United Nations reports on risks to living species

By The Editorial Board, New York Times, May 11, 2019
•
Our planet has suffered five mass extinctions, the last of which occurred about 66 million years ago, when a giant asteroid believed to have landed near the Yucatán Peninsula set off a chain reaction that wiped out the dinosaurs and roughly three-quarters of the other species on earth. A few years ago, in a book called “The Sixth Extinction,” the writer Elizabeth Kolbert warned of a devastating sequel, with plant and animal species on land and sea already disappearing at a ferocious clip, their habitats destroyed or diminished by human activities.

This time, she made clear, the asteroid is us — and we will pay heavily for our folly.

Humanity’s culpability in what many scientists believe to be a planetary emergency has now been reaffirmed by a detailed and depressing report compiled by hundreds of international experts and based on thousands of scientific studies. A summary was released last Monday in Paris, and the full 1,500-page report will be available later in the year. Its findings are grim. “Biodiversity” — a word encompassing all living flora and fauna — “is declining faster than at any time in human history,” it says, estimating that “around 1 million species already face extinction, many within decades,” unless the world takes transformative action to save natural systems. The at-risk population includes a half-million land-based species and one-third of marine mammals and corals.

Most of the causes of this carnage seem familiar: logging, poaching, overfishing by large industrial fleets, pollution, invasive species, the spread of roads and cities to accommodate an exploding global population, now seven billion and rising. If there is one alpha culprit, it is the clearing of forests and wetlands for farms to feed all those people (and, perversely, to help them get to work: The destruction of Indonesia’s valuable rain forests, and their replacement with palm oil plantations, has been driven in part by Europe’s boundless appetite for biodiesel fuels.)

Add to all this a relatively new threat: Global warming, driven largely by the burning of fossil fuels, is expected to compound the damage. “While climate change has not been the dominant driver of biodiversity loss to date in most parts of the world, it is projected to become as or more important,” said Sir Robert Watson, chairman of the biodiversity panel and former chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose most recent alarming report on global warming has given that issue new currency in American politics. Rising seas and increased extreme weather events propelled in part by climate change — fire, floods, droughts — have already harmed many species. The most obvious victim is the world’s coral reefs, which have suffered grievously from ocean waters that have grown warmer and more acidic as a result of all the carbon dioxide they’ve been asked to absorb.

As The Times’s Brad Plumer recently noted, many ecologists insist that species are worth saving on their own, that it’s simply morally wrong to drive any living creature to extinction. The new report deliberately adds a powerful practical motive to the spiritual one: Biodiversity loss, it says, is an urgent issue for human well-being, providing billions and billions of dollars in what experts call “ecosystem services.” Wetlands clean and purify water. Coral reefs nourish vast fish populations that feed the world. Organic matter in the soil nourishes crops. Bees and other threatened insects pollinate fruits and vegetables. Mangroves protect us from floods made worse by rising seas.

“Most of nature’s contributions are not fully replaceable,” the report says. But humans can stop or at least limit the damage. One critical task is to protect (and if possible to enlarge) the world’s natural forests, which, according to a recent paper by eminent ecologists in Science Advance, are home to fully two-thirds of the world’s species. Intact forests also absorb and store enormous amounts of carbon, so preserving them assists not only the species that live there but also the struggle against climate change. Conversely, cutting trees to make way for farming and other purposes — as Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, is determined to do in the Amazon — is a disaster for both the species and the climate; recent estimates suggest that deforestation accounts for slightly over 10 percent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, much smaller than the emissions from vehicles and power plants, but significant (and avoidable) nonetheless.

To Professor Watson and many other scientists, there are two important parallel approaches to the interconnected climate and species crises. One is to transform agricultural practices, the other is to enlarge the world’s supply of legally protected landscapes that cannot be touched for any commercial purpose. As to the first, farmers could figure out how to produce more food on fewer acres, and in ways that help the soil retain carbon; consumers could help by making smarter food choices, like eating more locally sourced food, and cutting back on meat and dairy products that require immense amounts of land for livestock.

Second, governments should mandate a significant increase in protected areas, both on land and at sea. Partly as a result of the Convention on Biological Diversity, a treaty agreed upon in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro along with a landmark agreement on climate change, nations have set aside about 15 percent of the world’s land and 7 percent of its oceans by setting up wilderness areas and nature preserves. Because this is only a fraction of the areas needed to protect biodiversity, the authors of the paper in Science Advance recommend a twofold increase in the protected land area and a fourfold increase in marine reserves over the next decade. If rigorously policed (which many parks are not today), that would effectively quarantine about 30 percent of the world’s land and oceans.

This proposal, which its authors call a Global Deal for Nature (echoing the Democrats’ Green New Deal on climate), will be further refined before the next meeting of the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in 2020 in China. Though it always sends a delegation to these meetings, the United States has never ratified the treaty; President Bill Clinton signed it in 1993, but the Republican Senate failed to ratify it for various reasons, including unfounded fears that the treaty threatened American patent and intellectual property rights.

It is hard to believe that the Trump administration and the current Senate will be any more enthusiastic about preserving biodiversity than the Senate was then. This is an administration, after all, that has proposed to shrink national monuments and reduce protections for the imperiled sage grouse in order to accommodate the oil, gas and coal industries; that is moving to open up the species-rich coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling; that plans to make available now-protected waters along America’s Pacific and Atlantic coasts for the same purpose; that proposes to sacrifice parts of

Alaska’s Tongass National Forest to logging; that, most tellingly, aims to weaken the Endangered Species Act, approved in 1973 with Richard Nixon’s signature in what seems a distant era when there was fairly deep bipartisan support for environmental values.

Few of the Democratic presidential hopefuls who have spoken about climate change and jumped with varying degrees of enthusiasm on the Green New Deal bandwagon have commented on the biodiversity report, despite biodiversity’s obvious connections to climate. They should read it, and make it part of their post-2020 agenda.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/11/opinion/sunday/extinction-endangered-species-biodiversity.html

Lake Chapala -- Mexico's largest freshwater lake

As a football score: It is Catastrophic Climate Change 400 ppm, Humanity 0.

From an Article by John de Waal, MBA, Lake Chapala (Mexico) Magazine, December 2016

The Meteorology Office and Climatic Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia reported that the Earth’s average temperature has increased by 1-degree C (1.8 F). The world’s biggest network of sensors that measure the constituents of the Earth’s atmosphere, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) that has been tracking carbon dioxide concentrations for many decades because it is vital for plant life and traps the sun’s heat to make our planet warmer, also reports that CO2 concentrations have risen 0.5 % during 2013, which is average for the decade, but that methane and nitrous oxide has increased much faster and warming of the planet increased by 36 % since 1990.

WMO Secretary General Michel Jarraud said: “We are moving into unchartered territory at a frightening speed and soon we’ll be living with globally averaged CO2 levels above 400 parts per million as a permanent reality (the carbon dioxide levels should remain well below 400 ppm to avoid long-term disruptions to the Earth’s climate). The implications for the planet are hotter global temperatures, more extreme weather events, melting ice, rising sea levels and increased acidity in oceans. It is an invisible threat, but a very real one!”

Mauna Loa Observatory too reported a 24 % increase since they began record keeping (1958) and NASA’s Dr. Michael Gunson observed:

“We are on an inexorable march to 450 PPM (parts per million) and…it should be a psychological tripwire for everyone.”

Other scientists at NASA said: Climate change is a threat to life on Earth and we can no longer afford to be spectators. The next threshold is the…point of no return in mankind’s unintended global-scale geo-engineering experiment.

As a football score: It is Catastrophic Climate Change 400 ppm, Humanity 0.

If we want to survive we must listen to the scientists, vote wisely, beat carbon addiction and put humanity into the game. Pew Research reports that majorities in all the 40 nations polled say that climate change is a serious problem (the global median is 54%), 78% want greenhouse gas emissions limited and 67% support major life style changes. In the US only 20% of Republicans believe that climate change is a serious problem, but 68% of Democrats do.

We must reduce 80% of CO2 emissions by 2020 by changing over to 100% electric vehicles and renewables for all other power needs. We also must get into the habit of frugality with Earth’s resources. Family planning, education and healthcare for all are essential. The choice is obvious.

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

Natural Gas is Mostly Methane

Natural gas will turn out to be wrong choice

From the Guest Opinion-Editorial Commentary by S. Thomas Bond, Charleston Gazette-Mail, September 18, 2016

It is now becoming clear that developing unconventional drilling for hydrocarbon fuels is the wrong choice. Two trends moving rapidly work against then: increasing population and global warming.

World population is over 7 billion and heading for 9 billion in a lifetime. Demographics, based on present population and birthrate, makes very dependable predictions.

An increasing part of the population in the developed world is going to be aged and require care, while younger people are increasingly disinclined to have children. However, in other parts of the world the population is increasing rapidly, and will continue to.

The human species combined weight is more than the weight of any other species. Something like one-half the world’s primary production on land (new growth) is devoted to feeding, clothing and sheltering our species. No single species has ever been so “successful.”

The world needs food, fiber, timber and other natural products to sustain humans. Otherwise, political unrest and vast population shifts are going to occur, and likely war and disease. Much of the immigration to Europe from the Middle East now is due to drought, rather than war, because food is not available.

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere absorbs infrared radiation by jumping to a higher vibrational state, thus converting radiation that would be reflected back into space into “sensible heat,” vibrational energy which can be transferred to all other molecules, and sensed by a thermometer, our skins, and everything else.

We are burning carbon in only a relatively few years derived from geologic layers of coal, oil and gas that have taken millions of years to lay down. The world put 39.8 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2015, 2.3 percent more than the previous year, not including carbon dioxide that comes from wildfires.

We need energy. We couldn’t sustain our present population without it. Fortunately, there are other ways to get it. We have crippled our species by not developing something else sooner.

In the early days of drilling, gas was no more than an unwanted byproduct, as it is in the remote Bakken field in the U.S. and in Russia. It is simply burned off into the air. Today with fracking, gas gives the illusion of providing cost effective energy.

I say illusion, because much of the cost is ignored. It destroys large areas of the surface, contaminates aquifers, and dumps carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, not as much as coal, but about 57 percent, by weight. In effect, burning carbon is destroying the earth’s capacity to sustain life, including human life.

In addition, the methane is lost into the atmosphere in sufficient quantity to be a an additional serious global warming gas; in fact, the second most important one due to man. These are real costs of gas, but never taken into the accounting. Gas’ balance sheet has no debit side in public discussion. Environmentally, its primary advantage is not having the secondary contamination of coal, including sulfur, phosphorus, heavy metals and particulate matter.

It would be much better to phase out coal for electricity at a rate that would reduce the social disruption and use the trillions of capital that are being poured into gas drilling, pipelines, compressor stations and all the other gas infrastructure instead to advance renewables and fusion.

The construction phase of gas energy creates several well paying jobs, but production is very labor efficient. Renewables involve much more widespread ownership of capital, and much more (and more worker friendly) labor for the capital invested. Storage of electricity isn’t here yet, but is coming along nicely.

Getting away from carbon fires is not a pipe dream. In some places, renewables are already cheaper than conventional electricity. Iowa will be self-sufficient in wind power in a few years. Hillary Clinton promises a billion solar panels at the end of her first term, and enough solar for every home in America in 10 years. Corporations like Google and Amazon are using it and expecting to be100 percent green energy in a few years. General Motors and others are buying in heavily. Non-carbon energy is coming along, and gas’ true costs makes it far more expensive than the market price.

S. Thomas Bond, of Jane Lew, is a retired teacher with a Ph. D. in inorganic chemistry and a member of the Guardians of the West Fork and the Monongahela Area Watersheds Compact.

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

HELP! — Our Biosphere is being replaced by an Econosphere

Commentary by S. Tom Bond, Retired Chemistry Professor and Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV

When I was about 16 and began to drive, I noticed the yellow spots on the map, and how much space they occupied. These were cities, of course, too densely developed to draw in the streets at the scale of whole-state road maps.

The world I grew up in consisted of the farm where Dad made our living and which provided most of our diet, thanks to Mom’s hard work with help from the three children. It was a great green continuum in all directions broken by houses and by the 30′s and some paved roads. By the 40′s strip mining was in progress, but it was understood the strip jobs would return to trees and grass in a decade or so. Cities were something else, large areas covered with concrete, roofs of metal and shingles, and a lot of bare spots. Later I learned about pollution from garages, chrome plating shops, and the huge amount of sewage towns produce.

This growth process in time lead to understanding what is called “environmental services.” We are essentially part of an ancient system, the organic world. Every atom of our bodies comes from the natural organic world through the food we ingest. When we die, we return to it, in spite of the effort we civilized folk make to delay the return. As a famous book says, we “come from the dust and we return to the dust,” this is through the ancient cycle of life.

Think of how it works: the atoms needed for our bodies are widely dispersed in the surface of the earth. Plants are able to gather them for their own use, and we eat the plants, or eat animals which have eaten plants. The part of the food we do not need is returned to the earth in our waste (when we live in a state of nature). When we die, the atoms of our bodies are also returned to the earth (again if we live in a state of nature). This system has served millions of species for a very long time. More microorganisms than you can imagine mediate it. We simply cannot exist without supplies from these natural processes for our food, and largely for our clothing and our shelter.

Our civilization separates us from the natural world. Stone age people continued to live in it, and many in the civilized world lived very close to it until recently, but much of today’s world has lost track of the organic necessity. One of the stories told here on Jesse Run is about a young couple that moved here from town. The husband told his wife he wanted to get a cow, so they could have milk. She replied, “I don’t want no milk that comes from a cow.”

Our offal is carefully carried to a sewage treatment plant where it is decomposed to the mineral state, with only a little fertility left in the sludge. Our artifacts go into a landfill. Our bodies are preserved in such a way it is difficult to return to the organic world. We extract what we need by organic means and then discard it in a way that it is not returned to the organic world. Mining and dumping. Our use of energy produced hundreds of millions of years ago by organisms using energy from the sun is prodigious.

Worse, our mining methods infringe on the organic world, green space, whatever you want to call it. This organic world is responsible for clean water, timber, food, oxygen in the atmosphere, and disposal of organic waste. What would the world be like if the dead dinosaurs and other species hadn’t decomposed and returned to be reused time and again?

We humans have been tremendously successful. The total weight of the seven billion of us is greater than most species. Some 350 million tons, as of 2012. The only species to exceed us in weight are bacteria, ants, marine fish (total), domestic cattle and termites. All whales (ten species) come in with only 40 million tons.

Another statement seen in the press lately is that the human race has doubled in the last 40 years and the total number of animals has dropped by half in the same time!  Shocking?

How long can this go on? Population rise is inexorable. Famines and plagues and wars are only a temporary setback. Look for a graph of population rise over the centuries. For several hundred years people have been talking about the “carrying capacity” of the earth, the maximum number of people can live here, followed by the same number of people generation after generation. Malthus in 1798 is given credit for the first written account of the idea. When the limit has been approached for one technology, another has been found. Potatoes and corn from the New World have supplemented cabbage and wheat, which poor North Europeans lived on.

There was a graph of the population of China vs. Time over many centuries published several years ago in Science. There was a series of stair steps of increasing population. Each was labeled with the introduction of a new foodstuff. Far back in time was millet, then dry land rice, then wetland rice. More recently, maize (which we call corn) and potatoes.

Also, fertilizer is making a difference, but we cannot count technology to go on forever. And, the population curve is rising.

I’d like to see a map with the yellow extended to houses, industrial areas and their pollution, buildings and roads of all kinds and all development. I’d like to know just how much land has been removed from production by civilization. I’d like to know how much each industry is killing the natural world, and how our “environmental services” are being reduced by them. We need to know. This kind of “return on investment” is both unknown and uncounted.

In the absence of such a map, the best we can do is get on Google Earth and “fly” over the earth at a low level. Stay a couple of thousand feet above the surface and move around. If you do this and learn to identify the “development,” you’ll be amazed at how much of the earth’s habitable surface is already preempted by what I call the “econosphere”, and lost to the biosphere.

Scientists from around the world are warning that population growth, widespread destruction of natural ecosystems, and climate change may be driving Earth toward irreversible change. This planet-wide tipping point would have destructive consequences unless adequate preparations and programs for change are instituted.

UC Berkeley professor Tony Barnosky tells how an increasing human population, coupled with climate change, could irreversibly alter Earth’s ecosystem in a video produced by Roxanne Makasdjian.

“It really will be a new world, biologically, at that point,” warns Anthony Barnosky, professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author of the review paper appearing in the June 7 issue of the journal Nature. “The data suggests that there will be a reduction in biodiversity and severe impacts on much of what we depend on to sustain our quality of life, including, for example, fisheries, agriculture, forest products and clean water. This could happen within just a few generations.”

The Nature paper, in which the scientists compare the biological impact of past incidences of global change with processes under way today and assess evidence for what the future holds, appears in an issue devoted to the environment in advance of the June 20-22 United Nations Rio+20 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The result of such a major shift in the biosphere would be mixed, Barnosky noted, with some plant and animal species disappearing, new mixes of remaining species, and major disruptions in terms of which agricultural crops can grow where.

This work by 22 internationally known scientists describes an urgent need for better predictive models that are based on a detailed understanding of how the biosphere reacted in the distant past to rapidly changing conditions, including climate and human population growth.

In a related development, groundbreaking research to develop the reliable, detailed biological forecasts the paper is calling for is now underway at UC Berkeley. The endeavor, The Berkeley Initiative in Global Change Biology, or BiGCB, is a massive undertaking involving more than 100 UC Berkeley scientists from an extraordinary range of disciplines that already has received funding.

Currently, to support a population of 7 billion people, about 43 percent of Earth’s land surface has been converted to agricultural or urban use, with roads cutting through much of the remainder. The population is expected to rise to 9 billion by 2045; at that rate, current trends suggest that half Earth’s land surface will be disturbed by 2025. To Barnosky, this is disturbingly close to a global tipping point.

“My view is that humanity is at a crossroads now, where we have to make an active choice,” Barnosky said. “One choice is to acknowledge these issues and potential consequences and try to guide the future (in a way we want to). The other choice is just to throw up our hands and say, ‘Let’s just go on as usual and see what happens.’ My guess is, if we take that latter choice, yes, humanity is going to survive, but we are going to see some effects that will seriously degrade the quality of life for our children and grandchildren.”

Related information:

• Berkeley Initiative in Global Change Biology
• Scientists core into Clear Lake to explore past climate change