planted city

Climate Change Infographic: ‘The Bridge to the Durban Outcome’

(Source: Climate Progress)

Dr. William Rees on ‘The Dangerous Disconnect Between Economics and Ecology’

From The Institute for New Economic Thinking:

The world economy is depleting the earth’s natural resources, and economists cling to models that make no reference whatsoever to the biophysical basis that underpins the economy. That’s why ecological economics is needed, says William Rees in this INET interview.

Standard economics portrays the economy as a circular flow: households pay money to firms in exchange for goods and services, and firms pay wages to households in exchange for labor. Textbooks describe this circular flow as self-perpetuating, capable of infinite expansion. William Rees argues that the textbooks get it wrong; he says the production of our goods and services depends on the extraction of material from ecosystems, causing resource depletion on the one hand, and excess pollution on the other.

William Rees, best known in ecological economics as the originator and co-developer of ‘ecological footprint analysis’, says the United States is using four or five times its fair share of the world’s total bio-capacity. In order to bring just the present world population up to the material standards enjoyed by North Americans, we would need the biophysical equivalent of about three additional planet earths.

More here.

From the Stockholm Resilience Institute:

There is a growing concern among scientists and policy makers that environmental crises are no longer the sole acts of nature but rather the result of an accelerating human-induced global change.

At the same time, a pattern is starting to unfold: crises such as floodings, famine and pandemic diseases are not only turning increasingly intense, they are also increasingly connected.

In an article published in Ecology and Society (request article), an international team of researchers including Oonsie Biggs from the centre asks if we are entering an era of ‘concatenated global crises’.

Concatenated crises are disturbances or shocks that emerge pretty much simultaneously, spread rapidly and interact with each other across the globe.

Biggs and her colleagues explored how crises such as the 2007-08 food price crisis, whose origin and effects stem from far removed parts of the world and diverse economic sectors, turned into a global crisis.

The causes and processes leading to global crises are difficult to untangle, but it appears that the food price crisis started with soaring energy prices.

After three decades of falling prices, the price for staples such as rice increased by 255% between 2004 and 2008, largely because the price of petroleum, coal and natural gas in the same period increased by an average of 127%.

Largely due to soaring costs, environmental concerns and security issues, the EU and the US enacted ambitious pro-biofuel production policies. But the whole project backfired: between 2007 and 2008 the conversion of land from food to biofuel production led to an inflationary pressure on global food prices.

In an attempt to deal with the emerging food price crisis, a number of countries such as India, Egypt, Vietnam, Argentina, Russia and China sanctioned substantial restrictions on food export which inevitably lead to further increase in food prices.

“The food crisis illustrates how a series of crises interacted with national policy responses to propagate the crisis throughout a highly connected global system,” Oonsie Biggs explains.

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Image credit: SRI)

From Reuters:

Global concern about climate change has risen only very slightly over the past two years, as consumers have focused on more immediate economic worries, according to an opinion poll published on Sunday.

Nielsen’s latest global online environment and sustainability survey showed that 69 percent of 25,000 Internet users in 51 countries were concerned about climate change in 2011, slightly up from 66 percent in a similar poll in 2009, but down from 72 percent in 2007.

“Focus on immediate worries such as job security, local school quality and economic wellbeing have all diminished media attention for climate stories in the past two years,” said Maxwell Boykoff, who was an adviser to the survey and is senior visiting research associate at the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute.

Hopes for a global climate treaty have faded over the past couple of years as successive United Nations meetings have failed to clinch a binding deal to cut greenhouse gas emissions, which are widely blamed for stoking global warming.

…

In China, the world’s top greenhouse gas emitter, climate change concern has dropped to 64 percent from 77 percent in the last two years.

In the United States, the second biggest emitter and the only industrialized nation not signed up to the U.N.’s Kyoto Protocol for curbing emissions, the number of those concerned has fallen steadily to 48 percent, from 51 percent in 2009 and 62 percent in 2007.

The regions with the highest levels of concern were Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, and Asia-Pacific.

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Image credit: Neilsen Wire)

Jeremy Rifkin on ‘The Empathic Civilization’

From RSA Animate:

Bestselling author, political adviser and social and ethical prophet Jeremy Rifkin investigates the evolution of empathy and the profound ways that it has shaped our development and our society. 

You may also want to check out Rifkin’s 2009 talk, ‘The Economy of Energy for Cities’, at the Global Urban Summit in Rotterdam.

A section of UK Foreign Secretary William Hague’s remarkable speech, ‘The Diplomacy of Climate Change’, presented to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in 2010.

(Image credit: ABC News)

In a recent post on his Weather Underground blog, meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters takes readers on a tour of the “top twenty most remarkable weather events of 2010”:

• Earth’s hottest year on record
• Most extreme winter Arctic atmospheric circulation on record: “Snowmageddon” results
• Arctic sea ice: lowest volume on record, 3rd lowest extent
• Record melting in Greenland, and a massive calving event
• Second most extreme shift from El Niño to La Niña
• Second worst coral bleaching year
• Wettest year over land
• Amazon rainforest experiences its 2nd 100-year drought in 5 years
• Global tropical cyclone activity lowest on record
• A hyperactive Atlantic hurricane season: 3rd busiest on record
• A rare tropical storm in the South Atlantic
• Strongest storm in Southwestern U.S. history
• Strongest non-coastal storm in U.S. history
• Weakest and latest-ending East Asian monsoon on record
• No monsoon depressions in India’s Southwest Monsoon for 2nd time in 134 years
• The Pakistani flood: most expensive natural disaster in Pakistan’s history
• The Russian heat wave and drought: deadliest heat wave in human history
• Record rains trigger Australia’s most expensive natural disaster in history
• Heaviest rains on record trigger Colombia’s worst flooding disaster in history
• Tennessee’s 1-in 1000 year flood kills 30, does $2.4 billion in damage 

And addresses some key questions regarding the influence of climate change: 

The pace of extreme weather events has remained remarkably high during 2011, giving rise to the question—is the “Global Weirding” of 2010 and 2011 the new normal? Has human-caused climate change destabilized the climate, bringing these extreme, unprecedented weather events? Any one of the extreme weather events of 2010 or 2011 could have occurred naturally sometime during the past 1,000 years. But it is highly improbable that the remarkable extreme weather events of 2010 and 2011 could have all happened in such a short period of time without some powerful climate-altering force at work. The best science we have right now maintains that human-caused emissions of heat-trapping gases like CO2 are the most likely cause of such a climate-altering force.

Human-caused climate change has fundamentally altered the atmosphere by adding more heat and moisture. Observations confirm that global atmospheric water vapor has increased by about 4% since 1970, which is what theory says should have happened given the observed 0.5°C (0.9°F) warming of the planet’s oceans during the same period. Shifts of this magnitude are capable of significantly affecting the path and strength of the jet stream, behavior of the planet’s monsoons, and paths of rain and snow-bearing weather systems. For example, the average position of the jet stream retreated poleward 270 miles (435 km) during a 22-year period ending in 2001, in line with predictions from climate models. A naturally extreme year, when embedded in such a changed atmosphere, is capable of causing dramatic, unprecedented extremes like we observed during 2010 and 2011. That’s the best theory I have to explain the extreme weather events of 2010 and 2011—natural extremes of El Niño, La Niña and other natural weather patterns combined with significant shifts in atmospheric circulation and the extra heat and atmospheric moisture due to human-caused climate change to create an extraordinary period of extreme weather.

Check out the rest of the article here. 

From Scientific American:

Poor countries have spent just as much as rich ones — and in the case of China, more — to develop low-carbon energy, according to a study coming out this week. Its conclusions could turn the conventional wisdom about the differences among nations over mitigation efforts on its head.

The report by former World Bank economist David Wheeler, who now leads the climate change division at the think tank Center for Global Development, finds that China spent 94 cents of every $10,000 of average income on clean energy between 1990 and 2008. The United States, by contrast, spent 44 cents of every $10,000.

Meanwhile, all other industrialized countries combined spent only a penny more per year than their less developed counterparts.

“We all had this idea that [climate change] was a rich country problem and that poor countries shouldn’t have to do anything until they get to a certain stage of development, and that rich countries need to make it worth their while. But what I had seen suggested [was] that poor countries were already doing a lot,” Wheeler said.

The data bore that out. Wheeler examined International Energy Agency data for 174 countries on investments in six low-carbon power sources (hydro, geothermal, nuclear, biomass, wind and solar) to find the incremental costs of clean power compared to a cheaper, carbon-intensive option like a conventional coal-fired power plant. He then computed the average income share in countries to compare how much people in poor countries are paying for carbon mitigation compared to those in rich nations.

“Lo and behold, you get a world in which the shares that poor countries have been devoting to low-carbon technologies over the past 18 years is really comparable to the rich countries,” Wheeler said.

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Photo credit: Green Packs)

From the Vancouver Sun:

Critical energy and water shortages combined with climate change could provoke wars within the next 15 years, warns a newly-released analysis by the Department of National Defence.

“Global reserves of crude oil could become problematic by 2025,” wrote Maj. John Sheahan in a draft version of the report, Army 2040: First Look. “This implies that (barring the discovery of significant new reserves, and barring the adequate adoption of substitute fossil fuels or alternative fuel and energy sources) critical energy shortages will develop in the time frame of (and perhaps prior to) 2025.”

The report noted that alternative fuels and energy may not be enough to respond to rising demand for energy that is forcing oil production to reach its capacity — a threat commonly referred to as “peak oil.”

“There can be little doubt that unrestricted access to reliable energy supplies is a global strategic issue, one for which, recently, numerous nations have been willing to fight, and have indeed done so,” said the report, released to Postmedia News through an Access to Information request. “Thus the trend that envisions depletion of fossil fuels such as crude oil in coming decades may also contribute to international tensions if not violent conflict.”

Sheahan is part of a Canadian team of analysts led by Lt.-Col. Michael Rostek, who are researching long-term planning scenarios for the military. Members of the team said earlier this spring that they had submitted their analysis to senior military officials who are still reviewing the work.

The analysis also warns that, even under conservative estimates, up to 60 countries could fall into a category of water scarcity or stress by 2050, making the natural resource “a key source of power” or a “basis for future conflict.”

The draft report said that despite some “vigorous debates” about the pace, cause, magnitude and impacts of global warming, there “can be no further debate that global climate change is occurring.” It would turn the phenomenon into a “shock” and not just a driver of change, the report said.

Crop failures resulting in mass migrations and starvation, along with rising sea levels from melting ice caps and other factors, would be among the impacts.

“These sorts of changes could lead to impacts resulting in the abandonment of large urban and cropland areas, further aggravating a broad range of existing resource scarcities,” said the report.

Governments from around the world reached a consensus in 2007, based on an international assessment of peer-reviewed science, that there was a 90 per cent probability that human activity is responsible for causing climate change observed over the past century.

Check out the rest of the article here. It is also worth noting that other governments and militaries are expressing similar thinking.

(Photo credit: Vancouver Sun)

Bees, Other Pollinators Worth Est’d $250 Billion to Global Food Production, Economy

From The Huffington Post:

What salary would you expect to pay a force of internationally diverse workers who toil harmoniously — without pension plans, paid overtime or the threat of union action — to produce 87 per cent of North America’s food supply?

How about… nothing?

Concordia University biologist Melanie McCavour is seeking greater recognition of the economic value of work done by bees and other crop-pollinating creatures.

…

Current estimates of the value of global annual agricultural production provided by natural crop-pollinators are in the neighbourhood of $250 billion.   

Assigning a tangible monetary value to the pollination service is the first step in establishing a protocol for protecting its workers. The logic goes that if people realize the labour value of bees, bats, birds, beetles, and butterflies, policy-makers will be likelier to develop better environmental and agricultural policies.

Any alternative to natural pollinators — such as having untold numbers of human beings manually spread pollen with paintbrushes and Q-tips — would be economically unfeasible, not to mention physically implausible.

With a decline in bee populations, McCavour called for major changes in pollination and agriculture practices.

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Photo credit: Glenn Apiaries)