From Conservation Magazine, 15 for ’11. “15 emerging issues that could have a substantial impact on conservation this year, according to a recent “horizon scanning” exercise. Last year, more than 150 scientists and specialists were asked to identify one to four issues that “might affect species, ecosystems, or regions of global interest” in 2011.”

Here’s number 9:

“Social psychologists suggest that denial is expected to INCREASE both in extent and intensity as scientific evidence of a threat from phenomena such as climate change or biodiversity loss ACCUMULATES.”

Expect denial to increase as evidence accumulates… How screwed up is that? How screwed up are we?

Crazy. (Lyrics follow…)

I remember when, I remember
I remember when I lost my mind
There was something so pleasant about that place
Even your emotions have an echo in so much space

And when you’re out there without care
Yeah, I was out of touch
But it wasn’t because I didn’t know enough
I just knew too much

Does that make me crazy?
Does that make me crazy?
Does that make me crazy?
Probably

And I hope that you are
Having the time of your life
But think twice
That’s my only advice

Come on now, who do you
Who do you, who do you, who do you think you are?
Ha ha ha, bless your soul
You really think you’re in control?

Well, I think you’re crazy
I think you’re crazy
I think you’re crazy
Just like me

The first image below is a screenshot from trillionthtonne.org. According to the “created” and “last edited” stats on my presentation, I must have captured the screenshot somewhere around early November 2009. (Click on the images themselves for easier reading, or, for the second one you can just click to the website itself.)

*

*

The trillionthtonne.org folks have since updated the format of their site, so I decided to update that presentation slide as well.

Here is the new screenshot, taken today – mid-January 2011.

*

Our emissions over those 14 months have released about another 12 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere. (Or about 44 tonnes of CO₂ for those that are more familiar with that metric).

But look at what’s happened to the implied “remaining time” and “required rate of change” numbers.

According to the “Trillionth Tonne” methodology and assumptions, to have a 75% chance of avoiding a 2° Celsius temperature rise, the “remaining time” before emitting that amount of carbon has been squeezed from both ends because we have not yet begun to reduce emissions. Back in late 2009 we still roughly had a leisurely 18 years, 10 months to achieve that rather ambitious goal. And to avoid ever emitting that amount, we needed a reduction rate of about 4.54% a year.

Now we have about 17 years, 4 months… and, or to avoid that we need to accelerate the reduction rate to about 4.84% a year.

Want a more “realistic” target? Ok, let’s gamble and relax the assumptions so that we would accept just a 50% probability we’ll avoid a 2° C temperature increase?

For that scenario, because of inaction over the last 14 months, our “time remaining” has been reduced by 2 years. From about 35.4 years initially, to about 33.4 years now. And, again, to avoid that eventuality we would now need to kick the reduction rate up a notch as well.

I was just struck that the two snapshots are real-life, real-time reminders that Figure 22 (below)  from the Copenhagen Diagnosis is not just an abstraction. It’s a reminder that we are painting a real curve now.

*

Time waits for no one. “We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.”

Well, that’s all… just my little personal, real-time, tick-tock anecdote.

And here’s a “glimmer twins” song about all this stuff… (bonus – clever! – look for a “Tom Waits” cameo in the “Time Waits” video…)

“Yes, star crossed in pleasure the stream flows on by
Yes, as we’re sated in leisure, we watch it fly

And time waits for no one, and it won’t wait for me
And time waits for no one, and it won’t wait for me

Hours are like diamonds, don’t let them waste

Time waits for no one, no favours has he
Time waits for no one, and he won’t wait for me”

“It’s gonna take a lotta love
To change the way things are.
It’s gonna take a lotta love
Or we won’t get too far.”

Some interesting bits and pieces I bumped into that I didn’t see much in play elsewhere:

From the June 2009 Tällberg Forum, all of the talks are online. Of the few I’ve watched, I particularly enjoyed the following two.

First was a discussion and update on “Planetary Boundaries”. At the previous year’s session, a commitment was made to investigate key ”planetary boundaries”, and initial contributors included James Hansen, Tim Lenton, Robert Costanza and others. Apparently there is an upcoming paper in Nature based on the nine identified “boundaries”:

It’s a good panel discussion and update of the broader, interconnected environmental issues we face. Some of it’s a bit slow/basic, but moderator Johan Rockström does a good job consolidating the discussion. I hope there is a paper forthcoming that expands on how the 9 boundaries and targets are being chosen. I suppose it’s encouraging that they didn’t conclude that there are 50 boundaries we need to worry about – although when you have categories as broad as “chemical pollution” and get to count mercury, radioactive wastes, POPs, plastics, etc. as one category, maybe it’s not as meaningful. (An aside. There was an interesting, throw-away ”visualization” I liked: A panelist remarks that we have added about 250 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere. Which means the equivalent mass of having suspended about 150 billion Volvo’s in the air above us. Just an interesting way of expressing it…)

The second Tallberg video I enjoyed was a short discussion by Paul Gilding, really just because it is the first time I heard him speak and I was even more impressed than in his good writing. It is very blunt and sobering, although he ends up quite optimistically (admitting that he has personally despaired at times).

Paul contends that most of “us” -  environmentalists, activists, scientists -  are, ourselves, in denial because the reality of the situation is so disturbing that even we are reluctant to live with it. He said we must still accept 3 uncomfortable realities:
1. Business and old existing institutions are not going to change until they are threatened. It will take a crisis, which is a very uncomfortable truth.
2. The crisis has begun. Economic growth is finished. The Earth is full.
3. Things are going to get very difficult.

But, as I mentioned, he sees this in an optimistic vein, because he says that the old “plan” we have been using – since the 1970′s – of enlightening the public and leadership of our environmental challenges and waiting for them to change has failed. And we need to admit that it has failed so that we can begin working within the crisis to achieve the transformations of our economic, energy and societal systems.

Admittedly, the speech is too short to do a good job of articulating just how, exactly, we are to achieve this new plan! Frustrating. So, if you enjoy Gilding’s themes, you may want to check out this longer (70 minutes), more solutions-based keynote speech to the University of Sydney Institute for Sustainable Solutions:

Paul Gilding argues that we have entered a period of global ecological crisis and economic stagnation that will last for decades. This will lead to an economic and social transformation of significance in the history of humanity… This crisis is now inevitable because the fundamental drivers are not opinion or politics but the established momentum of changes in the ecosystem. This is not philosophy, it’s physics and biology.

As a result our current model of economic growth is finished. Buying more stuff we don’t need, with money we haven’t got, in the pursuit of distraction from lives that lack meaning was never a really good idea, but now we’ve hit the wall.
.
.
The crisis we are now entering will present humanity with a clear choice between civilisations’ collapse or economic and social transformation. We will choose the latter, because there is no other way around the wall. This will lead to the complete transformation of our cities, our transport system and our energy sector in order to achieve a net zero CO2 economy. Whole sectors of the economy and many businesses will simply be replaced. All this will occur within a few decades.

Gilding’s assessment of “where we are” - in terms of effecting the changes we need, what’s (not) worked in the past, etc. - reminds me of Gus Speth in “The Bridge at the End of the World”.

Last “suggestion”: A REALLY Inconvenient Truth. Dan Miller “updates” the slideshow, reflecting the disconcerting advances in our scientific understanding since ~ 2007, the 2009 MIT update, etc.  Perhaps not new info for anyone that might bump into this blog, but what is most useful interesting is that Dan has made all of his slides and animations available for anyone that wants to use/adapt them in their own presentations.

Finally, for those in the GTA, a reminder that the UofToronto Centre for Global Change Science 2009-2010 Distinguished Lecture Serieskicks off again next week, with a pleasant-sounding topic: “The boreal ecoregion: A global change time bomb?”. Interestingly (to me), Schindler has done some good work on the nitrogen cycle as well, and there looks to be a good session on perturbations of atmospheric nitrogen later in the series. That goes to the point in the first Tallberg video that it is about a lot more than just carbon…

No “Bernard Shakey” tunes this time. Instead, interesting lyrics and visuals (from ~ 3:10 onward, ending with the blue marble), 20 years on, from World Party:

“We’re setting sail to a place on the map
From which no-one has ever returned
Drawn by the promise of the joker and the fool
By the light of the crosses that burned

You will pay tomorrow
You’re gonna pay tomorrow
You will pay tomorrow

Oh, save me, save me from tomorrow
I don’t want to sail with this Ship of Fools, no, no

Avarice and greed are gonna drive you over the endless sea
They will leave you drifting in the shallows
Drowning in the oceans of history”

Grizzlies starve as salmon disappear
First the salmon vanished, now the bears may be gone too.
Reports from conservationists, salmon-stream walkers and ecotourism guides all along British Columbia’s wild central coast indicate a collapse of salmon runs has triggered widespread death from starvation of black and grizzly bears. Those guides are on the front lines of what they say is an unfolding ecological disaster that is so new that it has not been documented by biologists.

and, earlier on the Fraser salmon:
No answers in B.C.’s sudden salmon collapse
This year was supposed to be a big one, with estimates predicting as many as 10.5 million fish would swim up the Fraser after spending two years in the open ocean… But those estimates have since been dramatically reduced, now putting this year’s Fraser sockeye run at just 1.37 million — the lowest on record.

“He came dancing across the water,
With his galleons and guns,
Looking for the new world,
And the palace in the sun.
.
.
He came dancing across the water,
Cortez, Cortez,
What a killer.”

I seldom read John Tierney’s spew in the NYTimes “science” section… let alone the comments… but I am glad I did today. Tierney lamely offers up the Environmental Kuznets Curve as some sort of shrewd insight into our carbon dilemma… and gets called on it, big time.

The balance of responses from commenters is, frankly, derisive… They call out Tierney’s risible research and bizarre stance that his lack of scientific bona fides is something to celebrate as he “rethinks conventional wisdom about science”….

There are a number of excellent comments that expose Tierney’s cherry-pick and logical fallacies, but I thought I would just highlight this bit from UVM  Gund Institute for Ecological Economics Prof. Josh Farley:

I find it interesting that you willingly point out in your online bio that you recognize that your work would not pass scientific peer review. Scientists make an effort to familiarize themselves with the literature. You seem to rely on the works of Julian Simon and Bjorn Lomborg, both of whom makes exactly the same claim as you…  Right now I wish the scientific review process were not so strict. You could then be a scientist, publishing your ‘research’ in lousy journals that no one would ever read. Instead, because you don’t qualify as a scientist by your admission, the NYT has given you a position as ’science writer’, where thousands of people read your shoddy work… Perhaps you (could) write an article on why belief in science has become a partisan issue.

I know that Tierney is a bit player, but I found this dismantling even more encouraging than those of George Will, et al.  Even the most “scientific” amongst them are being publicly called on their irresponsibility and ignorance, and they are silent in response.

Tell it like it is.   

“But you and I we’ve been through that
And this is not our fate
So let us not talk falsely now
The hour’s getting late.”
(love this version of All Along the Watchtower… )

His lecture topic “The Biology of Greed and the Future of Humans” is rather different from most of the lectures earlier in the series, which focussed primarily on geophysics, climate, etc. I suspect his lecture will have some overlap with his talk at the Smithsonian last month; an overview was posted by thingsbreak at A Tale of Two Ocean Lectures.

Hmmm… got my first “can’t make it” from an email I sent around on this earlier… Has a prior meeting to “discuss Usain Bolt”. That actually sounds pretty interesting too!

There are many depressing things about being a climate scientist these days. The emerging data is going from bad to worse and the political leadership is still acting as if we have all the time in the world to deal with global warming… The scientific community has a very solid understanding of what is causing global warming: it is overwhelmingly because of the combustion of fossil fuels. Thus, the primary solution to the problem is as simple as it is daunting: the elimination of fossil fuel use in our economies… Few people outside the scientific and engineering community have yet come to terms with the immensity of that task… The public debate has become a caricature. People complain about windmills blocking their view. Kayakers complain about seeing a transmission line on their weekend excursions. The public dialogue is riddled with outlandish and demonstrably false assertions such as windmills will devastate local bird populations or a hydro project will create more greenhouse emissions than it will displace by eliminating a coal-burning power plant. Some of the most insidious arguments attempt to slow things down: that we should do more planning, that we should do energy conservation first and build renewable energy later, that we shouldn’t do anything until China does… These arguments are fundamentally not serious. They come from groups and spokespeople that have simply not grappled with the math — with the scale and speed at which we must eliminate fossil fuel emissions…

Read the whole thing. And join me over at Zero Carbon Canada. If you are curious why this particular choice of music… it was just serendipity, I guess…

Set my compass north, I got winter in my blood… Acadian driftwood, gypsy tail wind. They call my home the land of snow. Canadian cold front movin’ in. What a way to ride, oh, what a way to go.

From the Oil Drum: “The Cost of Corrosion”.

At $2 trillion per year (the earlier rough estimate for the current cost of corrosion) it would take fifty years to rebuild 100 trillion dollars of infrastructure (across all industries). Since much of our infrastructure is 20, 50 or even 100 years old, renewing it over a period of half a century seems reasonable.

On the other hand, it could be reasonably argued that the condition of our infrastructure is getting worse on average and that the rate of spending needs to increase. But there is a limit to how much a $60 trillion world economy can spend on renewing infrastructure…

Whatever the actual cost is, engineers everywhere have plenty of work ahead; managing ageing infrastructure and delivering new projects, while meeting sustainability challenges and protecting scarce resources…

Should I link to “Hey hey, my my”? Nah, that would be too easy… oh, what the heck. Can I still use it later?

“There’s more to the picture
Than meets the eye…

It’s better to burn out than it is to rust.
The king is gone but he’s not forgotten…”

Hi all,

Well, I know that this note will be a bit out of the blue for many of you, but like the post title (and Neil Young) says – “there comes a time”… This is something important, something I want to “pay forward”.

Right now, we are all understandably concerned and immediately focussed on the global economic turmoil – politicians, business leaders, the media, etc.

But I am convinced we face even larger, urgent challenges with respect to our global energy-environment-economy dilemma.

Why am I writing to you about this? Well, partly because I was inspired by new US. Secretary of Energy Dr. Stephen Chu’s words the night of the recent U.S. Presidential inauguration. At the Environmental Ball, commenting specifically about climate change, he said:

“We all know how serious our challenges are and what the implications would be of unchecked climate change… We are on a path that scares me… We have a hard task ahead of us. What unites us is a concern for a better world for ourselves and our children… You have to convince your friends and your neighbors about this.”

So, that’s what I am trying to do.

First, I am going to make a brief case for just how urgent some of these issues really have become, pointing to some of the most current science and empirical evidence. Then I want to highlight one important and hopeful process that is taking place over the balance of this year, why I think we should put our best efforts behind it, and what each of us can do to help ensure its success.

Comes a Time – Part I: The Oceans.

The single issue that comes up most often in the energy-environment-economy dilemma I referred to above – as it did in Dr. Chu’s comments – is climate change.

And yet, the public-at-large still seems to have some difficulty relating to why some far-away, gradually melting glaciers represent a truly urgent threat. And, it is understandable. It is the type of problem that society seems to have systematic difficulty dealing with: The underlying problem builds up slowly over time, without any apparent immediate consequences. The real damages tend to lag – often by decades – the behaviour that fundamentally causes them. Familiar examples could include the recent build-up of excessive debt in our financial institutions, poor personal diet, etc., etc. But when the damages are apparent, they can be devastating.

So, I am not going to start my case for “urgency” by focussing on some theoretical future environmental damage, but rather just look at our oceans. The damage there is already stark and easy to comprehend.

My case is simply the following table:

I have been following the relevant science on various environmental and energy issues for some years now. I still get way too many “omfg!” moments when I see some of the findings, and that table is one of those moments. It was published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences (NAS) in August of 2008. Even a cursory look at the table shows that by almost any measure – large mammals, tortoises, seagrass, seabirds, large fish, small fish, crustaceans – we have devastated our vast, beautiful oceans in a remarkably brief span. And it is not “early innings”. We are looking at declines of 60%, 85%, 90%, 99%…

That paper, which is a survey of the current literature on marine ecosystems and which is quite accessible for non-science types, was developed after a lecture Jeremy Jackson gave to the NAS. I really recommend you listen to/watch Jeremy Jackson make his presentation, to get a true sense of how heartbreaking the situation really is.

Towards the end of Dr. Jackson’s entertaining (and eye-opening!) talk, he says:

“I mean, the amphibians may be disappering, but if you look at those photographs that David showed yesterday of the Sierras, it’s still beautiful. Right? There are still forests. There are still lots of other animals. (In the oceans) we’re talking about a situation where there are no forests, no grass, no birds… You know… when you change the rules to the point that are no more forests, you’ve jacked the stakes up a whole level. And that’s where we are in the oceans…”

As he describes, if we wanted to intentionally design some kind of ‘shock and awe’ assault against the oceans, we could hardly do ‘better’ than what we routinely abuse it with: habitat destruction, overfishing, introduced species, warming, acidification, toxins, massive runoff of nutrients, etc.

My point is that in the oceans we have – already – let these long-lag assaults silently progress far too long until the environmental damage is remarkably grim.

So these kind of lousy outcomes can occur and are, in fact, currently occurring. Climate change is another long-lag dilemma with the potential to create an even larger ecological catastrophe. As I describe next, we are closer to crisis there than most of us realize.

Comes a Time – Part II: What’s New on Climate Change.

Last week, possibly the largest academic conference on climate change ever convened was held in Copenhagen, with over 2,000 climate scientists, economists and social scientists attending. They were assembling to provide input for the important United Nations COP-15 climate change negotiations scheduled for November-December 2009, also in Copenhagen.

They felt such a meeting was necessary because new insight from the science and empirical data in the field of climate change is progressing remarkably rapidly. The most recent assessment report (AR4) from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was originally released in February 2007. In order to complete their work, the various IPCC working groups had cut-off dates for published scientific literature they could consider. What this has meant in practice is that output of IPCC AR4 is based on our best understanding of our climate and climate science as of about late 2005.

Since that time, the scientific understanding of a number of key issues relating to climate change – the rate that we are emitting greenhouse gases, observations of potentially aggravating positive feedbacks from various natural processes, observed impacts – has suggested that we may be facing scenarios that are far worse and far more urgent than anything that the IPCC AR4 considered.

Reporting on last week’s congress, Naturenews highlighted exactly that: Copenhagen summit urges immediate action on climate change. Scientists report intensifying impact of global warming.

Climate experts who met this week in Denmark have warned that the overall prognosis on climate change is worse than previous estimates have suggested…

The latest results made for bleak listening at times. Scientists cautioned that some of the impacts of global warming, such as sea level rise and loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic, are happening much sooner and more severely than scientists had estimated just two years ago. “What we are seeing now is that some aspects are worse than expected,” says Stefan Rahmstorf, head of Earth System Analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany…

Addressing congress delegates this morning, economist Nicholas Stern said that policymakers now need to consider the consequences of temperature rises of 6°C or more. Stern, who conducted a review in 2006 of the economic effects of climate change on behalf of the British government, was not alone in expressing a growing sense of urgency to policymakers…

… at the conference, there was a growing fear that the message is simply failing to permeate. “I’m frustrated, as are many of my colleagues, that 30 years after the US National Academies of Science issued a strong warning on CO2 warming, the full urgency of this problem hasn’t dawned on politicians and the general public,” says Rahmstorf.

Some excerpts from the official six preliminary Key Messages from the Congress:

Key Message 1: Climatic Trends:  Recent observations confirm that, given high rates of observed emissions, the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised… parameters include global mean surface temperature, sea-level rise, ocean and ice sheet dynamics, ocean acidification, and extreme climatic events. There is a significant risk that many of the trends will accelerate, leading to an increasing risk of abrupt or irreversible climatic shifts…)

Key Message 3: Long-Term Strategy:  Rapid, sustained, and effective mitigation based on coordinated global and regional action is required to avoid “dangerous climate change”… Weaker targets for 2020 increase the risk of crossing tipping points and make the task of meeting 2050 targets more difficult. Delay in initiating effective mitigation actions increases significantly the long-term social and economic costs of both adaptation and mitigation.

Key Message 5: Inaction is Inexcusable:  There is no excuse for inaction. We already have many tools and approaches  – economic, technological, behavioural, management – to deal effectively with the climate change challenge. But they must be vigorously and widely implemented… A wide range of benefits will flow from a concerted effort to alter our energy economy now, including sustainable energy job growth, reductions in the health and economic costs of climate change, and the restoration of ecosystems and revitalisation of ecosystem services.

Key Message 6: Meeting the Challenge:  To achieve the societal transformation required to meet the climate change challenge, we must overcome a number of significant constraints and seize critical opportunities. These include reducing inertia in social and economic systems; building on a growing public desire for governments to act on climate change;… enabling the shifts from ineffective governance and weak institutions to innovative leadership in government, the private sector and civil society; and engaging society in the transition to norms and practices that foster sustainability.

Simply put, the crisis is real, it’s here and it is urgent. It’s why I am writing.

Ok. What I am asking you for:

I started off briefly describing the state of our oceans as an example of how bad things are getting, almost invisibly to most of us. And I discussed some of the current insights on where we are in our understanding of the climate crisis.

What can you and I do about it?

Well, we all know about the personal choices we can each make with respect to our choices in transportation, home heating and energy, diet, consumption, etc. And this is all important and necessary and shows leadership and commitment.

But the magnitude and speed of the changes facing us – to radically reduce our carbon emissions, fundamentally transition our energy systems, reorganize our agricultural practices – these are remarkably enormous undertakings. Changing light bulbs is not going to be enough! The shifts will have to be undertaken at a societal level, and require almost unprecedented international cooperation.

There are huge benefits to these changes, but we need to begin aggressively and as soon as possible. To do so, we have to overcome the frustrating – but understandable – inertia of “business as usual”. That will require strong and visionary leadership from our elected officials. They, in turn, need to know that there the necessary support is there amongst their citizens.

There is no “magic bullet”, but in my opinion, the best hope for significant early action is the already scheduled COP-15 negotiations in Copenhagen at the end of 2009, which I referenced earlier. The process is in place, momentum is building, and almost all the major world leaders will be attending.

Furthermore, although these negotiations are specifically about climate change and greenhouse gas emissions, strong agreements there would have large complementary benefits for ocean health, pollution levels, etc.

There are less than nine months to those negotiations. They will be difficult negotiations – potentially with a continuing backdrop of the financial crisis, the balancing of wildly different national interests, etc., etc. But they have a real chance of substantial success, especially if our leaders are convinced that they have the support of large proportion of their populations.

So, I am asking you to whatever you can to communicate that support. Write to your representatives. Support the various advocacy groups. Educate yourself – and your friends and neighbours. We really need to get going on this. We have to build support very quickly and every little action and persuasion is going to count.

Thanks for your support. I’m counting on it!

Oh, and trust you are well! Sorry if it’s been a while – stay in touch! Enjoy the concert!  Cheers, gwm