And the facts. On climate change.
I have enormous respect for the patience and discipline it must take to repeat over and over data and arguments that are as plain as the 329 consecutive months of temperatures above the 20th century average.
Category: Environment
Global Warming By The Numbers
Bill McKibben does the math.
If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven’t convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.
Meteorologists reported that this spring was the warmest ever recorded for our nation – in fact, it crushed the old record by so much that it represented the “largest temperature departure from average of any season on record.” The same week, Saudi authorities reported that it had rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the hottest downpour in the planet’s history.
Rolling Stone calls these numbers “terrifying.” The only thing that is really terrifying is how willfully ignorant we insist on being about this reality. To paraphrase Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a person to understand something when his lavish lifestyle depends on not understanding it.”
C’mon people.
Garbage On The Garbage Patch
Here’s a classic example of a completely failed, even fraudulent, attempt at counterintuitive journalism, courtesy of Gawker: “Lies You’ve Been Told About The Pacific Garbage Patch.”
Hmm, how do the editors deliver on that eyeball-grabbing, page-view-seeking, “lies” headline? Well, the easiest way, it seems, is to create a series of straw men, then knock them down and call them “lies.”
Like: this picture was not actually taken in the middle of the Pacific. Wow, really?
And: there is not actually a solid island of garbage in the Pacific, just an area with lots and lots of pieces of plastic. Phew, glad we got that straight.
And: all that plastic is not killing every marine species out there, just some. Thanks, that’s a relief.
Despite such distractions–denial-mongering in search of chump change–the real news rolls on:
(CNN) — A marine expedition of environmentalists has confirmed the bad news it feared — the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” extends even further than previously known.
Organized by two non-profit groups — the Algalita Marine Research Foundation and the 5 Gyres Institute — the expedition is sailing from the Marshall Islands to Japan through a “synthetic soup” of plastic in the North Pacific Ocean on a 72-feet yacht called the Sea Dragon, provided by Pangaea Exploration…
[snip]…Leading the expedition is Marcus Eriksen, a former U.S. marine and Ph.D student from University of Southern California. “We’ve been finding lots of micro plastics, all the size of a grain of rice or a small marble,” Eriksen said via satellite phone. “We drag our nets and come up with a small handful, like confetti — 10, 20, 30 fragments at a time. That’s how it’s been, every trawl we’ve done for the last thousand miles.”
Eriksen, who has sailed through all five gyres, said this confirmed for him “that the world’s oceans are ‘plasticized.’ Everywhere you go in the ocean, you’re going to find this plastic waste.”
Ummm, Arsenic
Here’s the good news: Maryland is set to ban the use of arsenic-based drugs in chicken feed–which are used to combat a gut-eating parasite, and (apparently this is also viewed as a plus) burst small blood vessels which makes the meat look pinker and more appealing.
Here’s the bad news: Um, there’s been a form of arsenic in your chicken since 1944, and suddenly the FDA, Pfizer and health experts think that might not be such a good thing. And despite this somewhat dilatory change of heart, many states and growers will continue to use arsenic-based feed because, well, they’ll make more money doing it:
Inorganic arsenic has been linked to various human ailments, including neurological deficits in children, said Keeve E. Nachman, director of the Farming for the Future program at the Johns Hopkins University Center for a Livable Future.
Pfizer, which distributes the drug, agreed to voluntarily suspend its sales after consulting with FDA officials following the study. But growers that stockpiled supplies continue to use it.
Del. Tom Hucker (D-Montgomery), who sponsored the House version of the legislation, said the General Assembly was concerned about the levels of arsenic in chicken; about the 30,000 pounds of arsenic added each year to the soil in fertilizer and manure, mostly on the Eastern Shore; and about arsenic washed by heavy rains into rivers and streams that flow to the Chesapeake Bay.
Just one more grotesque insight into the astounding and unappealing practices which constitute our meat production industry. But, never mind, have at those chicken nuggets, friend. They’re cheap and they taste good, right?
Fish Fry
People sometimes ask me whether I eat fish, and when I tell them I don’t they want to know why. My stock answer is that I doubt that any fish are being fished sustainably, or farmed in a way that is net neutral when it comes to the environment and health.
Yes, there are fish guides that supposedly tell you what fish species are “safe” to eat. But then you see gross data, like that contained in this WWF Living Planet Report, which show an unrelenting, and appalling, human devastation of global fish stocks. Against that backdrop, it is simply hard for me to believe that anyone who cares about the future of fish and the oceans should do anything other than stop contributing to the insatiable demand for fish protein that is strip mining the seas. Against that backdrop, it makes sense to be overcautious, to not place our faith in subjective and imprecise assertions that some fish are doing fine. In other words, it makes sense to give fish everywhere a break.
Here’s a graphic from the WWF report, which says it all:
Yep. that’s a lot of red. And it’s not like it doesn’t follow many warnings that humanity’s estimations of “sustainable” fishing are pure fantasy. Here’s one of the best, which is in fact the analysis that prompted me to stop eating any and all fish.
Anyhow, this is the Washington Post‘s take on what has been happening:
Between 1950 and 2006, the WWF report notes, the world’s annual fishing haul more than quadrupled, from 19 million tons to 87 million tons. New technology — from deep-sea trawling to long-lining — has helped the fishing industry harvest areas that were once inaccessible. But the growth of intensive fishing also means that larger and larger swaths of the ocean are in danger of being depleted….
[snip]…Indeed, there’s some evidence that we’ve already hit “peak fish.” World fish production seems to have reached its zenith back in the 1980s, when the global catch was higher than it is today. And, according to one recent study in the journal Science, commercial fish stocks are on pace for total “collapse” by 2048 — meaning that they’ll produce less than 10 percent of their peak catch. On the other hand, many of those fish-depleted areas will be overrun by jellyfish, which is good news for anyone who enjoys a good blob sandwich.
This interactive graphic from the WWF report shows the overall population trends over the past few decades (hint: it doesn’t look very good). But we knew that already. The question is: what are you going to do about it? And what are you going to put on your plate?
Bye-Bye Baggie
There are many reasons to love Hawaii, but the latest is that it just became the first state in the Union to pass a ban on plastic bags (this is also one more reason to love the Surfrider Foundation, which pushed hard for the ban).
Plastic, and especially plastic bags, is choking the world’s oceans and waterways. So it is nice to see a very direct solution–a ban–instead of a 5 cent tax or some other half measure which doesn’t really get to the root of the problem. Maybe other states will follow Hawaii’s lead when they discover shopping without plastic bags does not in fact cause a catastrophe.
And, of course, I can’t write about plastic bags without posting my all-time favorite plastic bag video, featuring the genius of Werner Herzog:
Sharks Are The Modern Equivalent Of Bison
Anyone who is paying any attention at all knows that sharks are in trouble. But it is always helpful when science takes a hard run at establishing the facts. Here’s what a recent research effort at the University Of Hawaii came up with:
In an effort to answer the , the research team crunched data from 1607 surveys from the NOAA Coastal Reef Ecosystem Division (CRED) to calculate the effect of human habitation on shark populations. The CRED team counted sharks throughout the Pacific using towed diver surveys, the most efficient and effective way to study open ocean creatures on a large spatial scale, and compared their counts with local human population numbers. Their results were clear – and sobering.
“Around each of the heavily populated areas we surveyed — in the main Hawaiian Islands, the Mariana Archipelago and American Samoa — reef shark numbers were greatly depressed,” said Marc Nadon, lead author of the study. “We estimate that less than 10% of the baseline numbers remain in these areas.”
That 90% reduction in shark populations has long been the consensus guess on what humanity, which loves to monetize and commercialize fears of what sharks can do to us, is actually doing to sharks. So it is not surprising so much as it is a depressing indication that that catastrophic 90% number might actually be correct.
At that level, it is an echo of a similar destruction of a population for commercial benefit: the slaughter of the American buffalo. The American buffalo, or bison, was once the most numerous species of large animal on earth–until mankind saw profits in the skins and meat, and systematically reduced the herds to near extinction.
There is an echo also in the cruelty involved, with shark finning easily matching, and in my view surpassing, the practice of stampeding buffalo over a cliff for calculated barbarity.
There is one difference, though, between the human slaughter of sharks and the human slaughter of buffalo. The meat and skins of buffalo were arguably more vital to human existence than any product the shark slaughter provides. That is not to justify or excuse the slaughter of the buffalo. It is only to say that the destruction of shark populations for soup, crank cancer treatments and the pathetic hope for more sexual prowess (particularly given the importance of sharks to the overall oceanic ecosystem) is particularly senseless and a cosmic crime against the planet.
Exploiting An Ice-Free Arctic Ocean
Among the many disappointing truisms of human history: if there is a way to commercialize nature, nature will be commercialized.
That’s a dynamic that thousands of scientists are trying to stop, at least when it comes to industrial fishing in the Arctic Ocean. As global warming slowly pushes back, and even eliminates, the summer ice cover, it is opening up pristine waters and fish stocks that are barely understood to fleets of fishing boats that are eager for new fishing grounds.
In an effort to preempt the inevitable gold rush, the scientific community is pleading for caution:
Thousands of scientists from 67 countries have called for an international agreement to close the Arctic high seas to commercial fishing until research reveals more about the freshly exposed waters.
Recent Arctic sea-ice retreat during the summer months has opened up some of the waters that fall outside of the exclusive economic zones of the nations that circle the polar ocean. In all, more than 2.8 million square kilometres make up these international waters, which some scientists say could be ice free during summer months within 10–15 years. Although industrial fishing hasn’t yet occurred in the northernmost part of the Arctic, the lack of regulation may make it an appealing target for international commercial-fishing vessels.
“The science community currently does not have sufficient biological information to understand the presence, abundance, structure, movements, and health of fish stocks and the role they play in the broader ecosystem of the central Arctic Ocean,” says the letter, which was released by the Pew Environment Group on Sunday on the eve of the opening of the International Polar Year 2012 scientific conference in Montreal, Canada. More than 2,000 scientists, including 1,328 from Arctic coastal countries, signed the letter.
Keep an eye on this. It will be a good indicator of whether we have the capacity to learn and change, and elevate conservation and science to balance pure commercialism. But if you take any bets on it, make sure you are offered some serious odds.
Sustainable Meat Isn’t Sustainable?
Probably few practices are sustainable for a species which a) is relentlessly expanding; and b) has an economic and social culture that reveres and requires consumption. But this op-ed, “The Myth Of Sustainable Meat,” caught my eye a few weeks ago, because it argues–for all my meat-loving, environmentally-conscious friends–that organic, grass-fed, meat, is not really sustainable.
Grass-grazing cows emit considerably more methane than grain-fed cows. Pastured organic chickens have a 20 percent greater impact on global warming. It requires 2 to 20 acres to raise a cow on grass. If we raised all the cows in the United States on grass (all 100 million of them), cattle would require (using the figure of 10 acres per cow) almost half the country’s land (and this figure excludes space needed for pastured chicken and pigs). A tract of land just larger than France has been carved out of the Brazilian rain forest and turned over to grazing cattle. Nothing about this is sustainable.
Advocates of small-scale, nonindustrial alternatives say their choice is at least more natural. Again, this is a dubious claim. Many farmers who raise chickens on pasture use industrial breeds that have been bred to do one thing well: fatten quickly in confinement. As a result, they can suffer painful leg injuries after several weeks of living a “natural” life pecking around a large pasture. Free-range pigs are routinely affixed with nose rings to prevent them from rooting, which is one of their most basic instincts. In essence, what we see as natural doesn’t necessarily conform to what is natural from the animals’ perspectives.
The economics of alternative animal systems are similarly problematic. Subsidies notwithstanding, the unfortunate reality of commodifying animals is that confinement pays. If the production of meat and dairy was somehow decentralized into small free-range operations, common economic sense suggests that it wouldn’t last. These businesses — no matter how virtuous in intention — would gradually seek a larger market share, cutting corners, increasing stocking density and aiming to fatten animals faster than competitors could. Barring the strictest regulations, it wouldn’t take long for production systems to scale back up to where they started.
This is an important point. Factory farming is both a blight on the planet and a daily holocaust for millions of animals. And while small, organic farms address the toxic outputs, as well as the inhumanity, of industrial meat production, they do not really resolved the climate change impact of meat farming. And if all the world’s meat lovers abandoned factory-farmed meat, and demanded organic meat from small, humane, farms, meat-eating would still wreak environmental destruction on the planet (more pasture, fewer trees, more carbon output, etc., etc.).
The inevitable conclusion: while industrial meat-farming is an abomination for all sorts of reasons, the real environmental problem is that humanity eats WAY TOO MUCH meat. So the best thing our species could do for the planet and the animals is to stop eating meat. But the next best thing, a point made by many who wrote letters in response to the op-ed, is to eat a lot less meat.
So go ahead, enjoy your grass-fed, happy-cow steak, if you insist on eating meat. It’s better for you and better for the animals. But don’t feel smug or righteous about what you are doing for the planet. The only way you get to honestly feel you are doing something with impact is if you cut your meat consumption to near zero, or zero (basically, eat like a Bangladeshi–see below). Sorry, that’s just the reality. As Jonathan Safran Foer wrote in Eating Animals, if you eat meat you can’t really claim to be an environmentalist.
Antibiotics And Animals
This could be significant: a federal court has ordered the FDA to follow-through on a 35-year old proposal to stop pumping farm animals full of antibiotics:
A federal court on Thursday ordered the FDA to follow through on a 35-year-old proposal that would have banned the use of certain antibiotics in animal feed because the agency was concerned that these drugs were overused in livestock and helped develop drug-resistant bacteria that can infect people.
The concern is that some antibiotics given to treat illnesses in people are widely used on animals to promote disease prevention and weight gain, as well as compensate for crowded conditions on ranches and farms. The prevalence of those antibiotics in livestock has been linked in several studies to the creation of drug-resistant “superbugs” that can spread to humans who work with or eat the animals.
Excessive antibiotic use to prevent disease in factory farm animals is not only a major threat to human health, it also allows industrial farming operations to crowd large numbers of animals together. Restricting antibiotic use could (this is just the first step toward a ban and agribusiness has a lot of lobbying power) push industrial farms to do more to avoid crowding and conditions that lead to diseased animals, because diseased animals hurt the bottom line.
Put aside the fact that a potential ban is being motivated mainly by concerns over human health, not animal welfare (a reminder of the self-interested way in which humans view the world and its animals). This would be a step in the right direction for animal welfare, as long as it led to some changes in industrial farming practices, or even made such practices less feasible.
The Earthist Chronicles 