Climate Links: September 2018

Seven endangered species that could (almost) fit in a single train carriage. Mona Chalabi, Guardian. Sep. 17, 2018.

Some species are so close to extinction, that every remaining member can fit on a New York subway carriage (if they squeeze). 

All estimates come from the IUCN Red List, 2018.

Melting Arctic Permafrost Releases Acid that Dissolves Rocks. Mindy Weisberger, LiveScience. Sep. 18 2018.

'Dumbest Policy in the World': Report Details How Canada's Massive Fossil Fuel Subsidies Undermine Climate Action. Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams. Sep 17, 2018.

Working to curb emissions while using public funds to subsidize oil and gas industry "is like trying to bail water out of a leaky boat"

Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Growth Rate. Carl Edward Rasmussen. Sep. 14, 2018.

Release of green house gases, such as carbon dioxide, or CO2, into the atmosphere is causing global warming. The underlying physical mechanism has been well understood at least since the 1970s. More recently, attempts have been made to limit the release of green house gases both nationally and globally, most prominently the Kyoto Protocol in force from 2005 and the Paris Agreement in force from 2016. In this note I assess the progress made so far in limiting atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration.

So, what does the data tell us? It shows that all is not well in the state of the atmosphere! In order to prevent further warming, the carbon dioxide levels must not grow any further. On the growth curve, this corresponds the curve having to settle down to 0 ppm/y. There is absolutely no hint in the data that this is happening. On the contrary, the rate of growth is itself growing, having now reached about 2.3 ppm/y the highest growth rate ever seen in modern times. This is not just a "business as usual" scenario, it is worse than that, we're actually moving backward, becoming more and more unsustainable with every year. This shows unequivocally that the efforts undertaken so-far to limit green house gases such as carbon dioxide are woefully inadequate.

Why Growth Can't Be Green. Jason Hickel, Foreign Policy. Sep. 12, 2018.

New data proves you can support capitalism or the environment -- but it's hard to do both.

Warnings about ecological breakdown have become ubiquitous. Over the past few years, major newspapers, including the Guardian and the New York Times, have carried alarming stories on soil depletion, deforestation, and the collapse of fish stocks and insect populations. These crises are being driven by global economic growth, and its accompanying consumption, which is destroying the Earth’s biosphere and blowing past key planetary boundaries that scientists say must be respected to avoid triggering collapse. 

Many policymakers have responded by pushing for what has come to be called “green growth.” All we need to do, they argue, is invest in more efficient technology and introduce the right incentives, and we’ll be able to keep growing while simultaneously reducing our impact on the natural world, which is already at an unsustainable level. In technical terms, the goal is to achieve “absolute decoupling” of GDP from the total use of natural resources, according to the U.N. definition. 

It sounds like an elegant solution to an otherwise catastrophic problem. There’s just one hitch: New evidence suggests that green growth isn’t the panacea everyone has been hoping for. In fact, it isn’t even possible.

Green growth first became a buzz phrase in 2012 at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro. In the run-up to the conference, the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the U.N. Environment Program all produced reports promoting green growth. Today, it is a core plank of the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals. 

But the promise of green growth turns out to have been based more on wishful thinking than on evidence. In the years since the Rio conference, three major empirical studies have arrived at the same rather troubling conclusion: Even under the best conditions, absolute decoupling of GDP from resource use is not possible on a global scale.

This is how UN scientists are preparing for the end of capitalism. Nafeez Ahmed, The Independent. Sep 12, 2018.

As the era of cheap energy comes to an end, capitalist thinking is struggling to solve the huge problems facing humanity. So how do we respond?

Capitalism as we know it is over. So suggests a new report commissioned by a group of scientists appointed by the UN secretary general. The main reason? We’re transitioning rapidly to a radically different global economy, due to our increasingly unsustainable exploitation of the planet’s environmental resources and the shift to less efficient energy sources. 

Climate change and species extinctions are accelerating even as societies are experiencing rising inequality, unemployment, slow economic growth, rising debt levels, and impotent governments. Contrary to the way policymakers usually think about these problems these are not really separate crises at all.

These crises are part of the same fundamental transition. The new era is characterised by inefficient fossil fuel production and escalating costs of climate change. Conventional capitalist economic thinking can no longer explain, predict or solve the workings of the global economy in this new age.

Could we save the world if we all went vegan? Chloe Cornish, FT. Sep. 21, 2018.

According to scientist Joseph Poore of Oxford University, worldwide conversion to veganism would shrink the amount of farmland needed by 3.1 billion hectares, the size of the African continent. That land could store carbon instead, in trees for example. Poore estimates worldwide veganism could also help cut greenhouse gas emissions by a quarter.

In 2014, a UK study published in the journal Climatic Change found that eating a diet high in meat came with a cost of 7.2kg of carbon dioxide emissions per day, compared with 3.8kg for vegetarians and just 2.9kg for vegans. About a quarter of greenhouse gases attributable to human activity come from intensive farming, which is roughly the same as electricity and heat production, and slightly more than industry, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. Agriculture also pulverises ecosystems with deforestation and chemical change caused by fertilisers and pesticides. 

And it’s only going to get worse, because demand for meat and milk is rising

Nearly third of Earth’s surface must be protected to prevent mass extinction, warn leading scientists. Josh Gabbatiss, The Independent. Sep. 13, 2018.

Two leading scientists have issued a call for massive swathes of the planet’s land and sea to be protected from human interference in order to avert mass extinction. 

Current levels of protection “do not even come close to required levels”, they said, urging world leaders to come to a new arrangement by which at least 30 per cent of the planet’s surface is formally protected by 2030. 

Chief scientist of the National Geographic Society Jonathan Baillie and Chinese Academy of Sciences biologist Ya-Ping Zhang made their views clear in an editorial published in the journal Science.

Was Near-Term Extinction Unavoidable? Guy McPherson, Weekly Hubris. Sep. 1, 2018.

“The destruction of the natural world is not the result of global capitalism, industrialisation, ‘Western civilisation’ or any flaw in human institutions. It is a consequence of the evolutionary success of an exceptionally rapacious primate. Throughout all of history and prehistory, human advance has coincided with ecological devastation.”—John Gray, from The Human: Disseminated Primatemaia


It is not at all clear that humanity can be saved (or, for that matter, is worth saving). Evolution drives us to breed, drives to procreate, and drives us to accumulate material possessions. Evolution always pushes us towards the brink, and culture piles on, hurling us into the abyss. Nietzsche was correct about our virtual lack of free will; and, as British philosopher John Gray points out in Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, free will is an illusion. It’s not merely the foam on the beer: it’s the last bubble of foam, the one that just popped. It’s no surprise, then, that we are sleep-walking into the future, or that the future is a lethal cliff. 

Collectively, several authors from the Enlightenment illustrate the capacity for, and importance of, Reason. Reason is the basis for understanding the material world. As such, it serves as the foundation upon which conservation biology can be understood and practiced. We can willingly conserve Nature and its parts only through description and understanding rooted in reality. Mysticism has proven an insufficient foundation for conserving nature. Ultimately, it has proven inadequate for saving humanity as well. Reason has similarly failed us, thus leaving us with no time and no other options. In this essay, I demonstrate links between Reason and conservation biology to illustrate the process by which our demise as a species was ensured long ago. In short, we were doomed by our narrowly clinical application of Reason. ...