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!)

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

A “Thriving Population of Polar Bears”

Monday morning on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, naturalist Chris Packham reported from an expedition called Operation Iceberg up in the Arctic:

“… this berg seems to be home to a particularly thriving population of polar bears, who regularly come as close to the ship as they dare, sniff at us and wonder what we’re up to. But we have to pay keen attention to them, of course, as they can be – if we allow them the opportunity – to be quite dangerous”.

Is it just me, or is “quite dangerous” just a little bit of an understatement? These beasts are monstrous, ravening predators and don’t seem to be getting any scarcer.

Operation Iceberg, by the way, is a 5-week scientific mission to discover more about the life and death of icebergs, and later in the report, Chris Packham goes on to say that one reason for finding out as much as we can is that “we’re living at a time when there seem to be more icebergs breaking off the glaciers here than ever before.”

Of course, just over a century ago, an iceberg famously collided with R.M.S. Titanic and sent her to the bottom of the North Atlantic. Here is an article from the New York Times of May 5th 1912, which describes conditions at the time (h/t Larry Elkin in this article):

An unprecedentedly warm Winter in the entire arctic is believed to be the cause of the vast number of icebergs adrift in the North Atlantic Ocean during the present season and for the low latitudes which many of them have reached. Navigators and scientists of the Hydrographic Office and the Revenue Cutter Service in Washington have theories tending to prove that an unusually heavy snowfall in Greenland, where all icebergs are formed, in the Winter of 1910-11 was followed by an unusually hot Summer, and by a very mild Winter in 1911-12, these conditions resulting in the creation of an enormously large crop of icebergs from the West Greenland glaciers, and of floe, or field ice. Unusual northerly and northwesterly winds have blown these bergs far to the southward.

It all begins to sound oddly familiar.

Summer’s End

It’s that time of the year again. Mornings and evenings are becoming noticeably shadowy and chill. August is behind us and we’re starting to head back down into the cold and the dark of the year. Time to bolt the doors, draw the curtains, turn up the lights and settle down to some blogging once more.

This is a particularly beautiful time of year, I always feel. The autumn leaves are just starting to fall, fungi are ripening, the woods and parks and riverside areas of west London are still full of colour. This is when garden spiders are at their largest and most fearsome, and when the dew on their webs sparkles in the bright morning sunshine. Michaelmas daisies are everywhere, suddenly.

Definitely time to get down to some more writing – and there’s lots to write about.

UPDATE

And now it’s November. Yes, must do some writing before year’s end! I’ll probably do a sort of round-up edition of “100 Years of Climate Change” towards the close of 2011, but before then, I’m planning to write a few book reviews.

The Cargo of the Altavia

This story caught my attention last week. On Wednesday 14th July, the Liberia-registered cargo ship M.V.Altavia docked at the Pacific island of Guam, carrying building materials (insulation and beams, we’re told) from South Korea for use in a massive new project to house construction workers at the village of Dededo.

But that was not all that it carried. As soon as the items began to be unloaded, huge numbers of spiders were reported to have been sighted, both on the cargo and in the ship itself – hundreds of large ones with bodies the size of a quarter (which is 24.26 millimetres in diameter, according to Wikipedia) and thousands of smaller ones.

The unloading was stopped at once, and the ship forced to move off to a quarantine anchorage, further out into Apra Harbor, while a few of the spiders were analysed by the Department of Agriculture lab. Once it was established that the spiders were not native to Guam, and that they were simply too numerous on the ship for fumigation to be a success, the M.V. Altavia was turned away and forced to return to Korea. A second cargo ship, the M.V. STX Alpha, also containing construction materials and also sailing from South Korea to Guam, was then told to turn back, even before it had reached its destination.

I’m interested in this story for several reasons.

Firstly, when I was in Japan last December, one of the major and long-running news stories was the dispute and negotiations between Japan and the US over the American airbase in Okinawa, which has been the cause of much local friction over the years. The upshot of all that has been the planned withdrawal of 8,000 US Marines from Okinawa, which will lead to Guam increasing in importance as a major hub for the American military in the western Pacific (the airbase stays on Okinawa, though, but will be moved from the city to the coast.) Hence the plans for marshalling an 18,000-strong army of construction workers on the island, and hence the need for accommodation for said workers – the Ukudu Workforce Village, which is basically a temporary housing project of giant proportions.

The language in the original report (Pacific Daily News) is also worthy of note, as other internet commentators have already mentioned, as it includes the word “stevedores”, which has a sort of lovely old-world, age-of-sail ring to it. I’m imagining a crew of tobacco-chewing roughnecks on the docks at Guam, hauling on ropes and manhandling crates – only to leap back with many a startled oath as the cargo began to disgorge hordes of spidery invaders. Which was probably nothing like the real situation at all, as I’m sure all that sort of work could be done by a handful of blokes in hard hats, sitting at the controls of machines. I rather like my version, however.

Of course, I’m also interested in the spiders. What species do these belong to? For a moment, when I was first aware of the case, I wondered whether these might even be of a previously undiscovered kind, but on second thoughts this would be very unlikely (although to date, there doesn’t seem to be any confirmation yet of what exactly these interlopers are) and they’re possibly of a type that is native to Korea. (By the way, I was reminded somehow of John Wyndham’s posthumously published novella Web, and have been prompted finally to write a review of that rather curious work, which you can now find on my Planet Bookworm site.)

And what of the crew? What, one wonders, did they make of that situation – alone (as it were) on the high seas on a ship overrun by eight-legged horrors? Can you imagine having to venture down into the darkness of the hold to inspect the cargo, armed only with a flashlight (the one with the dodgy batteries, naturally)? Being moderately arachnophobic myself, I would have been inclined to start sending frantic and incoherent mayday signals as soon as the full predicament was known, and would have been sorely tempted to jump ship at Guam, despite the threat of prison.

Or cast myself adrift in a lifeboat perhaps, mid-voyage, if driven to the edge of uncontrollable gibbering madness. But the nightmare might not have ended there, oh no. Overcome with hunger, I might have opened my container of emergency rations at last, only to find – guess what.

UPDATE

As of the Friday before last, an entomologist at the University of Guam, Dr Aubrey Moore (with the help of Dr. Seung Tae Kim, who is an arachnologist at the Seoul National University) has apparently identified two separate kinds of spider, from the samples. Both are orb weavers, one large, the other small; both are common to Korea and both are harmless to humans. Orb weavers I’ve seen in Japan, and yes – they can get pretty large. Apparently, spiders are very plentiful on Guam, due to the abundance of insects and the lack of birds. So maybe it isn’t the sort of place where an arachnophobe would be advised to jump ship; a case of out of the frying pan…