Worrying about global tipping points distracts from real planetary threats

Posted on 4 March 2013 by Barry Brook

In a paper published last week in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, I (Barry Brook) and my colleagues argue against the idea of an ecological global-scale “tipping point”. Here, I outline the paper’s core argument, while Professor Corey Bradshaw (not an author on the study) explains what it means for conservation practice.

Locally, tipping points are real, but it’s unlikely the whole globe will go at once. (Truthout.org)

NOTE: For some counter arguments, see this HuffPo piece: Tipping Points: Can Humanity Break The Planet? What strikes me is that many of the critics apparently did not read the original article, because they’ve confused/conflated what we’ve said about ecological tipping points with those observed or forecast for the climate system. Because of the inherent global interconnectivity and physical couplings of the latter, tipping points are plausible and indeed likely for some elements, such as Arctic sea ice. Not so for biomes, we argue. If you want a PDF copy of the TREE paper, email me.

Barry Brook

We argue that at the global-scale, ecological “tipping points” and threshold-like “planetary boundaries” are improbable. Instead, shifts in the Earth’s biosphere follow a gradual, smooth pattern. This means that it might be impossible to define scientifically specific, critical levels of biodiversity loss or land-use change. This has important consequences for both science and policy.

Humans are causing changes in ecosystems across Earth to such a degree that there is now broad agreement that we live in an epoch of our own making: the Anthropocene. But the question of just how these changes will play out — and especially whether we might be approaching a planetary tipping point with abrupt, global-scale consequences — has remained unsettled.

A tipping point occurs when an ecosystem attribute, such as species abundance or carbon sequestration, responds abruptly and possibly irreversibly to a human pressure, such as land-use or climate change. Many local- and regional-level ecosystems, such as lakes,forests and grasslands, behave this way. Recently however, there have been several efforts to define ecological tipping points at the global scale.

At a local scale, there are definitely warning signs that an ecosystem is about to “tip”. For the terrestrial biosphere, tipping points might be expected if ecosystems across Earth respond in similar ways to human pressures and these pressures are uniform, or if there are strong connections between continents that allow for rapid diffusion of impacts across the planet.

These criteria are, however, unlikely to be met in the real world.

First, ecosystems on different continents are not strongly connected. Organisms are limited in their movement by oceans and mountain ranges, as well as by climatic factors, and while ecosystem change in one region can affect the global circulation of, for example, greenhouse gases, this signal is likely to be weak in comparison with inputs from fossil fuel combustion and deforestation.

Second, the responses of ecosystems to human pressures like climate change or land-use change depend on local circumstances and will therefore differ between locations. From a planetary perspective, this diversity in ecosystem responses creates an essentially gradual pattern of change, without any identifiable tipping points.

This puts into question attempts to define critical levels of land-use change or biodiversity loss scientifically.

Why does this matter? Well, one concern we have is that an undue focus on planetary tipping points may distract from the vast ecological transformations that have already occurred.

After all, as much as four-fifths of the biosphere is today characterised by ecosystems that locally, over the span of centuries and millennia, have undergone human-driven regime shifts of one or more kinds.

Recognising this reality and seeking appropriate conservation efforts at local and regional levels might be a more fruitful way forward for ecology and global change science.
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Dietary Guidelines Committee ignores climate change

Posted on 24 March 2012 by Barry Brook

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. His previous article on BNC was: Feeding the billions on a hotter planet (Part III).

He also wrote a brilliant recent piece for The Punch: Fukushima was no disaster, no matter how you spin it

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IPCC calls to reduce meat consumption

Back in 2008, head of the IPCC Rajendra Pachauri told the world to eat less meat because of its large greenhouse footprint.

At about the same time the National Health and Medical Research Council appointed a committee to update Australia’s Dietary Guidelines … last issued in 2003. The preface from the 2003 document is clear:

“The Australian Food and Nutrition Policy is based on the principles of good nutrition, ecological sustainability and equity. This third edition of the Dietary Guidelines for Australian Adults is consistent with these principles. The food system must be economically viable and the quality and integrity of the environment must be maintained. In this context, among the important considerations are conservation of scarce resources such as topsoil, water and fossil fuel energy and problems such as salinity.”

The Terms of Reference give no instructions about what the committee should do other than to update the documents with the best available science. Environmental issues were clearly worthy of lip-service in 2003, if nothing else. Any reasonable update to the 2003 document should see those issues front and center.

Our impacts on the climate will flow on into most other environmental issues, whether we are concerned with other species, or more narrowly focused on the habitability of the planet for our own. If food choices have a significant impact on climate forcings, then documenting and explaining the extent of those impacts to the public should have been front and centre in the workings of this committee. In addition to the head of the IPCC, no lesser scientific authority than NASA climate scientist James Hansen said in 2009:

If you eat further down on the food chain rather than animals, which have produced many greenhouse gases, and used much energy in the process of growing that meat, you can actually make a bigger contribution in that way than just about anything. So that, in terms of individual action, is perhaps the best thing you can do.

He made an equivalent statement to me in 2008 and advised that he was changing his own diet and was “80-90% vegetarian“.

We shall see later that Hansen’s claim is easily supported.
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Feeding 10 billion in 2050′s sauna (Part III)

Posted on 21 December 2011 by Barry Brook

What future for agriculture on a hotter planet?

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. His previous article on BNC was: Feeding the billions on a hotter planet (Part II)

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Welcome to Part III of my still presumptuously titled series on feeding the world in 2050.

I spent the first two parts of this series looking at global authorities like the FAO (United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation) with its predictive obsession and its policy associate IFPRI (International Food Policy Research Institute) with its meat obsession. Writing in a similarly obsessed country with far more cattle than people, I felt compelled to add a special section on protein and to also quantify the place of meat, particularly sheep and cattle meat, on the world food stage. Cattle are a major player in climate change, biodiversity loss and general environmental destruction but both they and sheep are globally irrelevant to food security. But worse than being irrelevant, their net contribution may well be negative. Here are some of the negative impacts:

  1. Reductions in the productivity of the land that produces real food. These reductions are via physical soil damage, consumption of crop residues which protect the soil, the deliberate burning of areas that are croppable to maintain them as pasture.
  2. Fouling water. Lack of clean water is the second biggest cause of malnutrition.
  3. Acting as disease generators. I mentioned Cryptosporidium in the last post, but livestock are also major generators of novel rotavirus strains. Rotavirus kills a million children annually, with vaccination not always available in the developing world. We don’t need new strains.
  4. The direct sickening and killing of children and women via the use of animal dung as a fuel.
  5. The reduction in the global food supply by making feed production more profitable than food production. The last impact doesn’t always apply to sheep and cattle but is more general. People with the perspicacity to easily recognise this problem in the context of biofuels are almost universally blind to its existence elsewhere.

Today, in the last of the series, I want to look some standout scientific work that breaks the predictive meat obsessed mould. This is work by Jonathan Foley and Navin Ramankutty and a sizeable group of associated researchers. I’ll call this the “FR” work, but keep in mind that there are many other researchers involved.

This work breaks the mold because it isn’t concerned with mere prediction, like that of the FAO. Nor is it obsessed with meat as a food but rather it recognises meat’s central role in reducing global food Calories.

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Feeding 10 billion on a hotter planet (Part II)

Posted on 4 December 2011 by Barry Brook

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. His previous article on BNC was: Feeding the billions in 2050′s sauna (Part I)

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Welcome to Part II of my presumptuously titled series on feeding the world in 2050. Before concluding where we left off with the analysis of the foods which the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) thinks are globally important, we need a short prologue on protein.

Protein prologue

Any suggestion based on Calorie counts that the net contribution of beef or other meats to global food security may be trifling or even negative brings instant feedback about protein. The presumption is that it is adequate protein, particularly animal protein, which is the key requirement for beating malnutrition. This is inevitable for two reasons: first, the absence of medical malnutrition literature from the best seller list, and second, we have all spent our entire lifetime swimming in meat industry propaganda … much of it focused on protein.

We need some historical perspective on protein.

There’s nothing quite like being the first, and protein can lay good claim to being the first critical nutrient discovered in the early days of modern chemistry. Nitrogen is protein’s key chemical component and one of the first to be accurately measured. Consequently, quite precise measurements of protein utilisation in people have been around for almost 200 years.

Early investigators fed dogs pure sugar diets and watched them die. Absence of protein was the explanation they eventually settled on. What else could it have been? In 1815, vitamins (in any measurable sense) were well beyond the knowledge horizon, so there was really only one candidate. By 1842, protein was pronounced the only true nutrient and the sole provider of energy to the muscles. It mattered not that measurements on prison work gangs showed no differences in protein utilisation on rest days and hard treadmill days. The history of protein spin is a picturesque tale of arrogant opinionated people holding fast to beliefs in the face of overwhelming data. Not everyone was fooled. US Yale University researchers in 1907 took athletes and halved their protein intake during a mammoth 5 month piece of live-in research. Over the 5 months, far from fading away, the subjects got stronger by 35%. The protein myth charged on regardless, pushed by the then head of the US Agriculture Department who thought (seriously) that when people could choose food without regard for cost or availability, they would choose an optimal diet. i.e., the rich must know best.

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Feeding the billions in 2050′s sauna (Part I)

Posted on 20 November 2011 by Barry Brook

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. His previous article on BNC was: The Swiss army nuclear knife

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During the past few years, all the world’s major science journals have had a steady stream of papers on the challenge of feeding 9 to 10 billion people on a warming planet in 2050. They have been joined by reports from bodies with varying prestige and influence likeInternational Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), The World Bank and the Royal Society. CSIRO has a long history of interest in the issue and even billionaire packager Anthony Pratt is getting in on the act telling Australia that since it can produce food for 200 million people, it has a responsibility to do so.

All these reports pay swollen lip service to the food security issues of the poor. All rightly regard the current global levels of stunting and malnutrition … running at 30 percent or more in many poor populations … as unconscionable.

Do we simply need more of the same?

Most of these papers and reports fall into two groups. The first looks at population and food intake trends and guesstimates that adding 2 to 3 billion people by 2050 will require between 70 percent and 100 percent more food. They typically then suggest places where large buckets of money might be deposited to fund research directed at meeting these projections.

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Strange bedfellows? Techno-fixes and conservation

Posted on 8 November 2011 by Barry Brook

I have a new paper out in the peer-reviewed journal Biological Conservation that will be of interest to BNC readers.

It is called “Strange bedfellows? Techno-fixes to solve the big conservation issues in southern Asia“, by Barry W. Brook & Corey J.A. Bradshaw. Here are some details:

Abstract

The conservation challenges facing mega-biodiverse South and Southeast Asia in the 21st century are enormous. For millennia, much of the habitat of these regions was only lightly modified by human endeavour, yet now it is experiencing rampant deforestation, logging, biofuel cropping, invasive species expansion, and the synergies of climate change, drought, fire and sea-level rise. Although small-scale conservation management might assist some species and habitats, the broader sweep of problems requires big thinking and some radical solutions. Given the long expected lead times between progressive economic development and stabilization of human population size and consumption rates, we argue that ‘technological fixes’ cannot be ignored if we are to address social and fiscal drivers of environmental degradation and associated species extinctions in rapidly developing regions like southern Asia.

The pursuit of cheap and abundant ‘clean’ energy from an economically rational mix of nuclear power, geothermal, solar, wind, and hydrogen-derivative ‘synfuels’, is fundamental to this goal. This will permit pathways of high-tech economic development that include intensified (high energy-input) agriculture over small land areas, full recycling of material goods, a transition from fossil-fuel use for transport and electricity generation, a rejection of tropical biofuels that require vast areas of arable land for production, and a viable alternative to the damming of major waterways like the Mekong, Murum and northern tributaries of the Ganges and Brahmaputra Rivers for hydroelectricity. Rational approaches that work at large scales must be used to deal with the ultimate, rather than just proximate, drivers of biodiversity loss in the rapidly developing regions of southern Asia.

Filed under: Future, Hot News, Impacts, Policy | 9 Comments »

Low intensity geoengineering – microbubbles and microspheres

Posted on 8 October 2011 by Barry Brook

Guest post by John Morgan. John runs R&D programmes at a Sydney startup company. He has a PhD in physical chemistry, and research experience in chemical engineering in the US and at CSIRO. He is a regular commenter on BNC.

A 9-page printable PDF version of this post can be downloaded here.

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Crazy talk

Geoengineering is crazy. The sheer scale of the aspiration speaks of hubris. Terraforming the planet by pulling down billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide, or pushing millions of tonnes of plastic up into orbit is absurd. The material intensities and costs are ridiculous.

And yet, with no deep cuts in emissions in evidence, with atmospheric CO2 at 390 parts per million and climbing at a rate of about 2 ppm a year, our “safe” working level of 350 ppm is rapidly disappearing in the rear view mirror even as we’re pushing the pedal harder to the floor. We do a lot of crazy things.

But what if there was a geoengineering approach that used no materials, almost no energy, works at sea level, with cheap technology we could start deploying at scale today?

That’s exactly what Russell Seitz at Harvard is proposing. In this post I want to look at his idea of increasing the reflectivity of the oceans with tiny microbubbles, It’s a fascinating, low impact concept, though not without some challenges. So I’ll also propose a different means to the same end that addresses these issues, and of course has some of its own. Then we can talk about how crazy it all is.

Bright Water

In a remarkable paper published just over a year ago – which I highly recommend reading – Seitz proposed injecting microbubbles of air into seawater, effectively creating an “inverse cloud”. Sunlight is scattered back into space from these bubbles. This concept has no material inputs, bubble sparging equipment is cheap and low power, and could be installed on ships already travelling the worlds waterways.

We don’t need to launch giant lenses into space or build giant balloon tethered pipelines to the stratosphere. We have a much more down to earth delivery system already in place, in the form of more than 10 000 ships at sea, 1300 working oil rigs and many thousands of retired platforms (3500 in the Gulf of Mexico alone) not to mention islands and suitable coastlines.

It’s the little bubbles of nothing that make it really something

The appeal of this technique comes from the fact that you only need very small bubbles to scatter light. Leveraging the cube law relationship for volume gives you a lot of scattering power if you can make really small bubbles. The air from a single 1 cm bubble, could fill a trillion 1 μm bubbles.

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Livestock and Climate Change … Status update

Posted on 17 January 2011 by Barry Brook

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.

The United Nations report Livestock’s Long Shadow (LLS) came out in 2006 with an estimate that 18 percent of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are attributable to livestock. If you exclude deforestation emissions, then the number drops to 14 percent. Some 95 percent of these emissions are direct emissions of methane or nitrous oxide with just 5 percent being from associated energy use as shown in the table which is a contraction of a table from LLS.

Livestock Greenhouse Giga Tonnes
Emissions CO2-eq
Energy Related 0.16
Methane 2.20
Nitrous Oxide 2.20

The reason the energy emissions are so small is that almost no processing is included. The energy associated with the refrigerated meat chain from abattoir to consumer, cooking costs, energy to build the trucks that carry the animals and later the meat etc. None of this was included.

A couple of years after the LLS report, BNC published a piece by myself, Barry Brook and Peter Singer which showed that Australia’s most powerful climate forcing was livestock and not coal fired power stations. The demonstration relied on the difference between radiative forcing, a concept roughly equivalent to warming and used by climate scientists, and the less accurate concept of carbon dioxide equivalent used in the Kyoto protocol.

Two years later and it’s time for an update. The NOAA chart shows that methane levels are rising again after a flat spot during the early 2000s, and the biggest single source of anthropogenic methane is livestock.

This update will look at implications of livestock growth predictions, the Goodland/Anhang photosynthesis imbalance theory, industry attempts to show beef is carbon friendly, and ruminant methane reduction research. I’d like to also cover black carbon and ozone issues, but that will have to wait. I have written a small section to explain why black carbon and ozone are really, really important, but the detail will have to wait.

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QLD floods highlight the cost of climate extremes

Posted on 12 January 2011 by Barry Brook

After a long, hot period of drought in eastern Australia, spanning much of the 1990s and 2000s and referred to as the worst in 1000 years (see also discussion on BNC on the drought here and the strange winter of 2009 here), the period 2010-2011 has seen record rainfall and rural flooding events in Australia. This has culminated this week with the 3rd largest city, Brisbane, being struck by severely damaging and costly urban floods, inundating the central business district and overwhelming many thousands of homes and businesses. To quote:

BRISBANE is besieged by the flood of the century, with more than 30,000 properties to be inundated tomorrow… The Queensland capital is now the scene of a natural disaster unprecedented in contemporary Australia. The Brisbane River is due to reach 5.2m on a 4am high tide, 30cm down on the predicted peak, but approaching the mark set in the devastating 1974 floods that claimed 14 lives.

This all comes on the back of an earlier ‘drought breaking’ flood that struck central Queensland earlier in 2010, which I described in this post:

Do the recent floods prove man-made climate change is real? In this post, I said:

Earlier this year in Australia, the Bureau of Meteorology released a Special Climate Statement on the recent exceptional rain and flooding events in central Australia and Queensland. February 28th 2010 was the wettest day on record for the Northern Territory, and March 2nd set a new record for Queensland. Over the 10-day period ending March 3rd, an estimated 403 cubic kilometres (403,000 gigalitres) of rainfall fell across the NT and QLD. Extreme, indeed.

For further background on these events, you should read the latest special climate statement, released on 7th January by the Bureau of Meteorology: An extremely wet end to 2010 leads to widespread flooding across eastern Australia. It says:

It was the wettest December on record for Queensland and for eastern Australia as a whole, the second-wettest for the Murray-Darling Basin, the sixth-wettest for Victoria and the eighth-wettest for New South Wales. For Australia as a whole it was the third-wettest December on record. This followed an extremely wet spring, the wettest on record for Queensland, New South Wales, eastern Australia and the Murray-Darling Basin. The heavy late November and December rainfall followed a very wet July to October for Australia, meaning many catchments were already wet before the flooding rain. It was Australia’s wettest July to October on record and also the wettest July to December on record.

The point of this post is not to try to attribute these extreme weather events directly to climate change, although I think there is a real influence at work here. A major factor is one of the strongest La Niñas on record, as detailed in this excellent piece by climatologist Neville Nichols. Climate scientist Will Steffen from ANU also had this to say:

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Energy and climate books I read in 2010

Posted on 21 December 2010 by Barry Brook

Here is a selection of sustainable energy and climate change books I read in 2010. I’ve provided a few sentence summary of each book (from my perspective) and a Rating out of 5. Some books have been reviewed in more detail on BNC already — enter from the title of the book in this website’s search box to find the review (or click links provided). For my 2009 list, go here.

Climate science

Tyler Volk. CO2 Rising: The World’s Greatest Environmental Challenge. MIT Press, 2008 (223 pp). Carbon atoms with personality – an entertaining tour of the carbon cycle, and an exploration of how humanity is disrupting the natural balance of flows in and out of the biosphere and geosphere. Full review here. Rating: 3

Edmond Mathez. Climate Change: The Science of Global Warming and Our Energy Future. Columbia University Press, 2009 (318 pp). A richly illustrated guide to all aspects of climate science, impacts, adaptation and mitigation. Superficial in parts, but mostly a superb overview, and excellent value as a student text. Full review here. Rating: 4

Peter Ward. The Flooded Earth: Our Future in a World Without Ice Caps. Basic Books, 2010 (272 pp). A chilling look at our possible destiny along the world’s coastlines as climate change drives an inexorable rise in sea levels. Hypothetical glimpses into possible futures are used as an effective device to indicate the limits of human adaptability. Full review here. Rating: 3.5

Stewart Cohen & Melissa Waddell. Climate Change in the 21st Century. McGill-Queen’s UP, 2010 (379 pp). Mostly a standard, plain text overview of climate change, but saved by the excellent concluding chapters on integrated assessment models and the interrelationship and synergies of anthropogenic climate change within the broader global environmental debate. Rating: 2.5 (more…)

Filed under: Clim Ch Q&A, Emissions, Future, Hot News, Impacts, Nuclear, Renewables | 20 Comments »

Systems modelling for synergistic ecological-climate dynamics

Posted on 18 November 2010 by Barry Brook

For those interested in my current science research directions, I’ve just been funded for another 4 years by the Australian Research Council as a Professorial “Future Fellow“, to continue my work on stochastic systems modelling and scenario optimisation. Here are some details on the project:

Title: Systems modelling for synergistic ecological-climate dynamics

Summary of Proposal: The project aims to improve forecasts of the response of biodiversity to future climate change, and develop better on-ground conservation management. A systems modelling framework will be developed and tested against real-world data, to integrate a wide variety of biological and geophysical inputs and so produce more realistic predictions.

Many computer-based tools have been developed to simulate single-species demography and population dynamics and the effect of habitat loss, disease spread, response to harvest, and shifts in geographical ranges due to climate change. These applications can be individually sophisticated, yet they perform necessarily limited roles in isolation. I will implement a set of ‘meta-modelling’ applications to inter-link separate ecological simulators, by allowing sharing of data structures, parameters and outputs. Using a dynamical systems approach, I will develop and test a framework for multidisciplinary forecasting and sensitivity analysis, providing improved predictions of biodiversity response to the many and complex stressors of global change.

Here is the University of Adelaide media release and below are some further details on the aims and methods:

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CO2 rising – the science of global warming

Posted on 10 November 2010 by Barry Brook

Below are two climate change book reviews by me; I hope you find them as interesting as I did.

I’ve provided an Amazon link to one and a Book Depository link to another — because I’m not out to promote any particular online bookstore (although I tend to find the latter cheapest, and as to the former, well, I love my Kindle 3G DX [I'm reading Weinberg on it right now])… Oh, and for Australians, never go past the Booko website!

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Volk, T. (2008). CO2 Rising: The World’s Greatest Environmental Challenge. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. ISBN 978-0-262-22083-5.

Carbon atoms with personality. That’s the interesting literary device biochemist Tyler Volk uses to illustrate the fantastic convolutions that define the many and varied pathways of the carbon cycle. ‘CO2 Rising‘ tracks the fate of atoms ‘Dave’, ‘Coalleen’, ‘Oiliver’ and others, as they wend their waythrough the Earth’s crust, oceans, biosphere and atmosphere – indeed, all of the reservoirs of carbon on the planet.

In an entertaining way, the reader learns to appreciate the transience of some states of carbon (such as the brief moments an atom is bound up in a molecule of CO2 in a glass of beer, only to be later measured by the instruments of Dave Keeling on the peak of Mauna Loa), and the timelessness of others (such as the subterreanean lumps of coal and pools of oil, sequestering atoms for eons in dark geological vaults).

Understanding the dynamics of different carbon reservoirs is fundamental to appreciating the overarching premise of the book: most carbon is ‘out of action’ in limestones, ocean ooze or buried fossil fuels, for most of time. But as greater and greater quantities of ‘old carbon’ are unearthed to stoke the fires and cement kilns of modern industry, a long-balanced equilibria is disrupted. On a planetary scale, with global consequences.

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Of brains, biceps and baloney

Posted on 31 October 2010 by Barry Brook

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.

NASA climate scientist James Hansen’s recent book Storms of my Grandchildren makes accessible the evidence behind the judgement of many climate scientists that we need to get atmospheric carbon dioxide back to 350 ppm (or perhaps 300-325 to be really safe) to avoid dangerous climate tipping points. But he also makes it clear that merely redesigning the global energy infrastructure isn’t enough, other important climate forcings like methane, nitrous oxide and black carbon must also be reduced.

What do we need to do?

Here’s Hansen’s todo list. Stick it on the fridge.

  1. Phase out all coal fired power stations by 2030. Of course, you can still use coal if you sequester all the emissions, … good luck with that.
  2. Undo 200 years of deforestation. We need to start this now, but it will take over 100 years and contribute a reduction of about 50ppm by 2150.
  3. Reduce non-carbon dioxide forcings. Hansen is a little vague here, but the argument implies that pre-industrial levels are required.

Now, if the next sentence doesn’t hit like a shattering ice-shelf, then reread until it does. All three items are mandatory. This isn’t a smorgasbord where you pick what you want and ignore the rest. With countries around the world still building new coal power plants, the first todo is looking shaky. Fortunately the second and third are technically easier. We don’t need any new science or technologies but the politics are diabolical.

You can’t tackle reforestation without a global food system rethink. People who’ve read my previous posts on BNC understand this, but be patient while I race through a little background for new readers.

As with reforestation, steep reductions of methane, black carbon and nitrous oxide forcings also require a rethink of the global food system. This is because 96 megatonnes of the 350 mega tonnes of anthropogenic methane emitted annually are due to livestock. It’s also livestock production which is responsible for the bulk of the annual global conflagrations responsible for preventing plenty of natural reforestation while also contributing rather a lot of black carbon. This is covered in Boverty I. The good news is that 38 megatonnes of methane emissions will go when we stop mining coal and another 73 megatonnes are tied up with oil and gas production and can be relatively easily dealt with when there is a will to do so.

The livestock reforestation impediment

Currently, a major sticking point on reforestation is the attitude to animal product consumption of the UN FAO which is summed up in the just released report on the greenhouse gases associated with the dairy sector: Without concerted action, emissions [from livestock] are unlikely to fall. On the contrary, they are rising, as global demand for meat, milk and eggs continues to grow rapidly. Projected population growth and rising incomes are expected to drive total consumption higher–with meat and milk consumption doubling by 2050 compared to 2000 (FAO, 2006b).

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Who crippled the Murray Darling Basin?

Posted on 18 October 2010 by Barry Brook

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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Filed under: Clim Ch Q&A, Impacts | 85 Comments »

Kakadu – a climate change impacts hotspot

Posted on 25 September 2010 by Barry Brook

When ecologists, policy makers, or the public, think about the visceral impacts of climate change on Australia’s natural systems, World Heritage listed Kakadu National Park (KNP), located in the seasonal tropics of the Northern Territory, is high on the at-risk list. But looking deeper into the human-driven processes now threatening KNP, there is actually a synergy of interrelated problems requiring simultaneous management – a situation common to most biomes threatened with global warming (Brook et al. 2008).


The big issues for KNP are changed fire regimes (impacting savanna and rain forest communities), rising sea levels (affecting the floodplain wetlands), and a suite of invasive weed and feral animal species, operating across all three major ecosystems. All three threats have a climate change component, although for fire and ferals, not wholly.

The savannas, which by area make up the largest part of KNP, are at first glance apparently intact. There has been relatively little clearance of the woody component (dominated by Eucalyptus tetrodonta and E. miniata); indeed analysis of historical aerial photography has documented vegetation thickening linked to elevated atmospheric CO2, which favours the growth of woody C3 species (Banfai & Bowman 2005). However, an emphasis by Park managers on avoiding hot late dry season fires, has meant that a large proportion of KNP is burnt during the dry season, with a return time of 1 to 5 years (Williams et al. 1999).

The impact of regular early season burning on the Park’s biota and on the structuring of understory vegetation, is a topic of ongoing debate and research. Nevertheless, some long-term studies have explicitly linked high fire frequencies to species declines (Pardon et al. 2003; Andersen et al. 2005). Climate change, via increased temperatures or shifts in the timing and intensity of monsoonal rainfall, will likely enhance future fire risk (Parry et al. 2007).

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Filed under: Hot News, Impacts | 12 Comments »

Do the recent floods prove man-made climate change is real?

Posted on 12 September 2010 by Barry Brook

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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Filed under: Clim Ch Q&A, Impacts | 90 Comments »

Climate change basics III – environmental impacts and tipping points

Posted on 19 August 2010 by Barry Brook

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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Filed under: Clim Ch Q&A, Impacts | 59 Comments »

Balancing carbon with smoke and mirrors

Posted on 31 July 2010 by Barry Brook

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.

Have I got a deal for you! I’ll be marketting my new patent-pending sandals in China and if just 1% of the population buy them, then I’ll sell 13 million pairs. To test my business plan, I gathered 100 Chinese into a room and sold 3 pairs of sandals. How can my plan fail?

The Wentworth Group of concerned scientists released a paper recently called “Optimising Carbon in the Australian Landscape”. It has a similar deal, but one for all Australians. It quotes a CSIRO estimate that there is a biophysical capacity to store 1,000 million tonnes of CO2eq in soils and vegetation every year for the next 40 years. The Wentworth group isn’t aiming to capture 1% of this “market”, but 15%. A mere 15% would offset 25% of estimated annual greenhouse emissions for the next 40 years. Who could resist a deal like that? How could it fail?

Leaving aside any problems with the methods behind the CSIRO estimate, it seems reasonable to ask just how hard this “market” is. Why pick 15%? Why not 20%? or 10%? But even more important than a justification of the number is the definition of the slippery little word offset. It needs examination. This isn’t semantics, but goes to the heart of the possibilities of climate change stabilisation.

Climate target constraints

First I’ll repeat the physical ground rules for new BNC readers. These basic limits come from James Hansen and coworkers recent paper Target atmospheric CO2: Where should humanity aim?. Hansen has simplified the presentation in his book Storms of My Grandchildren. He calculates what will happen to atmospheric CO2 levels over the next century if we can phase out unsequestered coal use entirely by 2030. This is unlikely considering the number of coal fired power stations still being built, but where would it put us in 2150? It would give us an atmospheric CO2 level of about 400 ppm and continued climate change with risks of crossing points of no-return to a climate of more and bigger storms and even more serious global food problems than presently. So, even the daunting challenge of phasing out coal by 2030 isn’t enough. Pulling the CO2 level down below 350 ppm will require further action. If we actually want to undo ongoing ocean acidity changes and arctic sea ice shrinkage, then Hansen suggests that a level of perhaps 300-350ppm is required. In addition, we must cut non-CO2 forcings … black carbon and methane being the biggest.

What is the most that a total roll back of 200 years of deforestation could yield? According to Hansen and the best available estimate of what those 200 years of deforestation have contributed to the atmosphere, the most is about 60 ppm … and we need it all.

This is the scenario within which the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists and others are discussing offsetting and carbon credits.

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Filed under: Emissions, Impacts | 13 Comments »

Travels to US and China: ecological models and the Argonne National Laboratory

Posted on 23 July 2010 by Barry Brook

I’m about to fly out for a 3-week trip to the US and China (24 July to 15 Aug).

But fear not! The BNC blog will remain active over that time. Indeed, there are quite a number of new posts in the pipeline for this period, including guest pieces by Rob Parker (this Sunday), Geoff Russell (next week) and Peter Lang (soon — an executive summary and review of the ZCA critique), a couple of new energy policy and planning essays by yours truly, plus parts III and IV of the climate change basics series, part II of the sea level rise post, and some more TCASE entries.

What will I be doing on my travels, you may ask? Well, first I fly to Chicago, where I’ll be working for a week with Dr Robert Lacy, Prof Resit Akcakaya and collaborators, on integrating spatial-demographic ecological models with climate change forecasts, and implementing multi-species projections (with the aim of improving estimates of extinction risk and provide better ranking of management and adaptation options). This work builds on a major research theme at the global ecology lab, and consequently, a whole bunch of my team are going with me — Prof Corey Bradshaw (lab co-director), my postdocs Dr Damien Fordham, Dr Mike Watts and Dr Thomas Prowse and Corey’s and my ex-postdoc, Dr Clive McMahon. This builds on earlier work that Corey and I had been pursuing, which he described on ConservationBytes last year.

After that research workshop, I fly back across the states to Sacramento CA, where I’ll be staying with Tom Blees (author of Prescription for the Planet) for a few days. I’ll also be meeting up with Steve Kirsch and a few other SCGI folks then, which should be great. Then, Tom and I will drive up to Idaho Falls and stay for a few days with Dr Charles Till, who ran the superb R&D programme for the Integral Fast Reactor at the Argonne West National Laboratory. Chuck, along with other members of the 1984-1994 IFR research team, Dr Michael Linberry and Dr John Sackett, will give Tom and I a personalised tour of what is now the Idaho National Laboratory, including the site where the Experimental Breeder Reactor II was run, and a visit to the fuel conditioning facility. Needless to say, I can’t wait!

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Filed under: Impacts, Nuclear | 11 Comments »

Climate change basics II – impacts on ice, rain and seas

Posted on 21 July 2010 by Barry Brook

This is part II, on impacts of climate change. Be sure to read climate change basics I – observations, causes and consequences, and for more on pragmatic energy solutions, see here.

Climate change impacts on ice, rain and sea level

The term “global warming” says it all – a heating of the atmosphere right across the world. But that does not mean that the warming, or its impacts, will be the same everywhere. Regional and local differences can cause things to be worse, or better, depending on where you are.

One example of this unevenness is in the Arctic. Snow and ice melt over progressively larger areas and for longer periods as the temperature rises, causing the Earth’s surface to be duller. Bare rock, soil, vegetation and the open ocean are all much darker than bright ice, and so, just like the dark panels on solar hot water systems, absorb substantially more sunlight. This leads to greater heating, more melting, and so on – just one example of an amplifying feedback that can make global warming worse that it would otherwise be. There are many other such feedbacks, some of which remain poorly understood and could lead to more severe and more rapid warming than expected.

Perhaps the biggest regional impact of climate change faced by mid-latitude temperate regions (where most of the ‘developed nations’ are located), is, ironically, shifts in tropical-equatorial weather systems. Global warming causes the overturning tropical air masses that circulate in giant loops (called Hadley Cells and the Walker Circulation) to expand north and south. This has been recently shown to have happened already – up to 2° of latitudinal expansion over the last 30 years. Atmospheric heating also causes polar winds to whip around the Southern Ocean more rapidly. Together, these effects of global warming act to push rain-bearing mid-westerly weather systems further north and south. So instead of places like southern Australia being doused in rainfall brought in from the Indian and Southern Ocean, progressively more of this rain will be dumped uselessly over the sea, below the continental margin. This means less rainfall for Australia’s agricultural areas, as well other mid-latitude regions such as South Africa, the Mediterranean, Mexico and the western United States.

With less rain in these areas, the vegetation and soils will dry. In combination higher temperatures, the risk of bushfires intensifies. Heatwaves are the most dangerous culprits in this relationship. The 15-day March 2008 heatwave in Adelaide was, on the basis of the 20th century temperature record, a staggering 1 in 3000 year event. Yet under a mid-range projection of global warming (should no action be taken to quickly curtail carbon emissions), such an event would be an expected part of an average summer.

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Filed under: Clim Ch Q&A, Future, Impacts | 28 Comments »

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