Tag: climate

Sylvia Earle On The Oceans

Speaking of the future of the planet’s watery realms, here’s an excellent podcast of Sylvia Earle talking about humanity and its impact:

If you’re inspired by Earle’s ability to pull this off at age 78, just wait: The real inspiration lies in her stunning plea for ocean conservation. In this episode of Inquiring Minds (click below to stream audio), Earle doesn’t shy away from giving us the really, really big picture. She explains that we’re the first generation of humans to even know what we’re doing to 96 percent of the Earth’s water—through assaults ranging from over-fishing to noise pollution to global warming’s evil twin, ocean acidification.

Older generations just didn’t get it; they simply had no idea they could have this effect. “We have been under the illusion for most of our history, thinking that the ocean is too big to fail,” Earle says. Now, thanks in large part to the work of ocean adventurer-scientists like Earle, we know better. And we’re right at that crucial moment where knowing something might actually help us make a difference.

Actually, I think knowing something about 50 years ago might have really helped us make a difference. We often don’t want to know until we are on the edge of disaster, and that is naturally very late in the game. Still…

The Power Of Activist Art: Factory Farm Edition

Yesterday I posted this mesmerizing photo on my Facebook page (click image for full size):

 

At first glance it looks like modern art, maybe Francis Bacon, maybe Ralph Steadman.

What it really is is a satellite image of a factory farm waste lagoon, that is part of a series curated by British artist Mishak Henner (hat tip to Rachel Clark for pointing the provenance out to me) that seeks to reveal the true impact of factory farming on the American landscape.

Here’s how Inhabitat.com describes the work:

Big food companies are always trying to convince us that their products come from idyllic family run farms, although that rosy image couldn’t be further from the truth. A recently released batch of aerial photographs by British artist Mishka Henner show that factory farming is taking its toll on our planet. In addition to producing nutrient-poor “food” rife with GMOs, these farms are literally carving swaths of death through the American landscape. Henner’s shocking photos provide bird’s eye proof of the destruction that follows when industrial beef farming moves into town.

The images, discovered by Henner while researching satellite photographs of oil fields, look more like post-apocalyptic wastelands than acreage in America’s heartland.

““While I was working on that series I was looking intensely at the American landscape, and that’s when I came across these really strange-looking structures, like a big lagoon, or all these dots that look like microbes,” Henner told Fast Co. “We have factory farming in England, but we don’t have it on that scale. I was just absolutely blown away.”

The aerial shots of factory farming feedlots are open source satellite imagery, so Henner doesn’t have to worry about the legal risk of publishing them. In recent years, the commercial agriculture industry has sought to hide its disgraceful practices from the public’s view, and journalists found photographing feedlots have faced arrest and criminal charges under bogus “Ag Gag” laws. It’s not hard to see why they’d rather no one know what they’re up to.

“Massive waste lagoons, which waft up dangerous hydrogen sulfide fumes and can contaminate groundwater with nitrates and antibiotics, first resemble open, infected wounds,” explains Fast Co. The land on which the feedlots sit is totally barren, brown and dry. Brightly colored waste from the poor animals housed there gives off an alien glow against the neutral backdrop of dying land. The cows themselves look like ants from the aerial perspective, crowded together with no shade or comfort from the harsh conditions.

“To me, as somebody in the U.K., looking at something [like] the feedlots I was shocked on a very personal level,” Henner told Fast Co. “I think what the feedlots represent is a certain logic about how culture and society have evolved. On one level it’s absolutely terrifying, that this is what we’ve become. They’re not just feedlots. They’re how we are.”

Here’s are some more photos (full set here). Very powerful.

 

 

Louis CK On Christians vs Environmentalists

Very funny on one level. Not so funny on another….

For an earlier comedic rant that was right up my alley, see here.

Phew, Glad We Settled That

Because it would nice to stop arguing about this and focus on solutions:

An international panel of scientists has found with near certainty that human activity is the cause of most of the temperature increases of recent decades, and warns that sea levels could conceivably rise by more than three feet by the end of the century if emissions continue at a runaway pace.

The scientists, whose findings are reported in a draft summary of the next big United Nations climate report, largely dismiss a recent slowdown in the pace of warming, which is often cited by climate change doubters, attributing it most likely to short-term factors.

The report emphasizes that the basic facts about future climate change are more established than ever, justifying the rise in global concern. It also reiterates that the consequences of escalating emissions are likely to be profound.

“It is extremely likely that human influence on climate caused more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010,” the draft report says. “There is high confidence that this has warmed the ocean, melted snow and ice, raised global mean sea level and changed some climate extremes in the second half of the 20th century.”

I suppose there will next be a demand for ABSOLUTE certainty. In the meantime here is a partial glimpse of what we are destroying:

The Ongoing Meat Bomb

It’s just a graphic, but it captures a big problem.

Growth in meat-eating is just one more reason a global culture that celebrates consumption is a disaster. At some point human values need to emphasize stewardship over self-gratification. But getting there is a big challenge.

(via)

It’s (Still) Getting Hot Up In Here

The latest World Energy Outlook is out. And it ain’t looking so good:

Global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions increased by 1.4 percent in 2012, a pace that could lead to a temperature increase of as much as 5.3 degrees C (9 degrees F) over pre-industrial times, according to the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) latest World Energy Outlook. Despite significant improvements in some regions, including the U.S. and Europe, a record 31.6 gigatons of carbon dioxide were emitted worldwide during the year, including a 5.8-percent increase in Japan, where more fossil fuels were burned to compensate for reductions in nuclear power. While the rate of emissions growth in China was dramatically lower than in recent years, it still emitted 3.8 percent more carbon dioxide in 2012 than in 2011.

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?

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.

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.

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?