The founder of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Sir Peter Scott is reported to have said that WWF’s aim of saving endangered species from extinction has failed miserably, because the organisation has not managed to save a single species. He then said this:
‘If only we had put all that money into condoms, we might have done some good.’
The main problem facing humanity is not climate change at all but human overpopulation and a looming food crisis. This doesn’t mean climate change isn’t happening (it always is), and it doesn’t mean we aren’t in a warming phase or that humans aren’t at least contributing to the warming. But about the only constant thing about climate is that it is constantly changing, and humans have faced periods much more challenging than the global warming we are facing in this century, such as the last ‘Ice Age’. See these pages for more information on this:
Basics – which looks at how climate has changed over the short, medium and long terms.
Ice Age – which looks at ice ages.
The real problem
The real problem is that the Earth is full. In the past if the climate got too hot or too cold people had the option to move elsewhere, but that option is extremely limited today because everywhere is crowded, and we have erected barriers everywhere to stop the movement of people. More people = more habitat loss = more trees cut down = more industrial pollution = more CO2 = more global warming.
If you really want to help the climate, stop having babies. Here’s an article by David Suzuki on the impacts of overpopulation: http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/features/print/2913/a-new-bottom-line
The human population is increasing by an almost unbelievable rate, and it simply is not sustainable. Here’s a screen shot of the population clock at http://www.worldometers.info/, which I took a moment ago while writing this post:
If you’re interested, click on the link here and check out how many more people this planet holds right now. Not convinced? There’s another world clock here.
The food problem
Cities naturally arise in the most fertile areas. It goes without saying that people settle close to water sources and where the land is arable and most suitable for growing food. It’s the same everywhere, and as a result much of the best land on Earth for growing food is now covered in concrete.
Cities everywhere are growing, and as a result farmers are being pushed out into more and more marginal land. Also, as the population increases the need for water for people increases, and since the amount of water is finite, less is available for farmers.
All this means that farmers in the very near future will reach breaking point. Being asked to grow double the food on less marginal land using half the water is a recipe for disaster, and famine.
Read more here:
The Coming Famine: The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do to Avoid It
The climate change debate is a smoke-screen
Politicians and scientists love the climate change debate because there’s a possibility we can do something about it if only we do this or that. Politicians who have a plan to ‘ tackle climate change’ get elected. Scientists working on tackling climate change get funding. But nobody has a clue what to do about the population explosion and the looming food crisis, and economists everywhere see only ‘problems’ with an aging population and the need for more taxpayers.
None of this will make the real problems go away.
Is there a solution?
Well no, not a single solution, but there are many things we could be doing that we are not doing.
First, we need to bring food growing into the cities as much and as fast as possible. This puts the food where the people are, cuts transportation costs (and cuts environmental pollution, wastefulness and CO2 emissions). There are several ways of doing this, but my own favourite is permaculture, and it’s my favourite because everyone can get involved, even if you only have a windowsill or a balcony. Here are some permaculture links:
Permaculture home page
Gaia’s Garden, Second Edition: A Guide To Home-Scale Permaculture
Getting Started In Permaculture: 50 Practical Projects to Build and Design Productive Gardens
The second thing we need to do in a hurry is re-evaluate our economic systems, because an economic system that requires endless growth is exacerbating all the problems and putting us all at serious risk. We have to find another form of economics, and one that values all of us. Our current system views old people, for example, as a burden on society, and one of the main reasons they say we need more taxpayers to support them, but in most societies in the past old people were regarded as a great resource. They still are, but we just don’t recognise it any more in our adulation of youth and constant infantalisation of the population.
Third, we need to start thinking instead of wasting hours of every day sitting like mindless zombies in front of television sets and other screens. The collective brain power of 6,800,000+ people ought to be able to come up with solutions, but instead everywhere people are becoming dependent on machines to think for us, and we’re becoming like babies who need to be entertained all the time, or who blindly put our faith in others instead of thinking for ourselves.
Tags: climate change smokescreen, coming famine, coming food crisis, overpopulation
Scientists at NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) in the US have developed a new climate-fish population model that forecasts the effects of climate change on the $8 million Atlantic croaker fish industry. The croaker (Micropogonias undulatus) is a coastal fish living on the east coast of America, and previous research has shown there is a strong link between winter temperatures and the croaker population.
Atlantic Croaker
(public domain picture courtesy Wikipedia)
The model predicts that because of the expected rise in ocean temperature over the next 90 years, if fishing levels remain the same, the spawning population of croakers will increase by 60-100%, the centre of the poplation will move 50-100 to the north, and the maximum sustainable yield of fish would increase by 30-100% by 2100.
The predictions are based on expected winter temperatures, since these determine how many juveniles survive their first winter. The temperature forecasts were obtained from the models used by the IPCC. All the models predicted greater abundance in the croaker population.
The study does not incorporate all the changes expected through climate change, just the minimum winter temperature, which is predicted to increase. Most stock assessments do not take into account changes in the environment, and this study is the first to do so.
Read more here.
Tags: Atlantic croaker, climate and fisheries, climate change, croaker, Croaker and climate change
According to Harvard scientists, around 716.5 million years ago the Earth was a giant snowball, with sea ice extending to the equator.
A report in the current edition of the journal Science describes the findings on the ‘Sturtian glaciation,’ which lasted about five million years. They lend weight to the ‘Snowball Earth’ theory that the entire oceans had frozen over, leaving only patches here and there that allowed simple organisms to survive.
As Professor Macdonald said, ‘From an evolutionary perspective, it’s not always a bad thing for life on Earth to face severe stress.’ Because that’s when evolution really gets going. After all, evolution is about survival of the fittest and adaptation to change. When there’s no change, there’s no impetus to evolve.
Tags: oceans frozen, snowball earth
This figure below shows how the climate has changed in the 65 million years since the end of the dinosaur era.
The period we are living in is at the extreme left of the chart, and it is quite clear from this that we are living in a period that is cold, not hot, and it is also perfectly clear that if the globe does warm up, the planet is in no danger, because it has been much, much warmer than the present even in the last 65 million years (and remember the earth is approximately 4,600 million years old).
(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:65_Myr_Climate_Change.png)
The graph shows O18 isotope levels, which are strongly correlated with temperature. In the warmer periods there was no ice at the poles. Ice appeared around 34 million years ago, disappeared again about 25 million years ago, and then reappeared around 13 million years ago. It was only about 3 million years ago that the ice sheets began to grow significantly.
The current “horror” predictions of a two degree increase in temperature by the end of this century still keep us in the little box at the bottom left of the chart (Vostok temperature section). The Eocene maximum was about 12 degrees hotter than today, and yet the planet survived just fine.
It really does show how hysterical a lot of the arguments about global warming are. Human overpopulation and the convergence of people towards the coasts are the real problems, but global warming destroying the planet? Obvious nonsense, as you can see.
Tags: climate last 65 million years, climate since dinosaurs, long-term climate change
Amid the hysteria of “the world as we know it will end” if the global average temperature goes up a couple of degrees this century, it seems to be lost that there are actually benefits.
Firstly, warm climates are more survivable than cold climates, and studies have shown that in areas that have a cold winter, more people die in the winter than they do in summer. If the globe heats up, places like Siberia, Greenland, Northern Canada, Alaska, Antarctica etc., will be far more liveable than they are now, and they will be able to grow food to a greater extent than they can now. We are already seeing this in Canada, where the yields of their wheat crops are increasing.
Secondly, nature adapts to climate change, and while global warming will cause extinctions, others will adapt. For example, the Great Barrier Reef may die as a result of warming, but corals are now being found off Tasmania that have not been seen before. Warmer seas may also extend the range of species such as lobsters.
Thirdly, as the carbon dioxide levels rise, more plants can grow, since they need CO2 for photosynthesis. More CO2 = more plants, which can = more crops. Warmer temperatures in areas that are now cold would mean the growing season would be longer. This is offset by a reduction in crop yields in other areas, which will become too hot and dry.
Fourthly, if the ice sheets in the north melt, there will be easier and faster travel between parts of Europe, Asia and America, as shipping routes will open up that have not been accessible in human memory.
Fifthly, global warming may keep another glaciation (ice age) at bay. And while the consequences for human settlements of global warming will actually be catastrophic in many places, a return of the ice would be far worse, making most of Europe, Russia and North America and elsewhere virtually uninhabitable/
Australia’s two top research organisations, the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology have announced they are firmly behind the science of anthropogenic global warming. They say the evidence is “irrefutable” and the link with human activities is clear, and various Universities have tossed their hats in the ring in support. They say scientists are 90% sure global warming is happening and linked to human activity.
Greg Ayers, from the Bureau of Meteorology says they have data going back over 100 years, and they show the climate has been getting warmer, with more hot days and fewer cold days, and with more drought in the East, South and West. The oceans are warming and the sea level is rising.
The CSIRO, which makes projections rather than collecting observations, says that the global average temperature may rise by a further two degrees C this century.
This may well be catastrophic for some cities and many communities and farmers, but looked at on the larger scale, it still leaves us living in an ice age, at a very low temperature, and with low levels of atmospheric CO2. Our settlements, cities, agriculture may be severely challenged by the changes, but the planet has been through this and much more before. As always, the scale of the graphs is around 100 years or less, and totally ignores the fact that humans are “new kids on the block” and the planet was here for around 4,599,900,000 years before humans arrived on the scene.
There is still the assumption that if we stopped pouring CO2 into the atmosphere, the climate would stop changing and would “settle down”, but this is ridiculous. Check out the Basics page. The climate has always been changing, and always will change. The planet is in no danger, and we must learn to adapt and realise the global climate is governed by forces much bigger than humans. Yes it’s warming, and yes, our emissions are adding to the warming, but the warming won’t stop if we cut our emissions to zero. It won’t “settle down”, because the climate has always changed, and will always change. We just happen to be around at a time of transition.
Climate change may prove to be expensive for many countries, because as the climate changes (whether it continues to warm up, or begins to cool down) there are disruptions to the weather systems we consider normal. This means, for example, more destructive storms, that can cause massive financial losses in insurance payouts and rebuilding costs. Hurricane Katrina, for example, is estimated to have cost around $81 billion, even before the rebuilding went into full swing.
Climate change can also affect agriculture, with crops failing in drought-stricken areas, and being damaged in storm-prone areas. Floods can also damage or ruin crops, and catastrophic fires can cause massive damage to farms and injury or death to farm animals. Agricultural damage means higher prices for consumers, and higher costs for farmers and insurance companies.
There are also economic effects in the home. In areas that are getting warmer, cooling costs are increasing, while in areas experiencing colder winters, cooling costs are increasing. The costs of electricity production are also increasing in some places through refitting coal-fired power stations to reduce their emissions, although as renewable sources come on line, costs may come down.
Musk ox population decline due to climate, not to humans, study finds (PhysOrg)
Scientists have discovered that the drastic decline in Arctic musk ox populations that began roughly 12,000 years ago was due to a warming climate rather than to human hunting. The research is the first study to use ancient musk ox DNA collected from across the animal’s former geographic range to test for human impacts on musk ox…
12,000 years ago the musk ox population began to decline because the glaciation was ending and the period of interglacial global warming was beginning. See the chart below. People seem to think that global warming is a new thing, but it’s been happening for thousands of years. What is new is that it’s accelerating, but if you look at the graph, you will note that the graph is always steep during periods of global warming. Our emissions of CO2 are adding to a warming that would be happening anyway. You’ll also note there’s a levelling off recently, when looked at over this period of time.
See the Basics page for more on this.
Tags: musk ox
Methane is a greenhouse gas around 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, and there are vast stores of this gas held frozen in permafrost on the floor of the Arctic Ocean.
A research team led by University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov, has found these vast reserves of methane are becoming destabilised and are venting.
The research is published in the journal Science, and describes how these deposits, which have long been throught impermeable, are perforated and leaking methane into the atmosphere. Natalia Shakhova said the amount of methane leaking into the atmosphere from the East Siberian arctic shelf is around the same as that coming from the world’s oceans.
Siberia and Alaska have vast stores of methane on land, but the reserves on the sea floor are even greater. As trigger points are reached, this methane is being released into the atmosphere and will probably cause extremely rapid global warming.
Of course, we could ask the question, where does the methane come from? And the answer seems to be that the methane is a product of vast peat reserves, which are the remains of tropical rain forests, and this is a reminder that it’s been much warmer in the past than it is today. See the Basics page for a discussion of long-term climate change.
Shakhova says the concentrations of methane in the atmosphere have varied from 0.3 parts per million to up to 0.7 parts per million in warm periods. In the Arctic the average is about 1.85 ppm, which is the highest in 400,000 years. Could this amount of methane and the global warming it could spark end the current ice age?
Shakhova says the Siberian Arctic is a concern because the frozen methane is held on the seafloor, but the water is shallow, and this means it does not have time to oxidise to CO2 before it reaches the surface. The effects of all this methane bubbling to the surface are hard (read, impossible) to predict.
Fifty ships have been trapped in moving sheets of Baltic Sea ice off the coast of Sweden for the last few days. The ships, including passenger ferries, have now been released by icebreakers, and the Swedish Maritime Administration has warned ships not to take the same route.
Sweden’s winter has been unusually harsh this year, with temperatures almost constantly below zero. Now, some would say the cold winters in the north suggest an ice age (or actually another glaciation within the current ice age) is imminent. Others would say the harsh winters are expected if the gulf stream is slowing down.
So what are we to believe? The article mentions that there have not been so many ships trapped since the mid-1980s. Did a glaciation start then? No. One event, one harsh winter, even one cold decade means little really because the large scale climate changes occur over such long periods. Scroll down a few posts, and you’ll see that while there is more ice off the east coast of Sweden, there is less ice off Greenland. One location also means little because climate is a global system, with some places colder, some hotter. What climate change scientists look at is the global average.
Check out the Basics page to view graphs of climate change over various scales.