Writing on the wall for prime farmland. Years of irrigation have taken toll on San Joaquin Valley.

Posted on March 24, 2014 by

Carolyn Lochhead. March 24, 2014. Writing on the wall for prime farmland. Years of irrigation have taken toll on San Joaquin Valley. San Francisco Chronicle.

Decades of irrigation have leached salts and toxic minerals from the soil [in the San Joaquin valley] that have nowhere to go, threatening crops and wildlife.

Aquifers are being drained at an alarming pace.

More than 95% of the area’s native habitat has been destroyed by cultivation or urban expansion, leaving more endangered bird, mammal and other species in the southern San Joaquin than anywhere in the continental U.S.

Federal studies long ago concluded that the only sensible solution is to retire hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland.  The 600,000-acre Westlands Water District has already removed tens of thousands of acres from irrigation.   Many experts said if farmers don’t retire the land, nature eventually will do it for them.

More than a decade ago, Jack Mitchell, now 74, sold 3,000 acres of his irrigated land to federal officials trying to find out whether imperiled farmland could be restored. Mitchell’s farm was on the site of the old Tulare Lake, once the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi, covering 800 square miles and yielding 3-foot trout. It went dry in the early 20th century as farmers began diverting water.  In 2006, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said that despite hundreds of millions of federal dollars spent over two decades, no technological solution had been found to dispose of drain water. Enormous amounts of salt and selenium – toxic to birds, other wildlife and humans at high concentrations – continue to accumulate each year.

The San Joaquin Valley is an ancient seabed arid enough to be classified as desert but irrigated by a huge complex of dams and canals. Large swaths of it have serious drainage problems, including more than 1.75 million acres of farmland, according to a 2005 federal report.

Much of the problem land lies on the valley’s west side, represented primarily by Westlands. More than half its acreage has been classified as drainage-impaired.

The Fish and Wildlife Service concluded that the best solution is to “remove the fundamental underlying source of the problem” by retiring 379,000 acres of land from irrigation.

In 2008, the U.S. Geological Survey warned that within 50 years, 20 million tons of contaminated salt will have to be disposed of. The agency said experimental technologies are “unprecedented and untested at the scale needed” and that the “potential release of selenium-contaminated drainage is massive.” The agency concluded that the best solution would be to retire 300,000 acres in the western San Joaquin Valley.

In some areas of the valley, salt has crystallized on the surface, covering fields with what is known as “California snow,” rendering the ground useless not just for crops but also for any vegetation at all.

Retiring lands before they reach that point “has just got to be the highest priority for California,” said Tom Stokely, a water policy analyst for California Water Impact Network, an environmental group. “We don’t have the water to be irrigating these poisoned lands. We’re having a hard enough time keeping the good lands in production.”

Posted in Peak Topsoil | Comments Off on Writing on the wall for prime farmland. Years of irrigation have taken toll on San Joaquin Valley.

Rot in the Banking culture

Posted on March 23, 2014 by

Questions are asked of Rot in Banking Culture

Peter Eavis. March 13, 2014. New York Times.

Money laundering, market rigging, tax dodging, selling faulty financial products, trampling homeowner rights and rampant risk-taking — these are some of the sins that big banks have committed in recent years.

Now, some government authorities are publicly questioning whether such misdeeds are not just the work of a few bad actors, but rather a flaw that runs through the fabric of the banking industry. After years of saying little about the behavior of bankers, even as one scandal followed another, regulators are starting to ask: Is there something rotten in bank culture?

At the heart of the issue is an inviolate social contract that bankers are supposed to honor. The government agrees to protect banks from collapse, and in return, bankers are meant to uphold the highest ethics when handling other people’s money.

But when lawbreaking and other missteps proliferate at banks, it is a sign that the industry has stopped cleaving to the special contract, endangering taxpayers. And bad management can be a leading indicator of future financial problems at an institution. “It usually translates into losses down the road,” Mr. Curry said.

It is a concern recently voiced by William C. Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the institution that has more day-to-day contact with Wall Street than any other arm of the government.  “There is evidence of deep-seated cultural and ethical failures at many large financial institutions,” Mr. Dudley said in a speech that sent a chill through the financial industry last year.

In a recent interview, Mr. Dudley explained why he decided to make such a loaded point about bank culture: “To make it clear that ‘too big to fail’ isn’t the only problem,” he said in his office three blocks from the actual Wall Street in Lower Manhattan. “I don’t want senior bank management to feel, ‘Oh gee, if we solve “too big to fail,” we’re done.’ ”

“Too big to fail” refers to the belief that some banks are so large that if they got into trouble, the government would have to rescue them to prevent their failure from harming the wider economy. Congress and government authorities have taken many steps to put banks on a firmer financial footing, but such efforts do not focus on cleaning up the ethics of large companies.

Other senior regulators are speaking out in a similar vein. Thomas J. Curry, the head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, has recently devoted several speeches to cleaning up the culture of banks. In a recent interview, he gave some insight into how his agency sometimes views its relationship with the banks.

The big question is whether regulators have the resolve to back up their tough words with meaningful punishments. Banks, for instance, have armies of lawyers who deploy strategies like refusing to turn over potential evidence to regulators. And the largest banks make such big profits these days that they can easily absorb the financial penalties the government throws at them. Also, notably, top bank executives did not voice their support for Mr. Dudley after he gave his sharply worded speech on culture.

But boards may have very different priorities from regulators. Directors may not see the need for far-reaching changes if a bank is producing large profits that benefit shareholders.

JPMorgan Chase’s board took steps to hold management accountable after the so-called London Whale trading scandal that engulfed the bank in 2012 and 2013. Still, in January, JPMorgan’s board approved a large raise in the 2013 pay of Jamie Dimon, the bank’s chief executive.

And compensation is one area where bank regulators may need to do more if they want to do more to clean up bank culture, according to critics of the industry.

Wall Street’s compensation practices can reward unhealthy levels of short-term risk-taking and entice bankers into ethical lapses. Acknowledging that, regulators around the world agreed after the crisis to overhaul bankers’ pay, in part by requiring them to wait several years before they receive all of their bonuses. The hope is that bankers will behave better if they know their employers can easily take back the deferred part of their pay.

But there is evidence that large American banks are still deferring much less pay than their European peers. The Fed is in charge of regulating compensation at American banks. When asked whether the pay overhaul at American banks had gone far enough, Mr. Dudley said, “There is potential to defer more compensation for longer periods of time.”

One particularly daunting challenge looms over the efforts to improve the ethics of banks. Some banks may be so large and complex that it would be difficult for managers to maintain a clean culture across all of their operations.

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James Hansen : Sea level could rise in decades, not centuries or millenia

Posted on March 23, 2014 by

James Hansen explains how sea level could rise in decades, not centuries or millenia

At the bottom is a more recent article that backs Hansen up.

Below are excerpts from:  Climate change and trace gases. James Hansen, Makiko Sato, et al. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. (2007) 365,1925–1954

The unusual stability of the Earth’s climate during the Holocene is probably due to the fact that the Earth has been warm enough to keep ice sheets off North America and Asia, but not warm enough to cause disintegration of the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets.

Climate sensitivity: the whipsaw

‘Fast-feedbacks’, including changing water vapor, clouds, sea ice, aerosols (dust, airborne organic particles, etc.) and effects of aerosols on clouds, determine climate response on decadal time-scales.

Thick ice sheets provide not only a positive feedback, but also the potential for cataclysmic collapse, and thus an explanation for the asymmetry of the ice ages. The albedo flip property of ice/water provides a trigger mechanism. If the trigger mechanism is engaged long enough, multiple dynamical feedbacks will cause ice sheet collapse. We argue that the required persistence for this trigger mechanism is at most a century, probably less.

An ice sheet in equilibrium may have summer melt on its fringes, balanced by interior ice sheet growth. Large climate change will occur only if a forcing is sufficient to initiate rapid dynamical feedbacks and disintegration of a substantial portion of the ice sheet. Rapidly rising temperatures in the past three decades is evidence that the Earth is now substantially out of energy balance and indications of accelerating change on West Antarctica and Greenland indicate that the period of stability is over. Civilization developed, and constructed extensive infrastructure, during a period of unusual climate stability, the Holocene, now almost 12 000 years in duration. That period is about to end.

The imminent peril is initiation of dynamical and thermodynamical processes on the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets that produce a situation out of humanity’s control, such that devastating sea-level rise will inevitably occur. Climate forcing of this century under Business-As-Usual (BAU) would dwarf natural forcings of the past million years, indeed it would probably exceed climate forcing of the middle Pliocene, when the planet was not more than 2–3 8 C warmer and sea level 25 G 10 m higher.

Such warming would assuredly activate the albedo-flip trigger mechanism over large portions of these ice sheets. In combination with warming of the nearby ocean and atmosphere, the increased surface melt would bring into play multiple positive feedbacks leading to eventual nonlinear ice sheet disintegration. It is difficult to predict time of collapse in such a nonlinear problem, but we find no evidence of millennial lags between forcing and ice sheet response in palaeoclimate data. An ice sheet response time of centuries seems probable, and we cannot rule out large changes on decadal time-scales once wide-scale surface melt is underway.

The gravest threat we foresee starts with surface melt on West Antarctica and interaction among positive feedbacks leading to catastrophic ice loss. Warming in West Antarctica in recent decades has been limited by effects of stratospheric ozone depletion. However, climate projections find surface warming in West Antarctica and warming of nearby ocean at depths that may attack buttressing ice shelves. Loss of ice shelves allows more rapid discharge from ice streams, in turn a lowering and warming of the ice sheet surface, and increased surface melt. Rising sea level helps unhinge the ice from pinning points. West Antarctica seems to be moving into a mode of significant mass loss.

Our concern that BAU GHG scenarios would cause large sea-level rise this century Hansen 2005 differs from estimates of IPCC 2001, 2007, which foresees little or no contribution to twenty-first century sea-level rise from Greenland and Antarctica. However,the IPCC analyses and projections do not well account for the nonlinear physics of wet icesheet disintegration, icestreams and eroding iceshelves, nor are they consistent with the palaeoclimate evidence we have presented for the absence of discernable lag between ice sheet forcing and sea-level rise.

 

climate code red

Big trouble in the Antarctic has been brewing for a long time

 15 Jun 2014  by David Spratt

“A game changer” is how climate scientist Dr Malte Meinshausen describes newly published research that West Antarctic glaciers have passed a tipping point much earlier than expected and their disintegration is now “unstoppable” at just the current level of global warming. The research findings have shocked the scientific community. “This Is What a Holy Shit Moment for Global Warming Looks Like,” ran a headline in Mother Jones magazine.

In the Guardian, lead researcher Dr Eric Rignot explained:

We announced that we had collected enough observations to conclude that the retreat of ice in the Amundsen sea sector of West Antarctica was unstoppable, with major consequences – it will mean that sea levels will rise one metre worldwide. What’s more, its disappearance will likely trigger the collapse of the rest of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which comes with a sea level rise of between three and five metres. Such an event will displace millions of people worldwide.

But this news should not have come as a shock. In 2007 when we wrote “Climate Code Red”, Philip Sutton and I devoted a chapter to Antarctica, and surveyed scientists who were warning of this scenario. We quoted NASA climate chief James Hansen:

We find it implausible that BAU [‘business-as-usual’] scenarios, with climate forcing and global warming exceeding those of the Pliocene, would permit a West Antarctic ice sheet of present size to survive  even for a century.

As far back as 1968 John Mercer had predicted that the collapse of ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula could herald the loss of the ice sheet in West Antarctica, and 10 years later contended that: “a major disaster — a rapid deglaciation of West Antarctica — may be in progress … within about 50 years.”

Such science was excluded from “mainstream” reports such as those of the IPCC, which systematically and embarrassing underestimated likely sea-level rises, with the most recent, 2013 report being no exception.

It’s par for the course for climate policy-makers to hope for the best, rather than plan for the worst. More than once this blog has warned that sea-level rises are being underestimated by Australian policy-makers, and that the tens of millions of dollars being put into adaptation planning for sea-level rises of no more than 1.1 metres by 2100 will be a waste of money, and all that work will have to be done again. And now that has come to pass.

It’s so dumb, but putting politics ahead of science has got us into this mess, and there is little sign that even peer-reviewed evidence that West Antarctic has passed a tipping point for partial or total collapse of its ice sheets will get those in power to acknowledge scientific reality.

So here, for the record, is what we said back in late 2007.

Climate Code Red (extract): Antarctica

Big changes are also underway at the other end of the world, in the Antarctic, where most of the world’s ice sits on the fifth largest continent. The majority of Antarctic ice is contained in the East Antarctic ice sheet — the biggest slab of ice on Earth, which has been in place for some 20 million years and which, if fully melted, would raise sea levels by more than 60 metres.

Considered more vulnerable is the smaller West Antarctic ice sheet, which contains one-tenth of the total Antarctic ice volume. If it disintegrated, it would raise sea levels by around 5 metres, a similar amount to what we would see with a total loss of the Greenland ice sheet.

While it was generally anticipated that the West Antarctic sheet would be more stable than Greenland at a 1–2 degree rise, recent research demonstrates that the southern ice shelf reacts far more sensitively to warming temperatures than scientists had previously believed. Ice-core data from the Antarctic Geological Drilling joint project (being conducted by Germany, Italy, New Zealand, and the United States) shows that ‘massive melting’ must have occurred in the Antarctic three million years ago, during the Miocene–Pliocene period, when the average global temperature in the oceans increased by only 2–3 degrees above the present temperature. Geologist Lothar Viereck-Götte called the results ‘horrifying’, and suggested that ‘the ice caps are substantially more mobile and sensitive than we had assumed’.

The heating effect caused by climate change is greatest at the poles, and the air over the West Antarctic peninsula has warmed nearly 6 degrees since 1950. At the same time, according to a report in the Washington Post on 22 October 2007, a warming sea is melting the ice-cap edges, and beech trees and grass are taking root on the ice fringes.

Another warning sign was the rapid collapse in March 2002 of the 200-metre-thick Larsen B ice shelf, which had been stable for at least twelve thousand years, and which was the main outlet for glaciers draining from West Antarctica. An ice shelf is a floating sheet, or platform, of ice. Largely submerged, and up to a kilometre thick, the shelf abuts the land and is formed when glaciers or land-based ice flows into the sea. Generally, an ice shelf will lose volume by calving icebergs, but these are also subject to rapid disintegration events. Larsen B, weakened by water-filled cracks where its shelf attached to the Antarctic Peninsula, gave way in a matter of days, releasing five hundred billion tonnes of ice into the ocean.

Neil Glasser of Aberystwyth University and Ted Scambos from the NSIDC found that as glacier fl ow had begun to increase during the 1990s, the ice shelf had become stressed. The warming of deep Southern Ocean currents (which increasingly reach the Antarctic coastline) had also led to some thinning of the shelf, making it more prone to breaking apart. Scambos concludes that ‘the unusually warm summer of 2002, part of a multi-decade trend of warming [that is] clearly tied to climate change, was the final straw’.

Looking at the overall pace of events, Scambos says: ‘We thought the southern hemisphere climate is inherently more stable, [but] all of the time scales seem to be shortened now. These things can happen fairly quickly. A decade or two of warming is all you need to really change the mass balance … Things are on more of a hair trigger than we thought.’

Much of the West Antarctic ice sheet sits on bedrock that is below sea level, buttressed on two sides by mountains, but held in place on the other two sides by the Ronne and Ross ice shelves; so, if the ice shelves that buttress the ice sheet disintegrate, sea water breeching the base of the ice sheet will hasten the rate of disintegration.

In 1968, the Ohio State University glaciologist John Mercer warned, in the journal of the International Association of Scientific Hydrology, that the collapse of ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula could herald the loss of the ice sheet in West Antarctica. A decade later, in 1978, his views received a wider audience in Nature, where he wrote: ‘I contend that a major disaster — a rapid deglaciation of West Antarctica — may be in progress … within about 50 years.’ Mercer said that warming ‘above a critical level would remove all ice shelves, and consequently all ice grounded below sea level, resulting in the deglaciation of most of West Antarctica’. Such disintegration, once under way, would ‘probably be rapid, perhaps catastrophically so’, with most of the ice sheet lost in a century. Credited with coining the phrase ‘the greenhouse effect’ in the early 1960s, Mercer’s Antarctic prognosis was widely ignored and disparaged at the time, but this has changed.

(James Hansen says it was not clear at the time whether Mercer or his many critics were correct, but those who labelled Mercer an alarmist were considered more authoritative and better able to get funding. Hansen believes funding constraints can inhibit scientific criticisms of the status quo. As he wrote in New Scientist on 28 July 2007: ‘I believe there is pressure on scientists to be conservative.’ Hansen is responsible for coining the term ‘The John Mercer Effect’, meaning to play down your findings for fear of losing access to funding or of being considered alarmist.)

Another vulnerable place on the West Antarctic ice sheet is Pine Island Bay, where two large glaciers, Pine Island and Thwaites, drain about 40 per cent of the ice sheet into the sea. The glaciers are responding to rapid melting of their ice shelves and their rate of fl ow has doubled, whilst the rate of mass loss of ice from their catchment has now tripled. NASA glaciologist Eric Rignot has studied the Pine Island glacier, and his work has led climate writer Fred Pearce to conclude that ‘the glacier is primed for runaway destruction’. Pearce also notes the work of Terry Hughes of the University of Maine, who says that the collapse of the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers — already the biggest causes of global sea-level rises — could destabilize the whole of the West Antarctic ice sheet. Pearce is also swayed by geologist Richard Alley, who says there is ‘a possibility that the West Antarctic ice sheet could collapse and raise sea levels by 6 yards [5.5 meters]’, this century.

Hansen and fellow NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies researcher Makiko Sato agree:

The gravest threat we foresee starts with surface melt on West Antarctica, and interaction among positive feedbacks leading to catastrophic ice loss. Warming in West Antarctica in recent decades has been limited by effects of stratospheric ozone depletion. However, climate projections find surface warming in West Antarctica and warming of nearby ocean at depths that may attack buttressing ice shelves. Loss of ice shelves allows more rapid discharge from ice streams, in turn a lowering and warming of the ice sheet surface, and increased surface melt. Rising sea level helps unhinge the ice from pinning points … Attention has focused on Greenland, but the most recent gravity data indicate comparable mass loss from West Antarctica. We find it implausible that BAU [‘business-as-usual’] scenarios, with climate forcing and global warming exceeding those of the Pliocene, would permit a West Antarctic ice sheet of present size to survive  even for a century.

Even in East Antarctica, where total ice loss would produce a sea-level rise of 60 metres, mass loss near the coast is greater than the mass increase inland (mass increase inland is caused by the extra snowfall generated from warming-induced increases in air humidity).

While the inland of East Antarctica has cooled during the last 20 years, the coast has become warmer, with melting occurring 900 kilometers from the coast and in the Transantarctic Mountains, which rise up to an altitude of 2 kilometers.

Research published in January 2008 by Rignot and six of his colleagues shows that ice loss in Antarctica has increased by 75 per cent in the last ten years due to a speed-up in the flow of its glaciers, so that the ice loss there is now nearly a great as that observed in Greenland.

 

 

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If Greenland Ice Sheets melt, sea level will rise 23 feet

Posted on March 23, 2014 by

Greenland Ice Sheet Destabilizing, Threatening Greater Sea-Level Rise

March 2014   (James Hansen makes the case that sea level could rise over decades)

[My comment: 90% of global trade (much of it food and oil) is carried by container ships and oil-tankers. All of the world’s ports will be affected and most of them overwhelmed by just a 3-foot rise from storm surges.  By 6 feet most harbors will be useless, and the massive shipments of food and oil that allow nations now to maintain populations vastly beyond their carrying capacity will become impossible as sea levels continue to rise for centuries]

“The Greenland ice sheet has contributed more than any other ice mass to sea level rise over the last two decades and has the potential, if it were completely melted to raise global sea level by more than 23 feet,” said Jonathan Bamber, a professor at Britain’s University of Bristol.

A new region of a massive ice sheet in Greenland has become unstable, threatening to raise global sea levels beyond previous estimates, an international team of scientists has found.

The Greenland ice sheet is a 660,000-square mile swath of ice that covers 80% of the country. The second-largest ice sheet in the world behind the Antarctic Ice Sheet, it’s especially vulnerable to global warming, yet its northeast portion had remained largely unaffected by rising temperatures.

Until recently, researchers say.

From April 2003 to April 2012, the northeast portion lost about 10 billion tons of ice per year, according to GPS data.

It’s losing more ice, and the rate is accelerating. The ice loss has accelerated by a factor of three,” says Michael Bevis, a professor at Ohio State University and one of the study’s lead investigators. “That’s a pretty big increase – it’s sort of like the canary in the mine.”

“Northeast Greenland is very cold. It used to be considered the last stable part of the Greenland ice sheet,” explained GNET lead investigator Michael Bevis of The Ohio State University. “This study shows that ice loss in the northeast is now accelerating. So, now it seems that all of the margins of the Greenland ice sheet are unstable.”

Historically, Zachariae drained slowly, since it had to fight its way through a bay choked with floating ice debris. Now that the ice is retreating, the ice barrier in the bay is reduced, allowing the glacier to speed up — and draw down the ice mass from the entire basin.

References

Shfaqat A. Khan, Kurt H. Kjær, Michael Bevis, Jonathan L. Bamber, John Wahr, Kristian K. Kjeldsen, Anders A. Bjørk, Niels J. Korsgaard, Leigh A. Stearns, Michiel R. van den Broeke, Lin Liu, Nicolaj K. Larsen, Ioana S. Muresan. Sustained mass loss of the northeast Greenland ice sheet triggered by regional warming. Nature Climate Change, 2014;
Study: Ice Sheet Destabilizing, Threatening Greater Sea-Level Rise The northeast portion of the Greenland Ice Sheet is melting faster than researchers estimated. Alan Neuhauser. March 16, 2014. US News & World Report

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Lessons From the Little Ice Age

Posted on March 23, 2014 by

Lessons From the Little Ice Age

Geoffrey Parker, March 22, 2014, New York Times

Climatologists call it the Little Ice Age; historians, the General Crisis.

During the 17th century, longer winters and cooler summers disrupted growing seasons and destroyed harvests across Europe.

In the 17th century, the fatal synergy of weather, wars and rebellions killed millions.

A natural catastrophe of analogous proportions today — whether or not humans are to blame — could kill billions.

It would also produce dislocation and violence, and compromise international security, sustainability and cooperation.

The deep cold in Europe and extreme weather events elsewhere resulted in a series of droughts, floods and harvest failures that led to forced migrations, wars and revolutions. The fatal synergy between human and natural disasters eradicated perhaps one-third of the human population.

What happened in the 17th century suggests that altered weather conditions can have catastrophic political and social consequences. Today, the nation’s intelligence agencies have warned of similar repercussions as the planet warms — including more frequent but unpredictable crises involving water, food, energy supply chains and public health. States could fail, famine could overtake large populations and flood or disease could cross borders and lead to internal instability or international conflict.

Climate …exacerbated [the deaths from] outbreaks of disease, especially smallpox and plague, which tended to be more common when harvests were poor or failed.

The Little Ice Age

It was the coldest century in a period of glacial expansion that lasted from the early 14th century until the mid-19th century. The summer of 1641 was the third-coldest recorded over the past 6 centuries in Europe; the winter of 1641-42 was the coldest ever recorded in Scandinavia. The unusual cold that lasted from the 1620s until the 1690s included ice on both the Bosporus and the Baltic so thick that people could walk from one side to the other.

Earth scientists have discerned three factors at work globally during the 17th century: increased volcanic eruptions, twice as many El Niño episodes (unusually warm ocean conditions along the tropical west coast of South America), and the virtual disappearance of sunspots, reducing solar output to warm the Earth.

The 17th century saw a proliferation of wars, civil wars and rebellions and more cases of state breakdown around the globe than any previous or subsequent age.

Just in the year 1648, rebellions paralyzed both Russia (the largest state in the world) and France (the most populous state in Europe); civil wars broke out in Ukraine, England and Scotland; and irate subjects in Istanbul (Europe’s largest city) strangled Sultan Ibrahim.

When an uprising by Irish Catholics on Oct. 23, 1641, drove the Protestant minority from their homes, no one had foreseen a severe cold snap, with heavy frost and snow at a time and in a place that rarely has snow. Thousands of Protestants died of exposure, turning a political protest into a massacre that cried out for vengeance. Oliver Cromwell would later use that episode to justify his brutal campaign to restore Protestant supremacy in Ireland.

But the cold did take a more direct toll. Western Europe experienced the worst harvest of the century in 1648. Rioting broke out in Sicily, Stockholm and elsewhere when bread prices spiked. In the Alps, poor growing seasons became the norm in the 1640s, and records document the disappearance of fields, farmsteads and even whole villages as glaciers advanced to the farthest extent since the last Ice Age. One consequence of crop failures and food shortages stands out in French military records: Soldiers born in the second half of the 1600s were, on average, an inch shorter than those born after 1700, and those born in the famine years were noticeably shorter than the rest.

Few areas of the world survived the 17th century unscathed by extreme weather. In China, a combination of droughts and disastrous harvests, coupled with rising tax demands and cutbacks in government programs, unleashed a wave of banditry and chaos; starving Manchu clansmen from the north undertook a brutal conquest that lasted a generation. North America and West Africa both experienced famines and savage wars. In India, drought followed by floods killed over a million people in Gujarat between 1627 and 1630. In Japan, a mass rebellion broke out on the island of Kyushu following several poor harvests. Five years later, famine, followed by an unusually severe winter, killed perhaps 500,000 Japanese.

No human intervention can avert volcanic eruptions, halt an El Niño episode or delay the onset of drought, despite the possibility that each could cause starvation, economic dislocation and political instability. But, unlike our ancestors who faced these changes 350 years ago, today we possess both the resources and the technology to prepare for them [my comment: no we don’t, from now on there’s exponentially less resources of all kinds at the same time the human population is still growing exponentially].

Britain’s chief scientific officer has warned, for instance, that in the face of a seemingly inexorable rise in sea levels, “We must either invest more in sustainable approaches to flood and coastal management or learn to live with increased flooding.” In short, we have only two choices: pay to prepare now — or prepare to pay much more later.

The experience of Somalia provides a terrible reminder of the consequences of inaction. Drought in the region between 2010 and 2012 created local famine, exacerbated by civil war that discouraged and disrupted relief efforts and killed some 250,000 people, half of them under the age of 5.

So while we procrastinate over whether human activities cause climate change, let us remember the range of climate-induced catastrophes that history shows are inevitable — and prepare accordingly.

———————-
Geoffrey Parker is a history professor at Ohio State University and the author of “Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century.”

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Without a Trace ‘The Sixth Extinction,’ by Elizabeth Kolbert

Posted on March 21, 2014 by

Review by Al Gore

Feb 10, 2014. New York Times.

Over the past decade, Elizabeth Kolbert has established herself as one of our very best science writers. She has developed a distinctive and eloquent voice of conscience on issues arising from the extraordinary assault on the ecosphere, and those who have enjoyed her previous works like “Field Notes From a Catastrophe” will not be disappointed by her powerful new book, “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.

Kolbert, a staff writer at The New Yorker, reports from the front lines of the violent collision between civilization and our planet’s ecosystem: the Andes, the Amazon rain forest, the Great Barrier Reef — and her backyard. In lucid prose, she examines the role of man-made climate change in causing what biologists call the sixth mass extinction — the current spasm of plant and animal loss that threatens to eliminate 20 to 50 percent of all living species on earth within this century.

Extinction is a relatively new idea in the scientific community. Well into the 18th century, people found it impossible to accept the idea that species had once lived on earth but had been subsequently lost. Scientists simply could not envision a planetary force powerful enough to wipe out forms of life that were common in prior ages.

In the same way, and for many of the same reasons, many today find it inconceivable that we could possibly be responsible for destroying the integrity of our planet’s ecology. There are psychological barriers to even imagining that what we love so much could be lost — could be destroyed forever. As a result, many of us refuse to contemplate it. Like an audience entertained by a magician, we allow ourselves to be deceived by those with a stake in persuading us to ignore reality.

For example, we continue to use the world’s atmosphere as an open sewer for the daily dumping of more than 90 million tons of gaseous waste. If trends continue, the global temperature will keep rising, triggering “world-altering events,” Kolbert writes.

According to a conservative and unchallenged calculation by the climatologist James Hansen, the man-made pollution already in the atmosphere traps as much extra heat energy every 24 hours as would be released by the explosion of 400,000 Hiroshima-class nuclear bombs.

The resulting rapid warming of both the atmosphere and the ocean, which Kolbert notes has absorbed about one-third of the carbon dioxide we have produced, is wreaking havoc on earth’s delicately balanced ecosystems.

It threatens both the web of living species with which we share the planet and the future viability of civilization. “By disrupting these systems,” Kolbert writes, “we’re putting our own survival in danger.

The earth’s water cycle is being dangerously disturbed, as warmer oceans evaporate more water vapor into the air. Warmer air holds more moisture (there has been an astonishing 4 percent increase in global humidity in just the last 30 years) and funnels it toward landmasses, where it is released in much larger downpours, causing larger and more frequent floods and mudslides.

The extra heat is also absorbed in the top layer of the seas, which makes ocean-based storms more destructive. Just before Hurricane Sandy, the area of the Atlantic immediately windward from New York City and New Jersey was up to nine degrees warmer than normal. And just before Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines, the area of the Pacific from which it drew its energy was about 5.4 degrees above average. Continue reading the main story

Our oceans, a crucial food source for billions, have become not only warmer but also more acidic than they have been in millions of years. They struggle to absorb excess heat and carbon pollution — which is why, as Kolbert points out, coral reefs might be the first entire ecosystem to go extinct in the modern era.

The same extra heat pulls moisture from soil in drought-prone regions, causing deeper and longer-lasting droughts. The drying of trees and other vegetation leads also to an increase in the frequency and average size of fires.

Food crops are threatened not only by more pests and the disruption of long-predictable rainy season-dry season patterns, but also by the growing impact of heat stress itself on corn, wheat, rice and other staples.

Earth’s ice-covered regions are melting. The vanishing of the Arctic ice cap is changing the heat absorption at the top of the world, and may be affecting the location of the Northern Hemisphere jet stream and storm tracks and slowing down the movement of storm systems. Meanwhile, the growing loss of ice in Antarctica and Greenland is accelerating sea level rise and threatening low-lying coastal cities and regions.

Viruses, bacteria, disease-carrying species like mosquitoes and ticks, and pest species like bark beetles are now being pushed far beyond their native ranges. Everywhere the intricate interconnections crucial to sustaining life are increasingly being pulled apart. 

This is the world we’ve made. And in her timely, meticulously researched and well-written book, Kolbert combines scientific analysis and personal narratives to explain it to us. The result is a clear and comprehensive history of earth’s previous mass extinctions — and the species we’ve lost — and an engaging description of the extraordinarily complex nature of life. Most important, Kolbert delivers a compelling call to action. “Right now,” she writes, “we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy.

Kolbert expertly traces the “twisting” intellectual history of how we’ve come to understand the concept of extinction, and more recently, how we’ve come to recognize our role in it. When mastodon bones were first studied, in 1739, many scientists reasoned that the large and unique bones belonged to an elephant or hippopotamus. But in 1796, the French naturalist Georges Cuvier presented evidence of an entirely new theory: The bones belonged to a lost species from “a world previous to ours.” Cuvier collected and studied as many fossils as he could, eventually identifying dozens of extinct species, and over the next several decades, with the contributions of Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin, extinction evolved as a scientific concept.

Since the origin of life on earth 3.8 billion years ago, our planet has experienced five mass extinction events. The last of these events occurred some 66 million years ago when a six-mile-wide asteroid is thought to have collided with earth, wiping out the dinosaurs. The Cretaceous extinction event dramatically changed the composition of biodiversity on the planet: Marine ecosystems essentially collapsed, and about 75 percent of all plant and animal species disappeared.

Today, Kolbert writes, we are witnessing a similar mass extinction event happening in the geologic blink of an eye. According to E. O. Wilson, the present extinction rate in the tropics is “on the order of 10,000 times greater than the naturally occurring background extinction rate” and will reduce biological diversity to its lowest level since the last great extinction.

This time, however, a giant asteroid isn’t to blame — we are, by altering environmental conditions on our planet so swiftly and dramatically that a large proportion of other species cannot adapt. And we are risking our own future as well, by fundamentally altering the integrity of the climate balance that has persisted in more or less the same configuration since the end of the last ice age, and which has fostered the flourishing of human civilization.

As early as the 1840s, scientists noticed large gaps in the fossil record — time periods in which earth’s biodiversity declined rapidly and could not be explained by a static system. Some scientists theorized that abrupt climate changes had caused past mass extinction events. But in the modern era, three factors have combined to radically disrupt the relationship between civilization and the earth’s ecosystem: the unparalleled surge in human population that has quadrupled our numbers in less than a hundred years; the development of powerful new technologies that magnify the per capita impact of all seven billion of us, soon to be nine billion or more; and the emergence of a hegemonic ideology that exalts short-term thinking and ignores the true long-term cost and consequences of the choices we’re making in industry, energy policy, agriculture, forestry and politics.

“People change the world,” Kolbert writes, and she vividly presents the science and history of the current crisis. Her extensive travels in researching this book, and her insightful treatment of both the history and the science all combine to make “The Sixth Extinction” an invaluable contribution to our understanding of present circumstances, just as the paradigm shift she calls for is sorely needed.

Despite the evidence that humanity is driving mass extinctions, we have been woefully slow to adopt the necessary measures to solve this global environmental challenge. Our response to the mass extinction — as well as to the climate crisis — is still controlled by a hopelessly outdated view of our relationship to our environment.

Fortunately, history is full of examples of our capacity to overcome even the most difficult challenges whenever a controversy is finally resolved into a choice between what is clearly right and what is clearly wrong. The anomalies Kolbert identifies are too glaring to ignore. She makes an irrefutable case that what we are doing to cause a sixth mass extinction is clearly wrong. And she makes it clear that doing what is right means accelerating our transition to a more sustainable world.

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University of Minnesota syllabus for HSEM 2624H “Sustainability or Collapse? An Interdisciplinary Overview of the Human Predicament”

Posted on March 21, 2014 by

HSEM 2624H  –  (PROVISIONAL) SYLLABUS

“Sustainability or Collapse? An Interdisciplinary Overview of the Human Predicament” 

—or–

 “Humans, Our Environment and the Future: A Survey of Opportunities and Constraints”

Instructors: Dr. Nathan John Hagens, Dr. Kathryn Draeger

This class will provide students with a broad exposure to various first principles relevant to human society, sustainability, and the future.  An exemplar of liberal arts education’, the class integrates many subjects matter disciplines related to humans and our environment.  Global climate change, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, overpopulation, overconsumption, limits to growth, and rising human inequality are all here and on the horizon.  Though we will explore the current environmental and energy science of these impacts, we will also spend about half the term exploring the human behavior and demand side of our environmental situation – what drives us to consume and compete, how we value the present more than the future, how our neural wiring can become hijacked and addicted to modern stimuli and consumption, and how we possess many cognitive biases that cause us to sweep these problems under the rug for another day.  It is expected that by semesters end, students will attain an introductory level understanding of the core constraints and opportunities facing human systems as we strive to live more sustainably on the planet.

An intensive series of reading, lectures and discussion will cover primary/summary literature in: systems ecology, energy and natural resources, thermodynamics, history, anthropology, human behavior, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, environmental science, sociology, economics, globalization/trade, finance/debt with an overarching goal to give students an understanding of how the modern human ecosystem really functions, and what are the opportunities and constraints facing us in the 21st century.  Most class sessions will include lecture, group discussion, and exercises. There will be panels and mock debates where students argue and defend one side of a major global environmental issue, partially to become familiar with the salient scientific points and partly to observe and reflect on the human psychology and cognitive biases involved in the debates.  Attendance and classroom participation will be an important component of the students grade.  In lieu of a midterm there will be periodic quizzes based on the readings, as well as some creative writing assignments. In lieu of a final exam there will be a group project pertaining to some aspect of sustainability applying the concepts learned in class.

Note to students: the main ‘benefit’ to you from taking this class will be the knowledge and understanding of how our human economy functions.   The instructors are expecting this to be a unique learning experience and it is geared towards students who are ambitious, curious, engaged and eager to learn.  As educators, we have observed that consilience, the integration of multiple fields to arrive at a new viewpoint, provides the most rewarding insights.an objective at the core of this seminar.   This class will not provide a lot of  ‘answers’ but will provide a framework that will enable you to ask better questions about environmental/social problems and apply the energy/behavioral concepts in multiple situations throughout your life.

While synthesizing about 15 academic disciplines, the class will be organized under the following five sections:

Week 1 –Student surveys about the future, Overview lecture for the topics to be covered during the course.

Selected readings –Chapter 1-5  A Short History of Progress –Ronald Wright

 

Weeks 2-3    ENVIRONMENT, CLIMATE CHANGE, BIODIVERSITY AND HUMAN SYSTEMS

Key questions:  What is the earth’s carrying capacity?  What are latest projections/science on climate change and ocean acidification. What is an externality and why do we have them?  What is the 6th great extinction?  What is the human impact on net primary productivity?

Key concepts: systems ecology, climate change, ocean acidification, biodiversity, externalities, throughput, carrying capacity, & related concepts.

Selected readings –Farley/Daly Ecological Economics Chapter 1-5

Environmental Science  Cleveland and Kaufmann  http://www.trunity.com/products/digital-textbooks/environmental-science/

 

Weeks 4-6  ENERGY, NATURAL RESOURCES AND ECONOMIC PROCESSES

Key questions:  Why is energy the most important commodity in our economies?  What advantages and disadvantages do fossil fuels have relative to renewables?  What is the difference between net energy and gross energy?  Can growth continue with less/lower quality energy? What is the status of modern fossil fuel/forest biomass/renewable resources?

Key concepts – thermodynamics, energy as core driver of growth, fossil fuels, EROI, net energy, renewables, energy quality, and related concepts. J

The Oil We Eat (Richard Manning)  http://www.resilience.org/stories/2004-05-23/oil-we-eat-following-food-chain-back-iraq

Energy Transitions Past and Future

http://www.eoearth.org/view/article/152562/

A Net Energy Parable – Why EROI is Important

http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/8/2/114144/2387

What you need to know about Energy – Board on Energy and Environmental Systems (BEES)

Hubbert, M.K., 1993. Exponential Growth as a Transient Phenomena in Human History, in: Daly, H., Townsend, K. (Eds.), Valuing the Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics. MIT Press, Cambridge, pp. 113-125.

Weeks 7-10  HUMAN BEHAVIOR, BIOLOGY, CULTURE

Some key questions: how did we arrive at 7 billion hominids?  How did hominids arrive at all?  Why do we compete for relative vs absolute fitness? Why do we try to ‘keep up with the Joneses’?  Why do we become easily habituated to certain standards of living?  Why is China/India trying to keep up with America?  Why do we care so much about the present vis-à-vis the future?  Why are we so confident in our viewpoints?  Why do we care so much about our friends and are so willing to blame other demographics?

Key issues: evolutionary drivers of behavior (sexual selection, status, novelty, addiction, steep discount rates, conspicuous consumption), cognitive biases (self-deception, cognitive dissonance, loss aversion, etc.) Multi-level selection, ultra-sociality, hunter gatherer studies, inequality etc.

Some selected readings: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7901  – The Evolutionary Roots of Resource Overconsumption

Andreas Chai and Graham Bradley and Alex Y. Lo and Joseph Reser, 2014.  What time to adapt? The role of discretionary time in sustaining the climate change value-action gap. http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/53461/1/MPRA_paper_53461.pdf

E.O. Wilson. 2004. On Human Nature. Selected readings.

Wilkinson, R. and K. Pickett (2009). The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. New York, Bloomsbury Press.

Dr. Peter Whybrow – Why We Are Biologically Ill-suited to the riches of modern America   http://www.postcarbon.org/report/508148-culture-and-behavior-dangerously-addictive-why

Human Nature and Sustainability – Bill Rees – http://www.postcarbon.org/report/471929-culture-and-behavior-the-human-nature

Week 11  – FINANCE/ECONOMICS

Some key questions:  What is money? How does it come into existence? What are key assumptions in macroeconomics and how do they fare on a full planet?  How do debt and energy interrelate? How does microeconomics mesh with our evolved behavioral drivers?

Key issues: Trade, globalization, comparative advantage, Liebig’s law, and related concepts.

Selected readings: Twenty Important Concepts I Wasn’t Taught in Business School   http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8402

Vohs, K.D., Mead, N.L., Goode, M.R., 2006. The Psychological Consequences of Money. Science 314, 1154-1156.

 

Weeks 12-14  SUSTAINABILITY/SYNTHESIS:

Some key questions:   How does all this fit together in modern economy?  what should humans aspire to?, Could we have a trillion humans live during the next 100,000 years?  Will a world in 2100 with billions of healthy humans but with dead oceans and forests be considered a success?  What are the implications of an end to growth? What can individuals, communities, regions, nations do to prepare for a world with ‘less’ instead of more each year? What are the most important projects for young  science minded citizens to initiate? What does a unified theory of knowledge look like?

key issues: tragedy of the commons, wants vs needs, hedonic psychology, intergenerational equity, GINI coefficient, Buddhist economics, consilience, resilience

Some selected readings:

Consilience –E. O. Wilson

Fleeing Vesuvius – Overcoming the Risks of Economic and Environmental Collapse  -Douthwaite  http://fleeingvesuvius.org/contents/

Immoderate Greatness –William Ophuls

Meadows, D. (2009). ” Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System.” Solutions 1(1): 41-49.

Nate Hagens:  Nate has a PhD in Natural Resources from University of Vermont (2010), and MBA w Honors from the University of Chicago in Finance (1992) and a BBA in International Business from UW Madison (1987).  He worked on Wall St at Lehman Brothers and Salomon Brothers and closed his own hedge fund in 2003 to pursue interdisciplinary knowledge about the bigger picture, which is modern society. Nate was lead Editor for the popular energy and sustainability web-portal www.theoildrum.com for several years.  Currently Nate is the US Director for Institute for Integrated Economic Research (IIER) and is on the Board of Post Carbon Institute, The Institute for Energy and Our Future and The Bottleneck Foundation.  This 1 hour lecture would serve as rough overview of class content, adjusted to college undergrad audience    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ055LzK86Q&feature=youtu.be

Kathryn Draeger, PhD, is an adjunct professor of Agronomy and Plant Genetics and the statewide director of the U’s Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships (Regional Partnerships).  Dr. Draeger’s MS is in Soil Science and PhD in Water Resources Sciences (2001).  The Regional Partnerships are a unique program, nationwide, formed by the Minnesota legislature in the late 1990s to build community-University partnerships to test and apply sustainability principles.  Kathy was a MacArthur Scholar at the U and recipient of a Bush Fellowship. In 2008 statewide director Kathy Draeger relocated her family to Big Stone County to practice what she preached in sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, and rural revitalization. Governor Dayton appointed her to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency board as the agricultural representative for the state in 2012.  A few recent publications include:

Kapuscinski, A., Schmidtt Olabisi, L.,  Johnson, K., Jordan, N.,  Dana, G., Bawden, R., Draeger, K., Reich, P., Stenquist, B. (In Revision).  Learning Systems for Sustainability: Knowledge for action in an uncertain world.  Ecology and Society.

Johnson, K. A., G. Dana, N. R. Jordan, K. J. Draeger, A. Kapuscinski, L. K. Schmitt Olabisi and P. B. Reich. 2012. Using Participatory Scenarios to Stimulate Social Learning for Collaborative Sustainable Development. Ecology and Society 17 (2): 9. [online] URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol17/iss2/art9/

Stedman Smith, M., P. McGovern, L. Kingery and K. Draeger. 2012. Photovoice in the Red River Basin of the North: A Systematic Evaluation of a Community-Academic Partnership.  Journal of Health Promotion Practices.  September 2012. Vol 13, No.5. Pp. 599-607.

Schmitt Olabisi L.K., Kapuscinski A.R., Johnson K.A., Reich P.B., Stenquist B., Draeger K.J. (2012) Using Scenario Visioning and Participatory System Dynamics Modeling to Investigate the Future: Lessons from Minnesota 2050. Sustainability. 2010; 2(8):2686-2706.

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What Happens When Weed Killers Stop Killing?

Posted on March 21, 2014 by

Robert F. Service. September 20, 2013. What Happens When Weed Killers Stop Killing?  Science (341):1329

“U.S. farmers are heading for a crisis,” says Stephen Powles of the University of Western Australia, Crawley. Powles is an expert on herbicide resistance, a worsening problem in U.S. fields.

  • Weeds resistant to glyphosate—the world’s most popular herbicide—are now present in the vast majority of soybean, cotton, and corn farms in some U.S. states.
  • Perhaps even worse, weeds that can shrug off multiple other herbicides are on the rise.
  • Few new weed killers are near commercialization, and none with a novel molecular mode of action for which there is no resistance.

Although herbicide companies say research is going full tilt, no new herbicide with a novel mode of action has hit the market in 20 years. And researchers say they know of no new herbicides on the way that have proven to be effective, short-lived, and nontoxic to other life forms. 

Herbicide resistance has ebbed and flowed for decades. But because most herbicides could not kill all weeds, farmers had to continually rotate their crops and rotate herbicides to prevent resistant weeds from taking over their fields.

That picture changed in the 1990s with the commercialization of transgenic crops resistant to glyphosate, marketed as Roundup by Monsanto. Glyphosate disrupts the ability of growing plants to construct new proteins. Because the transgenic crops didn’t suffer this fate, their use—and glyphosate’s—soared.

“Glyphosate used to control everything easily,” says Bryan Young, a plant biologist at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Some experts referred to it as agricultural heroin because it was so effective and easy to use that farmers quickly became hooked. “We trained a generation of farmers that weed control was very easy,” says Thomas Mueller, a weed management scientist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. But the overuse had a cost, selecting for resistant weeds.

Among the biggest concerns is a family of weeds that includes waterhemp (Amaranthus rudis). At the ACS meeting, Kevin Bradley, a weed management scientist with the University of Missouri, Columbia, reported that a 2008 to 2009 survey of 144 populations of waterhemp in 41 Missouri counties revealed glyphosate resistance in 69%. “It’s way higher than that now,” Bradley says. “It just blew up dramatically.” The problem extends far beyond Missouri. Micheal Owen of Iowa State University in Ames reported that surveys of weeds from some 500 sites throughout Iowa in 2011 and 2012 revealed glyphosate resistance in approximately 64% of waterhemp samples.

In response to the rise in glyphosate resistance, farmers have turned to other herbicides—often applying several in a single growing season—to protect their crops. In the United States, most midwestern and southern farmers continue to use glyphosate because it still kills most weed species. But they’ve had to add additional herbicides, known as residuals, to deal with resistant weeds. “We’ve seen the use of more residuals in the last couple of years than the previous 10 years combined,” says Bob Scott, an agricultural extension scientist with the University of Arkansas in Lonoke.

Perhaps because of the use of multiple herbicides, the spread of glyphosate resistance appears to have slowed. According to data at WeedScience.org, an international database of herbicide resistance in weeds, from 2005 through 2010 researchers discovered 13 different weed species that had developed resistance to glyphosate. But since then only two more have been discovered.

The alternatives could meet the same fate as glyphosate, however. A survey that Bradley and colleagues conducted last year in Missouri shows that weeds resistant to multiple herbicides with completely different biological modes of action are also on the rise. Of weed populations they sampled in Missouri, 43% are now resistant to two different herbicides; 6% are resistant to three herbicides; and 0.5% are resistant to four separate herbicides. In Iowa, Owen also found a rise in multi-herbicide resistance, with 89% of water hemp populations he sampled now resistant to two or more herbicides, 25% resistant to three, and 10% resistant to five separate herbicide classes. “We are looking at control that is not working,” Owen says.

The need to apply more herbicides, more often, is affecting farmers’ bottom line. For cotton grown in the South, the cost of using herbicides has climbed from between $50 and $75 per hectare a few years ago to about $370 per hectare today, Scott says. For soybeans in Illinois, Young says the jump has been from about $25 to $160 per hectare. “It changes how profitable it is to grow the crops,” Scott says. And in the South it is contributing to a massive shift away from growing cotton; over the past few years, the area planted with cotton has declined by 70% in Arkansas and by 60% in Tennessee, says Larry Steckel, a weed management scientist at the University of Tennessee’s West Tennessee Research and Education Center in Jackson.

Dow, Bayer CropScience, Syngenta, and Monsanto are all developing new seed varieties resistant to herbicides other than glyphosate, which will make it easier for farmers to use alternative weed killers. Even though weeds have already evolved some resistance to those herbicides, Powles says the new seed-and-herbicide combos should work well if used with proper crop and herbicide rotation. However, he adds, “if there is an over-reliance on them, they will fail and fail rapidly.”

Posted in BioInvasion | Tagged | Comments Off on What Happens When Weed Killers Stop Killing?

Dmitry Orlov Definancialisation, deglobalisation and relocalisation

Posted on March 21, 2014 by

Definancialisation, deglobalisation and relocalisation

by Dmitry Orlov. Sep 2, 2011. Fleeing Vesuvius.

Some excerpts:

Collapse without preparation is a defeat.

Collapse with preparation is an eccentricity.

I concede that the choice is a difficult one: either we wait for circumstances to force our hand, at which point it is too late for us to do anything to prepare, or we bring it upon ourselves ahead of time. If we ask the question, “How many people are likely to do that?” —then we are asking the wrong question. A more relevant question is, “Would we be doing this all alone?” And I think the answer is, probably not, because there are quite a few other people who are thinking along these same lines.

Even so, it is very important to understand social inertia for the awesome force that it is. I have found that many people are almost genetically predisposed to not want to understand what I have been saying, and many others understand it on some level but refuse to act on it. When they are touched by collapse, they take it personally or see it as a matter of luck. They see those who prepare for collapse as eccentrics; some may even consider them to be dangerous subversives. This is especially likely to be the case for people in positions of power and authority, because they are not exactly cheered by the prospect of a future that has no place for them.

There is a certain range of personalities that are most likely to survive collapse unscathed, physically or psychologically, and adapt to the new circumstances. I have been able to spot certain common traits while researching reports of survivors of shipwrecks and other similar calamities.

  • A certain amount of indifference or detachment is definitely helpful, including indifference to suffering.
  • Possibly the most important characteristic of a survivor, more important than skills or preparation or even luck, is the will to survive.
  • Next is self-reliance: the ability to persevere in spite of loneliness and lack of support from anyone else.
  • Last on the list is unreasonableness: the sheer stubborn inability to surrender in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, opposing opinions from one’s comrades, or even force.

Those wishing to be inclusive and accommodating, who want to compromise and to seek consensus, need to understand that social inertia is a crushing weight. Translated, “We must take into account the interests of society as a whole” means “We must allow ourselves to remain thwarted by people’s unwillingness or inability to make drastic but necessary changes; to change who they are.” Must we, really?

Our social instincts are atavistic and result far too reliably in mediocrity and conformism. We are evolved to live in small groups of a few families, and our recent experiments that have gone beyond that seem to have relied on herd instincts that may not even be specifically human. When confronted with the unfamiliar, we have a tendency to panic and stampede, and on such occasions people regularly get trampled and crushed underfoot. And so, in fashioning a survivable future, where do we put our emphasis: on individuals and small groups, or on larger entities — regions, nations, humanity as a whole? I believe the answer to that is obvious.

“Collapse” or “Transition”?

It’s difficult for most people to take any significant steps, even individually. It is even more difficult to do so as a couple. I know a lot of cases whether one person understands the picture and is prepared to make major changes in the living arrangement, but the partner or spouse is non-receptive. If they have children, then the constraints multiply, because things that may be necessary adaptations post-collapse look like substandard living conditions to a pre-collapse mindset. For instance, in many places in the United States, bringing up a child in a place that lacks electricity, central heating, or indoor plumbing may be equated with child abuse, and authorities rush in and confiscate the children. If there are grandparents involved, then misunderstandings multiply. There may be some promise to intentional communities: groups that decide to make a go of it in rural setting.

When it comes to larger groups — towns, for instance — any meaningful discussion of collapse is off the table. The topics under discussion center around finding ways to perpetuate the current system through alternative means: renewable energy, organic agriculture, starting or supporting local businesses, bicycling instead of driving, and so on. These certainly aren’t bad things to talk about, or to do, but what of the radical social simplification that will be required? And is there a reason to think that it is possible to achieve this radical simplification in a series of controlled steps? Isn’t that a bit like asking a demolition crew to demolish a building brick by brick instead of what it normally does? Which is, mine it, blow it up, and bulldoze and haul away the debris?

Better living through bureaucracy – A 10-Step program

  1. Formulate a brilliant plan
  2. Generate community enthusiasm
  3. Get support from industry, government, the UN, the Vatican and the Dalai Lama.
  4. Use mass media to generate public awareness.
  5. Form action committees.
  6. Propose new legislation. Lobby parliaments.
  7. Secure corporate sponsorship.
  8. Execute pilot programs.
  9. Publish papers, present results at conferences
  10. COLLAPSE!

There are still many believers in the goodness of the system and the magic powers of policy. They believe that a really good plan can be made acceptable to all — the entire unsustainably complex international organizational pyramid, that is. They believe that they can take all these international bureaucrats by the hand, lead them to the edge of the abyss that marks the end of their bureaucratic careers, and politely ask them to jump. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to stop them. Let them proceed with their brilliant schemes, by all means.

There are far simpler approaches that are likely to be more effective. Since most wealth is in private hands, it is actually up to individuals to make very important decisions. Unlike various bureaucratic and civic bodies, which are both short of funds and mired in social inertia, they can act decisively and unilaterally. The problem is, what to do with financial assets before they lose value.

The answer is to invest in things that will retain value even after all financial assets are worthless: land, ecosystems, and personal relationships. The land need not be in pristine or natural condition. After a couple of decades, any patch of land reverts to a wilderness, and unlike an urban or an industrial desert, a wilderness can sustain life, human and otherwise. It can support a population of plants and animals, wild and domesticated, and even a few humans.

The human relationships that are the most conducive to preserving ecosystems are ones that are in turn tied to a direct, permanent relationship with the land. They can be enshrined in permanent, heritable leases payable in sustainably harvested natural products. They can also be enshrined as deeded easements that provide the community with traditional hunting, gathering and fishing rights, provided human rights are not allowed to supersede those of other species. I think the lifeboat metaphor is apt here, because the moral guidance it offers is so clear. What has to happen in an overloaded lifeboat at sea when a storm blows up and it becomes necessary to lighten the load? Everyone draws lots. Such practices have been upheld by the courts, provided no-one is exempt — not the captain, not the crew, not the owner of the shipping company. If anyone is exempt, the charge becomes murder. Sustainability, which is necessary for group survival, may have to have its price in human life, but humanity has survived many such incidents before without descending into barbarism.

Gift-giving as an organizing principle

Many people have been so brainwashed by commercial propaganda that they have trouble imagining that anything can be made to work without recourse to money, markets, the profit motive, and other capitalist props. And so it may be helpful to present some examples of very important victories that have been achieved without any of these.

In particular, Open Source software, which used to be somewhat derisively referred to as “free software” or “shareware,” is a huge victory of the gift economy over the commercial economy.” Free software” is not an accurate label; nor is “free prime numbers” or “free vocabulary words.” Nobody pays for these things, but some people are silly enough to pay for software. It’s their loss; the “free” stuff is generally better, and if you don’t like it, you can fix it. For free.

General science works on similar principles. Nobody directly profits from formulating a theory or testing a hypothesis or publishing the results. It all works in terms mutuality and prestige — same as with software.

On the other hand, wherever the pecuniary motivation rises to the top, the result is mediocre at best. And so we have expensive software that fails constantly (I understand that the Royal Navy is planning to use a Microsoft operating system on its nuclear submarines; that is a frightening piece of news). We also have oceans full of plastic trash — developing all those “products” floating in the ocean would surely have been impossible without the profit motive. And so on.

In all, the profit motive fails to motive altruistic behaviour, because it is not reciprocal. And it is altruistic behaviour that increases the social capital of society. Within a gift-giving system, we can all be in everyone’s debt, but going into debt makes us all richer, not poorer.

Barter as an organizing principle

One option is to organize as communities to produce certain goods that the entire community wants: food, clothing, shelter, security and entertainment. Everyone makes their contribution, in exchange for the end product, which everyone gets to share. It is also possible to organize to produce goods that can be used in trade with other communities: trade goods. Trade goods are a much better way to store wealth than money, which is, let’s face it, an essentially useless substance.

We’ll need to re-skill and toughen up

Supposing all goes well, and we have a swift and decisive collapse, what should follow is an equally swift rebirth of viable localized communities and ecosystems. One concern is that the effort will be short of qualified staff.

It is an unfortunate fact that the recent centuries of settled life, and especially the last century or so of easy living based on the industrial model, have made many people too soft to endure the hardships and privations that self-sufficient living often involves. It seems quite likely that those groups that are currently marginalized would do better, especially the ones that are found in economically underdeveloped areas and have never lost contact with nature.

And so I would not be surprised to see these marginalized groups stage a come-back. Almost every rural place has its population of people who know how to use the local resources. They are the human component of the local ecosystems and, as such, they deserve much more respect than they have received. A lot of them can’t be bothered about fine manners or speaking English. Those who are used to thinking of them as primitive, ignorant and uneducated will be shocked to discover how much they must learn from them.

Rules for your new life

  1. Conserve energy. Get plenty of rest and sleep a lot. Sleeping burns 10 times less energy than hard physical labor.
  2. Save time. Avoid living to a schedule. Work with the weather and the seasons, not against them.
  3. Pick and choose. Always have more to do than you ever plan to get done.
  4. Have plenty of options. You don’t know what the future holds so (don’t) plan accordingly.
  5. Think for yourself. The popularity of the stupid idea doesn’t make it any less stupid.
  6. Laugh at the world. Make sure to maintain a healthy sense of humor.

So what are we to do while we wait for collapse, followed by good things? It’s no use wasting your energy, running yourself ragged and aging prematurely; so get plenty of rest, and try to live a slow and measured life. One of the ways industrial society dominates us is through the use of the factory whistle: few of us work in factories, but we are still expected to work a shift. If you can avoid doing that, you will be ahead. Maintain your freedom to decide what to do at each moment, so that you can do each thing at the most opportune time. Specifically try to give yourself as many options as you can, so that if any one thing doesn’t seem to be working out, you can switch to another. The future is unpredictable, so try to plan so as to be able to change your plans at any time. Learn to ignore all the people who earn their money by telling you lies. Thanks to them, the world is full of very bad ideas that are accepted as conventional wisdom, so watch out for them and come to your own conclusions. Lastly, people who lack a sense of humor are going to be in for a very hard time, and can drag down those around them. Plus, they are just not that funny. So avoid people who aren’t funny, and look for those who can laugh at the world no matter what happens.

Endnotes

  1. ttp://www.theoildrum.com/node/5381 Dated 3 May 2009
  2. The average price of a barrel of oil in 2007 was $65.61 and production was 73.78 million barrels per day. The Gross World Product was $65,610 billion. This means that 2.7% of world output spent on buying oil. In 2008, the average price rose to $91.50, thus pushing the share of world output figure to around 4%.
  3. R,H. Tycot et al., “The Importance of Maize in Initial Period and Early Horizon Peru”, chapter 14 in Histories of Maize: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Prehistory, Biogeography, Domestication, and Evolution of Maize, J.E. Staller, R.H. Tykot & B.F. Benz eds., Elsevier, 2006, downloadable from http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~rtykot/14%20Tykot%20et%20al.pdf
Posted in Expert Advice | Comments Off on Dmitry Orlov Definancialisation, deglobalisation and relocalisation

Energy production requires a LOT of water

Posted on March 21, 2014 by

Energy and water – the real blue-chips

August 20, 2011 by Nate Hagens and Kenneth Mulder

Some excerpts from this article:

The 2 most important natural resources are water and energy. In most cases, each is required to procure the other. We use water directly through hydroelectric power generation at major dams, indirectly as a coolant for thermoelectric power plants, and as an input for the production of biofuels.

  • The 2 largest consumers of water in the USA are agriculture and electric power plants.
  • world-wide agriculture uses 90% of fresh-water
  • If we count only fresh water, fully 81% of U.S. use is for crop irrigation.
  • CORN: uses about 2,100 gallons of water per bushel which yields 2.7 gallons of corn-based ethanol. This means that 206 gallons of water is needed per gallon of ethanol

[Water shortages will only get worse if we adopt energy-production technologies that use a lot of water, like biofuels, and also lead to hunger as less food is produced.  Water depends on energy: for example, in California water delivery uses over 15% of the state’s total electricity consumption.]

Fossil fuels use the least amount of water per unit of energy generated:

Water requirements for energy production
(litres per megawatt hour)
Petroleum Extraction 10-40
Oil Refining 80-150
Oil shale surface retort 170-681
NGCC* power plant, closed loop cooling 230-30,300
Coal integrated gasification combined cycle ~900
Nuclear power plant, closed loop cooling ~950
Geothermal power plant, closed loop tower 1900-4200
Enhanced oil recovery ~7600
NGCC*, open loop cooling 28,400-75,700
Nuclear power plant, open loop cooling 94,600-227,100
Corn ethanol irrigation 2,270,000-8,670,000
Soybean biodiesel irrigation 13,900,000-27,900,000
*Natural Gas Combined Cycle

Unlike energy, water can sometimes be recycled. For example, cooling water withdrawn for use by a nuclear power plant may be returned and withdrawn again farther downstream to irrigate biofuel crops.

Energy derived from finite and renewable resources is a function of multiple inputs including land, labor, and raw materials — any of which may become a limiting factor for energy production. A technology might have a high EROI and yet require sufficient levels of scarce, non-energy inputs as to be extremely restricted in potential scale. For example, the amount of land required for biofuels is between 100 and 1,000 times more than the land area required for conventional fossil fuels. In addition to non-energy inputs, energy technologies vary in their waste outputs and impact on environment. Within the biofuels class itself, there is a large disparity of pesticide and fertiliser requirements. For example, per unit of energy gained, soybean biodiesel requires just 2% of the nitrogen, 8% of the phosphorous, and 10% of the pesticides that are needed for corn ethanol, inputs that impact groundwater quality and stream runoff. As such, future refinements to an energy and water policy framework will probably have to look beyond energy and water supplies.

How much water does it take to provide energy?

The net Energy Return on Water Invested (EROWI) for selected fuels Source: (2) This graph has a logarithmic scale so the bars rrepresent orders of magnitude. The actual amounts are shown at the top of each bar. As it takes 250 times more water to produce ethanol from sugar cane to run a car than it does to run one on ordinary diesel, the availability of water is likely to place a tight limit on biofuel production.

References

  1. “Environmental, Economic, and Energetic Costs and Benefits of Biodiesel and Ethanol Biofuels”. Hill et al,. Proc. Acad. Nat. Sci. 103:11206-11210 (2006).
  2. “Burning Water: Energy Return on Water Invested”, Mulder, K., Hagens, N., Fisher, B. Volume 39, Number 1/February, 2010 AMBIO — Journal of Human Environment
  3. “The Water Intensity of the Plugged-In Automotive Economy”, Webber, M., King, C., Environmental Science & Technology 2008 42 (12), 4305-4311
  4. Cleveland, C. “Net Energy from the Extraction of Oil and Gas in the United States”. Energy, 2005, 30, 769–782.
  5. “Another Biofuels Drawback: The Demand for Irrigation”, Robert F. Service, Science 23 October 2009:Vol. 326. no. 5952, pp. 516 – 517
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