Media throws in the towel on coverage of climate change

Posted on January 24, 2012 by John Gibbons

Below, my article, as it appeared in last Thursday’s Irish Times (and fair play to the IT for running a piece that is openly critical of its own editorial policy in this area; that’s the true mark of a serious newspaper).

Still, it’s all a far cry from Monday, December 7th, 2009. On that day, the Irish Times joined 55 other major newspapers in 45 countries around the world to publish an unprecedented joint editorial ahead of the opening of the climate conference in Copenhagen. Who could forget the following dramatic call to arms from many of the world’s most respected newspapers, which began: “humanity faces a profound emergency”.

“Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year’s inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world’s response has been feeble and half-hearted.

“Overcoming climate change will take a triumph of optimism over pessimism, of vision over short-sightedness, of what Abraham Lincoln called ‘the better angels of our nature’. The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history’s judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We implore them to make the right choice.”

That was then. The “calamity…that will ravage our planet…which we did nothing to avert” draws ever closer. But the world’s media, having never encountered a story of the magnitude, complexity or civilization-ending consequences, has quite literally capitulated and walked away from what is, without doubt, the story of the 21st century, or any other century you care to name.

From an objective “news” standpoint, this is bigger than Darwin, Newton, Copernicus, Marco Polo, Martin Luther, the Atom Bomb, JFK, Galileo, Hitler, Stalin, Mao and the Black Death – combined. Yet the news media, having briefly come to its senses just over two years ago, has quickly fallen back into its customary stance, so presciently described by George Bernard Shaw: “Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization”.

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GLOBALLY, 2010 was a year of weather-related disasters on an almost unprecedented scale. Last year was worse, with a record $380 billion in economic losses attributed to ‘natural’ disasters, many climate-related, according to insurance giant Munich Re.

Few experts expect to see any break in this upward trend this year, or any time soon. Instead, as record emissions of greenhouse gases continue unabated, the climate system is now behaving precisely as scientists have been projecting for decades. The rapid build-up of energy in the system is the ‘engine’ that is fuelling extremes, from storms and floods to severe droughts.

This time last January, an area of Australia twice the size of France lay submerged. Last summer, over 3,000 monthly weather records were shattered across the continental US. Meanwhile, Ireland, has endured a series of so-called ‘one in a century’ flooding events in recent years.

Whether or not you choose to ‘believe’ in climate change and what is fuelling it, only the most obstinate or delusional persist in denying that it’s real, it’s serious and it’s getting worse.

Of course, none of this is news. But what is news is that it’s not news. At a time of unprecedented weather disasters fuelled by climate change, the media has, both here and abroad, largely walked away from the story. Given what is at stake, this is a truly extraordinary state of affairs.

RTÉ, under its public service broadcasting Charter, is committed to covering a wide range of areas, from news and current affairs to entertainment, religion, children’s programmes, sport, etc. Nowhere in its extensive Charter is there any mention of the environment.

Indeed, since Paul Cunningham left early in 2011 for a new posting, the position of Environment Correspondent has been “suppressed”, a spokesperson told me this week. This means RTÉ isn’t even considering filling it. It’s simply not a priority for a station with 2,000 staff and a £350 million-plus annual budget. And it shows. November 28th last marked the first day of the crucial UN climate conference. Not alone did RTÉ have no reporter in Durban, the COP 17 conference didn’t even make that evening’s TV bulletins.

Nor is RTÉ alone in throwing in the towel. This newspaper’s environmental coverage peaked in 2007 and 2008, with, on average 6.2 mentions per edition of the phrase “climate change” or “global warming”. By 2011, coverage had slumped to around 1.5 mentions per issue – the lowest level since 2004.

Overall, that’s a 75 per cent drop in coverage intensity in just four years (in contrast, the UK Guardian, with twice the circulation of the Irish Times, gave climate issues seven times greater frequency of coverage in 2011).

The situation is much worse elsewhere, with many media outlets, notably those controlled by Rupert Murdoch, engaging in open ideological warfare against climate science.

Globally, the decline in newspaper coverage is flowing from the top down. The number of newspaper editorials on climate change fell by over 50 per cent between 2009-2011, according to monitoring website, Dailyclimate.org.

Eric Pooley of Harvard University framed the issue like this: “Suppose our leading scientists discovered a meteor, hurtling toward the earth… governments had less than ten years to divert or destroy it. How would news organisations cover this story?”

Even in an era of recession and financial distress they would, he argued, “throw teams of reporters at it”. The race to stop the meteor “would be the story of the century”. The analogy is imperfect but useful. The man-made meteor that is climate change is right on target to render much of the planet uninhabitable later this century. The Harvard study pointed to a combination of ‘climate fatigue’ among editors and editorial cutbacks leading to the loss of specialist, science-literate reporters.

Given the complexity of the issues involved, non-specialist journalists are often easy meat to be drawn into spurious ‘debates’ which give unwarranted airtime to contrarians and industry shills (this is known as bias-in-balance). And, as in RTÉ’s case, without a senior correspondent to guide them, the news desk often simply ducks the story entirely. The lone voices in the Montrose wilderness (Duncan Stewart and Met Éireann) have this in common: neither is on the staff of RTÉ.

Analyst and author, Prof Justin Lewis argues that the media is collectively engaged in “one of the most obstinate displays of inertia in human history, a time when, like latter-day Neros, we fiddle while our planet burns”.

Environmental scientist, Prof Robert Brulle adds: “people take their cues about what’s important from what shows up in the headline of a newspaper”. The decline in public understanding of the gravity of climate change is directly attributable, he says, to decisions being made at editorial meetings every day.

It took forecaster Evelyn Cusack to remind us one evening last September: “climate change is not a matter of faith, it’s a matter of physics”.

- John Gibbons is a specialist environmental writer and commentator and is online at Thinkorswim.ie. Twitter: @think_or_swim

Posted in Global Warming, Irish Focus, Media, Sustainability | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments

Weird weather is our ‘new normal’

Posted on January 13, 2012 by John Gibbons

The folks over at TheJournal.ie asked me to do an OpEd on the ever weirder weather that is now featuring in pretty much every other news bulletin. Turns out that this is one seriously busy website. The posting has been viewed over 7,500 times and has attracted 90 user comments, with the usual generous contributions from skeptics/deniers, who swarm like flies on any article or commentary that dares ‘join the dots’ between weather disasters and the larger picture involving the slow death spiral of our gravely damaged biosphere. The piece is below:

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GIVEN THE DRAMATIC slump in media coverage of climate change compared to two or three years ago, you could be forgiven for thinking that it must all have been a bit of a storm in a teacup, rather like the Y2K panic back in the late 90s. This impression, while understandable, could hardly be further from reality.

The decline in public and media concern about climate change is doubly puzzling, considering that extreme weather events are now occurring with a frequency and intensity greater than at any time in the century and a half for which detailed instrumental global climate records have been tracked.

2011 was a year of unparalleled weather extremes, with heatwaves, droughts, flooding and a host of other ‘natural disasters’ causing record damage from Russia to the US, Australia, across Asia and in Europe.

Ireland, thanks to its maritime location, is buffered to a degree against the most severe weather events, yet even here, disasters like the freak flooding in the Dublin area last October that left two dead and the Dundrum Shopping Centre under water are recurring with ominous regularity.

Across the continental US, almost 3,000 monthly weather records were smashed in 2011. Severe weather events cost the US over $50billion last year. Early in 2011, unprecedented floods in Australia covered an area almost twice the size of France.

In fact, the 13 warmest years since global records began in the 19th century have all occurred since 1998. This year will almost certainly continue this trend. Even though 2012 is only a few days old, this can be predicted with a high degree of confidence. I can also predict that 2012 will see another tumultuous year of weather extremes right across the globe. And next year may well be worse again…

Given that Met Eireann struggles to predict the weather here on this one small island more than a handful of days ahead, how can I be so sure about projections months, even years ahead and right around the globe?

‘The economic crisis has blindsided us to a rapidly unfolding tragedy’

The answer is surprisingly simple: global average temperatures are rising rapidly, and human activities are the main driver. Last year, we pumped yet another 30 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2), a powerful ‘greenhouse’ gas, into the atmosphere.

Year after year, tens of billions of tonnes of CO2 arising from burning of fossil fuels make their way into the atmosphere, where they remain for hundreds, even thousands of years into the future. As this layer of invisible heat-trapping gases thickens, so the global temperature rises, slowly but inevitably.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in its landmark 2007 report, warned that if carbon emissions were not quickly and drastically reduced, the world would face ever-worsening weather disasters, leading within decades towards a global environmental catastrophe on a scale not witnessed in recorded human history.

The IPCC’s warnings have gone unheeded, and carbon emissions are now running at levels well beyond the IPCC’s “worst case” scenario figures, which projected a cataclysmic 4C rise in global average temperatures this century.

The obsession among the media and politicians with the economic crisis has blindsided us to a rapidly unfolding environmental tragedy that is on course to demolish the world economy (which depends entirely on natural resources) and plunge billions of us into crushing poverty as well as drastically diminishing biological diversity on this planet for millennia. Unstoppable sea level rises will, in time, wipe most of today’s coastal settlements from the map of the world.

Scientists have a name for all of this: The Sixth Extinction. The very survival of millions of species now hangs in the balance, chief among them the genus homo sapiens, a young species which has enjoyed global hegemony for barely a hundred centuries (the dinosaurs ruled for an impressive 160 million years).

If this all sounds like the plot from a Hollywood disaster movie, keep in mind that these projections are from the world’s most respected scientific experts and organisations. And they don’t do science fiction.

John Gibbons is a specialist environmental writer and commentator and is online atThinkOrSwim.ie. Twitter: @think_or_swim

Posted in Global Warming, Media, Sceptics, Sustainability | 7 Comments

2011 – another year of living dangerously

Posted on December 22, 2011 by John Gibbons

It’s been one hell of a year for the planet, with the meteorological and climatic record books being re-written and in some cases, thrown away. This year ushered the concept of the ‘new normal’ into being, as US scientists simply ran out of superlatives to describe the rate of change being recorded.

John Vidal, the Guardian’s environment editor, has just published a detailed review of the year. It’s well worth reading, with plenty of useful source links, for anyone interested in getting to grips with the ever-quickening rate of acceleration of ‘weird weather’ phenomena. When scattered willy-nilly across the media, it can be difficult to grasp just how fast this subtle freight train of climate destabilisation is now moving.

We are in debt to the Guardian newspaper for its trojan efforts at covering climate, environment and sustainability issues systematically, rather than reactively, as is unfortunately still the norm right across the Irish media (am I correct in thinking that since Paul Cunningham moved to Europe, RTE simply hasn’t bothered replacing the role of Environment Correspondent? If this remains the case, it is a scandal of myopic incompetence and dereliction of its public service remit to rival the Kevin Reynolds fiasco).

This lack of specialist expertise on the environment beat renders media outlets particularly vulnerable to being blindsided by industry-funded spooks like the Global Warming Policy Foundation and a variety of neoliberal ideologues with personal or political agendas passing themselves off as independent experts.

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THE YEAR 2011 was another ecologically tumultuous year, with greenhouse gases rise to record levels, Arctic sea ice nearly equalling 2007′s record melt, and temperatures the 11th highest ever recorded.

It was marked on the ground by unparalleled extremes of heat and cold in the US, droughts and heatwaves in Europe and Africa and record numbers of weather-related natural disasters.

In addition, 2011 saw the world population reach 7 billion, the second worst nuclear disaster and record investments in renewable energy.

The 41 sea, land and air indicators used by the US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to measure sea and land temperatures showed unequivocally that the world continued to warm throughout 2011. In July, NOAA reported that the last 300 months had all been above average temperature and that the 13 warmest years had all occurred in the 15 years since 1997. 2011 was additionally remarkable, it said, because a “La Niña” event was taking place, a naturally occurring oceanic cooling phenomenon that would normally bring temperatures down.

Despite stagnation or economic recession in many industrialised countries, concentrations of CO2, measured at Mauna Loa in Hawaii, peaked at more than 394 parts per million in May and are now 39% above where they were at the start of the industrial era and approaching the point when some scientists say it will be nearly impossible to contain global warming.

In September, Germany’s University of Bremen reported that Arctic sea ice had hit a record low, based on data from a Japanese sensor on Nasa’s Aqua satellite. Days later, the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre, using a different satellite data set, reported that ice coverage in 2011 was marginally greater, making 2011 the second-lowest on record.

Christophe Kinnard, of the Centre for Advanced Studies in Arid Zones in La Serena, Chile reported in November that both the duration and magnitude of the current decline in sea ice “seem to be unprecedented for the past 1,450 years”.

“Everything is trending up – surface temperature, the atmosphere, and it seems also that the ocean is warming and there is more warm and saline water that makes it into the Arctic. The sea ice is eroded from below and melting from the top,” said Kinnard.

While eastern Europe, Russia, Pakistan and the Middle East suffered the most from weather extremes in 2010, it was the turn of North America in 2011. The continent experienced massive flooding along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, record wildfires and a crippling droughtin the south.

More than 2,941 monthly records for extreme heat and extreme cold were broken in all 50 US states in 2011, said the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The costs of weather-related disasters spiralled. The US experienced 14 separate disasters each costing over $1bn. In total, financial losses were estimated at over $50bn.

“In many ways, 2011 rewrote the record books. From crippling snowstorms to the second deadliest tornado year on record to epic floods, drought and heat, and the third busiest hurricane season on record, we’ve witnessed the extreme of nearly every weather category,” said NOAA spokesman Christopher Vaccaro.

2011 was described by many commentators as the “year of the tornado“. Between January and June, 43 major thunderstorms released nearly 1,600 tornadoes in the central, southern and eastern United States. Half happened in April, and 226 of them on April 27.

But 2011 was also the year of too much or too little water. It began with devastating floods in Australia which covered an area the size of France and Germany combined, and ended with tropical storm Washi killing nearly 1,000 people and making 300,000 homeless in the Philippines.

Thailand’s worst floods in 50 years claimed 730 lives, northern China’s drought that started in 2010 continued well into 2011 and was the worst drought to hit the country in 60 years.

Massive droughts affected some of the world’s richest and poorest communities. The worst drought in 60 years gripped more than 10 million people and led to the death of thousands of people and millions of animals in Somalia and the Horn of Africa.

Meanwhile, Texas was badly hit by heatwaves and drought. The city of Austin had 27 consecutive days where the temperature was over 100F and 90 days in total when it reached that level. The Texas Forest Service said the continuing drought had killed 100-500 million trees, a figure that did not include the ones killed in wildfires that scorched around 4m acres of the state.

The year began and ended with drought and record temperatures in Europe. The average temperature for northern Norway in November was 5.3C (9.5F) above normal, the Danube was at its lowest levels in 60 years, and Germany and much of northern Europe had the driest end to a year since recordkeeping began in 1881.

2011 was also an extraordinary year for major earthquakes. In the seven weeks between 1 January and 21 February, Argentina, Chile, Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Tonga, Burma, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, Sulawesi, Fiji and New Zealand were all hit.

But by far the most damaging quake was the one that led to Japan’s deadly tsunami on 11 March. This killed 15,500 people, caused the meltdowns of three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, and led to 160,000 people fleeing the area or being moved away. By the end of the year, it was estimated to have cost around $210bn in lost production and physical damage. Decommissioning the station is expected to cost a further $15bn.

Arguments still rage over the radioactivity levels, but while the industry, backed by some western commentators, played down the consequences, levels of radioactive caesium were shown to have reached 50m times normal levels off the coast. As 2011 ended, it was still hard to accurately gauge the level of devastation, the amount of the meltdown and the exact radiation levels. Last week, the Japanese prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda, said its owners had at last brought the station into a state known as “cold shutdown”.

One clear fallout of the Fukushima disaster has been European countries turning their backs on nuclear power. Most significantly, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said in May that she would bring forward the phase-out of Germany’s nuclear power stations to 2022.Italians voted overwhelmingly against new nuclear reactors and theSwiss government moved to phase out its reactors.

Now for the good news. In July, the UN Environment Programme announced that investments in renewable energy had grown 32% in 2010, reaching a record $211bn since 2004. For the first time, investment in faster-growing developing economies was greater than that in developed economies.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance said renewable energy investments were projected to double over the next eight years and reach $395bn per year by 2020. The bad news is that the International Energy Agency (IEA) says even this will not be enough to stabilise emissions and controlclimate change.

The IEA’s sense of realism was underlined at the UN’s annual climate conference in December. The talks in Durban, South Africa, avoided a major split between big emitters and others, with an agreement between 194 countries to work towards a legally binding deal to cut emissions in the future, leaving only voluntary pledges in the meantime.

“Without much stronger commitments for the next 5-10 years the Durban outcome will stay nothing more than smoke and mirrors – an illusion of ambition with no real targets or clear timelines,” said Nnimmo Bassey, head of Friends of the Earth International.

Negotiators also concentrated on establishing carbon markets for forest protection and transport.

Conservationists battling the worldwide loss of forests welcomed satellite data from Brazil showing deforestation in the Amazon region had fallen to the lowest level for 23 years. However, new laws were passed in December that, if enacted, will allow ranchers to fell more trees near rivers and on mountaintop watersheds.

Tigers and other charismatic mega-fauna appeared to do better in 2011. Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Laos, Burma and Nepal protected a further 2m hectares of land for tigers. India – which holds half of the world’s tigers – estimated an increase in the population from 1,411 in 2007 to 1,706 today. However, the WWF announced that only 18-22 Siberian tigers remained in the wild in north-east China.

Unexpectedly, a significant increase was recorded in the Virunga mountains that are shared between Rwanda, The Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda. A WWF survey counted 480, an increase of 100 since the last count in 2003.

And in a small triumph for conservation, the UN Development programme declared in December that more than $100m had been raised, mostly by Latin American countries, to temporarily leave in the ground the estimated 900m barrels of oil believed to be below theYasuni national park in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

Posted in Global Warming, Sustainability | 7 Comments

Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will

Posted on December 14, 2011 by John Gibbons

Any lingering sense, however slight, that humanity could shake itself from its collective somnambulation in time to arrest the coming twin ecological and resource catastrophes was finally snuffed out this month in Durban.

Here, the nations of the world in essence agreed to defer commencing discussions to frame a roadmap leading to some more discussions that would begin as a matter of the greatest urgency…sometime in the next seven or eight years. Unless of course there is a Republican back in the White House in the coming years, or the Chinese, Indians or Indonesians decide that Kyoto, or son-of-Kyoto is definitely not for ‘developing’ nations.

And on and on the farce goes. Canada’s Environment Minister, Peter Kent explained earlier today that “Kyoto is not the path forward for a global solution for climate change’”. The alternate path proposed by the right-wing government led by Stephen Harper is to ape the Bush-era US position of making vague promises about future commitments, then walking away when these mean actually confronting the issue of limiting carbon emissions.

Canada has had an extraordinary backwards voyage over the last decade or so, from being vocal proponents of strong actions to limit climate-wrecking carbon emissions to joining the ranks of the energy industry’s most vociferous glove puppets.

What changed Canada so utterly was its decision to intensively exploit the massive Athabasca tar sands for oil production. This at a stroke made Canada global player in the energy market, with proven reserves of ‘unconventional’ (i.e. incredibly filthy) oil greater than Saudi Arabia. The IEA estimates Canada to have 178 billion barrels of recoverable oil buried beneath over 140,000 sq km of once-pristine boreal forests and peat bogs. All the wishful thinking and earnest diplomacy in the world will not alter the simple fact that this oil will be extracted and it will be burned, and let the devil take the hindmost.

The reason I labour the obvious is this: the time for optimism has passed. In truth, that light did not go out in Durban; it has in fact been in a death spiral for decades. It’s almost 20 years since the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. The 27 Principles enunciated in the ‘Rio Declaration’ and signed up to by the nations of the world read, in hindsight, like an elaborate prank. Sustainable development, ecosystem protection, poverty eradication, compensation for victims of pollution… the list goes on and on.

The section dealing with the precautionary principle is worth repeating (Principle 15): “In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.”

I nearly skipped past Principle 8: “To achieve sustainable development and a higher quality of life for all people, States should reduce and eliminate unsustainable patterns of production and consumption and promote appropriate demographic policies”.

If you harbour any remaining doubt as to the capacity of the world’s political leadership to talk pious claptrap, even in the face of imminent disaster, the Rio Declaration is as good a place as any to revisit.

“When faced with a predicament, seeking a solution isn’t just a useless thing to do; it is the wrong thing to do”. So argues Chris Martenson, author of ‘The Crash Course’. “Critical time and resources should be devoted to managing the outcome, not trying to do the impossible…by failing to appreciate the nature of our collective predicament, we place ourselves at greater risk, because the longer we dither, less time and fewer options remain”.

Lest this sounds defeatist, let me put it in an oh-so-familiar analogy: you’re on a luxury liner in mid-ocean. It hits a large object, and is badly damaged, but remains afloat, though there are reports of some flooding in the distant lower decks. The ashen-faced chief engineer reports that the ship will in fact sink, even though it may take several hours.

He is rounded on by the drunken financiers and economists at the bar. “Look around you, man, everything’s fine. This ship is too big to fail. Besides, what if you’re wrong, and you frighten all these good people for nothing. Besides, it’s bloody freezing outside, and I’ll be dammed if you think I’m getting into one of those rickety lifeboats…”

To save lives, they must abandon ship. To save lives, we must first abandon hope, for it is hope that is the enemy of resolve, holding out the chimera of ‘renewable’ or ‘sustainable’ fixes to a fathomless predicament we have, clinging to the guard rails of hope, mistaken for a series of manageable problems.

If only. If only most economists weren’t ideologically blinkered morons (“anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist” – Kenneth Boulding, 1933).

If only governments didn’t consist of spineless politicians badly advised by careerist civil servants and beholden to special interest groups and corporate cash. If only gross income inequality wasn’t so especially toxic to society (“An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics” – Plutarch (46-120 CE).

“It could be said that we (in the developed world) all live like kings, but truthfully, even the wealthiest king of times past couldn’t click on a link, order an item made halfway around the world and have it in his hands the next day”, writes Martenson. “That ability is something the ancient Greeks would have recognised as the power of a god, and so it is”.

The folks at Feasta, the Dublin-based foundation for the economics of sustainability draw their analogy not from Greek but rather ancient Roman tragedy. The fruits of much of their recent labour have been drawn together in a powerful volume entitled ‘Fleeing Vesuvius – overcoming the risks of economic and environmental collapse’.

The Vesuvius analogy is apt. The volume would have sounded rather odd if instead it were titled: ‘Stopping Vesuvius Erupting In the First Place’, since any rational analysis would quickly realise the folly of such an undertaking. And so it is with industrial civilisation. We cannot alter its trajectory in any meaningful way. We can however, make some pretty accurate estimates about that trajectory, if we choose to be guided by the abundant available scientific knowledge.

I wrote about a Feasta paper, ‘Tipping Points’ in the Irish Times in April 2010 and found myself quite convinced by author David Korowicz (his chapter on energy in ‘Vesuvius’ is equally compelling). As I read and re-read ‘Crash Course’, Korowicz’s words about industrial civilisation being propelled along by an ever-expanding consumption of readily available, easily affordable high grade (i.e. fossil) energy were ringing in my ears.

What both sources have in common is the belief that the unravelling of our wholly unsustainable exponential debt-based global economic system is likely to be the trigger factor that sets of the shock waves of cascading failures that ripple, then tear apart, the fabric of a system that is both unknowably complex and self-organising.

“What we now require is rapid emergency planning coupled with a plan for longer term adaptation,” counsels Korowicz. It has been one hell of a ride, but the fact remains that this pleasure cruise is over. It’s time to let go of the comfort blanket of false hope and instead make our way, with great reluctance and resolve, towards the lifeboats, while there is still some time, and while relative calm still prevails.

Adjusting to this predicament is counterintuitive; the temptation to continue trying to wish and will this away is overwhelming but, as I’ve argued here, both unhelpful and futile. Once you accept that the coming storm cannot be headed off, then you start planning to seek shelter and learn to survive the storm and its aftermath, in the best way you can, ideally in the company of other ‘early accepters’.

The fact that I desperately want to be wrong about all this only reinforces my conviction that no, this is indeed how it is. Psychologist John Sharry, also writing in Vesuvius, put it thus: “when we consider the scale of the problems we face, it is easy to retreat into denial or wishful thinking or feel despair, helplessness or hopelessness about change”.

Sharry offers us ‘the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will’ in confronting what lies ahead. It’s not a bad way of squaring up otherwise crippling contradictions. “When we take collective, concrete and constructive action, in the process we generate hope and a sense of movement and possibility.” This can also, Sharry concludes, “counterbalance the cynicism, despair and inaction that could hobble the next generation”.

The hour is late, the road ahead unmapped and uncertain. Let us begin.

Posted in Biodiversity, Economics, Energy, Global Warming, Media | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 11 Comments

Ireland after Durban

Posted on December 12, 2011 by James Nix

After Durban, how Ireland will deliver its 20 per cent emissions cut moves centre-stage.

We need to move quickly from the headline figure to a hard-minded sector-by-sector approach.

The new climate agreement reached in Durban is bitterly disappointing for its lack of ambition, revealing a world held back by the continued foot-dragging of the United States in particular. But at least the Durban deal contains a pledge that all the major polluters will put in place legally binding measures to reduce climate change emissions over the next three years.

The EU already has binding measures in place, and under them, Ireland must cut emissions 20 per cent by 2020. Indeed, Minister Phil Hogan told the Durban negotiations that the Irish Government “is prioritising the climate agenda to ensure that we realise our 2020 climate ambitions and position ourselves on a pathway to a low carbon economy”.

EU law does not specify how that 20 per cent cut will apply in Ireland, but the reality is that we must move very quickly to translate our headline figure into real action in all the key sectors. Agriculture, transport, buildings, waste management and domestic fuel use are central to this effort.

Agriculture and transport between them account for around half of Ireland’s emissions. Agriculture alone accounts for 30% and increased by 0.2% in 2010. The government’s current agricultural policy is set out in Food Harvest 2020. This strategy document envisages a 50% increase in milk output by 2020. Clearly, it will be impossible to reduce or even contain emissions from agriculture if the number of dairy cows increases rapidly over the next 8 years.

There are other goals we can adopt in agriculture. There are strong arguments to increase the income of farm families by adding value on the farm – rather than focusing on the volume of goods produced. In this way there is scope to increase farm revenue without damaging our environment and the longer term prospects for food production. Concentrating on massive hikes in production – as Food Harvest 2020 does – is no guarantee of higher income.

Countries such as Austria are following a different vision to Ireland, working to minimise input costs (such as electricity and diesel), adding value at farm level using direct sales, and encouraging multi-product farming. At the centre of this approach is reconnecting farms and local economies, and the first steps in how this strategy could be applied in Ireland have already been documented.* Work is also slow in Ireland in terms of implementing feedmix changes and the use of biomass, and a greater focus here would deliver progress.

More sustainable transport and better agriculture policy are linked, if indirectly. Nothing damages local producers more than massive out-of-town hyper-markets served by vast expanses of free parking. Sadly, a great part of floorspace in these stores tends to be given over to non-Irish produce, or products with limited country-of-origin information.

In 2009 the Government pledged to introduce minimum car parking charges at retail centres, much like the plastic bag levy. It won’t be a popular idea at the beginning – but it does offer long term dividends. Flagged in the Smarter Travel policy document two years ago, the idea would be to collect 20 to 25 cents for every 2 or 3 hours of parking at major retail outlets where parking is currently free. Again the vision is simple, to nudge us to leave the car behind if we can. If we can’t, the charge is not prohibitive – and it does provide much-needed revenue for public transport alternatives so that we can wean ourselves off our over-reliance on imported oil in the medium to long term.

A step-wise approach should be adopted, introducing the levy first at large retail centres which have more than, say, 40 parking spaces available for free. Some revenue would need to go to back the retailer in the initially period to pay for installing the car park charging system, but over time the money would be sent to local government to provide sustainable transport.

All of our cities are struggling to secure funds for bike-sharing. Dublin has ambitious plans to deliver a 9-fold increase in its programme, but lacks the money. Cork, Limerick, Galway and Waterford are all finding it very tough to even start bike-sharing programmes. In rural areas local authorities must do far more to deliver sustainable transport. At the very least councils need to finance structures so that vetted volunteers can offer lifts to people living in isolated areas, and pave the way for county-wide services over time.

When it comes to cutting emissions from the use of energy in new homes, offices and other premises, we should, within a short few years, only construct new buildings that generate as much energy as is required for their occupation – i.e. carbon-neutral buildings.

For the most part, however, Ireland’s work is in retro-fitting existing buildings, with a document published by the Institute of International and European Affairs in September (“Thinking Deeper: Financing Options for Home Retrofit”) pointing the way in this regard. Minister Hogan controls Ireland’s stock of social housing and can lead the way in this area.

Turning to waste management, EU policy has been shifting for some time, but moved decisively in September 2011. From 2020 only material which cannot be recycled should be incinerated according to the European Commission’s “Roadmap to a Resource Efficient Europe”, a new policy that also applies to incineration with energy recovery. Incineration causes far more climate-altering emissions than recycling.

The most effective policy step to ensure recyclables are in fact recycled is to have incinerator levies. Critically, incinerator levies will help to ensure Ireland does not start burning recyclables only to be forced into a costly switch in direction in 8 years time. The Minister will need to change course here but the cost of not doing so is simply too high.

Applying a levy at the rate recommended by the ESRI (and there are strong arguments that this level is too low), waste fed into an incinerator would be charged at €10 per tonne. There is also no sense in having the ash that comes out of incinerators exempt from the landfill levy. For every 4 tonnes incinerated there is roughly 1 tonne of bottom ash which should, in 2012, be levied at the landfill rate of €65 per tonne. Over the course of 2012 the Carranstown incinerator in County Meath is expected to burn 200,000 tonnes of waste. Unless incinerator levies are introduced for next year, €5.25 million will be turned away from near-empty State coffers over the coming 12 months.

Coal and peat are the most polluting fuels. The failure to apply the carbon levy to both is likely to prove contrary to European competition law – and it means that the carbon levy isn’t really about minimising carbon, but is just another revenue-raising tool. Coal and peat need to be brought within the carbon levy from mid 2012 onwards. This will also give a much-needed boost to the wood sector in Ireland. Much of our private forest stock needs to be thinned out (to allow the rest of the timber to mature properly), and applying the carbon levy to the most polluting fuels will deliver job creation right across this sector well into the medium and long term.

The truth is that no sector can be indulged when it comes to emissions reductions. The recent review completed by Minister Hogan’s own department was downbeat about Ireland meeting its climate obligations under EU law. An attempt to give any sector a ‘free pass’ on emissions would compound the pressure on all other sectors. Cutting climate change emissions requires a hard-minded approach across all policy areas – and soon.

Minister Hogan has deferred legislation on climate change in favour of policy reform – but whether there is in fact commitment regarding policy measures remains to be seen. Certainly, come Ireland’s Presidency of the EU on 1 Jan 2013, Minister Hogan will have not have credibility unless it is clear – sector-by-sector – how Ireland will meet its 2020 commitment.

*Sage, Re-imagining the Irish foodscape, Irish Geography, 2010.

Posted in Global Warming | Tagged , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Phoney war ends as military eyes up new ecological foe

Posted on November 25, 2011 by John Gibbons

Late last year, Village magazine carried a cracking article entitled ‘Our deluded ESRI’, which opened as follows: “Patchy and boosterist forecasting, unquestioning neo-liberalism, an unempirical attitude to science and systemic ambivalence to environmentalism taint the performance of this apparently domestically-unassailable Irish institution”.

The author of that piece, Adrian Kelleher, did a particular public service in deconstructing the modus operandi of the ESRI’s Dr Richard Tol, a chameleon figure who is on the one hand presented as a mainstream ‘climate expert’ (usually by himself, admittedly, and mainly in a pseudo-science known as ‘climate economics’). The busy Dr Tol finds time to also be a member of the grandly titled ‘Academic Advisory Council‘ of a right wing climate denialist lobby front called the Global Warming Policy Foundation. It masquerades as a charity so the identity of its energy industry paymasters can be kept from public scrutiny.

Meanwhile, I am delighted that, after an extended absence from the fray, Adrian Kelleher returns today with the contribution below for ThinkOrSwim:

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At the time of writing Google throws up about 1.43 million pages with the exact phrase “global warming alarmism”, so it is already a cliché. The site Wattsupwiththat alone features alarmism no fewer than 15,200 times, alarmist 6,720 times and warmist on 3,610 occasions. Like the question “how long since you stopped beating your wife?” these words are designed to convey an implication but in a way that evades responsibility.

A typical claim is that environmental NGOs exaggerate scientific facts to try and mobilise opinion. Certainly there are some very unsettling scenarios out there. One study speculated that a “world of warring states” will emerge and that “disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life” with many countries driven to develop nuclear weapons if the uncertainty in current climate projections turns out to conceal powerful feedback mechanisms.

Another pointed out that “lack of access to stable supplies of water is reaching unprecedented proportions in many areas of the world”, that the global food supply is in serious jeopardy and claimed that within 15 years “perceptions of a rapidly changing environment may cause nations to take unilateral actions to secure resources, territory, and other interests”. It only got gloomier from there, stating that “scientists are currently uncertain whether we already have hit a tipping point at which climate change has accelerated and whether there is little we can do … Most scientists believe we will not know whether we have hit a tipping point until it is too late”.

It goes on to project a scenario where, in the wake of a weather event of unprecedented severity occurring within just 10 years, the US president writes in his diary that “the scenes were like the stuff from the World War II newsreels, only this time it was not Europe but Manhattan…”. The fictional president is left to regretfully ponder his own failures: “the problem has been our whole attitude about globalization… we have not prepared sufficiently for the toll that irresponsible growth is having on the environment”. American presidents are not known for placing the words “irresponsible” and “growth” side by side, so do these studies reflect extremist NGOs frightening the public with overblown claims?

The two studies quoted originated in reality within different offices at the Pentagon. They represent the fear among military thinkers that threats to peace may loom that cannot be bombed or shot at. The first was a leaked report prepared by the Office of Net Assessment, a blue-skies intelligence and theoretical think tank at the core of the US military headed by Andrew Marshall who has served eight presidents in the post. The second was “Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World” by the National Intelligence Council.

Marshall, a figure whose public reticence belies his centrality to the American military, has been at the core of US strategic thinking since he worked alongside luminaries like John Von Neumann and John Nash (who was portrayed by Russell Crowe in “A Beautiful Mind”) at RAND in the 1950s and 60s, not to mention the real-life model for Dr Strangelove, Herman Kahn. When they weren’t trying to figure out what percentage society could endure of infants mutated in the wake of a nuclear exchange or how to maximise the number of Soviet fatalities, the RAND faculty made contributions of first-rate importance to economics and mathematics.

Marshall was appointed Director of Net Assessment by Nixon in 1973, where people like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were his protegΘes. There, he took charge of “transformation”, something as sweeping as it sounds: a re-imagination of the military as an information-centric institution which Donald Rumsfeld viewed as his crowning achievement. It’s difficult to imagine someone further removed than the ultra-hawk Marshall, who is 90 this year, from the tofu-eating, kaftan-wearing hippie jealous of “wealth creators” that is sceptics’ stereotypical environmentalist.

The National Intelligence Council is described as a “center of strategic thinking within the US Government” and reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence, a four-star general or equivalent and the USA’s highest-ranking intelligence figure.

Global Trends isn’t the only NIC publication that worries about the strains that global warming will place on world peace. It commissioned a series of reports on climate impacts on developing countries. The one devoted to China cautions that within 20 years water stresses “may impact [its] social, economic, and political stability to a great extent”, notes that it has already experienced more extreme weather events of every kind recently than ever before and that these currently have direct costs of around $30Bn annually.

The military is one of the Republican Party’s most reliable voting blocks. The Military Times conducts occasional surveys of serving troops and its most recent one reported that just 8.4% considered themselves “liberal” or “very liberal” compared with 45.8% who replied “conservative” or “very conservative”. More than three times as many personnel reported being Republican as did Democrat. Officers were even more likely than the average to be Republican and it seems reasonable to assume that this pattern holds true of senior intelligence staff.

In recent years the Republican Party has set itself against the scientific establishment not just in relation to climate change but regarding a whole range of issues. The Bush presidency was accused of manipulating scientific data regarding stem cells, AIDS, homosexuality, deforestation and mining as well as fossil fuel use and its effects.

Why has the US intelligence community not succumbed to the Republican Party’s hostility to climate science? Part of the reason is that it has long and bitter experience of political interference, its effects on the accuracy and credibility of its work and implications for national security, a story that also includes RAND.

In the late 1950s, the collegiate world of American intelligence broke down as senior air force figures conspired with certain Republican politicians to exaggerate Soviet strength. The politicians then used the distorted figures to press for more military funding. Political pressure was exerted on other intelligence sources and their work was subject to constant criticism, causing their assessments in turn to become ever more inaccurate.

RAND was entrusted with optimising the size, structure and doctrine of the USA’s nuclear arsenal but as the figures it was fed grew more unrealistic, garbage in garbage out caused its results to become progressively more misleading. The result was serious damage to the strategic security of the United States, not to mention the waste of vast sums of money on poorly-selected weapons. Much of the wasted money ended up in the hands of corrupt defence contractors that were later shown to have routinely paid bribes at home and abroad, and the episode influenced Eisenhower’s famous farewell speech where he warned of the dangers of the “military-industrial complex”.

The entire process was repeated in the 1970s when Republicans including Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld created a special group called Team B which distorted intelligence about Soviet missile strengths, once again resulting in squandered resources and funds being diverted to counter imaginary threats. The mutual incomprehension between the superpowers that was an enduring, dangerous and destabilising feature of the Cold War was thus aggravated during one of its most tense periods in the early 1980s.

In the run up to the Iraq war, Dick Cheney inserted a political team into the top of the CIA called the Office of Special Plans (OSP). Following a familiar script, the OSP laundered intelligence until it suited the objectives of the administration, showing what Bush and Cheney wanted to be true: that Saddam Hussein had secret nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programmes that threatened the world. Colin Powell was then handed a dossier of phoney intelligence and sent to the UN to justify the invasion.

When he found he had been exploited, Powell was embittered. “There were some people in the intelligence community who knew at that time that some of these sources were not good,” he said later, “…they didn’t speak up. That devastated me”.

By this time, however, the trick was getting old and the CIA soon felt the blowback of public outrage. Repeated exploitation as tools of right-wing politicians caused a backlash among staff. One CIA officer went on the record to describe Cheney’s OSP as “a threat to world peace”, adding that it “lied and manipulated intelligence to further its agenda of removing Saddam. It’s a group of ideologues with pre-determined notions of truth and reality”.

Ironically repeated manipulation of intelligence for political ends may have helped inoculate its intelligence agencies against political illusions. Hard-headed and conservative, they are nonetheless aware of how dangerous the manipulation of their work proved over 5 decades.

Since the end of the Bush administration, which discouraged its discussion, study of the political implications of global warming has exploded in US security circles. The recent quadrennial defence review devoted significant attention to the topic. Even the CIA has opened a centre to study its effects, promising to fast-track declassification of satellite imagery of use to geophysicists when it did so.

While the US military is an especially voracious consumer of fossil fuels, its recognition of the problem’s existence provides environmentalists with a gilt edged debating point in arguments with sceptics. By digesting the issue on conservative terms, it suggests ways in which the cross-party consensus on climate that exists elsewhere might be translated to the USA.

It goes without saying that famine cannot be bombed with precision munitions and missiles are of no use against carbon dioxide. The inescapable logic of US long-term intelligence is that spending on the military should actually be reduced and money redirected to emissions control in order to promote stability.

Another logical conclusion is that while models might place a floor under the cost of impacts, any attempt to put a ceiling to the figure is doomed. To the ‘tail risk’ of so-called black swan events must be added the possibility that even much milder climate impacts could have disastrous results due to the interplay of economic, political and environmental factors. History is replete with cautionary examples of societies such as the Maya or the Garamantes which imploded under environmental pressure.

In recognising that economic growth as the sole and paramount objective of governments could prove a deadly trap they demonstrate political courage their civilian bosses would do well to emulate.

Global Trends 2025 also makes an important leap in considering how future leaders will understand the world. GHG pollution continues to be aggravated at an ever increasing rate with no end in sight. It may be that by 2025 it will be apparent that extreme consequences can no longer be avoided. That would alter the perceptions and behaviour of political leaders in ways it’s hard to imagine as benign. “Unilateral actions to secure resources, territory, and other interests” means war plain and simple — and plausibly within 15 years rather than sometime after mid-century.

If the upsurge in interest in climate change indicates anything, it’s the unreality of much of the climate change debate. For example reinsurance rates are soaring to accommodate anticipated climate related costs and if sceptics really believed in what they said, they’d invest in those businesses, undercut their competitors and make a fortune. It says volumes about the sincerity of their purported beliefs that they don’t. Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no sceptics in insurance.

Likewise, while conservative politicians insist everything is fine the military professionals are preparing for dire implications. This isn’t just purely theoretical, for example designs of ships and aircraft are being re-examined and adapted to withstand more severe weather conditions.

In spite of all this it’s important to remember that alarmists really do exist, frightening the public with propaganda to dishonestly advance hidden agendas. Dick Cheney is chief among them. In fact global warming may be the only thing that does not alarm Cheney, a man inclined to fear that every rock in Asia might conceal a terrorist.

During his time in office he pressured the Centers for Disease Control until it edited to his liking a report to Congress on its health effects, deleting six pages. Not for the first time, he forced his “pre-determined notions of truth and reality” down the throats of the professionals.

Posted in Global Warming, Irish Focus, Sceptics | 9 Comments

Hogan’s U-turn on climate is short-sighted and damaging

Posted on November 7, 2011 by John Gibbons

Below, my article as it appears in today’s Irish Times:

WILL THE real Phil Hogan please stand up? On June 16th last, responding in the Dáil to questions from Sinn Féin’s Martin Ferris on whether climate change legislation was being “put on the long finger”, the Minister for the Environment gave a response that left no one in the chamber in any doubt as to where he stood: “Climate change is widely recognised as the most fundamental and far-reaching environmental challenge to humanity, both globally and nationally.”

When in opposition, Phil Hogan was even more passionate. In the Dáil last December, Hogan offered his strong support for then minister, John Gormley’s carbon budget.

However, as a seasoned campaigner, Hogan warned Gormley there would be concerted attempts to wreck this critical legislation. “I know it was not easy for the ministers to pursue this matter through Cabinet because it is an area with many vested and conflicting interests.” Fine Gael would be “as constructive as always in the climate change committee when the Bill comes before it”.

Gormley was at the time under a ferocious two-fronted assault from the farming and business lobbies, specifically the Irish Farmers’ Association and Irish Business and Employers Confederation. The Green Party’s failure to get climate legislation enacted on their watch was, however, primarily down to their own lack of political nous.

Meanwhile, the Phil Hogan who understood not alone the gravity of the climate crisis, but was also wise to the spin and special pleading from an assortment of lobby groups, has vapourised, to be replaced by his Doppelgänger, Phil “the fixer” Hogan.

Early last month, Hogan and his senior officials took part in a behind-closed-doors briefing organised by Ibec. The meeting, according to Ibec chief Danny McCoy, was “a timely opportunity for our members to influence the development of a climate policy framework”. Understandably, McCoy was “particularly pleased the Minister will be joining us”. In private. No reporters, no notes. Oisín Coghlan of Friends of the Earth remarked at the time that Hogan was running the “Galway tent of climate politics”.

The volte-face by Hogan has been stunning. His capitulation to special pleading by IFA/Ibec is testimony to the power of these unelected bodies in “shaping” legislation before it even reaches the public domain.

The damage from Hogan’s apparent solo run may be far-reaching. Ireland’s most senior climate scientist, Prof John Sweeney of NUI Maynooth, described it as “a really short-sighted decision, showing that political expediency, not vision, is driving policy in Ireland”. Hogan has been “undermined by vested interest groups, this is all just rhetoric and hot air, he’s simply kicking the ball down the road”, Prof Sweeney said. He said Hogan’s move would cost Ireland jobs and further damage our reputation.

One of the reasons Hogan proffered for walking away from Ireland’s climate change commitments is his claim that “food security is being ignored”. To grasp what an astonishingly uninformed statement this is, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation reported recently that climate change posed “potentially catastrophic impacts on food production”. The UN organisation called for urgent measures to mitigate climate change as the only way to ensure food security. In other words, the opposite to what Hogan says.

The spectre of climate disruption is no longer confined to far-away places. The growing impacts are hitting home here in Ireland, years ahead of projections. The upsurge in destructive weather events, including the recent massive flood that submerged parts of Dublin, are harbingers of a rapidly warming atmosphere. A deluge of similar intensity in late summer would wipe out most of the Irish cereal harvest. “Food security” without climate stabilisation is oxymoronic.

On the same morning last week that Hogan’s bombshell was dropped, former president Mary Robinson was pointing out that, left unchecked, climate change could reduce global output by a ruinous 20 per cent. As the authoritative 2006 Stern report on climate economics argued, climate change is like a smouldering fire – the most costly and dangerous approach by far is to just ignore it. This “do nothing” agenda is promoted by an influential cabal of neoliberal economists who support economic growth at all costs.

Robinson also pointed out that emissions from developed countries like Ireland are already wreaking havoc in some of the poorest places on earth. Many Irish people would be horrified to think that one Minister was rewriting the programme for government to put special interests ahead of our moral, ethical and legal obligations. In climate change, as in politics, as we sow, so shall we reap.

Posted in Economics, Global Warming, Irish Focus | Tagged , , , , , , | 25 Comments

Population surge difficult to halt and almost impossible to reverse

Posted on October 31, 2011 by John Gibbons

My article, as it appears in this morning’s Irish Times:

Today, just like every day for the last 50 years, around half a million babies will be born. Every 16 days or so, the equivalent of the population of Ireland is added to our burgeoning numbers. Annually, that’s a new Germany.

Astonishingly, the number of human babies born in just one day exceeds the total number of our closest living relatives, the great apes, alive in the world. Almost all our cousin primates are now in in sharp decline, with some in an extinction spiral. All, that is, except one. Our gain is nature’s pain.

To describe us as super-abundant is a heroic understatement. “Humans are 10,000 times more common than we should be, according to the rules of the animal kingdom”, notes biologist Dr Steve Jones.

Right up to the dawn of the industrial revolution, global population never exceeded 600 million – or less than one tenth of today’s level. Fossil fuels changed all that.

Today, human beings, for good or ill, are the greatest single force of nature on the planet. Our sheer numbers, combined with ready access to cheap hydrocarbon energy, mean we are quite literally reshaping the world. The pace, scale and consequences of this colossal endeavour are becoming ever more apparent.

“Science makes clear that we are transgressing planetary boundaries that have kept civilisation safe for the past 10,000 years. Evidence is growing that human pressures are starting to overwhelm the Earth’s buffering capacity”, according to a recent statement from a group of Nobel laureate scientists. “Humans have propelled the planet into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene – the Age of Man”.

Our hegemony has manifestly not been accompanied by a widespread awareness of the limits of our finite world. Twenty, perhaps even 10 years ago, it could still be argued that we simply didn’t truly grasp that human activity could jeopardise the biosphere as a whole.

Over the last two decades, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has confirmed, with ever increasing certainty, that the by-products of the activity of billions of humans, their industries and their agriculture, are drastically altering the chemical composition of the atmosphere.

The scientific evidence is surprisingly unambiguous: the price of persisting with our current twin trajectory of population and economic grown is a near-certain abrupt ending this century of the benign global climatic conditions that have prevailed since the end of the last Ice Age.

Back in the 1950s and 60s, there were repeated warnings that global food production could not keep up with rapid population growth, and large-scale famines could be common by the 1980s. This didn’t happen, thanks in large part to the ‘green revolution’, which combined new high-yield grains with the massive expansion and industrialisation of agriculture. In short, the process of turning oil into food.

In accepting the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in boosting food output, Dr Norman Bourlag warned: “the green revolution has won temporary success in man’s war against hunger…but the frightening power of human reproduction must also be curbed”. Failure to rein in human numbers and impacts, Bourlag added, would mean: “the (21st) century will experience sheer human misery on a scale that will exceed the worst that has ever come before”.

The geometric nature of population growth makes it extraordinarily difficult to arrest, and almost impossible to reverse. The last population doubling took only 40 years. Even if global population growth rate drops to just one per cent, today’s seven billion would swell to an unimaginable 14 billion in 70 years.

This will manifestly never happen. Already, the biosphere is showing signs of acute system failure. The sequestration of vast swathes of the land surface for agriculture has compromised the planet’s self-regulatory systems. Pollution is further crippling the absorptive capacity of these systems.

More humans and ever more unequal ‘economic growth’ mean less and less space for the millions of other species which comprise the complex interdependent web of life. Levelling the rainforests and overfishing the oceans produces short-term profits for some, but at a fearsome cost to our children’s generation. “We are degrading natural ecosystems at a rate unprecedented in human history”, according to the World Wildlife Fund, which has tracked a catastrophic 30 per cent decline in biological diversity on the planet since 1970.

The convergence of crises that threaten humanity and the wider biosphere are the by-products of an unprecedented spasm of growth, in both population and expectation. Neither is sustainable; in combination, they are lethal. What is truly remarkable is not just that there are seven billion people alive today; rather, it’s the lack of any sense of existential awareness of what this actually means for us all.

Decades of economist-inspired cornucopianism, which enshrined impossible growth as somehow normal and desirable, have numbed us to our predicament. As the US satirist H.L. Mencken put it: “It is the nature of the human species to reject what is true but unpleasant and to embrace what is obviously false but comforting”.

John Gibbons is a specialist environmental writer and commentator and is on Twitter: @think_or_swim

Posted in Global Warming, Irish Focus, Sustainability | 22 Comments

“We are earning the scorn and condemnation of history”

Posted on October 21, 2011 by John Gibbons

He’s hardly a household name, but US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (a Democrat representing Rhode Island) delivered a quite extraordinary 23-minute speech last week on the floor of the Senate – the speech we hoped, back in the heady days of late 2008, to hear the incoming President one day deliver – and deliver on.

That, of course, hasn’t happened, and the world’s inexorable slide towards resource exhaustion and carbon-fuelled climate collapse has barely been dented by the change of incumbent in the White House from an outright climate change denier to a young president who has turned out to be simply a captive of a corporatised, utterly broken and bastardised political system. In hindsight, it was naive on my part, and on the part of millions around the world, to think that any one politician could or would dare to step beyond politics-as-usual and put his career on the line for the overwhelmingly greater good of preventing climate chaos. Continue reading →

Posted in Global Warming, Sceptics, Sustainability | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments

A little something for the weekend…

Posted on September 30, 2011 by John Gibbons

While smoking out climate change deniers can offer a little light relief, it’s important not to lose sight of what exactly is on the line here. For this, I am grateful to Joe Romm over at ThinkProgress for the following reminder:

mit-wheels.gif

The above ‘wheel’ graphic was developed by scientists at MIT to try to visualise complex options. The ‘No policy’ wheel’ is on the left, and that’s the wheel we are collectively now rolling. The wafer-thin blue segment at the very top represents the scale of likelihood of global warming not exceeding the catastrophic tipping point of +2C. Mid-range projections swing between 4-6C and there’s a one in four chance that the heating will be 7C, 8C or even more. Continue reading →

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How to demolish a denier: scientist fillets Pat Kenny

Posted on September 27, 2011 by John Gibbons

Prof Richard Somerville of the University of California is one of the world’s top climate experts. A lead author for the IPCC’s AR4, he is research professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He is also a big fan of John Tyndall, the 19th century scientific genius from Leighlinbridge, and (at least until Seán O’Brien hit the Ireland rugby squad) Carlow’s most famous son.

Somerville was in Dublin earlier tonight to deliver a lecture on the amazing legacy of scientific discoveries attributed to the dogged and ingenious research work carried out by Tyndall over a glittering career. With the international focus on climate science, the EPA was celebrating the 150th anniversary of the publication in 1861 of Tyndall’s landmark paper, entitled ‘On the Absorption and Radiation  of  Heat  by  Gases  and Vapours’. Continue reading →

Posted in Global Warming, Irish Focus, Media, Sceptics | Tagged , , | 25 Comments

The devil or the deep blue sea – our nuclear conundrum

Posted on September 16, 2011 by John Gibbons

Twenty five years ago, in the early hours of April 26, 1986 a botched safety test led to a massive explosion at one of the four nuclear reactors at Chernobyl in Belarus. This was the world’s most serious nuclear event since the US air force dropped nuclear weapons on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in August 1945.

In the quarter century since the Chernobyl disaster, a powerful narrative has built up to the effect that nuclear power is simply too dangerous to be used. Among the environmental community in Ireland and elsewhere, opposition to nuclear power became conflated with opposition to nuclear weapons. And who in their right minds would want but to limit the development and distribution of nuclear weapons? Continue reading →

Posted in Energy, Global Warming, Nuclear, Sustainability | Tagged , , , , , | 10 Comments

When ‘functionally insane’ seems normal, time to worry

Posted on September 6, 2011 by John Gibbons

Every now and again I try to take a couple of hours out of life in La La Land (or was it Namaland?) to check in on the state of the real world. You know the one, it sustains all life, it’s the one upon whose well being all human hopes, dreams and plans depend. Yes, that one, the very one we’re collectively killing just as fast as we possibly can.

Of course, only crazy people see the crippling of the biosphere in the coming decades as a crisis. The grown ups, the politicians, the pundits who crowd around Marian Finucane on Saturdays and Sundays, the economists, columnists and assorted other soothsayers for what ails us have absolutely nothing whatever to say on the subject.

To be fair, for many of our humanities-educated commentariat this goes beyond just rank indifference and laziness; it is also generously leavened with quite spectacular levels of ignorance of even the most fundamental pass Leaving Cert science. Continue reading →

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More power to us if we choose nuclear option

Posted on August 25, 2011 by John Gibbons

Time to shake the ‘drill baby, drill’ debate on Ireland’s energy future up a little? here’s my piece in today’s Irish Times

OPINION: Instead of seeking partners to exploit hoped-for offshore fossil fuel resources, Ireland should consider building some medium-sized nuclear plants, writes JOHN GIBBONS

LAST MARCH, shortly after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Fintan O’Toole memorably described a nuclear power station as “a concrete testament to hubris”. The term, he reminded us, came from the ancient Greek, and is a “warning that there are boundaries we should not cross”.

The damage to the nuclear power plants resulting from a massive earthquake followed by a mega-tsunami apparently proved not the mistake of siting these facilities in a vulnerable coastal location, but rather, the folly of building any system that can ever fail catastrophically. Continue reading →

Posted in Energy, Global Warming, Nuclear, Sustainability | Tagged , , , , | 21 Comments

John Tyndall – Ireland’s Greatest Climate Scientist

Posted on August 17, 2011 by Paddy Morris

Science in 1861 was very different to now, and entire fields of study and concepts that are now taken for granted – quantum physics, the theory of relativity, continental drift, the big bang, DNA, the uncertainty principle, black holes, an expanding universe with multiple galaxies – simply didn’t exist.

Climate Science, contrary to what some people might like you to believe, did exist 150 years ago,and it was John Tyndall, an Irish scientist, who first correctly measured the relative infrared absorptive powers of the atmospheric gases – mainly nitrogen, oxygen, water vapour, carbon dioxide, ozone and methane.

With the publication in 1861 of ‘On the Absorption and Radiation  of  Heat  by  Gases  and Vapours,  and on the Physical Connexion of Radiation, Absorption, and Conduction’, Tyndall was the first to prove experimentally the existence of the greenhouse effect, which had been postulated by Joseph Fourier in 1824. This helped form the basis of modern climate science, and it laid the groundwork for Svante Arrhenius who quantified the relationship between CO2 and temperature in 1896 with his greenhouse law which read as follows: ‘if the quantity of carbonic acid increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression’. Continue reading →

Posted in Global Warming, Irish Focus | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments