News and analysis. A collection of related In the Wake blog posts.
Saturday, March 18, 2006
Declining oxygen levels
Some of you may have been following the discussion at Ran Prieur's site about declining oxygen levels in the atmosphere from deforestation and phytoplankton die-offs in the ocean.
There's interesting discussion there about the impacts of that on humans, but there's also an aspect that no one has brought up yet. According to my favourite wilderness medicine book, flaming combustion is impossible below 12% oxygen, and gasoline burning in an enclosed "bunker" will self-extinguish when the oxygen levels drop to 14%.
So if the oxygen levels dropped to half of what they are now campfires wouldn't start and conventional woodstoves and furnaces wouldn't work anymore. That means that even before healthy humans actually start dying of hypoxia they might start freezing to death or dying of contaminated food that they couldn't cook. There would also be an impact on internal combustion engines, especially in airplanes which already have limited oxygen availability at high altitudes to start with.
You might be able to get around the problem by having combustion take place in a pressurized chamber. Doubling the pressure would double the amount of oxygen in a given volume of air, which is how racecars are "turbocharged" to drive faster and how propeller airplanes operate at high altitudes. But you can't turbocharge a campfire, and if we get to the point where your woodstove has to be built like a submarine and attached to a constantly running (and energy hungry) air compressor ... well, by then we're pretty screwed.
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
Arctic ice not returning
According to an article in the Independent ice in the arctic is not reforming. It's obviously a sign of severe global warming happening sooner than it was predicted to. But more importantly, major warming at the poles could lead to a "methane burp" as trapped and frozen organic matter release huge amounts of methane on thawing. And some studies suggest that a temperature increase of as little as four degrees celsius at the poles would be enough to cause an irreversible cycle of methane emission and further warming.
Relating to Friday's posts about the rivers in Canada being destroyed by global warming and oil extraction, the Independent now has two articles on the global destruction of rivers. From Death of the world's rivers:
The world's great rivers are drying up at an alarming rate, with devastating consequences for humanity, animals and the future of the planet.
The Independent on Sunday can today reveal that more than half the world's 500 mightiest rivers have been seriously depleted. Some have been reduced to a trickle in what the United Nations will this week warn is a "disaster in the making".
From the Nile to China's Yellow River, some of the world's great water systems are now under such pressure that they often fail to deposit their water in the ocean or are interrupted in the course to the sea, with grave consequences for the planet. [...]
The UN report says that demand for [dams]"will continue to increase", but recommends that they should be barred from the world's remaining, undammed "free-flowing" rivers.
The United States has dismantled 465 dams in recent years, mainly for environmental reasons. But last week, in an abrupt U-turn, it signalled that it was about to embark on its biggest dam-building campaign in decades, when the Washington State legislature passed a bill to allow the federal government to build a series of dams on the Columbia, the West's largest river.
Global warming is endangering even the rivers that have largely escaped damming.
Not only that, but studies have shown that dams cause significant global warming because of the breakdown of organic matter in their reservoirs. Dams account for about 20% of the methane produced by human activity, and dam reservoirs now cover 1% of the land area of the planet. The linked report notes that in tropical areas dams create even more greenhouse gases than an equivalent amount coal generation:
Some tropical reservoirs release more emissions than the dirtiest fossil fuel plants, said the report. Emissions from the 250-megawatt Balbina Dam in the middle of the Amazon basin in Brazil are exceptionally high: some 25-38 times higher than a modern coal plant of similar megawatt capacity.
A second report in the Independent, Rivers: a drying shame, takes several "case studies" of large rivers that have been horribly damaged.
Friday, March 10, 2006
Tar sands and disappearing Canadian rivers
Egils Evalds points us to a report which discusses tar sands exploitation for synthetic oil production in Canada along with its staggering consumption of water. According to the report, Fuelling Fortress America (PDF):
The tar sands development has already had a huge impact on freshwater pollution and water depletion. Water is a huge issue. It takes more than three barrels of water, on average, to process one barrel of synthetic oil. Syncrude claims it recycles about 75% of the water it uses, but it still took 31 million cubic metres of water from the Athabasca River in 2004, and Suncor sucked up 45.5 billion, averaging 6.2 barrels of water per barrel of oil. The water needs for tar sands extraction will only intensify if coal-bed methane were to become a source of fuel to replace natural gas. [...]
"We're going to need water resources long after the oil resources are gone," [a water policy analyst] says. "We have experienced drought in Alberta over a number of years, not just in the southern parts of the province, but in northern Alberta as well. This is climate change. We could be experiencing far more drought in the future, so we need to ensure all our allocations of water are sustainable."
Northern Alberta rivers are shrinking. The summer flows are down by 35–40% on the Peace, Slave, and Athabasca rivers. One of Canada's foremost water experts, David Schindler, warns that the major river systems across the food-producing
Prairies are drying up. During the last century (between 1910 and 2002), Schindler's studies show that the South Saskatchewan River has declined 80%. The Old Man and Peace Rivers are down 40%, while the Athabasca River has dropped by 30%. At the same time, several lakes have dried up, including Lake Maglore near Grand Prairie, Alberta. Already, the glacier that feeds the Bow River in Alberta is melting so quickly that there may be no water left in it 50 years from now. [Emphasis mine, see pages 35-36 of the report.]
This is a typical collision of oil demand and climate change. Industrial production will use up water and will cause long term climate change which will leave our descendants with dry riverbeds, rusted gas-starved automobile hulks, and illnesses caused by oil extraction. Even now, though tar sands production has been fairly small in scale, health officials are aghast at the health effects of tar sands production on neighbouring communities. Which, oh-so-typically, affect mostly indigenous communities.
Tar sands development has a direct impact on local and planetary ecosystems. In Alberta, this form of oil extraction completely destroys the boreal forest, the bogs, the rivers as well as the natural landscape. The mining industry believes that the boreal forest will eventually colonize the reclaimed lands, yet 30 years after the opening of the first open pit mine near Fort McMurray, Alberta, no land is considered by the Alberta Government as having been "restored."
Furthermore, for every barrel of synthetic oil produced in Alberta, more than 80 kg of greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere and between 3 and 5 barrels of waste water are dumped into tailing ponds.
Official estimates recently placed the number of ecological refugees (people displaced by ecological degradation or disaster) at about 10 million, but that number may be significantly larger. In any case, ecological refugees outnumber all other categories of refugees, including those displaced by war. The number of ecological refugees requiring help from the Red Cross increased by a factor of ten between 1992 and 1998. And that population is due to continue to increase dramatically in the coming years, to 150 million, although it could be much more than that since the impact of climate change has been historically underestimated.
So the question for me is, with all of these new refugees from ecological causes alone how will people in power treat them? I think that the construction of new detention camps in the US gives us part of the answer.
Historically those in power have often moved indentured or enslaved labourers from their homelands and away from their communities and social support networks to exploit and indoctrinate them more effectively. This includes the slavery of Africans in America, the Gulags of Soviet Russia, and the modern day charcoal slaves of Brazil. Many of the people who currently work in sweatshops in Asia were forced into slums and factory labour after being displaced from their rural homes. And after the Second World War many people who left Europe to move to Canada or the US were forced to work as maids or domestic servants for years to be allowed citizenship, including people I know. (I'm not saying their economic circumstances forced them to work as domestic servants which is commonly the case now. I'm saying that was an explicit government requirement.) So people in an increasing population of ecological refugees would certainly be integrated as labourers in whatever exploitative system dominates the land they are displaced to.
That becomes especially true and worrying in a collapse context. As cheap oil declines those in power will surely use human power to fill in that energy gap. Much commercial fruit and vegetable in North America is currently dependant on migrant labourers to do the actual hands-on labour like picking food. Peak oil will likely mean a decrease in the availability of fuel for tractors and energy-hungry synthetic fertilizers for farms. So agriculture, and other industries, will probably see an increase in exploitative manual labour and even slavery as collapse proceeds. Indeed, the people running those industries will recognize that increased exploitative labour will be required to keep those industries intact. They certainly aren't going to recommend that people grow their own food and stop buying it or other products.
I've long thought that those in power deliberately want to destroy the world. Not just because they don't value it for its own sake (which they don't), or because its destruction is a byproduct of "business as usual". But because the world has to be destroyed to force people to participate in civilization by destroying all other means people have to sustain themselves. For those in power in industrial civilization a handy supply of labourers from a growing population of ecological refugees would only be one more handy side benefit of destroying the world. Also for them, those labourers will be especially useful during collapse.
A crucial global warming "tipping point" for the Earth, highlighted only last week by the British Government, has already been passed, with devastating consequences.
Research commissioned by The Independent reveals that the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has now crossed a threshold, set down by scientists from around the world at a conference in Britain last year, beyond which really dangerous climate change is likely to be unstoppable.
The implication is that some of global warming's worst predicted effects, from destruction of ecosystems to increased hunger and water shortages for billions of people, cannot now be avoided, whatever we do. It gives considerable force to the contention by the green guru Professor James Lovelock, put forward last month in The Independent, that climate change is now past the point of no return.
Saturday, February 4, 2006
Ethanol from switchgrass
Switchgrass is a native grass in North America that has recently been touted as source of feedstock for industrial ethanol production. Recent coverage includes this piece from National Public Radio.
Many of the problems with biofuels that George Monbiot writes about apply here as well. One major difference is that switchgrass is a native plant and also a perennial. So compared to annual monocrops like soy, switchgrass planting would be much less destructive to the soil because it doesn't require plowing or periods of bare soil. In fact, since switchgrass has a very extensive root system, planting it (and other native grasses) where annual crops have previously been would generally be a major improvement and would take carbon out of the air and put it in the roots. Of course, if you do harvest switchgrass for ethanol and cart it away to the factory instead of letting it grow, die, and add biomass to the soil, you are simply mining the soil of matter and nutrients which will eventually cause soil loss and counteract all of the positive effects of planting it in the first place.
The main problem with using switchgrass for industrial ethanol production is that it would still require massive and destructive industrial infrastructure -- tractors, roads and highways, factories, mines and everything associated with those. It would require massive amounts of energy and cause serious long term ecological damage.
So with that it mind it's worth mentioning that switchgrass is also an excellent grass for pasture for horses, goats, and the like. It and grasses like it have been used for thousands of years to feed those creatures, who then can provide transport as part of their relationship with humans.
I have a friend who has a pasture-fed goat, and that goat pulls a little sled of firewood in the winter, and gives milk for drinking and cheese and yogurt, and meat from the occasional offspring. It requires no industrial infrastructure to build that goat, and the goat produces no toxins during its birth or life. In the process of turning switchgrass into transport via the goat (or horse, or what-have-you) there is no energy wasted by building and maintaining huge machines, factories, mines or roadways. And there is none of the ecological destruction that results from that. The goat also gives nutrients back to the land with her manure.
Now, if the people who advocate running industrial transportation on switchgrass can come up with a car that will gather its own food and water, convert it into useful energy internally, steer itself when I'm not paying attention and avoid obstacles or hazards, make copies of itself without any industrial infrastructure, feed me, give fertilizer for my garden, and produce no toxins or pollution in its use or manufacture then I'll be impressed.
But let's be honest. I'm not going to hold my breath.
Update: Just as I was getting ready to post this Lierre Keith forwarded me a message from a related discussion on the Alas Babylon listserv, where Tom Fugate writes:
I would add to this discussion the amount of human labor that's going to be involved just in feeding ourselves without fossil fuels is going to be staggering. I've been attempting to grow a good portion of my own food for several years now using manual bio- intensive methods, and it's not easy! The idea that we're going to be growing crops to make ethanol during the energy decline is really preposterous. Maybe if the wealthy want to keep their cars they will have human slaves to plow and harvest their energy crops for them, like in the plantation days.
ENERGY usage in Victoria surged 45 per cent above normal weekend levels yesterday, as air-conditioners were switched on to cope with the heatwave.
Forecasts of more hot weather this week, and power shortages yesterday in South Australia, have raised the spectre of blackouts in Victoria. [...]
Searing temperatures in South Australia ... caused widespread blackouts ...
And of course much of Australia's electricity comes from coal. So climate change leads to increased energy consumption which leads to more climate change and more consumption until it reaches a breaking point, and collapses.
The world has already passed the point of no return for climate change, and civilisation as we know it is now unlikely to survive, according to James Lovelock, the scientist and green guru who conceived the idea of Gaia - the Earth which keeps itself fit for life. [Emphasis mine.] [...]
Over the coming decades soaring temperatures will mean agriculture may become unviable over huge areas of the world where people are already poor and hungry; water supplies for millions or even billions may fail. Rising sea levels will destroy substantial coastal areas in low-lying countries such as Bangladesh, at the very moment when their populations are mushrooming. Numberless environmental refugees will overwhelm the capacity of any agency, or indeed any country, to cope, while modern urban infrastructure will face devastation from powerful extreme weather events, such as Hurricane Katrina which hit New Orleans last summer. [...]
And in today's Independent he writes: "We will do our best to survive, but sadly I cannot see the United States or the emerging economies of China and India cutting back in time, and they are the main source of [CO2] emissions. The worst will happen ..."
It's pretty horrible to hear, but I think he may be right about what will happen if fossil fuel burning continues unhalted. The upside is that is enough people deliberately disable the fossil fuel infrastructure in their region a runaway greenhouse effect could still be avoided (although the window for that may be less than ten years long).
Also from the article:
One of the most striking ideas in his book is that of "a guidebook for global warming survivors" aimed at the humans who would still be struggling to exist after a total societal collapse.
Hey, that's a great idea! Like some kind of manual for outliving civilization...
About 300 million Chinese drink unsafe water tainted by chemicals and other contaminants according to a new report from the Chinese government. A leading government official said the greatest non-drought threat to China's water resources, is chemical pollutants and other harmful substances that contaminate drinking supplies for 190 million people.
A recent nationwide survey found that about 90% of China's cities have polluted ground water, while millions of rural Chinese face risks from naturally occurring contaminants like arsenic and excess fluorine.
The report follows a massive chemical spill in northeastern China which dumped 100 tons of benzene and other carcinogenic chemicals into the Songhua River following an explosion at a petrochemical plant. Initially local officials tried to cover up the toxic spill which eventually forced shutoff of water in the major city of Harbin and later flowed into Russian territory.
China's water problems are expected to worsen in coming years...
"Disease is the bullet killing frogs, but climate change is pulling the trigger," said Pounds, lead study author and resident scientist at Costa Rica's Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve.
"Global warming is wreaking havoc on amphibians and will cause staggering losses of biodiversity if we don't do something fast."
Monday, January 9, 2006
Ancient fish pushed towards extinction
After existing for more than 400 million years, the coelacanth has been pushed to the brink of extinction in a matter of years by deep sea trawlers.
The oceans are emptying. In a single generation, once thriving populations of deep sea fish have been driven to the brink of extinction by expanding fisheries, researchers say today. [...]
"We expected to see declines, but we didn't expect such severe declines," said Jennifer Devine, a PhD student who led the study at Memorial University in Newfoundland, Canada. "If nothing changes, we could be facing barren oceans ..." [...]
The scientists reviewed trawler logs for records of five deep sea by-catch species - the roundnose grenadier, onion-eye grenadier, blue hake, spiny eel and spinytail skate. All are slow growing, reaching more than a metre long and living to 60 years. They found that levels of all the fish plummeted by 87%-98% over the 17 years, a rate that will see a decline over the next three generations of 99%-100%. Records for roundnose grenadier and onion-eye grenadier from 1995 to 2003 show those species have collapsed by 99.6% and 93.3% in 26 years.
The upside is that with any luck a reduced availability of oil and the eventually collapse of the industrial infrastructure may prevent many species from becoming completely extinct.
AT LEAST five people were killed and ten more were feared trapped last night after the roof of a skating rink in the Bavarian Alps collapsed after heavy snowfall, as extreme weather around the world marked the first days of 2006. [...]
Snowslides have killed seven people in the French Alps in the past few days.
Meanwhile, excessive heat has caused wildfires across the US prairie states of Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico. In Texas yesterday, scores of homes were destroyed and two small towns burned to the ground.
Other fires across the drought-stricken region burned thousands of acres in Oklahoma and New Mexico, forcing hundreds of people to be evacuated. Officials warned that the dry, windy weather and extreme fire danger would continue. [...]
Asia also suffered badly from the climatic extremes. In central Indonesia, flash floods swept away hundreds of houses and schools early yesterday, killing at least 34 people.
Villages were inundated when overnight rains triggered a landslide on a hill in Panti, a sub-district of the East Java province, causing a river to break its banks. Many people sought shelter from the surging waters in mosques and boarding schools. "So far 34 people have been confirmed dead," said Burhanudin, an official in Panti. "At least 30 others have been injured."
In Pakistan, heavy snow and rain brought more misery to Kashmiri earthquake survivors, halting relief work, bringing landslides down on roads and flooding tents.
Modified genes from crops in a GM crop trial have transferred into local wild plants, creating a form of herbicide-resistant "superweed", the Guardian can reveal.
The cross-fertilisation between GM oilseed rape, a brassica, and a distantly related plant, charlock, had been discounted as virtually impossible by scientists with the environment department. It was found during a follow up to the government's three-year trials of GM crops which ended two years ago.
The new form of charlock was growing among many others in a field which had been used to grow GM rape. When scientists treated it with lethal herbicide it showed no ill-effects.
Unlike the results of the original trials, which were the subject of large-scale press briefings from scientists, the discovery of hybrid plants that could cause a serious problem to farmers has not been announced.
The scientists also collected seeds from other weeds in the oilseed rape field and grew them in the laboratory. They found that two - both wild turnips - were herbicide resistant.
This is exactly the sort of thing that anti-GMO activists have been warning about for a long time, and it is completely predictable.
The main question for me is what the exact result will be. In an ideal world, more and more farmers will see the light and shift to more organic methods. But I think what we will actually see as "superweeds" start to spread is that companies like Monsanto (which owns the patents to pesticide resistant food crops and manufactures the pesticides used on them) will simply use this occurance to their advantage, and start selling new and more toxic pesticides to try to kill the superweeds.
More than a million people in a southern China have been warned not to drink tap water after a factory dumped poisonous cadmium into the water supply.
Dangerous levels of cadmium, a carcinogenic metal widely used in batteries, were found earlier this week in the Beijiang River near the city of Shaoguan, a city of 500,000 people in China's heavily industrialised Guangdong province, after leaking from a zinc smelting factory.
Sunday, December 18, 2005
2005 warmest year on record, economically costliest year for damage by extreme weather
Professor Sir David King, the [British] Government's Chief Scientist, has said the last time levels of the gas were that high was 60 million years ago. And that was during a period of rapid warming in the Palaeocene epoch, which caused a massive reduction in life on Earth.
The past year was also the costliest in terms of economic damage caused by extreme weather, with financial losses of more than US$200 billion.
Among the many awful effects of drastic climate change, it has now been observed that polar bears are drowning because melting ice in the arctic has forced them to swim much greater distances than before:
New evidence from field researchers working for the World Wildlife Fund in Yakutia, on the northeast coast of Russia, has also shown the region's first evidence of cannibalism among bears competing for food supplies. [...]
As the ice pack retreats north in the summer between June and October, the bears must travel between ice floes to continue hunting in areas such as the shallow water of the continental shelf off the Alaskan coast — one of the most food-rich areas in the Arctic.
However, last summer the ice cap receded about 200 miles further north than the average of two decades ago, forcing the bears to undertake far longer voyages between floes.
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Methane Catastrophe
One of the most compelling reasons to dismantle industrial civilization as soon as possible is the so-called "methane burp". Vast quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas twenty times as potent carbon dioxide, are frozen in cold locations like the Arctic tundra and the bottom of the seas. However, industrially-caused global warming could (and is very likely to) release them, causing a runaway greenhouse effect and mass extinction. Geologist John Atcheson writes that:
A temperature increase of merely a few degrees would cause these gases to volatilize and "burp" into the atmosphere, which would further raise temperatures, which would release yet more methane, heating the Earth and seas further, and so on. There's 400 gigatons of methane locked in the frozen arctic tundra - enough to start this chain reaction - and the kind of warming [currently predicted] is sufficient to melt the clathrates and release these greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
If a methane catastrophe were to happen in the near future, it is likely that not only would a considerable percentage of existing plants and animals be killed off, but a large percentage of the human population as well, as a result of the climate change and significantly more hostile environmental conditions. Yet we are heading toward such a catastrophe. It will happen because we continue to warm the planet by our burning of carbon fuels, and particularly fossil fuels. It is against the background of global warming that a methane catastrophe will take place. [...]
A methane catastrophe is abrupt because it can be initiated by a major submarine landslide, which can happen in a matter of days or even hours, or by the venting of vast quantities of seafloor methane over a period of decades. These events can take place in a geological eyeblink.
The climate can take a long time to respond to greenhouse gas emissions, and even if industrial societies stopped emitting greenhouse gases immediately global temperature would still continue to increase for a time before levelling off. Unfortunately, that means that even if industrial civilization collapsed completely next week, it would still be possible for a massive and rapid methane burp to happen decades down the road. (So the sooner emissions stop or are massively reduced, the better.)
Over the past two years I have made an uncomfortable discovery. Like most environmentalists, I have been as blind to the constraints affecting our energy supply as my opponents have been to climate change. I now realise that I have entertained a belief in magic. [...] The idea that we can simply replace this fossil legacy – and the extraordinary power densities it gives us &#S211; with ambient energy is the stuff of science fiction. There is simply no substitute for cutting back.
He goes on to underline the futility and destructiveness of efforts to replace oil with biodiesel in his article "Worse Than Fossil Fuel".
Monbiot has been writing insightful articles about fossil fuels and climate issues for some time now. Years ago he observed that "either we lay hands on every available source of fossil fuel, in which case we fry the planet and civilisation collapses, or we run out, and civilisation collapses." ["The Bottom of the Barrel"]
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