Category: Environment

The Human Impact

A fascinating set of images, which show the impact humans have had over time reworking the surface of the Earth:

Since the 1970s, NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey have been amassing satellite images of every inch of our planet as part of the Landsat program. Over time, the images reveal a record of change: of cities expanding, lakes and forests disappearing, new islands emerging from the sea off the coast of rising Middle East metropolises like Dubai.

If you could thumb through these historic pictures as if in a flip book, they would show stunning change across the earth’s surface, in both our natural environments and our man-made ones. Now, the digital equivalent of that experience is possible – three decades of global change as GIF – in a project unveiled today between NASA, the USGS, TIME, Google, and the CREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon University.

Landsat images taken between 1984 and 2012 have been converted into a seamless, navigable animation built from millions of satellite photos. As Google wrote this morning on its blog: “We believe this is the most comprehensive picture of our changing planet ever made available to the public.”

Sorry, this makes me think of locusts.

Welcome To The Era of 400-Plus

PPM of carbon in the atmosphere, that is.

Just passed it for the first time in human history. Stand by for 500?

Props To Europe: Norwegian Edition

Trash piled nine yards high is converted to heat and electricity at a waste-to-energy incinerator in Oslo. (Brian Cliff Olguin for The New York Times)

Is it possible to recycle too much? Apparently so. Or at least recycling too much can cause problems for other energy saving strategies. That is a good good dilemma, and I am having a hard time imagining Americans having the same problem:

Oslo, a recycling-friendly place where roughly half the city and most of its schools are heated by burning garbage — household trash, industrial waste, even toxic and dangerous waste from hospitals and drug arrests — has a problem: it has literally run out of garbage to burn.

The problem is not unique to Oslo, a city of 1.4 million people. Across Northern Europe, where the practice of burning garbage to generate heat and electricity has exploded in recent decades, demand for trash far outstrips supply. “Northern Europe has a huge generating capacity,” said Mr. Mikkelsen, 50, a mechanical engineer who for the last year has been the managing director of Oslo’s waste-to-energy agency.

Yet the fastidious population of Northern Europe produces only about 150 million tons of waste a year, he said, far too little to supply incinerating plants that can handle more than 700 million tons. “And the Swedes continue to build” more plants, he said, a look of exasperation on his face, “as do Austria and Germany.”

But it is easy to imagine Americans helping solve this problem, since we are very good at generating garbage, to the tune of 161 million tons a year (or 3 pounds per person, per day).

 

Chasing (Antarctic) Ice

Two months of icebreaking in 5 minutes:

Time-lapse of our icebreaker, the Nathaniel B. Palmer, traveling through the Ross Sea, Antarctica. Two months of sequences, condensed into less than five minutes, with a surprise at the end. Enjoy! To learn more about the current movement to protect the Ross Sea, visit http://www.lastocean.org and http://www.asoc.org.

Just another reminder that the Antarctic is special, and should be protected. (Also a great advertisement for a career as an environmental scientist).

PS: If you are not familiar with the story of Nathaniel Palmer, it is a story worth knowing.

Ocean Investigations: Chasing Glass

Over the past 25 years, C. Drew Harvell has meticulously recovered more than 200 models in a mostly forgotten collection of 570 glass sculptures created by a pair of father-and-son glassmakers, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, in the 1860s. (Photo: Jeffery DelViscio/The New York Times)

 

A very cool effort to find and film oceanic hundreds of oceanic species that were captured in exquisite detail by a family of 19th century glassmakers:

I’ve been a marine biologist my entire professional life, spending more than 25 years researching the health of corals and sustainability of reefs. I’m captivated by the magic of sessile invertebrates like corals, sponges and sea squirts — creatures vital to the ecosystem yet too often overlooked in favor of more visible animals like sharks and whales.

The filmmaker David O. Brown and I want to change that. To make a documentary, “Fragile Legacy,” we are on a quest to lure these elusive and delicate invertebrates in front of the camera lens.

Our inspiration springs from an unlikely source: a collection of 570 superbly wrought, anatomically perfect glass sculptures of marine creatures from the 19th century.

These delicate folds and strands of glass make up theBlaschka collection of glass invertebrates at Cornell, of which I am the curator — enchanting and impossibly rare jellyfishes of the open ocean; more common but equally beautiful octopus, squid, anemones and nudibranchs from British tide pools and Mediterranean shores.

How many will be thriving? How many will be impossible to find? It’s an interesting snapshot of what has happened in the oceans over the past 200 years.

Make sure you check out the spectacular multimedia presentation that compares the glass versions to the real thing.

Burgers vs. The Climate

Salon magazine taps into the most important truth about climate change, which is that the single greatest change any human can make to help reduce greenhouse warming is to eat a lot less meat:

In their report, Goodland and Anhang note that when you account for feed production, deforestation and animal waste, the livestock industry produces between 18 percent and 51 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions. Add to this the fact that producing animal protein involves up to eight times more fossil fuel than what’s needed to produce an equivalent amount of non-animal protein, and you see that climate change isn’t intensified only by necessities like transportation and electricity. It is also driven in large part by subjective food preferences — more precisely, by American consumers’ unnecessary desire to eat, on average, 200 pounds of meat every year.

If you find it demoralizing that we are incinerating the planet and dooming future generations simply because too many of us like to eat cheeseburgers, here’s that good news I promised: In their report, Goodland and Anhang found that most of what we need to do to mitigate the climate crisis can be achieved “by replacing just one quarter of today’s least eco-friendly food products” — read: animal products — “with better alternatives.” That’s right; essentially, if every fourth time someone craved, say, beef, chicken or cow milk they instead opted for a veggie burger, a bean burrito or water, we have a chance to halt the emergency.

Here’s more from Goodland, who says that even the below video underestimates the massive contribution meat consumption makes to greenhouse warming. And the Daily Dish notes that others, like Mark Bittman and economist Tyler Cowen, are on board.

So it would be better to stop buying burgers than it would be to keep buying Priuses. Plus, you’ll be doing your heart a favor, too.

Climate Change Is Not An Environmental Issue

Well, okay, it is partly that. But what it really is is an existential issue. And that distinction is very important.

So, in honor of the impending human achievement of carbon at 400PPM in the atmosphere, here is how we should be thinking about climate change. Because if we don’t understand the problem we can’t divine the solution.

Approaching A Carbon Milestone

400 PPM. Woo-hoo.

Scripps Institution of Oceanography
A curve shows the rising concentration of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. PPM stands for parts per million of CO2 in air. Before the 1800s, the concentration did not exceed 280 parts per million for hundreds of thousands of years.

From Andy Revkin at the NYT:

For hundreds of thousands of years preceding the industrial revolution, the concentration of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere didn’t exceed 280 parts per million. Now it is poised to pass 400 parts per million, thanks to the burst of fossil fuel combustion and forest clearing that’s accompanied humanity’s recent growth spurt.

That shift was noticed thanks to decades of work by Charles David Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and more recently his son Ralph. (Keeling’s work establishing a meticulous record of CO2 levels at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii was beautifully described in a 2010 feature by Justin Gillis.)

The Scripps Institution launched a Twitter account, @keeling_curve, to make it easy for people to track the gas’s path through 400 and beyond. Bryan Walsh of Time Magazine has a nice post up discussing what is and isn’t significant about that concentration and what comes next.

How did we get here?

Overexploitation Watch: Antarctic Krill

Sea Shepherd has a pretty depressing report on the factory ships they have seen plying Antarctic waters and scooping up krill:

The area where we found the krill fishing vessels was incredibly close to the Antarctic Peninsula and the South Shetland Islands that are dotted with penguin rookeries and fur seal haul-outs. This gives a full overlap between the fishery and the foraging ranges of land-based predators like the penguins (Gentoo, Chinstrap, Adelie and Macaroni), which cannot move to other locations. Even if there is still plenty of Krill around, both predators and fishing vessels will concentrate on the highest densities and therefore directly compete. The surrounding waters are cruised by seven species of Baleen whales. The ice floes in these waters function as resting places for Crabeater and Leopard seals. All these animals depend directly or indirectly on Krill as their food source. The true seals have flourished and the fur seals were able to bounce back from near-extinction when the Antarctic waters were emptied of the Krill-gorging baleen whales during the whaling era (early 1900s until the 1980s). The competition eliminated, more food became available for them, but a decline in Krill will eventually hit all animals in the Antarctic, even flying birds and fish, and will prevent the great whales from returning to pre-exploitation numbers.

Krill is called the single largest under-utilized commercial marine resource remaining, because the global quota set is not yet reached, but expansion of the fishery seems inevitable. The fishery was kept in check by the distance and inhospitality of Antarctica’s waters, the fact that Krill are highly perishable once killed and that consumer interest was limited. Aquaculture feed demand is on the rise however, rapid on-board processing techniques have dealt with the quick spoiling and new products are being developed. The Krill fishery is the continuation of a trend in the history of fishing. We fish further and further away from home and we fish further and further down the food chain. You can’t get much further away as Antarctica and you can’t get much further down the food web than Krill. We are reaching the end.

Worth thinking about the next time someone tells you that fish farming is sustainable. Everywhere you look, new species, and new resources, are being exploited for commercial purposes. Each one is unique, and each one has its own special role in the ecosystem, and it seems impossible to keep up with, and blunt or even slow the insatiable grind of industry and its quest for new profits.

How is it that we have created an international system of politics and economics that completely fails to value and protect these resources?

 

The only way, really, to address these endless and destructive forays into nature’s delicate balance, the only way to imagine that all these extraordinary natural resources can be defended, is to change the culture that lies behind them.  That is the only global solution, but it will take a revolution in thinking and values.

Climate Change Reality Check: The Gap Between Theory And Action

I’ve long been struck (dumb) by the enormity of the chasm between the policies and actions climate change demands, and the policies and actions humans and their governments are actually willing to take (no, buying a Prius isn’t enough).

Grist’s David Roberts digs into this problem, with a look at just one industry, the shipping industry. First, some general context:

There is a titanic gulf between what we say ought to be done about climate change and what we are doing. This ineluctable fact has loomed behind national and international policymaking for decades, but it is getting harder and harder to ignore…[snip]

Needless to say, we are not acting in a fashion that would put us on any of those emission curves. According to International Energy Agency chief economist Fatih Birol, our current trajectory is “perfectly in line with a temperature increase of 6°C, which would have devastating consequences for the planet.”

Here’s a quick graphic on what sort of reductions Annex 1 (developed countries) and non-Annex 1 (developing countries) would have to accomplish to achieve different probabilities of avoiding the 2 degree C increase in global temperatures that is the guesstimated dividing line between sorta bad consequences and really bad consequences (click image to enlarge).

 

Not looking very likely, is it? And here is why the shipping industry, and its stated plans to help reduce carbon, can help explain why this gulf exists:

In fact, note Anderson and Bows, “the shipping industry’s EEDI and SEEMP leave the sector on a trajectory for emissions to be approximately 2200% higher by 2050 than is their fair and proportionate contribution.”

Let that sink in for a moment: 2,200 percent. That’s the size of the gulf between the industry’s stated intentions and the industry’s real-world policies, between what it says it intends to do and what it’s doing. Anderson and Bows call this a “Machiavellian duality,” and it is by no means unique to shipping. It is true of most industries and most countries. We talk a good game about 2°C, but nobody, anywhere, is doing close to what would be necessary to make it real.

To add a kind of surreal twist to all this, the industry talks constantly about the emission “reductions” it plans. How can it do this when, as the graph makes clear, it plans enormous emission increases? What enables this kind of Orwellian doublespeak?

The answer is that the reductions are relative to a baseline projection of growth. They’re lower than they would be otherwise, without policy to reduce emissions. You hear this all the time, from companies, industries, agencies, and countries, about emission “reductions” that are, in fact, merely slightly-less-enormous emission increases. And so we lull ourselves with the thought that we’re doing something, making progress.

So there you have it. The reality of climate change is met by the fantasy that incremental change will get the job done. Unless that fantasy is made apparent and banished, and real changes on the scale reality requires are implemented, things are going to get mighty warm up in here.

What should we do if everyone wakes up and suddenly says, how do we achieve the change required? Repeat with me: price carbon. The change will follow.