BraveNewClimate

Guest Post by Geoff Russell. Geoff is a mathematician and computer programmer and is a member of Animal Liberation SA. His recently published book is CSIRO Perfidy.

If I see another fruit tree, I’ll throw up!

I guess that most people have seen information about the eco-footprint of different foods. It takes so many litres of water to produce a kilo of this or that food. Or figures about how much energy is consumed in the production of meat, coffee, chocolate or rice. But there are much bigger aspects to the environmental footprints of animal product that are rarely considered in such studies. This blog piece will end up at a great piece of Australian scientific research from the University of Queensland (with software from CSIRO) on the big picture impacts, the regional impacts of choosing to eat large amounts of animal products.

Placing that research in context will take some time, but before we get started on these big issues, let’s have a quick quiz.

1. How many news reports have you seen about the water shortages in the Murray Darling Basin (MDB) without fruit trees being the dominant image? Rows of citrus fill the frame like Matt Preston’s gourmet gut. I guess it’s more convenient for TV film crews than battling the high seas of manure at a dairy.
2. How many of the 13,700 billion litres of water extracted from the waters of the Murray Darling Basin go to fruit trees?

The fruit industry, according to a 2004 CSIRO report used 2.6 percent of water extracted in the basin. The vegetable industry is even smaller at about half that … 1.3 percent. The four biggest users were, in order, dairy (34 percent), cotton (24 percent) and rice (16 percent) and beef (7 percent).

You could cynically argue that it is quite accurate to feature fruit trees in the MDB stories. The fruit growers may be the smallest in the list of people causing the problems in the MDB, but they will, individually, be paying a major price.

Now let’s slow down, take a step back and look at the bigger picture behind the MDB problems.

Global warming “gone” … but the Murray crisis continues

Global warming has largely vanished from center stage in Australian political life. The old Prime Minister was too poll-driven to take tough decisions and the new one is transparently disinterested in such matters.  The boredom in her voice even overwhelms the dry monotone delivery and becomes palpable as she goes through the motions of feigning Government commitment to de-carbonising our lifestyles.

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I was asked by the Adelaide Advertiser newspaper to write a short piece last week which addressed the question “Does all the recent rain across the country prove man made climate change is real?“, in less than 500 words. My response, given below, appeared in the print edition on Thursday 9 September 2010:

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Does all the recent rain across the country prove man made climate change is real? No.

As Dorothea Mackellar wrote over a century ago, Australia is naturally “A land… Of droughts and flooding rains”.

Putting the impossible issue of ‘proof’ aside, scientists certainly do expect climate change to lead to an increase the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. After all, a warmer planet holds extra energy, making today’s climate system more dynamic than when Mackellar penned her poem.

In short, as the Earth’s atmosphere traps more heat due to an increase in greenhouse gases, it triggers more evaporation of water from the oceans. Average global humidity and precipitation rise in response.

As such, climate scientists predict increasingly energetic storms, heavier bursts of rain, and more intense flooding. In many parts of the world, deeper droughts and longer, hotter heat waves are also forecast.

So, while it is impossible to attribute any one event solely to human-caused warming, a useful analogy is that “weather throws the punches, but climate trains the boxer”. Another way to look at it is that human impacts are “loading the climate dice” towards more unfavourable (and previously unlikely) outcomes.

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The world’s climate is inherently dynamic and changeable. Past aeons have borne witness to a planet choked by intense volcanic activity, dried out in vast circumglobal deserts, heated to a point where polar oceans were as warm as subtropical seas, and frozen in successive ice ages that entombed northern Eurasia and America under miles of ice. These changes to the Earth’s environment imposed great stresses upon ecosystems and often led to mass extinctions of species. Life always went on, but the world was inevitably a very different place.

We, a single species, are now the agent of global change. We are undertaking an unplanned and unprecedented experiment in planetary engineering, which has the potential to unleash physical and biological transformations on a scale never before witnessed by civilization. Our actions are causing a massive loss and fragmentation of habitats (e.g., deforestation of the tropical rain forests), over-exploitation of species (e.g., collapse of major fisheries), and severe environmental degradation (e.g., pollution and excessive draw-down of rivers, lakes and groundwater). These patently unsustainable human impacts are operating worldwide, and accelerating. They foreshadow a grim future. And then, on top of all of this, there is the looming spectre of climate change.

When climate change is discussed in the modern context, it is usually with reference to global warming, caused by anthropogenic pollution from the burning of fossil fuels. Since the furnaces of the industrial revolution were first ignited a few centuries ago, we have treated the atmosphere as an open sewer, dumping into it more than a trillion tonnes of heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO₂), as well as methane, nitrous oxide and ozone-destroying CFCs. The atmospheric concentration of CO₂ is now nearly 40% higher than at any time over the past million years (and perhaps 40 million years – our data predating the ice core record is too sketchy to draw strong conclusions). Average global temperature rose 0.74°C in the hundred years since 1906, with almost two thirds of that warming having occurred in just the last 50 years.

What of the future? There is no doubt that climate predictions carry a fair burden of scientific ambiguity, especially regarding feedbacks in climatic and biological systems. Yet what is not widely appreciated among non-scientists is that more than half of the uncertainty, captured in the scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is actually related to our inability to forecast the probable economic and technological development pathway global societies will take during the twenty-first century. As a forward-thinking and risk averse species, it is certainly within our power to anticipate the manifold impacts of anthropogenic climate change, and so make the key economic and technological choices required to substantially mitigate our carbon emissions. But will we act in time, and will it be with sufficient gusto? And can nature adapt?

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