We Speak For Earth
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ikenbot CWL -
mohandasgandhi Mohandas Gandhi -
realcleverscience Real Clever Science -
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perscientiamlibertas A Matter of the Most Pleasant Fraternal Confidence
Fragile Namibian Deserts ‘Damaged’ By Mad Max Film Crew
Say it aint so! One of my favorite deserts and landscapes on the whole world has apparently been maimed. The people behind the upcoming Mad Max film are undergoing a lot of criticism from Namibian environmental groups who are accusing the makers of the film of damaging the ecosystems of this precious desert that’s already undergoing stress from climate change.
The movie was being filmed in an area that was recently named as the Dorob National Park. Parts of it are designated for tourism, while others are set aside for particular species of endangered animal and plant life. The extremely dry environment in the desert makes any changes in the ecosystem extremely perilous — less than 10mm of rain falls on the Namib Desert every year, and it can take decades for small lichens and mosses to build up where condensation occurs during fog. It is alleged that the Mad Max film crew damaged areas which are meant to be protected from human activities, threatening lizards, geckos, chameleons and “the rare lithops cactus”.
Jon Henschel, an ecological scientist hired by the Namibian Coast Conservation and Management (Nacoma) Project to study the damage the environment suffered from the film crew, found that parts of the desert until now untouched by vehicles had been driven over, leaving tracks — in one area a “ploughing device” had been used. Even worse, to try and level the tracks as they left, the crew had dragged nets across the ground, ripping out small plants.
Recent Global Warming Slowed by Volcanoes
Global average temperatures have been rising in recent years, but not as much as they might have, thanks to a series of small-to-moderate-sized volcanic eruptions that have spewed sunlight-blocking particles high into the atmosphere. That’s the conclusion of a new study, which also finds that microscopic particles derived from industrial smokestacks have done little to cool the globe.
Between 2000 and 2010, the average atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide — a planet-warming greenhouse gas — rose more than 5%, from about 370 parts per million to nearly 390 parts per million. If that uptick were the only factor driving climate change during the period, global average temperature would have risen about 0.2°C, says Ryan Neely III, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. But a surge in the concentration of light-scattering particles in the stratosphere countered as much as 25% of that potential temperature increase, he notes.
According to satellite data, a measure of the light-scattering ability of the stratospheric particles, called aerosols, rose on average between 4% and 7% each year between 2000 and 2010. (The more incoming sunlight is scattered back into space, the stronger the cooling effect.) But researchers have strongly debated the source of those aerosols, Neely says. While many teams have suggested that the aerosols came from small-to-mid-sized volcanic eruptions, a few others have proposed that they originated in Asian smokestacks. Their rationale: Emissions of sulfur dioxide in India and China grew about 60% during the decade, and atmospheric convection associated with the region’s summer monsoon provides a way for watery droplets containing that gas to reach the stratosphere then diffuse around the world.
Global map of national ecological footprint per person in 2008 (Global Footprint Network, 2011). Image: Living Planet Report (2012)
Will we have enough resources to consume and survive if 60% of the world’s population becomes urbanized by 2030? Are our cities self-sufficient entities? How are we going to satisfy the huge appetite of the growing cities and still be able the leave a livable world for our future? Two per cent (2%) of the world’s land surface, which the cities currently occupy, consumes 75% of the world’s natural resources and discharges an equal amount of waste, causing huge ecological footprints.“We are using 50 per cent more resources than the Earth can provide. By 2030, even two planets will not be enough” (Living Planet Report 2012, WWF).“Ecological footprint”, a term coined by Rees and Wackernagel in 1992, uses land as currency to measure what we have and what our demands are and how our activities impact nature. It measures the land resources required to support the current consumption levels with current levels of technology for supporting our food consumption, housing, transport and waste production. It is measured in so-called global hectares (GHA), defined as the average productivity of all biologically productive areas (measured in hectares) on earth in a given year. The figures above show how much ecological footprints have increased between the years 1961 and 2008. Against an estimated biocapacity of our planet of 1.87 hectares (per person) — as estimated by Wackernagel et al. (1999) — the average ecological footprint is now 2.2 Gha.
The point of debate in this note is not which country has larger ecological footprints, but rather to point out the fact that cities have large footprints and if we do not curb our footprint it would pose a huge challenge for the policy makers and public. The Future We Want, an outcome document at Rio+20, acknowledged that we must recognize the interlinkages among the three dimensions of sustainability and develop various tools and approaches to measure sustainability in a way that can support growth as well as health of the ecosystems.
The key question is: what are the possible ways to ensure that we bequeath a sustainable planet to our future generations? Some of the solutions proposed in various international debates and fora are:
(1) Reduce the ecological footprints by promoting conservation and sustainable use.
(2) Promote green economies, which would reduce negative environmental impacts, increase resource efficiency and reduce waste.
(3) Engage all the stakeholders of the society — the people, governments, civil society and private sector — in the job of achieving urban sustainability.
The prime thing is to reduce our ecological footprints. The ecologists, conservationists, architects and designers all have proposed several alternatives, such as adopting a landscape management approach to improve connectivity between ecosystem fragments, leaving ecosystems undisturbed, planting native species, controlling invasive species and ensuring ecological succession. These are necessary but not sufficient to bequeath a sustainable earth. Policy makers have a huge role to play to tackle environmental and social issues towards facilitating public acceptance towards naturalistic habitats in urban areas.
I am not advocating that we use a particular measure to see how damaging our activities are. Each approach offers its unique advantages and suffers from limitations. One could use various measurable indicators and environmental planning tools to know where we are heading and how to manage our resources, such as carbon footprints, Biodiversity indices for Cities, ecoBudgets, etc. These indicators are like lists, as pointed out by David Maddox in his earlier essay. Everybody likes to be on the top of the good lists (like clean, green, wealthy) and bottom of ‘bad’ lists (carbon, ecological, water footprints etc.). These lists are useful for managing our environment using different environment management tools like Integrated Management systems, Local Agenda 21, ISO 14001, European Environment Management systems etc, to know where we are heading and how to manage our resources. As mentioned, the applicability of these tools and indicators varies as the situation warrants.
Former University of Michigan graduate student Katy Keller with a hand on eroded and melting permafrost near Toolik Lake, Alaska. The gully erosion seen here is a type of thermokarst failure, formed when ice-rich, permanently frozen soils are warmed and thawed. Image: George Kling
Ancient carbon trapped in Arctic permafrost is extremely sensitive to sunlight and, if exposed to the surface when long-frozen soils melt and collapse, can release climate-warming carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere much faster than previously thought.
University of Michigan ecologist and aquatic biogeochemist George Kling and his colleagues studied places in Arctic Alaska where permafrost is melting and is causing the overlying land surface to collapse, forming erosional holes and landslides and exposing long-buried soils to sunlight.
They found that sunlight increases bacterial conversion of exposed soil carbon into carbon dioxide gas by at least 40 percent compared to carbon that remains in the dark. The team, led by Rose Cory of the University of North Carolina, reported its findings in an article to be published online Feb. 11 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Until now, we didn’t really know how reactive this ancient permafrost carbon would be — whether it would be converted into heat-trapping gases quickly or not,” said Kling, a professor in the U-M Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. EEB graduate student Jason Dobkowski is a co-author of the paper.
“What we can say now is that regardless of how fast the thawing of the Arctic permafrost occurs, the conversion of this soil carbon to carbon dioxide and its release into the atmosphere will be faster than we previously thought,” Kling said. “That means permafrost carbon is potentially a huge factor that will help determine how fast the Earth warms.”
Tremendous stores of organic carbon have been frozen in Arctic permafrost soils for thousands of years. If thawed and released as carbon dioxide gas, this vast carbon repository has the potential to double the amount of the heat-trapping greenhouse gas in the atmosphere on a timescale similar to humanity’s inputs of carbon dioxide due to the burning of fossil fuels.
That creates the potential for a positive feedback: As the Earth warms due to the human-caused release of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, frozen Arctic soils also warm, thaw and release more carbon dioxide. The added carbon dioxide accelerates Earth’s warming, which further accelerates the thawing of Arctic soils and the release of even more carbon dioxide.
Recent climate change has increased soil temperatures in the Arctic and has thawed large areas of permafrost. Just how much permafrost will thaw in the future and how fast the carbon dioxide will be released is a topic of heated debate among climate scientists.
In lakes and streams, fish and insects can help protect aquatic plants that gobble up greenhouse gas
Climate scientists note that Earth will suffer excessive warming if levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere get much higher. That’s why scientists have been looking for ways to encourage living organisms to act like a sponge, mopping up and storing much of that carbon dioxide. These carbon-storing species include trees, grasses and algae.
This diagram illustrates how fluctuations between continental-arc states and island-arc states could lead to episodic deposition and purging of carbon dioxide in Earth’s continental crust. Image: C. Lee/Rice University
A new Rice University-led study finds the real estate mantra “location, location, location” may also explain one of Earth’s enduring climate mysteries. The study suggests that Earth’s repeated flip-flopping between greenhouse and icehouse states over the past 500 million years may have been driven by the episodic flare-up of volcanoes at key locations where enormous amounts of carbon dioxide are poised for release into the atmosphere.
“We found that Earth’s continents serve as enormous ‘carbonate capacitors,’” said Rice’s Cin-Ty Lee, the lead author of the study in this month’s GeoSphere. “Continents store massive amounts of carbon dioxide in sedimentary carbonates like limestone and marble, and it appears that these reservoirs are tapped from time to time by volcanoes, which release large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.”
Lee said as much as 44 percent of carbonates by weight is carbon dioxide. Under most circumstances that carbon stays locked inside Earth’s rigid continental crust.
“One process that can release carbon dioxide from these carbonates is interaction with magma,” he said. “But that rarely happens on Earth today because most volcanoes are located on island arcs, tectonic plate boundaries that don’t contain continental crust.”
Earth’s climate continually cycles between greenhouse and icehouse states, which each last on timescales of 10 million to 100 million years. Icehouse states — like the one Earth has been in for the past 50 million years — are marked by ice at the poles and periods of glacial activity. By contrast, the warmer greenhouse states are marked by increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and by an ice-free surface, even at the poles. The last greenhouse period lasted about 50 million to 70 million years and spanned the late Cretaceous, when dinosaurs roamed, and the early Paleogene, when mammals began to diversify.
Lee and colleagues found that the planet’s greenhouse-icehouse oscillations are a natural consequence of plate tectonics. The research showed that tectonic activity drives an episodic flare-up of volcanoes along continental arcs, particularly during periods when oceans are forming and continents are breaking apart. The continental arc volcanoes that arise during these periods are located on the edges of continents, and the magma that rises through the volcanoes releases enormous quantities of carbon dioxide as it passes through layers of carbonates in the continental crust.
We all share the common desire to leave the Earth a better place for our children and for future generations. The problems of pollution and environmental degradation can sometimes seem so vast that it’s hard to know where to start. What can we do?
We can show our children that we care about their future, and the future of their children’s children, by actively participating in clever and innovative solutions to restore health to the Planet. The Life Box® is one solution.
All my life, I have loved watching life emerge. Knowing that all plants are part fungi and that fungi are essential for our food webs, I started to experiment with combining seeds and mycorrhizal fungal spores and was astonished by the results. The mycorrhized plants surged in their growth compared to the same plants without mycorrhizae. The mycorrhizal mycelium enhances the root nutrient-aborption zone of plants by hundreds of times. Knowing the benefits of marrying plants and fungi, and that deforestation is exacerbating climate change, I focused my attention on the roles of fungi in forest ecosystems.
While growing many wood-decomposing mushrooms, my friends and I discovered the ‘wonders of cardboard’ for growing mycelium. Silky, diverging forks of mycelium would happily race down the valleys within the folds of corrugated cardboard. Having myco-mulched with cardboard for many years, I realized that cardboard could become a growth medium for encouraging communities of fungi and plants symbiotically working together. Then, the epiphany hit me like a lightning bolt. Why not re-invent the cardboard box so each box becomes a designed ecosystem? The Life Box was the result.
Within the corrugated walls of a Life Box, tree seeds intermingle with millions of spores of mycorrhizal fungi, forming a tree-nursery-in-waiting. When it has outlived its usefulness as a box, it can be torn up and planted, and begin anew as a platform for the growth of nascent trees.
Why use a Life Box?
Once delivered, a regular cardboard box dies at your doorstep, so to speak. The conventional brown box serves only the purpose of delivering a product. And then, at best, it is recycled. The Life Box is not just a box: it is a teaching tool that unfolds into a continuing, life-long experience. It empowers individuals with the ability to sequester carbon by planting trees and making a positive difference. The Life Box has ‘legs’, or more aptly trees, which will remind the receiver for years to come of their own environmental awareness, and that of the company who shipped it. The shared experience of everyone involved builds a community of those trying to help the planet with a long-lasting and sustainable solution to climate change.
The Life Box may become a palette, a template for eco-artisans and architects to help re-green the planet. The Tree Life Box uses trees approved by every state in the United States that regulates tree movement, and are approved for export to Canada. All species embedded within the Life Box are native to the continental US and Canada and are non-invasive. We plan to expand the Life Box line of products to include wild flowers, vegetables, grasses and herbs within boxes, padded envelopes, egg cartons and a wide variety of packaging materials.
The city of Singapore has rapidly advanced over the past four decades, posting average economic growth of 8.5 percent between 1965 and 2005. It has also managed this growth responsibly, argue the authors, a historical narrative that could offer insight into achieving goals of sustainable development. Image: Mike Behnken
Summary: When Singapore gained independence in August of 1965, the challenges it faced were unanticipated, multifaceted, immediately threatening, and without precedent. How Singaporeans coped with these sudden challenges—resiliently and effectively—provides an important message for other cities and countries coping with the encroaching limits of a resource-constrained world. Disciplined land-use planning, practical policies that look after citizen well-being, and flexible economic approaches are some of the political responses that helped Singapore emerge, over 50 years, as one of last century’s great development stories. A review of the policies and programs that shaped Singapore’s post-independence point to the value of avoiding strict ideology when managing resource challenges. Singapore’s solutions should ultimately be viewed as tools or indicators that other cities need not borrow whole-cloth, but might usefully adapt to local contexts and limitations.
It was in the early 1970s that the profile of a possible global-scale overshoot and collapse was first highlighted in a publication, The Limits to Growth, based on a computer simulation model. “Overshoot” referred to exponentially growing trends in population, resource consumption, and waste generation that would overwhelm planet Earth’s carrying capacity. “Collapse” referred to a possible consequence of overshoot: a catastrophic decline in resource availability, industrial output, food production, population, and, consequently, the quality of human life. This paper argues that the challenges of overshoot and collapse are likely to first manifest themselves in cities. It points to Singapore as an example of a city that faced challenges analogous to overshoot and collapse. Responding to these challenges, Singapore’s leaders crafted solutions that overcame them and produced a successful and sustainable development trajectory. There are lessons to be drawn from Singapore’s solutions.
Warnings of possible overshoot and collapse were further reinforced by a project that is unique in the history of public-policy modelling. Three Limits to Growth authors, Dennis Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and, before her untimely death, Donella Meadows, collaborated on two subsequent books, Beyond the Limits and Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update. These books presented new global development scenarios, generated by the original World3 model upon which The Limits to Growth was based, updated with new statistics on industrial output, population, pollution, resource availability, and food production.
Those who created global models and sought to publicize their results believed that the presentation of model results, coupled with a growing weight of evidence confirming the results, would change attitudes. They believed that changes in attitudes would produce changes in policies and that there was sufficient time to mitigate the socio- and political-economic momentum impelling humankind toward overshoot and collapse. Dennis Meadows reports that 40 years of experience provides little evidence to support that view. His research highlights indicators pointing to the conclusion that, in some areas, we have already reached overshoot, sooner than anticipated. “Where we once only had models, we can now get confirmation from the newspapers,” he has observed.
Coal consumption in China alone now accounts for 47% of global coal consumption. That’s roughly 3.8 billion tons. Since 2000, China has accounted for 2.3 billion tons, or 82%, of the 2.9 billion ton growth in global coal demands.
