and disappeared, causing the extinction of their fauna, as did the freshwater fishes in the former rivers. As the mountains grew further, however, rivers once again flowed, fed by the precipitation intercepted by the range. The fishes that now populated them were instead secondary re-invasions of freshwater habitats by marine fishes. (Oversimplified version of a much more intricate and fascinating story.) Life went on even in the face of drastic change. What's different about this time, though, is the time scale. The environment is now changing in tens and hundreds of years instead of thousands and millions. It's a sobering thought to think that long after we humans disappear, some alien paleontologist looking through the fossil record of the former Earth would find our age to be one of the great Mass Extinctions in the history of life. We manage to slake our thirst, but at the same time have poisoned the well for everyone.

(Stay tuned for Blog Action Day updates at our partner blogs: Coastal Cleanup Singapore, Otterman Speaks, Wild Shores Singapore.)

Many Pacific Islands Not Shrinking Despite Sea-level Change

One of the feared consequences of climate change is that low-lying islands in Oceania and elsewhere will become submerged by rising sea levels. A new study to be published in Global and Planetary Change by researchers from the South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission and the University of Auckland looked at the land area of 27 atoll islands in the Pacific, and found that despite the sea level rising at an average rate of 2 mm per year over the period for which data was available, most of the islands either stayed the same size or grew, and only four actually shrank.

Land area change was small compared to other 'gross changes':

"...changes in the planform configuration and position of islands on reef platforms. Modes of island change included: ocean shoreline displacement toward the lagoon; lagoon shoreline progradation; and, extension of the ends of elongate islands."

The composition of the islands is responsible for their dynamism and ability to respond to changing sea levels. As coral atoll islands, the accumulation of coral debris as well as the trapping of sediment by the atolls explains how they are able to grow, because they are made of once-living material that is continuously being added by new growth. The growth of atolls was first explained by Charles Darwin in The Voyage of the Beagle

Because the mechanism of growth and stabilization is specific to this type of island, though, it means that other kinds of landmass, such as sandbar islands, are still susceptible to inundation by rising sea levels. This report does not mean that we have nothing to worry from climate change, though it must come as a partial relief to inhabitants of atoll island nations in the Pacific.

------

New Scientist magazine has a feature on the research that was erroneously cited by The Australian newspaper as the source where the study was published (their headline: "Pacific islands have not shrunk: New Scientist study").

This is an annoying characteristic of newspaper science journalism, that articles often mis-cite or do not cite the original sources where the research was published. It's frustrating for readers who want to find out more, or to verify for themselves the claims made in the newspaper articles (which may be sensationalized by journalists or subeditors looking for a catchy headline). It's shoddy journalism, too, because the sources were not carefully scrutinized before being written up, though in The Australian's writer's defence, perhaps he didn't know how scientific publishing works.

It's getting better in some places, though. BBC News now names the journals in which research which it features are published, although they still don't cite the year or volume, or state whether the write-up is based on work that's still in press.

Let's hope for more awareness of proper citation; otherwise the so-called 'news' might degenerate into a game of Chinese Whispers.

Ice-coring on the Glaciers of Puncak Jaya

Mt. Kinabalu on Borneo is perhaps most famous mountain in Southeast Asia, but taller still and less well known is Puncak Jaya in the Indonesian province of Irian Jaya. Although the island of Papua, which Indonesia shares with Papua New Guinea, is to the East of the Wallace Line, making it biogeographically outside of SE Asia, it's still important because it and its neighbors bear the only tropical glaciers "west of the Andes and east of Mount Kilimanjaro." Like the rest of them, they're also receding fast, and a team led by Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University is traveling to the glaciers on Puncak Jaya to core them and study the ice layers. They aim to date the ice to find out how old the glaciers are, and to use the gases trapped in the ice to reconstruct ancient climates, to study how the Earth's climate has changed over time.

The image above (source: Wikimedia Commons) shows how patchy the remaining ice cover is, and the big hole in the foreground is a mine run by PT Freeport Indonesia; the company is helping the team ferry its ice samples back.