environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility fisheries oceanic acidification sustainability
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Year 4, Month 10, Day 10: Shadow-Boxing In The Dark
The Grand Falls/Windsor Falls Advertiser (Newfoundland) discusses fisheries specialist George Rose’s recent presentation:
Rose told the approximately 250 conference delegates the collapse of cod stocks, and the moratorium, was mainly due to overfishing.
However, looking ahead — whether the subject is cod, caplin, lobster, crab, shrimp or any other species — determining what amounts to a sustainable fishery is about gathering the information that will provide the best, most detailed understanding of the ever-changing situation within offshore ecosystems.
Temperatures, acidity levels, and even the amount of plastic floating in our waters all need to be considered, he said.
On climate change, “I’ve read recent reports from as diverse places as Norway, the Northeastern United States and China … all basically reporting similar phenomenon: massive changes in production of their local waters,” he said.
Rose said climate has long been recognized as “a major, major — probably the most important influence” on fisheries.
Revised an earlier letter and sent it off. October 2:
Even if we ignore the looming threat of climate change, Newfoundland’s fisheries are already feeling the devastating impact of overfishing, where the abundant catches of decades past are no longer attainable even with the most advanced technologies. Once we include heating and acidification (the two most significant oceanic impacts of the rapidly accelerating greenhouse effect) in our assessments, there’s no getting around the inevitability of catastrophic declines. There’ll be fewer fish in the coming decades, and they’ll be increasingly difficult (and expensive) to catch. You’ve heard of Peak Oil? We’ve already reached Peak Fish.
With as much as a third of Earth’s population directly or indirectly relying on the ocean for food, this constitutes a humanitarian emergency. Add climate change’s likely impacts on agriculture, and it’s a grim warning to humanity: storm clouds are gathering, and we’re in for a hell of a ride.
The fossil-fuel industry’s myopic readiness to subsidize climate-change denial in politics and the media is a grave mistake. With billions of lives hanging in the balance, these corporations are elevating the easy lure of quarterly profits over the long-term happiness and prosperity of our species.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility economics media irresponsibility sustainability
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Year 4, Month 10, Day 7: May The Wind Always Be At Your Back
The Economist weighs in on the IPCC report – far more responsibly than American business outlets, needless to say:
IT HAS been a long time coming. But then the fifth assessment of the state of the global climate by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations body, was a behemoth of an undertaking. It runs to thousands of pages, involved hundreds of scientists and was exhaustively checked and triple-checked by hundredds of other boffins and government officials to whom they report—and whose policies are often based on what they read. The first tranche of the multi-volume report—an executive summary of the physical science—was released in Stockholm on September 27th. And it is categorical in its conclusion: climate change has not stopped and man is the main cause.
It may be the last report of its kind: a growing chorus of experts thinks a more frequent, less bally-hooed and more up-to-date assessments would be more useful. It is certainly the first since negotiations for a global treaty reining in carbon emissions collapsed in Copenhagen in 2009; the first since questions were raised about the integrity of the IPCC itself following mistaken claims about the speed of glacier melt in the Himalayas and, most important, the first since evidence became incontrovertible that global surface air temperatures have risen much less quickly in the past 15 years than the IPCC had expected. A lot is riding on its findings, from the public credibility of climate science to the chances of a new global treaty.
Gack. September 29:
For too long, the business community’s discussion of climate change has been mistakenly conceived as a competition between different economic viewpoints, and environmentalists have often been vilified for pointing out the obvious truth that when we exceed Earth’s carrying capacity, we put ourselves in very grave danger. As the recently released IPCC report makes clear, industrialized civilization has stressed the planet’s resources to the breaking point; dealing honestly and comprehensively with the climate crisis is not an issue of ideology, but of survival.
Our carbon dioxide emissions linger in the atmosphere for tens of thousands of years, causing rising sea levels, oceanic acidification, and incidences of extreme weather all over the globe. “Emit now, pay later” has been our approach for the decades since the problems of global warming were first identified in the 1950s. Now the bills for our accumulated greenhouse emissions coming due, and the longer we wait to take care of our environmental debt, the more it’s going to cost — in money, in infrastructure, and in the shattered lives we will bequeath to our posterity.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists droughts idiots media irresponsibility sustainability
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Year 4, Month 10, Day 4: Love You To
Crater Lake in Oregon is drying up:
Almost 2,000 feet deep, Crater Lake is the deepest body of water in the United States, a beautiful gem of southern Oregon. Fed by overhead snow and rain, the lake is one of the cleanest and purest in the world. Gazing upon the breathtakingly bright blue waters of the lake is something you never forget.
But there is trouble in paradise. During the past 21 years, I have spent my summers living in Crater Lake National Park. Looking out my bedroom window, I noticed winters are becoming shorter, warmer and less snowy. It looks to me like it has been raining more and snowing less in the months of May, June, September, and October. This change in the weather has led me to become very worried about climate change.
The science confirms my observation. In 1931, rangers first began keeping track of the average annual snowfall at Crater Lake. Since then, the totals have been trending downward by decade from an average of 614 inches in the 1930s to about 455 inches last decade. Even more alarming, this last winter, 2012-13, Crater Lake received about 355 inches.
Climate researchers expect the trend to continue. They predict the Pacific Northwest will experience even less snow and warmer temperatures in the decades to come.
I gather it’s a lovely place. September 25:
When it comes to confronting global climate change, Oregon’s not alone. Everywhere on Earth, people are discovering that the bill for a century-long carbon binge is coming due. Whether it’s devastated agriculture, rising sea levels and oceanic acidification, extreme and unpredictable weather, or the kind of droughts that are disrupting ecosystems at Crater Lake, we can no longer ignore the warning signs.
There’s a lot of argument about how to prepare for the greenhouse effect’s consequences — but one thing is certain: we will never successfully address climate change if we cannot accept its existence, its causes, and its potential to harm our neighborhoods, our regions, our states, our nation, and our world. The time is past for denial; politicians and media figures who continue to hide their heads in the sand on this planetary crisis are sacrificing the happiness of future generations for a few minutes in the limelight.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: oceanic acidification oceans scientific consensus sustainability
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Year 4, Month 9, Day 24: Carry That Weight A Long Time
More on the acidifying oceans, this time from the San Francisco Chronicle:
The problem: When carbon dioxide mixes with water, it takes on a corrosive power that erodes some animals’ shells or skeletons. It also robs the water of ingredients animals use to grow shells in the first place.
New science shows ocean acidification also can bedevil fish and the animals that eat them, from sharks to whales and seabirds. Shifting sea chemistry can cripple the reefs where fish live, rewire fish brains and attack what fish eat.
Those changes pose risks for food supplies, from the fillets used in McDonald’s fish sandwiches to the crab legs sold at seafood markets. Both are brought to the world by a Northwest fishing industry that nets half the nation’s catch.
Sea-chemistry changes are coming as the oceans also warm, and that’s expected to frequently amplify the impacts.
This transformation — once not expected until the end of the century — will be well under way, particularly along the West Coast, before today’s preschoolers reach middle age.
“I used to think it was kind of hard to make things in the ocean go extinct,” said James Barry, of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California. “But this change we’re seeing is happening so fast it’s almost instantaneous. I think it might be so important that we see large levels, high rates of extinction.”
Still hammering away on Jacques Cousteau. One day, one day…September 16:
The crisis of oceanic acidification recalls memories of the late Jacques Cousteau, who introduced countless Americans to the extraordinary beauty and mindboggling complexity of the world’s oceans — and taught us, as well, that caring for them must be one of our generation’s responsibilities to posterity.
Katharina Fabricius’s report has me imagining that tough old Frenchman’s response to such an emergency. After a volley of unprintable Gallicisms, he’d tell the world’s industrialized nations — leaders and ordinary citizens alike — that the time is long past for us to shed our apathy and show genuine leadership on climate change and carbon emissions. He would once again remind us that “the water cycle and the life cycle are one” — a fact that’s easy to forget when we are distracted by petty politics and the scandals du jour of an industrialized civilization disconnected from the core truths of the natural world.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: divestiture economics sustainability
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Year 4, Month 9, Day 20: Rinse And Repeat
The Somerville Journal (MA, next town over from me) argues for divestment:
There is currently a global movement to get cities, universities, and other institutions to divest from the fossil fuel industry. Cities such as Seattle, San Francisco, Portland, Madison, Providence, and our neighbors in Cambridge have already agreed to do so. I and others in Somerville believe that our city should be at the forefront of this movement.
We have known for quite some time now that we cannot keep releasing carbon dioxide into the air indefinitely without terrible consequences for the ecosystem and the sustainability of our way of life. This point has recently been underlined by an analysis from the Carbon Tracker Initiative (carbontracker.org) showing that we can only burn around 20 percent of currently known fossil fuel deposits and keep climate change within internationally accepted limits.
And yet, despite this knowledge, fossil fuel companies continue to try to increase extraction, extract from currently untapped deposits, and find new deposits. This is their business model, this is their reason to exist, and their profitability depends on extracting the fossil fuel deposits they own and have rights to. They will continue to use their enormous wealth and power to make sure this happens.
I revised yesterday’s letter and sent it along. September 13:
When William Lloyd Garrison began agitating to end the great societal evil of slavery, the Civil War was decades away, and much of the public couldn’t have cared less about the issue. “There have always been slaves; without them our economy would collapse.” But the dedication of Massachusetts’ voice of conscience helped build a movement that transformed our society and hastened the end of a humanitarian crime.
Today we are beginning to recognize our collective servitude to the giant multinational corporations which sell us fossil fuels, sources of energy which we now realize are compromising our planet’s health and the lives of our posterity, most of the public still couldn’t care less. “We have always burned fossil fuels; without them our economy would collapse.”
The campaign for Massachusetts to divest from fossil fuels is the economic and moral inheritor of the fight against slavery, a hundred and fifty years ago.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: divestiture economics heroes justice slavery sustainability
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Year 4, Month 9, Day 19: Just The Word I Was Looking For!
I sure am proud to be from Massachusetts. The Boston Globe:
Some Massachusetts lawmakers want the state to join a growing national movement that is fighting climate change by pressuring institutional investors such as pension funds and university endowments to divest holdings in companies that produce, distribute, and support fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels include oil, natural gas, and coal, which, when burned, produce carbon dioxide, the major culprit in climate change. Earlier this week, the Legislature held its first hearing on a bill that would require the state pension fund to unload over five years some $1.4 billion in investments — about 2.6 percent of the $54.4 billion fund — in oil companies, mining companies, refiners, and similar corporations. An estimated 200 people rallied in support of the bill in front of the State House Tuesday.
If the legislation is approved, Massachusetts would become the first state in the nation to divest its fossil fuel holdings, said state Senator Benjamin B. Downing, a Pittsfield Democrat sponsoring the bill. He argued that divestment makes economic sense given the quickening adoption of wind, solar, and other renewable energy sources.
“At some point, those fossil fuel companies will not be a good investment, and that will have an impact on our pension fund,” Downing said. “We need to transition away.”
This sprang naturally to mind. September 12:
It was in 1831 that Massachusetts’ voice of conscience, William Lloyd Garrison, excoriated public indifference to the evils of slavery, writing, “The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal, and to hasten the resurrection of the dead.” His dedication, and that of countless other abolitionists motivated by a profound sense of justice, helped hasten the end of a crime against humanity.
We now confront another kind of bondage — a servitude to the giant multinational corporations which profit hugely by selling us oil and coal to heat our homes, run our automobiles, and power our infrastructure — but which we now know are damaging our planet’s health in ways which will make our descendants’ lives all but intolerable. The movement to divest from fossil fuels is morally and economically analogous to Garrison’s tenacious campaign against another “peculiar institution” one and a half centuries ago.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists rising sea levels sustainability
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Year 4, Month 9, Day 16: Because The World Is Round
The Miami Herald sends intrepid reporter Nancy San Martin to Greenland:
QAQORTOQ, Greenland — — On an inlet nestled between soaring cliffs, huge chunks of ice shimmer from a distance like precious stones on a cocktail ring.
The icebergs take on various formations — a swan, a whale, a ship, a floating island. Some are as white as the shaved ice on a snow cone. Others as glaring as Superman’s kryptonite. The thickest blocks look utterly alive with blue lines running through them like veins, the result of melting and refrozen crevices within the layers of ice that broke away from the glaciers that once covered the nearby cliffs.
Amidst the slow-moving icebergs, the sound of lapping water is interspersed with cracks and pops, similar to the noise that comes from pouring warm water over a frozen ice tray. Up close, one can hear the drip, drip, drip of melting ice. As the sun gets hotter, the drips become a trickle, then a steady flow like rain pouring through a gutter after a heavy storm.
This is a snapshot of climate change.
The melting is taking place thousands of miles away, but its effects can be felt in South Florida in the form of rising sea levels. According to recent studies, the sea level has risen nine inches since the 1920s and if the sea-rise trend continues to accelerate — as some predict — parts of the state could eventually be submerged under water.
Since Miami is populated by retirees, they’ll all be dead by then, so who gives a shit? September 9:
Nancy San Martin’s report on how Greenlanders are coping with a radically changing world makes for compelling reading. It is self-evident to all but the willfully deluded that the transformations they see around them are harbingers of unwelcome and dangerous changes for those of us in more temperate latitudes.
For too long, climate change has been seen as a problem only affecting people and nations far from us, or times far from now. Given the effect rising sea levels are likely to have on Miami within our children’s lifetimes, this type of denial is no longer a viable option.
As droughts, extreme storms, heatwaves, and wildfires make clear, the greenhouse effect’s consequences are not going to stay comfortably outside American borders; we’re all starting to feel the hangover from our civilization’s century-long carbon binge. Soon enough, Floridians will have more in common with Greenlanders than either group can imagine.
Warren Senders
atheism environment Politics: population sustainability
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Year 4, Month 9, Day 11: This Dusty Old Dust Is A Gettin’ My Home
The San Francisco Chronicle makes some obvious associations which are usually ignored, presumably because everybody loves kids:
California has 157 endangered or threatened species, looming water shortages, eight of the 10 most air-polluted cities in the country and 725 metric tons of trash washing up on its coast each year.
California also has 38 million people, up 10 percent in the last decade, including 10 million immigrants. They own 32 million registered vehicles and 14 million houses. By 2050, projections show 51 million people living in the state, more than twice as many as in 1980.
In the public arena, almost no one connects these plainly visible dots.
For various reasons, linking the world’s rapid population growth to its deepening environmental crisis, including climate change, is politically taboo. In the United States, Europe and Japan, there has been public hand-wringing over falling birthrates and government policies to encourage child-bearing.
But those declining birthrates mask explosive growth elsewhere in the world.
In less than a lifetime, the world population has tripled, to 7.1 billion, and continues to climb by more than 1.5 million people a week.
A consensus statement issued in May by scientists at Stanford University and signed by more than 1,000 scientists warned that “Earth is reaching a tipping point.”
An array of events under way – including what scientists have identified as the sixth mass extinction in the earth’s 540 million-year history – suggest that human activity already exceeds earth’s capacity.
It’s been nice. September 4:
It’s possible that our species’ fate was sealed the moment we discovered agriculture. The increased quantities and enhanced predictability of our food supply encouraged our numbers to grow — and after twelve thousand years or so (an eyeblink in geological time) we’ve gone far beyond the planet’s carrying capacity.
But this doesn’t even begin to tell the whole story. The futurist visionary Buckminster Fuller coined the term to measure our ability to influence our environment through the expenditure of energy. One “energy slave” equals 250 days per year of an adult male’s physical labor — and thanks to mechanized agriculture, manufacturing, and infrastructure, we who live in the industrialized world now command thousands of them with the flick of a finger. There may be seven billion human bodies on Earth, but the transformations we force on the planet demand that our energy slaves be included in the census — a thousandfold increase.
With a population numbered in the trillions, it’s no wonder that we are now coming face to face with what biologists coyly call an “evolutionary bottleneck.”
Warren Senders
environment: agriculture drought sustainability
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Year 4, Month 9, Day 3: Headin’ For A Fall…
I wonder when Ownership is going to take notice. The Farm Journal:
Drought conditions have rapidly spread and worsened in Iowa, Minnesota and Illinois over the past six weeks, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. But longer term, odds are that conditions will improve in the eastern half of the Corn Belt, while worsening again in the western half, experts say.
This week’s hot, dry weather helped late-planted corn and soybeans catch up, but lack of water could also prevent proper ear filling in non-irrigated corn.
Dug out an old one, filed off the serial numbers, and sent it on. August 29:
It’s harder and harder to reject the evidence for the slow-motion catastrophe of climate change. As Duke Ellington’s old song says, “Things ain’t what they used to be” — and there’s nobody in our society better equipped to recognize this than our nation’s farmers, now reeling from sustained droughts that are approaching Dust Bowl proportions.
But while more people are aware of the problem, much of our agricultural infrastructure is stuck in the past. With equipment and systems belonging to a period of conspicuous consumption, both farming and manufacturing sectors waste unimaginable quantities of water every day — and there’s nothing like a prolonged drought to remind us that it’s not a disposable commodity, but a precious resource.
While technological improvements are essential to properly husband our dwindling water supplies, the most important transformations must be in our collective behavior and attitudes. Climate change’s most important lesson may well be that the era of waste is ended.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture biodiversity sustainability
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Year 4, Month 8, Day 28: It’s A Rock! It Doesn’t Have Any Vulnerable Spots!
The Laramie Boomerang (WY) notes that the state’s farmers are looking trouble in the face, and not liking what they see:
Just like the weather, Gregor Goertz said, his Wheatland farm is changing.
“What I have seen personally is changes in weather: less predictable rains and snows,” the United States Department of Agriculture Wyoming Farm Service Agency executive director said. “That has really affected our farming operations.”
Goertz was one of several speakers at the “I Will Act on Climate Change” event Wednesday at the University of Wyoming ACRES Student Farm.
Speakers discussed the effects of climate change on Wyoming agriculture.
Goertz said the Farm Service Agency serves 11,000 production operations, which farm about 30 million acres throughout the state. Many of those operations are strained because of climate change, he said. But he began his conversation with a discussion of observations he’s made on his own farm.
“Out on the farm, we’re seeing more frequent hails,” Goertz said. “It used to be, when I was growing up, if we had a hailstorm once every ten years, we thought that was about normal. Now I’m experiencing that about every other year. So, we’ve had to change our operation to try to deal with that.”
Ranchers across Wyoming are dealing with droughts, Goertz said.
Here we go. August 2:
Wyoming isn’t alone in confronting the troublesome facts of planetary climate change. All over the globe, agriculturists — from factory farmers in the American corn belt to subsistence farmers in the world’s poorest nations — are looking towards a future in which extreme and unpredictable weather disrupts planting schedules, hinders plant growth, and makes for increasingly uncertain harvests.
The climate crisis underlines the crucial importance of diversity in our food systems. Monocropping leaves cultivators far more vulnerable to pests and disease (the Irish potato famine is a compelling demonstration of the dangers of relying too heavily on a single vulnerable staple food), creating the potential for catastrophic failures from environmental disruptions.
There are many differences of opinion about how to prepare for the greenhouse effect’s onrushing consequences — but can be no doubt that the problem will never be successfully addressed by those who refuse to admit its existence. The time for climate-change denial is past; just like Wyoming’s farmers, our politicians and media figures must adapt to these new environmental realities.
Warren Senders