Revenge of the Lawn

A couple of weeks ago I tuned into the PM programme on BBC Radio 4 on my way home from work, and listened to a report by Andrew Bomford from the Royal Horticultural Society’s garden at Wisley. The occasion was a survey being organised by the RHS and Reading University into people’s perceptions of how climate change might be affecting their gardens, and as usual my interest was immediately aroused when I heard the words “climate change”.

Later I found it again on iPlayer, and have written up the segment on my transcript website.

The report is interesting, I find, for several reasons. One is the changing narrative of global warming and the – to my mind – rather reactive nature of the predictions being made about how climate change is going to manifest itself. Many forecasts seem to be more about what was happening when they were being made, rather than about times to come. As Andrew Bomford said, on PM:

…I think a lot of people get quite confused about this and think about global warming – you know, ten years ago, when we talked about this, I think people imagined that right now we’d all be growing cacti and that clearly hasn’t happened.

I commented about this on the Bishop Hill blog (“Unthreaded” page) and also linked to an old National Geographic article from 2003, in which horticulturalist Richard Bisgrove looked forward to the delicious things that might be grown in a hotter, drier England.

Bananas, dates, olives, pomegranates, palms, yucca plants, and other plants not usually associated with the typical English garden may also become increasingly common in the English gardens of the 21st century.

I then got a response from famous commentator ZedsDeadBed, in that person’s typically rather uncompromising style:

Yet more denier quote mining and attempts to mislead. The timeframe in the article you mention is around 70 years. It is also almost exclusively drawn from the work of gardeners, are they really who you look to for your climate science Alex? Or are you just slinging mud around in the hope that some of it sticks?

ZedsDeadBed does have a point about the time frame. The Gardening in the Global Greenhouse report was about climate trends up to the year 2080, which is still 67 years hence – climate-wise, pretty much anything could have happened by then, including, of course, England indeed becoming more like Spain or the south of France. From a starting point in 2003, we are barely a sixth of the way there.

On the other hand, though, who on Earth plans a garden on a 70 or 80-year time scale? Gardeners (of which I am one – I have the scars to prove it, from a weekend of weeding and root removal) tend to want advice they can heed and results they can appreciate during their lifetime. A horizon of ten years, give or take, seems just about right.

As to whether I look to gardeners for climate science, the answer would be: no, not really. A more interesting question, from my point of view, would be: who did the RHS gardeners look to, for authoritative statements about the climate? And the most likely answer would appear to be: they looked to climate scientists such as Myles Allen, who works at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute (ECI), which hosts the UK Climate Impacts Programme (UKCIP), which in turn was one of the partners of the RHS and Reading University in producing the Global Greenhouse study, over ten years ago.

(By the way, I thought the “slinging mud” remark, in the context of gardening, rather clever, although I also suspect it might have been unintentional.)

Interestingly, there’s an article this year on the Reading University website which does mention the discrepancy between what was predicted then and predicted now.

Vines growing in Scotland, olive trees in England and longer, drier summers – these were among the long-term predictions 11 years ago in a landmark report commissioned by, among others, the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), based on work by scientists at the University of Reading.

Now scientists are conducting the biggest survey of its kind to find how gardeners are responding to the reality of Britain’s changing climate, which has been dominated in recent years by cold spells in winter, extended periods of drought, record rainfall and flooding.

Climate change plant scientist Dr Claudia Bernardini adds:

The latest projections indicate that the climate is likely to affect gardens and gardening in a significantly different way than that predicted in 2002.

Will these latest projections be any better, I wonder, than their predecessors, though?

At the turn of the 21st century, when the future was one of long, hot, parched summers, the English lawn seemed to be doomed, according to some, being “increasingly difficult and costly to maintain.” As late as 2009 it was even suggested that lawns would become a “sign of moral decadence“, due to climate change.

They’re still going on about this. In an article in the Telegraph, back in January, Richard Bisgrove – who had dreamed of English olive groves and banana plantations back in 2003 – “believes people will have to abandon the dream of having the perfect lawn.”

And in the PM report from Wisley earlier this month, RHS gardener Leigh Hunt expressed his doubts about the future of the lawn, because “we’re not going to have those moist, warm summers” (although at the same time he recommended establishing a green roof to soak up water and reflect heat, which seems to suggest that he nevertheless thinks summers will be moist and warm. Go figure.)

No-one really knows what weather patterns will emerge, between now and the mid 2020s – including, it’s becoming ever more apparent, the experts. However, I think it would be a delicious irony if the good old-fashioned English lawn, despite being virtually written off and consigned to climate history’s compost heap, were to thrive and prosper, regardless.

UPDATE

(Just to quickly express my gratitude to Richard Brautigan – wherever he is now – for the use of his wonderful title, which I’ve always loved and intended to borrow at some point. Thank you!)

Finding Better Slaves

There’s a recent blog article by Tim Worstall which has some bearing on my post about HS2 and also the one about the circular economy; it was in response to a Guardian article by Nick Cohen about the dangers of a high-tech borderless future.

Nick Cohen:

Sensible economists worry about automated manufacturing replacing factory workers, Google’s autonomous cars replacing lorry and taxi drivers, and automatic online writing and translation services taking on tasks that only humans have been able to perform since the invention of literacy.

Tim Worstall responds:

Imagine the end state: machines do everything. Machines make the machines that repair the machines that make machines….and we don’t need to iterate any further back than that I think.

What happens to living standards here?

Clearly, no one has a job. Machines quite literally do everything. The robots act for us, the software writes the scripts and the machines make the 3D holo machines that we watch them on.

What happens to living standards here? They soar, of course.

As several commentators on Tim Worstall’s blog have pointed out, this is the scenario underpinning Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels, the Culture being a future civilisation in which no-one has money but everyone nevertheless enjoys the good life, as all goods and services – from basic necessities to unimaginable luxuries – are provided by self-sustaining technology. This chimes with some old-fashioned socialist ideals (such as Sylvia Pankhurst’s “great production that will supply all, and more than all the people can consume”) – although, I hasten to add that the socialist reality has, to put it mildly, not exactly delivered on this. Capitalism, on the other hand, has delivered, to a certain extent, although we’re not anywhere near the promised land just yet.

Commentator IanB makes some good points:

It is also quite hard for those of us living under the tyranny of scarcity (and by this, I mean me) to think about, because one tends to bring in all sorts of scarcity-based assumptions without realising it.

… in the economy as described by Tim, there is no scarcity of raw materials either. Because a robot can always build a new robot to go fetch some more. Even from the asteroid belt.

One aspect that interests me in particular is that many people presume that demand would escalate without limit. I don’t. I think there is actually a limit to human wants. There is no use me having a hundred loaves of bread. I can only eat one. But in particular, it would presumably mean the end of demand for status goods, because if anyone can have them, there is no status to be had.

It seems to me that “the tyranny of scarcity” is a good way of describing the dominant mindset among today’s political and cultural elite (not just the greens, and not just the left.) And I think IanB is right to say that without it, there would be actually less conspicuous consumption. If everyone was well-shod, why would anyone (to use Lord Skidelsky’s example in my HS2 post) want 2000 pairs of shoes?

Clearly, capitalism has delivered in a way that state-controlled collectivist methods of production haven’t, although it has been anything but a smooth or a safe ride. And technology has, of course, been the key to capitalism’s relative success. If the ancient world was run on slave labour and the medieval world was run on serf labour (and animal labour!), today’s world is powered by a modern-day slave workforce which includes ubiquitous electrical power and the dense energy sources of fossil fuels. And, increasingly, it is not necessary to be a member of society’s elite to enjoy the fruits of this labour, such as air travel or the use of personal wheeled conveyances.

There’s a very good article about this on Graham Strouts’s SkeptEco blog, entitled “Earth Hour: We will Never Give up our Energy Slaves”. Look out for the comments and a link to another article about “turnspit dogs”, a fascinating example of how child labour and then animal labour was pressed into performing a service (turning meat on a spit) which technology now provides at the touch of a button.

Another very good article is this one by Colin McInnes on the Perpetual Motion blog.

It will be interesting to see whether the trend continues. Will the “limits to growth” people and the tyranny of scarcity prevail? Or will developments like 3D printing and molecular nanotechnology start to usher in a world where, eventually – for all of us – robots build robots and machines do everything?

I hope it will be the latter. And if something like Iain M. Banks’s Culture ever came into existence, I’d probably sign up in a heartbeat.

UPDATE

While drafting this post, I heard the extremely sad news on Wednesday that Iain Banks has terminal cancer and has only months to live. A century from now – hopefully sooner – we should have full-blown molecular nanotechnology, with fleets of tiny medical slave-machines patrolling our bodies and zapping cancer cells wherever they can be found. Roll on the day.

Circular Economy

Twenty years ago I owned a pretty good portable TV set, which worked perfectly until one day something went wrong with the colour balance and the picture started to take on a sort of weird pink tinge. Taking it to an electrical goods shop which also did repairs, I was dismayed to learn that my TV was basically uneconomical to fix and I’d be better off buying a new one.

It was a shame as I’d become rather attached to my little TV, and wasn’t keen on having to buy another. However, cold logic dictated that I had to get rid of it – either that, or to settle for viewing everything in TV-world through a permanent rose-tinted filter. Luckily, someone then left me their old telly and VCR, as they were leaving the country, so I got what turned out to be a free upgrade (and ended up using the “new” TV for another decade and a half, only parting with it when they finally switched off the analogue signal in the UK last year and the set became unusable.) You can tell that I’m not what you’d call an early adopter.

But I was quite put out to learn that people weren’t repairing old televisions any more. It seemed rather wasteful to me, as it meant throwing away a device that was perfectly good except, maybe, for one small component. Why not, I thought, make things easier to fix? Perhaps these items could be made in modular form, so it would be easier (and cheaper) to remove and replace a faulty part, in the same way that we get new toner cartridges for a printer instead of having to buy a new printer.

That’s why I was interested to listen to an item about washing machines on BBC Radio 4′s Today programme, earlier this month – the audio has probably vanished by now, but there’s a transcript of it here. The item was about returning, in a way, to the days when things were fixed rather than junked, and could be more easily rented, as opposed to owned outright.

It’s something that would have been right up my street, twenty years ago, and even now I find the idea appealing. I hate waste, as do most people, which is also why the idea of recycling can be attractive even when we might know or suspect that it is uneconomical. And if it is cheaper in the long run to rent a washing machine, for example, than buy one – as calculated by one Today programme interviewee’s “eco-nazi” daughter – then fair enough.

However, if we did have a “circular economy”, more or less, and consumer goods were built to be far more durable than they are now, what would happen to innovation? If you were renting a washing machine, and if it broke down and was efficiently replaced by the leasing company, would you have the incentive to look around and ask for a more advanced model? Would the leasing company really have an incentive to upgrade their stock (maybe, if they were competing with other similar companies.) If everyone had CRT televisions that were expensive but lasted for twenty years, would this slow down the adoption of more efficient and innovative technology such as LED TVs?

There’s another aspect to this, of course, which is resources; the programme mentions metal, and steel specifically. But steel is not about to run out, and is one of the most recycled materials we have, which means that really, they’re talking about energy (the master resource) – the energy to produce a new washing machine, which would be saved by continuing to use an existing one.

Energy is pretty abundant – we have plenty of coal, and they’re discovering new stores of unconventional oil and gas all the time. But the use of these abundant energy sources is, we’re told, causing dangerous climate change.

So this is really a climate change story, after all. Without the perceived urgency of the planetary crisis, there would be no need to restrict anyone’s use of cheap, fossil-fuelled energy, and so whether we continued to use our old washing machines or scrapped them and bought new ones would be a non-issue.

Well, I’m sceptical about the planetary crisis. I don’t like waste, and tend to recycle and reuse things all the time – it seems to be a personal preference. But I also dislike the thought that the CO2 scare is being used to, in effect, nudge us all into abandoning the idea of abundance.

Sir John Beddington

Sir John Beddington, the current Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK government, is due to be replaced next month and he spent most of this Monday in various radio and TV studios, taking part in some of what will be his final public appearances in that role. He was on BBC Breakfast News, BBC Radio 5 Live and Radio 4 in the morning, and on ITV News and Channel 4 News in the evening.

What did he talk about? Well (not surprising, perhaps, as he’s a Professor of Applied Population Biology) he briefly mentioned the extra billion people there will be in the world at the end of the next 12 years, and he noted the fact that more and more people are living in cities.

However, what he talked mostly about was climate change, and a few of the things he said were quite remarkable.

I have transcribed Monday’s interviews, and here are the links:
BBC Breakfast News
BBC Radio 5 Live
BBC Radio 4 Today programme
ITV News
Channel 4 News

These sequences are interesting in that climate scepticism routinely gets a mention nowadays in the mainstream media. The BBC’s Bill Turnbull quoting Richard Lindzen, Radio 5 Live bringing in Benny Peiser to provide a counter-argument (also transcribed) – all this would have been highly unlikely back in the Copenhagen era, which, lest we forget, was less than four years ago.

The background to the interviews is of course the freezing weather we are experiencing in Britain right now – it is almost April and farmers are digging dead sheep out of snowdrifts. But beyond the UK and its recent string of cold winters, there also looms the great hiatus – 15 years or so with no statistically significant global warming.

With that in mind, here’s the quote I found most intriguing, from the Channel 4 News segment.

Everybody’s sort of looking out of the window and saying “God, it’s damn cold! It’s not global warming – this is nonsense”. “Climate change” is a much better descriptor of what is actually happening in the world, and just one of the symptoms of it is an increase in world temperatures.

So world temperature increase is now “just one of the symptoms” of climate change?

And not a particularly important one, he seems to be implying.

Moral Maze

I’ve just finished transcribing an edition of BBC Radio 4′s Moral Maze programme which was broadcast this year on 30th January, and you can read it here on my transcript site.

It is about “nimbyism” and the controversial new High Speed 2 (HS2) rail project in the UK, which is now set to go ahead and will link London to some of the more northern cities of Britain, starting with Birmingham. The discussion covers several important and interesting topics, such as the idea of progress, the economy and what should be done with the countryside.

The subject of consumerism also comes up, and I was struck by one exchange between economist Lord Robert Skidelsky and Clare Fox, who is director of the Institute of Ideas. Skidelsky has been arguing for an emphasis on “the good life” rather than economic growth, and Fox is arguing for economic dynamism.

Clare Fox: …I mean as we haven’t got very much GDP, and we’re not making very much money, I think – you can understand, for people –

Lord Robert Skidelsky: I agree.

Clare Fox: – that what we might want, at the moment, is a little bit more sense of economic dynamism, rather than trying to make excuses for not having enough. I’m only saying that because, surely, things like the “good life” – in order for us to philosophically consider our spiritual lives, we don’t want to be worried about unemployment, or having no money, or being poor, or “How are going to feed the kids?”, or any of this. Or even – wouldn’t it be nice to be a bit more ambitious and be able to think we could, you know, get to Manchester dead quick or even fly to the Moon? Wouldn’t that be good for the spirit?

Lord Robert Skidelsky: Yeah, and more and more things to buy in supermarkets -

Clare Fox: Let me tell, you I -

Lord Robert Skidelsky: – and more and more consumer goods.

Clare Fox: But that’s good, is it not? I mean, can -

Lord Robert Skidelsky: For ever and ever, like Mrs. Marcos’s shoes, 2000 pairs?

Clare Fox: I don’t think most of us have quite arrived at getting 20, never mind 2000.

Lord Robert Skidelsky: No, but then, you know, there’s 30 and then there’s 40, what else are we offering people?

What I find interesting here is Lord Skidelsky’s representation of economic growth as an ever-accumulating heap of superfluous consumer goods – 20 pairs of shoes, then 30, then 40 until we have amassed a collection to rival that of Imelda Marcos. Interesting, because it certainly does not resonate with my experience of society at all.

Now there is a bit of the hoarder in all of us, and there are a few people who do manage to collect vast amounts of stuff they don’t need. However, these are extreme cases. Like many people, I have the money to waste on more shoes than I could ever need (although 2000 pairs would be a challenge, admittedly) – but my point is, we don’t tend to do that.

What Lord Skidelsky touches on but (deliberately, perhaps) does not emphasise is the choice we enjoy, as modern consumers. I don’t need 20 or 30 pairs of shoes but I appreciate being able to choose from a range of 20 or 30 different kinds of affordable shoe in a shop.

And that’s what is valuable here – variety and the freedom to choose, not mere senseless accumulation. That’s what I would understand by “more and more” – more variety, more freedom of choice, not just more and more stuff.

I wonder – when people like Lord Skidelsky argue against “more and more things to buy in supermarkets”, do they mean that the volume and number of things we buy should be less, or that we should be allowed to exercise less choice?

Shooting Gallery

30th June 1908: A huge explosion flattens over 800 square miles of Siberian forest in the remote region of the Podkamennaya Tunguska River. In the absence of detailed information, wild theories abound – it might have been a miniature black hole, perhaps even an alien spacecraft in difficulties. However, the general view is that it was an asteroid or comet fragment entering the Earth’s atmosphere and bursting in mid air, possibly a piece of Encke’s Comet; witness accounts mention repeated sounds like artillery, which perhaps means that Siberia was under bombardment by a series of separate fragments.

13th August 1930: There are reports of three large explosions in the Brazilian rain forest near the Peruvian border – local inhabitants talk of burning trees and a widespread ash cloud. Observatory records suggest that these were caused by one or more asteroid impacts coinciding with the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower.

2nd February, 1932: Explorer and intelligence officer St. John Philby (father of double agent Kim Philby) discovers pieces of meteoric iron littering the remote Arabian desert in the Empty Quarter or “Rub’ al Khali”. Later, three impact craters are found in the sand at Wabar, which suggests that an asteroid exploded in mid-air over the Arabian Peninsula (with the force of a 16-kiloton nuclear weapon, approximately), maybe as recently as 1891.

16th July, 1994: The first of many fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crash into Jupiter, the comet having been captured by the gas giant’s gravity in the 1960s or ’70s and fallen victim to Jupiter’s crushing tidal forces. Over the next few days, big pieces of comet slam into the planet’s atmosphere one after the other, creating vast dark spots which are clearly visible by telescope from Earth. The largest of these pieces (fragment G), impacting on 18th July, smashes with a force equivalent to 6,000,000 megatons.

15th February, 2013: A meteor explodes high over the Urals in Russia, creating a massive fireball, damaging buildings in six cities across the region and injuring over a thousand people (mainly cuts caused by shattering window glass). This happens 16 hours before asteroid 2012DA14 is due to pass by Earth; NASA tells us, however, that the two events are not related, the trajectories of the two objects being very different.

The meteor that lit up the skies over Chelyabinsk last week exploded with a force of nearly 500 kilotons and is estimated to have had a diameter of up to an estimated 56 feet. However, near-earth asteroid 2012DA14 which skimmed past us the same day has a diameter of around 160 feet and would have made a correspondingly bigger bang, had it collided with Earth instead – it would not have been in the Shoemaker-Levy class (thankfully!) but might have done considerably more than create smoke trails and smash windows.

To those who say that global warming is the greatest long-term threat to the human race, I think we might have to agree to disagree. In the Solar System’s great meteoric shooting gallery – going by a century’s worth of occasional impacts and near misses – it seems we have been relatively fortunate. So far, anyway.

Some useful links:

Wikipedia on the Tunguska Event:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event
Article on the Armagh Observatory website about the Brazilian meteors of 1930:
http://star.arm.ac.uk/impact-hazard/Brazil.html
Wikipedia on Wabar impact craters:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabar_craters
Wikipedia on Shoemaker-Levy 9:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Shoemaker-Levy_9
Wikipedia on the Russian meteor event of 2013:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Russian_meteor_event

Catastrophic Storm Tide, 1953

Last week saw the 60th anniversary of the great North Sea storms and flooding of 1953, which occurred over the night of 31st January and the following morning, and which wrought terrible havoc across Britain, Holland, Belgium and France, when a strong area of low pressure acted in combination with a high spring tide. A trawl through the newspaper stories at the time makes for some grim reading.

On 1st February 1953, an AP news article reported on the loss of the ferry Princess Victoria (she was one of the first roll-on/roll off ferries), which was sailing between Stranraer in Scotland and Larne in Northern Ireland, a distance of only 20 miles.

Dazed survivors said the 2,694-ton vessel plying between Scotland and Ireland went under after “five hours of hell”.

At 11:13 p.m., hours after the disaster, port officials announced there were only 49 known survivors [Wikipedia says 40 survivors] out of the 177 [Wiki has 179] persons aboard the Princess Victoria.

She was battered by 115-mile-an-hour winds. Huge waves splintered lifeboats before they could be launched.

Terror-struck passengers, all outfitted with lifebelts, plunged into the seething waters as the skipper, Capt. James Ferguson, gave the order to abandon ship. It was barely five miles off the mouth of Belfast harbor in the Irish Sea.

Survivors reaching this port said the Princess Victoria went down within minutes after Ferguson gave the abandon ship order.

She was not the only ship to founder in the storm – many fishing boats and other vessels were also lost that night. The situation was no better on land, however, as the storm surge battered North Sea coastlines, from Scotland down to the Low Countries. AP news again, from 2nd February:

Tidal seas – churned by hurricane winds – flooded thousands of coastal towns and drowned at least 408 persons in England, Holland and Belgium. Fears grew Tuesday that the toll in the three nations might go far higher.

The death of 132 persons on the British carferry Princess Victoria in a hurricane in the Irish Sea Saturday boosted the toll to 540 in two days.

Winds were abating but thousands of relief workers – including many American airmen – worked through the night in near freezing waters to evacuate survivors in flooded English coastal areas. It was estimated that 25,000 persons would have to be moved from their homes.

Hundreds were drowned or made homeless in Scotland and in England along the North Sea coast, at places like Crovie in Scotland, King’s Lynn, Hunstanton and also Canvey Island in Essex. The Sydney Morning Herald reports, 5th February:

The battle to reclaim Britain’s flooded areas is the biggest combined military and civil operation ever staged in peacetime.

It must be won in 12 days before the new high tide which is expected about February 16.

Planes, ships, trucks and trains are carrying millions of sandbags to troops, airmen and civil defence teams of volunteers, who are toiling round the clock to plug the gaps in the sea walls.

However, it was in the Netherlands that the true scale of the catastrophe revealed itself, where almost 2,000 people and 30,000 animals died when the storm surge overcame sea defences and flooded vast areas of farmland, destroying 10,000 buildings. The Age reports, 5th February:

News has been lacking for three days from parts of Holland since the pounding North Sea breached the dykes.

Many Dutch defences which withstood the first onslaught are reported crumbling today, brining danger to the farms and villages which hitherto had escaped.

The North Sea is rolling unhindered across the shattered dykes of the Scheldte estuary islands and south-western Holland covering with salt water an estimated one-sixth of Holland’s total area.

Out of this catastrophe arose the construction some of humanity’s most ambitious flood defences, including the mighty Delta Works in Holland, and the Thames Barrier in London.

As with “Superstorm Sandy” last year in the United States, several events happened coincidentally to make things worse – in the case of the North Sea floods, there was a powerful low-pressure weather system bringing gales, a high spring tide and also the fact that the disaster happened at night, on a Saturday (when local radio stations in Holland were not broadcasting, for example) and in the freezing cold of winter.

If a similar episode of storms and flooding happened again in the North Sea, it would naturally be taken by some commentators (as was Sandy) to be evidence of man-made global warming, which they claim is contributing to the severity of extreme weather events. However, this took place at a time when the globe was relatively cooler – in fact, over 30 years before the late 20th century warming was even a gleam in James Hansen’s eye.

And, although there have been storms and floods in the region after 1953, nothing quite as bad as this has happened here in the decades since.

Some links:

Rome News Tribune – Feb 1, 1953: Howling Storm Sinks British Ferry; 128 Perish Within Sight of Shore:
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=J5UFAAAAIBAJ&sjid=UDEDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6320,4761405&dq

The Milwaukee Sentinel – Feb 2, 1953: Hundreds Dead as Floods Sweep Britain, Holland:
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=jUMxAAAAIBAJ&sjid=EhAEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6926,2109405&dq

The Sydney Morning Herald – Feb 5, 1953: Hundreds Still Missing:
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/18356010

The Age – Feb 5, 1953: Gale Endangers Flood Rescues: Deaths in Holland Exceed 1200:
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=u8NVAAAAIBAJ&sjid=SsMDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6220,3565919&dq

Extinction – A guest post on Geoff Chambers’s Blog

Just to write that there’s a new post by me on the subject of extinction, not here but on Geoff Chambers’s blog. Coincidentally, there’s also a new paper on the subject published in Science magazine, which has been vigorously discussed at the Telegraph and by Willis Eschenbach at Watts Up With That.

In the post I look at the species-area relationship as a predictor of extinctions, some of the dissenting voices in the extinction debate, including Loehle and Eschenbach, and also go back to the 1980s (see previous post) when experts were warning of a mass extinction event by the year 2000.

Some links:

My guest post:
http://geoffchambers.wordpress.com/2013/01/25/extinction-guest-post-by-alex-cull/

Science Magazine: “Can We Name Earth’s Species Before They Go Extinct?”
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6118/413

The Telegraph: Extinction of millions of species ‘greatly exaggerated’:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/9824723/Extinction-of-millions-of-species-greatly-exaggerated.html

WUWT: Willis Eschenbach: “Always Trust Your Gut Extinct”:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/25/always-trust-your-gut-extinct/

The Way of the Dodo

This is the first in a series of posts on the subject of extinction. I’m writing about it partly because the subject is fascinating in its own right (I’m a dinosaur fan, after all) and also because this is one of the strands in Stephen Emmott’s stage play Ten Billion last year and I’m interested in unpacking and critiquing the ideas expressed in the play. You can read an initial critical analysis of Ten Billion’s themes over at the Climate Resistance site (link below), written by Geoff Chambers with some input from myself, but it would also be good to take a further, more in-depth look into some of these themes.

So, extinction. During the play (which was actually more a sort of presentation or monologue on neo-Malthusian themes), Professor Emmott referred to it at least once, stating that species on Earth are becoming extinct a thousand times faster than the normal evolutionary rate, as humans consume the planet’s resources.

And if species were disappearing at a thousand times the normal rate, this would of course be highly alarming. It would look very much like the beginnings of a sixth mass extinction in the history of life on Earth. And Emmott is not the only one saying it – you can read about the extinction crisis in science magazines, hear it mentioned in science programmes on the TV and radio, find it bundled up with other (and equally panic-inducing) themes such as human population growth, peak oil and so forth in articles by people such as biologist Paul R Ehrlich. It’s one of those facts that are repeated so often that there’s a general tendency to assume they’re true – that is, if people don’t put too much thought into the matter.

But is this true? And if it’s true, how do we know it’s happening? When people say that species are going extinct a thousand times faster than before, how are scientists supposed to be measuring it? And when did this idea start?

There’s much to explore on this subject, and I’m going to try and do so over several posts. But first, what I wanted to attempt to find out was when this idea first appeared in the media. I ran some searches, and the earliest result in Google’s online newspaper archive came from 19th August 1989, when several newspapers ran an Associated Press article mentioning a new report that had emerged from a study by the NSF or National Science Foundation in the US.

According to the article: “One quarter or more of the Earth’s species of animals, plants, microbes and fungi will become extinct without measures to preserve them, a National Science Foundation study said Friday.”

And: ‘”Unless the international community can reverse the trend,” the report said, “the rate of extinction over the next few years is likely to rise to at least 1,000 times the normal background rate of extinction and will ultimately result in the loss of a quarter or more of the species on Earth”.’

I then searched for and downloaded the NSF report from 1989. It is called “Loss of Biological Diversity: A Global Crisis Requiring International Solutions” (link below) and describes what it calls an “an ongoing, unprecedented loss” of biodiversity (the gist of the report might be expressed somewhat like: “The biodiversity crisis is very serious and huge. We don’t even know how huge it is. We need to gather more information – send us more funding.”) In the prologue, it says:

The extinction event that we are witnessing is the most catastrophic loss of species in the last 65 million years. Most importantly, it is the first major extinction event that has been caused by a single species, one that we hope will act in its own self interest to stem the tide.

Unless the international community can, indeed, reverse the trend, the rate of extinction over the next few decades is likely to rise to at least 1000 times the normal background rate of extinction, and will ultimately result in the loss of a quarter or more of the species on earth.

So here is the first instance that I can find of the “1000 times the normal background rate” idea. But that’s just the prologue – where else does the report mention it? It doesn’t, exactly. What it does mention is the theory of island biogeography, which states that “when natural communities have been reduced to less than 10% of their original area, half of the original species are at risk”, and this is something that I will return to, later.

And it also mentions, on page 3: “Estimates of species loss rates suggest that, unless current trends are reversed, from one quarter to one half of the earth’s species will become extinct in the next 30 years (Lovejoy 1980; Ehrlich and Ehrlich, 1981; Norton, 1986).”

There are some good pointers here for further investigation…

A few notes, at this stage:

1) Notice how “the rate of extinction over the next few decades” in the prologue of the actual report becomes “the rate of extinction over the next few years” in the AP news item? This is something I’ve noticed quite a bit in the environmental and climate debates – information gets distorted as it is passed on. Numbers get inflated, time scales are dramatically compressed – remember the business of the Himalayan glaciers in IPCC’s AR4?

2) Also notice how in 1989 they were saying that the extinction rate “is likely to rise to at least 1000 times the normal background rate”, while now Emmott and others are saying it’s already happening. Has there been a measurable increase in the rate between then and now?

3) Also note the fact that in the 1980s, the Ehrlichs and others were suggesting that between a quarter and a half of all species would become extinct in the next 30 years. Time, needless to say, has not been kind to that prediction! There is a historical pattern, of which this is a great example, of sweeping doom-laden predictions that come to nothing; however, there are genuinely intelligent people such as Professor Emmott who appear curiously unable to acknowledge the pattern of failure.

Much more later. Stay tuned!

Some links:

Blog post “It’s a F*ct – We’re F*cked” on Climate Resistance:
http://www.climate-resistance.org/2012/08/it’s-a-fct-we’re-fcked.html

National Science Foundation report “Loss of Biological Diversity: A Global Crisis Requiring International Solutions”:
http://www.nsf.gov/nsb/publications/1989/nsb0989.pdf

Happy January!

You can tell it’s January, here in the land of Orwell’s Airstrip One. What was once a fairly harmless pastime – looking to the future, making up resolutions for the New Year and seeing how long they lasted – has become yet another fabulous opportunity for our “betters” (there’s a whole professional class of them now) to lecture the rest of us on how to live.

I’ve been struggling to come up with any this year, to be honest. As it is, I subsist mostly on wholesome foods like brown rice, broccoli and tofu and go to the gym or swimming pool several times a week. Mind you, I drive to work rather than use the train (too expensive) or cycle (no conscious death wish) so I don’t entirely live the low-carbon dream/nightmare. However, I suspect that I might be somewhat more “green” – although I wouldn’t describe myself as such – than quite a few others who would describe themselves as such.

So perhaps it’s time for some different resolutions, to get me through the next few months, anyway.

1) Alcohol. I really have neglected alcohol recently. Days or even weeks pass without touching a drop, so that definitely has to change. Especially as there is now a campaign by Alcohol Concern to get people to stop drinking altogether this January. Luckily there’s also a campaign called Drinkuary, to get people to enjoy alcohol more this month – and there’s still some cheap booze in the shops, as our ridiculous government’s minimum pricing measure hasn’t yet been wheeled out – so time to be inspired and stock up!

2) Smoking. This one’s a bit more tricky, as I’m a non-smoker and never really got started on the habit, even when I was a student. And it’s expensive. Mind you, I find the idea of those electronic cigarettes (e-cigs) rather intriguing, and sometimes toy with the idea of buying one. But they’re also a bit pricey too, especially when I could be spending the cash on cider instead, or maybe cake, so that’s one resolution bound to fail at the first hurdle.

3) Food. And talking of cake – yes, please. And all things biscuity and chocolatey, of course. I’ve been neglecting them, as well, over the festive season, so absolutely need to make up for lost time. Who could forget the exciting battle between our wonderful PM David Cameron and equally useful leader of the opposition Ed Miliband this time last year over the issue of cheap chocolate oranges for sale in the high street. Well, I remember it anyway – Dave was going to nudge us away from the wicked oranges, Ed was simply going to crack down and ban them, or something. Lovely people. In celebration of “irresponsible capitalism” and of course cheap calories, I think I’ll start my campaign with a whole Terry’s chocolate orange, purchased, naturally, at newsagent WH Smith.

That’s plenty of resolutions for now, although hopefully a few more will occur to me before the new year has started to get old. You know what’s also good about them (aside from the actual pleasure of consuming these naughty things, of course)? The fact that in a small way they go against Nanny and all her little rules and strictures. Even the thought that enjoying some fast food or a Mars bar or a bottle of cheap supermarket wine will make Nanny cross and want to stamp her feet makes these items taste all the better.

Happy January, everyone!