Environment – Forecast: partly sunny with a chance of cataclysms

Rewilding Challenge: North American Jaguar

Intro to Rewilding: George Monbiot

Just in case you are not acquainted with “rewilding,” the best introduction I know is a short video with George Monbiot below. Actually I was introduced to Monbiot by the audio of this talk on NPR about ten years ago. The video adds a couple of dimensions, but it might detract from the enthusiasm in Monbiot’s voice. (His enthusiasm is contagious, so if you are looking for a contagion to improve on COVID and flu, a listen here could lift your spirits.) He relates a snippet of his personal journey and expands the view to a planetary scale. If you’ve already heard it, you might still enjoy another go. Check it out:

NEXT: To see what an effort rewilding a significant portion of our planet’s land will take, we have to look at what humans have already seized, largely in the form of agriculture.

The landuse challenge, by the numbers

In Our World in Data, Hannah Ritchie reports that almost half of the world’s habitable land (land not covered by glaciers and deserts) is used for agriculture. A thousand years ago, roughly 4 million square kilometers—less than 4% of habitable land—was used. Now that’s up to 48 million out of 106 million square kilometers: 45%.

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The Protein Predicament: Livestock’s Impact on Human and Environmental Health (and What to Do About It)

Report says red meat OK for human health

By now you have likely heard of a report recently published in the Annals of Internal Medicine that concludes “there’s no need to reduce red or processed meat consumption for good health,” as summarized in the Washington Post.

Beef: good (for protein), bad (for the environment, and probably for health), and kinda ugly (for aesthetics, if that matters)

Kaboom! Went the plunge of this report into the midst of what had been a gathering consensus about the many ill effects of a meat-heavy diet.

RECOMMENDATION: before you read the full Washington Post piece, first read its last two paragraphs (beginning with “Willettt says the panel’s conclusions and recommendations do not reflect the study’s findings . . .” – emphasis mine). They indicate that the editorial board of the Annals etc. have spun the data in favor of the red and processed meat industry. In the editorial itself, the writers bury concerns about the environmental impacts of meat consumption in the final paragraph.

If you read the complete piece in the Post, you will see that the conventional nutritional wisdom, that it’s healthier to eat less meat, still has solid support among almost all nutritionists. Walter Willett pointed out that the study itself associates moderate reduction in meat production with a 13 percent lower mortality, and said, “if a drug brought down the number of deaths to that degree . . . it would be heralded as a success.” Certainly such a drug would be heralded as a success by a multi-billion dollar drug company. There is no multi-billion dollar profit-making enterprise to curb the consumption of red meat.

Once the media, always on the hunt for controversy, had taken up the report it went mainstream (as in the Washington Post, the New York Times etc.) accompanied by a glut of social media chatter. And then came a firestorm of backlash such as you can read of in a litany of objections from nutritionists, doctors, and researchers found on this page of WebMd.

The study is tainted by past ties of one of the research’s co-leaders to an industry trade group, the “International Life Sciences Institute” (ILSI)—a connection he did not disclose because technically the connection did not fall within the past-3-year reporting requirement for publication. While the earlier study—which incidentally was an attempt to allay health concerns about sugar additives—was published in December 2016 (less than 3 years ago), researcher Bradley Johnston said he was paid for the research in 2015 (more than 3 years ago). Ergo he was not obliged to disclose the connection because the payment fell outside the 3-year window. . . . Did he really think this was not going to come out? Did he really think that no one would suspect he might be eyeing future funding by the ILSI, having insinuated himself further into their good graces with the red meat study? Maybe in the context of runaway mendacity and moral obtuseness in the twenty-teens he saw no reason to observe the spirit of disclosure rules.

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Americans Serious about Climate Change? Tell Me Another Whopper

[WARNING: many readers may find the following a downer—but if you care about facts, you must be willing to look at all kinds of Inconvenient Truths.]

U.S. public on climate change: a crisis in name only

The September 20th Global Climate Strike has been inspiring—for those seriously concerned about global warming and climate change.

It’s less inspiring to read of how not-serious most of the American public is. A week before the Climate Strike, the release of a Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation poll headlined “Americans increasingly see climate change as a crisis” appeared to portend a sea change (pun partially intended) in attitudes toward climate change.

Read on for what underlies appearances.

The takeaway from the poll is that the public says, big problem—let somebody else take care of it. Consider that 38% describe climate change as “a crisis,” and another 38% describe it as “a major problem but not a crisis.” However, to combat climate change only 37% say major sacrifices will be required, 48% say minor sacrifices, 14% “not requiring much sacrifice,” with 1% having no opinion.

Next we read that “nearly half of adults say they would be willing to pay a $2 monthly tax on electricity to help combat climate change.” If that sounds promising, the report says just 27% would pay $10 extra a month. Meaning that at best 27/38 (71%) is the fraction of those saying the threat is “a crisis” would also pay $10 extra a month. $120 a year. Hmmm . . . 33¢/day = a bit more than 1/6th the price of a “tall” cup of Starbucks coffee. Now that’s what I call a major sacrifice!

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Make-Believe on Climate: the Secretary of State Speaks

Startling climate insight – “There’s always changes that take place”

Today (June 9, 2019 as I write), Secretary of State Mike Pompeo brushed off concerns about climate change with a string of banal commonplaces that reflected either his own state of ignorance, or more likely a cynical reliance on the ignorance of the public. For detail, see https://myfox8.com/2019/06/09/pompeo-downplays-climate-change-suggests-people-move-to-different-places/

Pompeo trotted out the well-worn platitude that “the climate’s been changing a long time. There’s always changes that take place.” This expresses the fallback position of defenders of the fossil-fuel burning status quo, by conceding climate change is indeed taking place, but say it is a consequence of “natural cycles.” This position bolsters the status quo in two ways, by implying (1) it’s not so bad, we’ve been through this before; and (2) human activity has little or nothing to do with it.

In the recent past, Pompeo has shown his enthusiasm for the commercial advantages of climate change by celebrating reductions in polar sea ice that may open “new passageways and opportunities for trade,” likening an ice-free Arctic Ocean to “21st Century Suez and Panama Canals.” In other words, climate change was a Good Thing. Now—hedging his bets due to military and intelligence communities warnings about disruptions, and a shift in public opinion—he pronounces climate change a security threat to be addressed “in ways that are fundamentally consistent with our values set here in the United States.” Since Pompeo has been the recipient of $375,000 in campaign contributions from Koch Industries in his Congressional career (see profile in Business Insider) , we can be pretty sure the “values” he is talking about are not geared to cutting carbon emissions.

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A Cooler Look at Global Warming: Bjorn Lomborg Runs the Numbers

Skewed Priorities? Another AGW Perspective

Bjorn Lomborg is a thorn in the side of many a climate change warrior. As a self-described environmentalist (onetime Greenpeace member), he’s been accused of global warming heresy, largely on account of his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist (1998, English editon 2001). In that book, Lomborg accused climate alarmists of making mountains out of climate molehills, forecasting doom when we had much more urgent needs to address. Fast forward to 2011, and he was taking a more modest tack, admitting that Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) had progressed further, and its impacts were likely to be more severe, than he had previously forecast. Nevertheless, he maintained the future progression, and potential harm, were far less urgent than claimed by climate hawks, when compared with other threats.

Fast forward to 2019, and he has come to admit that climate change is a problem of daunting dimensions. Where he parts ways with most environmentalists and climate scientists is how he ranks climate change against other threats to the well-being of most people and natural systems: e.g. malnutrition, disease, air and water pollution, war, subsistence agriculture, habitat destruction, unsustainable exploitation of natural resources, and failing infrastructure. The last is most glaring in the Third World, where the state of roads, bridges, power delivery systems, flood containment, and the resistance of buildings to earthquakes, high winds, flood, and fire, are all woefully inadequate by the standards of the developed world. He disagrees with climate warriors who overwhelmingly prioritize the elimination of fossil fuel use as soon as possible, regardless of the consequences to other economic activities.*

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Crimes against Nature, I: Border Wall

Inhumanity compounding inhumanity: the monumental price of “homeland security”

Trump’s border wall, an embodiment of cruel immigration policies, is inhumane to people to a degree that is criminal—if not according to written law, then according to moral laws we grasp by intuition. Even many of those whose job it is to enforce draconian immigration policies intuit those laws—it’s just that they don’t obey them.*

Border Wall dividing and conquering life

There’s another, less visible, less publicized inhumanity, that is not so plainly criminal. But in the long run it may be just as devastating to the living world as to refugees and asylum seekers. That’s the way a continuous wall carves up vital, often fragile habitat, puts up barriers to creatures who have neither understanding of, nor use for, political boundaries, and robs the environment of resiliency. We know how habitat fragmentation has diminished the capability of living things to cope with such additional man-made injuries as climate change. However, some things that fragment and destroy habitat have at least the excuse of some utility: roads, farms, power lines, airports, wind farms, solar energy arrays, etc. But this ugly artifice has little purpose besides division for division’s sake. It is a monument to human vanity, and especially the vanity of one corrupt, depraved individual, U.S. President Donald Trump.

So many wildlife refuges and sanctuaries are already under assault by the Wall or are soon to be, that I gave up trying to list them here. Just do a search on a string such as “threatened wildlife refuge border wall,” or similar keywords, and you’ll find enough of them to make you seethe, or weep. One particular lovely and imminently jeopardized landscape can be seen at Lower Rio Grande Valley Wildlife Refuge

The horrific and potentially irreparable damage resulting from extensions of a continuous border wall would spread well beyond wildlife refuges, as described in a paper in the journal Bioscience and summarized last summer in an article in Cosmos. (I referred to this same piece in a post last year; it’s even more urgent today.) The article had 16 co-authors and was endorsed by 2,500 scientists worldwide.

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Statistical Case for Global Warming Approaches Certainty

Five Sigma threshold crossed for Global Warming

What the heck is “Five Sigma?”

The online publication Earther recently reported the strengthening of the statistical case for global warming based on satellite data. If you find Earther’s Evidence for Global Warming Passes Physics’ Gold Standard Threshold readily comprehensible, then you need not read most of this post. (The “Gold Standard” is five sigma.)

If you have been pretty satisfied with the Earther article, I invite you to skip way down to the section “Three further notes of clarification [etc.]“

If Earther’s piece is not easily comprehensible, that’s probably because writer Daniel Kahn did not explain just what “five sigma” means statistically. My hunch is that 30% of my readers will understand and remember it, another 45% understood it in the past but have forgotten a lot of it, and the remaining 25% may never have had it presented to them. If you belong to the latter group, don’t blame yourself—blame the scattershot American education system.

Simply said, “five sigma” comes down to we have zillions of measurements and 99.99994% of them confirm that global warming is real. There is an item of faith here: you have to trust that NASA has amassed enough data over a long enough period of time to meet the requirements of a statistical analysis. My “zillions of measurements” encapsulates that faith to my satisfaction. Very scientifically of course. (Well . . . The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines zillion as “a very large but indefinite number.”)

Does understanding “five sigma” matter?

It matters if you’d like to have a scientifically bulletproof case for the existence of global warming. Don’t you want bulletproofness?

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Geoengineering: Not If, But When

Reality: We are losing the fight against climate change

It’s time to stop kidding ourselves. Global carbon emissions are going up, not down. No surprise there. Even if they stayed flat, we’d be in a world of hurt. Even if they were halted immediately, with CO2 at 405 parts per million, planetary greenhouse warming will continue for many decades, perhaps hundreds of years.

Well, you already know that.

Of course if fossil fuel burning were stopped immediately, we’d have a world-wide depression that would make the recent Great Recession look like a garden party.

The climate change conference in early December in Katowice, Poland, accomplished the usual: not much. Politico carried a succinct summary of a largely disappointing affair, written by Kalna Oroschakoff and Paola Tamma: Climate disappointments in Katowice

The leading solution is geoengineering. Like it or not.

Is geoengineering inevitable? Just do a web search on “geoengineering inevitable” and you’ll find all sorts of smart people, realistic smart people, coming to the conclusion that without geoengineering, we’re sunk (as many coastal cities will literally become).

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Whose Hoax? The Carbon Cycle & Climate Change Denial

If anyone is perpetrating a climate “hoax,” it’s the Deniers. For why, read on.

Countering one of the deniers’ favorite trick questions.

It’s not necessarily a “trick” question in all cases. Maybe sometimes it’s an “honest” error, if being honest entails burying one’s head in the sand. But in case of willful tricksters, it’s another one of those niggling questions with which they like to trip up the unsuspecting. Another piece of their hoax to confuse us.

Here’s how the question goes: A carbon dioxide molecule stays in the atmosphere for only five years. So what’s all this doom and gloom forecasting that CO2 will hang around for hundreds of years in the air even if we stop fossil fuel burning?

Yes it’s doom and gloom. But it’s based on facts (the inconvenient kind).

For an explanation, we have the carbon cycle to thank.

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Animals Get Help from Above

Eyes in the sky usher in new era for monitoring animal diversity, numbers, and movement

Drones and satellites radically change the game in forestalling the worst in animal declines and species extinctions. Key to wildlife conservation is just getting the facts—and there are a lot of facts to get when it comes to the complexity of the natural world. Without accurate and comprehensive information on what is actually happening on the ground, prioritizing and designing conservation efforts are mostly guesswork. Such is the growing enormity of human impacts on the biosphere, research methods must scale up, or fall behind the accelerating pace of change.

How best to scale up is with devices that can remotely gather vast amounts of data on both groups and individuals—seeing both the forest and the trees. The best positioning for these devices is up in the sky, and their primary data-gathering methods are electronic.*

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