Seven billion

Jared Diamond: Collapse

In the video below, Jared Diamond discusses the findings of his book Collapse.

The point of the book is best described by its subtitle: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive.

It would take days or even weeks to read the 560 pages of the book, but in only an hour, Diamond provides an effective summary in the video below.



Diamond developed a five point framework for considering the fate of societies. The following paragraph, taken from page 11 of the book, briefly describes the factors:

... I don't know of any case in which a societie's collapse can be attributed solely to environmental damage: there are always other contributing factors. When I began to plan this book, I didn't appreciate those complications, and I naively thought that the book would just be about enviromental damage. Eventually, I arrived at a five-point framework of possible contributing factors that I now consider in trying to understand any putative environmental collapse. Four of those sets of factors - environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, and friendly trade partners - may or may not prove significant for a particular society. The fifth set of factors - the society's response to its environmental problems - always proves significant.

The Ultimate Rollercoaster

Fossil fuels have powered human growth and ingenuity for centuries. Now that we're reaching the end of cheap and abundant oil and coal supplies, we're in for an exciting ride. While there's a real risk that we'll fall off a cliff, there's still time to control our transition to a post-carbon future. (source: post carbon institute)



The video gives a brief and entertaining introduction to the history of our fossil fuel adiction.

Here are links to more detail on some of the issues:

Our over use of resources

Passing planetary tipping points

The end of growth

Prosperity without growth

Erosion of ecosystem services and biodiversity loss

Anthropogenic global warming (AGW)

Evidence that human activities are causing global warming

Evidence that the great majority of those qualified to make a decision support the claims of AGW

Evidence that over Earth's history carbon dioxide has been the major determinant of climate

Peak oil

Consuming the Planet

The video below is a new documentary compiled from lectures by William Rees, who is the co-creator of the Eco-Footprint concept. He is a Professor in the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia.

Dr. Rees has measured humanity’s use of the planet’s resources, and has concluded - not surprisingly - that humans are using more resources of the Pale Blue Dot than the planet can supply us with sustainably.

Warning To the People of Earth from Bruce Mohun on Vimeo.

For more discussion by Dr. Rees of the issue of Ecological Footprints and their implications for the world follow this link

Here are some quotes from the link above:

Humankind now seems to be the victim of a global "catch-22" of its own making. More material growth, at least in the poor countries, seems essential for socioeconomic sustainability, yet any global increase in material throughput is ecologically unsustainable.

If just the present world population of 5.8 billion people were to live at current North American ecological standards (say 4.5 ha/person), a reasonable first approximation of the total productive land requirement would be 26 billion ha (assuming present technology). However, there are only just over 13 billion ha of land on Earth, of which only 8.8 billion are ecologically productive cropland, pasture, or forest (1.5 ha/person). In short, we would need an additional two planet Earths to accommodate the increased ecological load of people alive today. (Note the quotation above was written in 1994, the current world population is close to 7 billion people.)

Links

Follow this link for a Wikipedia article on Ecological Footprings

For another take on the issue of planetary boundaries see this post on the work of the Stockholme Resilience Center.

Professor Tim Jackson discusses the econimic and social implications of growth in a finite planet at this post.

Ecosystem services and biodiversity loss are issues related to the theme of this post - see this post for details.

Here is a link to an article from the Post Carbon Institute about the End Of Growth.

Biodiversity Loss

It is clear that we are seriously damaging our planet, the Pale Blue Dot. As shown here and here this damage is occurring in nine different ways. Although Climate Change is the one most discussed, biodiversity loss is also very impoatant, as the video below briefly explains:

Biodiversity - Vancouver Film School from Vancouver Film School on Vimeo.

Our society is embedded in an environment that provides a wide range of services that are very important in maintaining our communities and our lives. These are generally called ecoystem services, which can be divided into four main categories, as shown below:

Provisioning services

• food (including seafood and game), crops, wild foods, and spices
• water
• pharmaceuticals, biochemicals, and industrial products
• energy (hydropower, biomass fuels)

Regulating services

• carbon sequestration and climate regulation
• waste decomposition and detoxification
• purification of water and air
• crop pollination
• pest and disease control

Supporting services

• nutrient dispersal and cycling
• seed dispersal
• Primary production

Cultural services

• cultural, intellectual and spiritual inspiration
• recreational experiences (including ecotourism)
• scientific discovery
Source: Wikipedia.

One of the many websites that I regularly read is Conservationbytes written by Corey J.A. Bradshore. Bradshore has dedicated his "site to highlighting, discussing and critiquing the science of conservation that has demonstrated measurable, positive effects for global biodiversity".

Bradshore published the following talk on the web site. The first few minutes discuss the video at the top of this post.

Global erosion of ecosystem services

View more webinars from Conservation Bytes.

As the reality and dangers of biodiversity loss became increasingly evident an international response was clearly required. Consequently the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) was launched in 2001. The MA has produced a range of technical reports which are summarised in the Living Beyond Our Means report.

The key messages of the report are:

■ Everyone in the world depends on nature and ecosystem services to provide the conditions for a decent, healthy, and secure life.
■ Humans have made unprecedented changes to ecosystems in recent decades to meet growing demands
for food, fresh water, fiber, and energy.
■ These changes have helped to improve the lives of billions, but at the same time they weakened nature’s ability to deliver other key services such as purification of air and water, protection from disasters, and
the provision of medicines.
■ Among the outstanding problems identified by this assessment are the dire state of many of the
world’s fish stocks; the intense vulnerability of the 2 billion people living in dry regions to the loss of
ecosystem services, including water supply; and the growing threat to ecosystems from climate change
and nutrient pollution.
■ Human activities have taken the planet to the edge of a massive wave of species extinctions, further threatening our own well-being.
■ The loss of services derived from ecosystems is a significant barrier to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals to reduce poverty, hunger, and disease.
■ The pressures on ecosystems will increase globally in coming decades unless human attitudes and
actions change.
■ Measures to conserve natural resources are more likely to succeed if local communities are given
ownership of them, share the benefits, and are involved in decisions.
■ Even today’s technology and knowledge can reduce considerably the human impact on ecosystems.
They are unlikely to be deployed fully, however, until ecosystem services cease to be perceived as free and limitless, and their full value is taken into account.
■ Better protection of natural assets will require coordinated efforts across all sections of governments,
businesses, and international institutions. The productivity of ecosystems depends on policy choices on investment, trade, subsidy, taxation, and regulation, among others.

The report contains the following graphic illustrating the services provided by nine ecosystems. Click on the graphic for a larger and clearer view.

Electric Cars

Here is an advertisement for the new Nissan Leaf, electric car.



It is an attractive advertisement that is cleverly aimed at the environmentally conscious market.

The hard headed questions are: "What is the point of an electric car if it gets its electricity from coal fired power stations? Surely it is just swapping one form of carbon emission for another?"

Peter Sinclair has an interesting answer to this problem in the following video:



Maybe this is a win-win solution, and might be part of the answer to Climate Change and Peek Oil.

Which is all a perfect lead in to these two cartooms:

Rockstron on Planetary Boundaries

As Johan Rockström explains in this TED talk, human activities have severely strained our planet's resources. It is also clear that there are solutions to the problems that we are creating. For me the major issue is the inability of our national and international political systems to implement the solutions.

I have aleready written a post that included the work of Johan Rockström's group which can be found here. Rockstrom's work is also discussed by Tim Jackson in his talk about Prosperity Without Growth.



Here is the transcript for the talk:

We live on a human-dominated planet, putting unprecedented pressure on the systems on Earth. This is bad news, but perhaps surprising to you, it's also part of the good news. We're the first generation, thanks to science, to be informed that we may be undermining the stability and the ability of planet Earth to support human development as we know it. It's also good news, because the planetary risks we're facing are so large, that business as usual is not an option. In fact, we're in a phase where transformative change is necessary, which opens the window for innovation, for new ideas and new paradigms. This is a scientific journey on the challenges facing humanity in the global phase of sustainability.

On this journey, I'd like to bring, apart from yourselves, a good friend, a stakeholder, who's always absent when we deal with the negotiations on environmental issues, a stakeholder who refuses to compromise -- planet Earth. So I thought I'd bring her with me today, on stage, to have her as a witness of a remarkable journey, which humbly reminds us of the period of grace we've had over the past 10,000 years. This is the living conditions on the planet over the last 100,000 years. It's a very important period. It's roughly half the period when we've been fully modern humans on the planet. We've had the same, roughly, abilities that developed civilizations as we know it. This is the environmental conditions on the planet.

Here, used as a proxy, temperature variability. It was a jumpy ride. 80,000 years back in a crisis, we leave Africa, we colonize Australia in another crisis, 60,000 years back, we leave Asia for Europe in another crisis, 40,000 years back, and then we enter the remarkably stable Holocene phase, the only period in the whole history of the planet, that we know of, that can support human development. A thousand years into this period, we abandon our hunting and gathering patterns. We go from a couple of million people to the seven billion people we are today, The Mesopotamian culture: we invent agriculture, we domesticate animals and plants. You have the Roman, the Greek and the story as you know it. The only place, as we know it, that can support humanity.

The trouble is we're putting a quadruple sqeeze on this poor planet, a quadruple sqeeze, which, as its first squeeze, has population growth, of course. Now, this is not only about numbers. This is not only about the fact that we're seven billion people committed to nine billion people, it's an equity issue as well. The majority of the environmental impacts on the planet have been caused by the rich minority, the 20 percent that jumped onto the industrial bandwagon in the mid-18th century. The majority of the planet, aspiring for development, having the right for development, are in large aspiring for an unsustainable lifestyle, a momentous pressure.

The second pressure on the planet is, of course, the climate agenda, the big issue, where the policy interpretation of science is that it would be enough to stabilize greenhouse gases at 450 ppm to avoid average temperatures exceeding two degrees, to avoid the risk that we may be destabilizing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, holding 6 meters -- level rising, the risk of destabilizing the Greenland Ice Sheet, holding another seven meters -- sea level rising. Now, you would have wished the climate pressure to hit a strong planet, a resilient planet, but unfortunately, the third pressure is the ecosystem decline. Never have we seen, in the past 50 years, such a sharp decline of ecosystem functions and services on the planet, one of them being the ability to regulate climate on the long term, in our forests, land and biodiversity.

The forth pressure is surprise, the notion and the evidence that we need to abandon our old paradigm, that ecosystems behave linearly, predictably, controllably in our, so to say, linear systems, and that, in fact, surprise is universal, as systems tip over very rapidly, abruptly and often irreversibly. This, dear friends, poses a human pressure on the planet of momentous scale. We may, in fact, have entered a new geological era, the Anthropocene, where humans are the predominant driver of change at a planetary level.

Now, as a scientist, what's the evidence for this? Well, the evidence is, unfortunately, ample. It's not only carbon dioxide that has this hockey stick pattern of accelerated change. You can take virtually any parameter that matters for human well-being -- nitrous oxide, methane, deforestation, overfishing land degredation, loss of species -- they all show the same pattern over the past 200 years. Simultaneously, they branch off in the mid-50s, 10 years after the second world war, showing very clearly that the great acceleration of the human enterprise starts in the mid-50s. You see, for the first time, an imprint on the global level. And I can tell you, you enter the disciplinary research in each of these, you find something remarkably important, the conclusion that we may have come to the point where we have to bend the curves, that we may have entered the most challenging and exciting decade in the history humanity on the planet, the decade when we have to bend the curves.

Now, as if this was not enough -- to just bend the curves and understanding the accelerated pressure on the planet -- we also have to recognize the fact that systems do have multiple stable states, separated by thresholds -- illustrated here by this ball and cup diagram, where the depth of the cup is the resilience of the system. Now, the system may gradually -- under pressure of climate change, erosion, biodiversity loss -- lose the depth of the cup, the resilience, but appear to be healthy and appear to suddenly, under a threshold, be tipping over. [...] Changing state and literally ending up in an undesired situation, where new biophysical logic takes over, new species take over, and the system gets locked.

Do we have evidence of this? Yes, coral reef systems. Biodiverse, low-nutrient, hard coral systems under multiple pressures of overfishing, unsustainable tourism, climate change. A trigger and the system tips over, loses its resilience, soft corals take over, and we get undesired systems that cannot support economic and social development. The Arctic, a beautiful system, a regulating biome at the planetary level, taking the knock after knock on climate change, appearing to be in a good state. No scientist could predict that in 2007, suddenly, what could be crossing a threshold. The system suddenly, very surprisingly, loses 30 to 40 percent of its summer ice cover. And the drama is, of course, that, when the system does this, the logic may change. It may get locked in an undesired state, because it changes color, absorbs more energy, and the system may get stuck. In my mind, the largest red flag warning for humanity that we are in a precarious situation. As a sideline, you know that the only red flag that popped up here was a submarine from an unnamed country that planted a red flag at the bottom of the Arctic to be able to control the oil resources.

Now, if we have evidence, which we now have, that wetlands, forests, [...] the rainforests, behave in this nonlinear way. 30 or so scientists around the world gathered and asked a question for the first time, "Do we have to put the planet into the the pot?" So we have to ask ourselves: are we threatening this extraordinarily stable Holocene state? Are we in fact putting ourselves in a situation where we're coming too close to thresholds that could lead to deleterious and very undesired, if now catastrophic, change for human development? You know, you don't want to stand there. In fact, you're not even allowed to stand where this gentleman is standing, at the foaming, slippery waters at the threshold. In fact, there's a fence quite upstream of this threshold, beyond which you are in a danger zone. And this is the new paradigm, which we gathered two, three years back, recognizing that our old paradigm of just analyzing and pushing and predicting parameters into the future, aiming at minimalizing environmental impacts, is of the past.

Now we to ask ourselves: which are the large environmental processes that we have to be stewards of to keep ourselves safe in the Holocene? And could we even, thanks to major advancements in Earth systems science, identify the thresholds, the points where we may expect nonlinear change? And could we even define a planetary boundary, a fence, within which we then have a safe operating space for humanity? This work, which was published in "Nature," late 2009, after a number of years of analysis, led to the final proposition, that we can only find nine planetary boundaries with which, under active stewardship, would allow ourselves to have a safe operating space. These include, of course, climate. It may surprise you that it's not only climate. But it shows that we are interconnected, among many systems on the planet, with the three big systems, climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion and ocean acidification being the three big systems, where the scientific evidence of large-scale thresholds in the paleo-record of the history of the planet.

But we also include, what we call, the slow variables, the systems that, under the hood, regulate and buffer the capacity of the resilience of the planet -- the interference of the big nitrogen and phosphorus cycles on the planet, land use change, rate of biodiversity loss, freshwater use, functions which regulate biomass on the planet, carbon sequestration, diversity. And then we have two parameters which we were not able to quantify -- air pollution, including warming gases and air-polluting sulfates and nitrates, but also chemical pollution. Together, these form an integrated whole for guiding human development in the Anthropocene, understanding that the planet is a complex self-regulating system. In fact, most evidence indicates that these nine may behave as three Musketeers -- "One for all. All for one." You degrade forests, you go beyond the boundary on land, you undermine the ability of the climate system to stay stable. The drama here is, in fact, that it may show that the climate challenge is the easy one, if you consider the whole challenge of sustainable development.

Now this is the Big Bang equivalent then of human development within the safe operating space of the planetary boundaries. What you see here in black line is the safe operating space, the quantified boundaries, as suggested by this analysis. The yellow dot in the middle here is our starting point, the pre-industrial point, where we're very safely in the safe operating space. In the 50s, we start branching out. In the 60s already, through the green revolution and the Haber-Bosch process of fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere -- you know, human's today take out more nitrogen from the atmosphere than the whole biosphere does naturally as a whole. We don't transgress the climate boundary until the early '90s, actually, right after Rio. And today, we are in a situation where we estimate that we've transgressed three boundaries, the rate of biodiversity loss, which is the sixth extinction period in the history of humanity -- one of them being the extinctions of the dinosaurs -- nitrogen and climate change. But we still have some degrees of freedom on the others, but we are approaching fast on land, water, phosphorus and oceans. But this gives a new paradigm to guide humanity, to put the light on our, so far, overpowered industrial vehicle, which operates as if we're only on a dark, straight highway.

Now the question then is: how gloomy is this? Is then sustainable development utopia? Well, there's no science to suggest. In fact there is ample science to indicate that we can do this transformative change, that we have the ability to now move into a new innovative, a transformative gear, across scales. The drama is, of course, is that 200 countries on this planet have to simultaneously start moving in the same direction. But it changes fundamentally our governance and management paradigm, from the current linear, command and control thinking, looking at efficiencies and optimization towards a much more flexible, a much more adaptive approach, where we recognize that redundancy, both in social and environmental systems, is key to be able to deal with a turbulent era of global change. We have to invest in persistence, in the ability of social systems and ecological systems to withstand shocks and still remain in that desired cup. We have to invest in transformations capability, moving from crisis into innovation, and the ability to rise after a crisis, and, of course, to adapt to unavoidable change. This is a new paradigm. We're not doing that at any scale on governance.

But is it happening anywhere? Do we have any examples of success on this mindshift being applied at the local level? Well, yes, in fact we do, and the list can start becoming longer and longer. There's good news here, for example, from Latin America, where plow-based farming systems of the '50s and '60s led farming basically to a dead-end, with lower and lower yields, degrading the organic matter and fundamental problems at the livelihood levels in Paraguay, Uruguay, and a number of countries, Brazil, leading to innovation and entrepreneurship among farmers in partnership with scientists into an agricultural revolution of zero tillage systems combined with mulch farming with locally adapted technologies, which today, for example, in some countries, have led to a tremendous increase in area under mulch, zero till farming, which, not only produces more food, but also sequesters carbon.

The Australian Great Barrier Reef is another success story. Under the realization from tourist operators, fishermen, the Australian Great Barrier Reef Authority and scientists that the Great Barrier Reef is doomed under the current governance regime. Global change, [...], overfishing and unsustainable tourism, all together placing this system in the realization of crisis. But the window of opportunity was innovation and new mindset, which today has led to a completely new governance strategy to build resilience, acknowledge redundancy and invest in the whole system as an integrated whole, and then allow for much more redundancy in the system.

Sweden, the country I come from, has other examples, where wetlands in southern Sweden were seen as -- as in many countries -- as flood-prone polluted nuisance in the peri-urban regions. But again, a crisis, new partnerships, actors locally, transforming these into a key component of sustainable urban planning. So crisis leading into opportunities.

Now, what about the future? Well, the future, of course, has one massive challenge, which is feeding a world of nine billion people. We need nothing less than a new green revolution, and the planet boundaries shows that agriculture has to go from a source of greenhouse gases to a sink. It has to basically do this on current land. We cannot expand anymore, because it erodes the planetary boundaries. We cannot continue consuming water as we do today, with 25 percent of world rivers not even reaching the ocean. And we need a transformation. Well, interestingly, and based on my work and others in Africa, for example, we've shown that even the most vulnerable small-scale rainfall farming systems, with innovations and supplementary irrigation to bridge dry spells and droughts, sustainable sanitation systems to close the loop on nutrients from toilets back to farmers' fields, and innovations in tillage systems, we can triple, quadruple, yield levels on current land.

Elinor Ostrom, the latest Nobel laureate of economics, clearly shows empirically across the world that we can govern the commons if we invest in trust, local, action-based partnerships and cross-scale institutional innovations, where local actors, together, can deal with the global commons at a large scale. But even on the hard policy area we have innovations. We know that we have to move from our fossil dependence very quickly into a low-carbon economy in record time. And what shall we do? Everybody talks about carbon taxes -- it wont work -- emission schemes, but for example, one policy measure, feed-in tariffs on the energy system, which is already applied, from China doing it on offshore wind systems, all the way to the U.S., where you give the guaranteed price for investment in renewable energy, but you can subsidize electricity to poor people. You get people out of poverty. You solve the climate issue with regards to the energy sector, while at the same time, stimulating innovation -- examples of things that can be out scaled quickly at the planetary level.

So there is, no doubt, opportunity here, and we can list many, many examples of transformative opportunities around the planet. The key though in all of these, the red thread, is the shift in mindset, moving away from a situation where we are simply are pushing ourselves into a dark future, where [...] we say, "What is the playing field on the planet? What are the planetary boundaries within which we can safely operate?" and then backtrack innovations within that. But of course, the drama is, it clearly shows that incremental change is not an option.

So, there is scientific evidence. They sort of say the harsh news, that we are facing the largest transformative development since the industrialization. In fact, what we have to do over the next 40 years is much more dramatic and more exciting than what we did when we moved into the situation we're in today. Now, science indicates that, yes, we can achieve a prosperous future within the safe operating space, if we move simultaneously, collaborating on a global level, from local to global scale, in transformative options, which build resilience on a finite planet.

Thank you.

Our World in Crisis?

Over six nights recently I attended the Our World in Crisis? course run by Professor Jospeh Camilleri.

The course website can be found here

The course was very informative, challenging, and very well run. Thanks to Professor Camilleri for his organisation of the course and many interesting lectures and guest speakers.

The course covered the following:

Making sense of ‘our times’:

It is often said that we live in a globalising world? What does this mean? How different is today’s world from that of our parents or grandparents? Is the Modern world ushered in by the Renaissance and the revolutions of the 16th to the 18th centuries coming to an end? If so, what is taking its place?

The global financial crisis: why, where and how?

How do we explain the unprecedented growth of international finance? What factors have led to the current global financial crisis? What are the long-term implications of the crisis? What do we make of the responses of governments? Of the major international organisations? Where does the crisis leave the rich-poor divide? What are the prospects for greater international regulation?

Climate change: after Copenhagen

What are the key issues at stake in international climate change negotiations? Why are governments finding it so difficult to come to terms with the challenges posed by climate change? What are the prospects for stabilising global warming? Has Australia’s position on climate change shifted significantly since the election of the Rudd Government?

Arc of conflict: from Algeria to Afghanistan:

How do we account for the conflicts that have dotted the recent history of this part of the world? What lies behind the conflicts in the Middle East, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan? How do we make sense of the relationship between Islam and the West? Are international terrorism and the ‘war on terror’ here to stay?

Conflict resolution and the dialogue of cultures:

Are the world’s major civilisations on a collision course? With the decline of the world’s colonial empires, is Western dominance coming to an end? Are we seeing the rise of new centres of power and influence? Can collision be avoided? What are the prospects for dialogue and conflict resolution? How can dialogue be approached internationally? In Australia?

The puzzle that is Australia:

How well are Australians coping with the pressures of a rapidly changing world? How well is Australia managing cultural and religious diversity at home and in its relations with Asia and the Pacific? Does multiculturalism have a future? What of our relations with the United states on the one hand and China on the other? What are the options facing Australia over the next decade and beyond?

The assignments that I produced for the course and some of the research that I conducted on the topics can be found at the links below:

Globalisation, here and here.

Assignment letter to the editor here.

My notes on the Copenhagen conference here.

Assignment on the Global Financial Crisis here.

The Political Philosophy of Malcolm Fraser here.

Photos of Earth

On October 13, 1994, the famous astronomer Carl Sagan delivered a public lecture at his own university of Cornell. During that lecture, he presented this photo:



The photo above was taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 as it sailed away from Earth, more than 6 billion kilometres in the distance. Having completed its primary mission, Voyager at that time was on its way out of the Solar System. Ground Control, at Sagan's suggestion, issued commands for the distant space craft to turn around and, looking back, take photos of each of the planets it had visited. From Voyager's vast distance, the Earth was captured as a infinitesimal point of light actually smaller than a single pixel of the photo. You could easily miss the pale blue dot in the photograph if there wasn't the arrow pointing to it.

This is a profound and moving photograph, to which my pedestrian prose cannot do justice, instead I will quote Sagan's beautiful descrtiption:

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

The soundtrack of the video below is Sagan's extended description from which the paragraphs above were taken:



Towards the end of the video you may have noticed another famous space photograph - Earthrise:



The photograph was taken during the Apollo 8 mission to the moon.

Apollo 8 was the first human spaceflight mission to leave Earth orbit; the first to be captured by and escape from the gravitational field of another celestial body; and the first crewed voyage to return to planet Earth from another celestial body – Earth's Moon.

Here is a video that starts with the Earthrise photo and includes an Earthrise video and an Earthset video:



Awareness of the fragility of our Pale Blue Dot and the damage that we are doing to it has increased dramatically since the two photographs were taken.

Twenty years after the Pale Blue Dot photo was taken, Voyager 1 is nearing the edge of the Solar System, as this link demonstrates.

For an even more humbling view of our place in the Universe go to this post on the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.

For a post on the search for extrasolar planets try this post.

For a post on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence see this post.

Recently the Cassini probe has taken its own version of the Pale Blue Dot, illustrated below. The dot, which is the Earth, can be seen above the centre of the photograph, just outside the bright ring of Saturn.



Details of the photo can be found at this post.

The photograph of Earth and the Moon below was taken from Mars orbit.

Here is a post discussing the photograph.



I will finish this post with the first five minutes of Carl Sagen's classic series Cosmos which is now thirty years old. Although the series was first aired on television 14 years before the Pale Blue Dot photo, there is a prophetic image 46 seconds into the film.

Eight US Presidents and Oil Dependency

Jon Stewart does entertaining and wonderfully perceptive commentary.

There are plenty of blog posts and books explaining why we are unlikely to solve the many problems facing us, but this seven minute video pretty much explains it all.

Keep listening to the end as the last comment on Nixon is priceless.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
An Energy-Independent Future
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Are Humans Smarter then Yeast?

How we wrecked the ocean

Here is a disturbing TED talk by coral reef ecologist Jeremy Jackson. The introductory comment below is from Climate Shifts:

In this bracing talk, coral reef ecologist Jeremy Jackson lays out the shocking state of the ocean today: overfished, overheated, polluted, with indicators that things will get much worse. Astonishing photos and stats make the case.

Jeremy Jackson is the Ritter Professor of Oceanography and Director of the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Painting pictures of changing marine environments, particularly coral reefs and the Isthmus of Panama, Jackson’s research captures the extreme environmental decline of the oceans that has accelerated in the past 200 years.

Jackson’s current work focuses on the future of the world’s oceans, given overfishing, habitat destruction and ocean warming, which have fundamentally changed marine ecosystems and led to “the rise of slime.” Although Jackson’s work describes grim circumstances, even garnering him the nickname Dr. Doom, he believes that successful management and conservation strategies can renew the ocean’s health.

Biodiversity and human health

Dr Aaron Bersnstin spoke at the Lowy Wednesday lunch on the human health implications of biodiversity loss.

The talk can be downloaded here.

Bernstein made three major points:

1. The living world is crucially important to our health

2. We generally undervalue the importance living world to our health

3. We need to do a better job of valuing the natural world

We know little about life on Earth, we know perhaps one in five of all species alive today. The most rich and diverse group of organisms we cannon directly see - the microbial world. We are losing species today at a rate not seen in 65 million years. The asteroid impact 65 million years age meant that 50% of all species went extince at that time, it took several million years for those species to come back. Today we are losing species at the same rate. By the most conservative of estimates we expect to lose between 1/3 to 1/2 of all species by the end of this century. The two leading drivers of the species loss are habitat loss and climate change. We are clearly doing very little to reverse the trend of biodiversity loss.

Our health in every concievable way depends on the health of the living world.

How does our health depend on nature?

Drugs

Two thirds of new drugs come from natural sources, one third are synthesised in the baboratory. Of the 100 most preoscribed drugs in the world, 50 are derived from natural products.

One instructive example is the Pacific Yew tree. This tree had been seen as totally worthless and was felled and discarded by loggers in their desire to get at the pine trees in northern forests. Taxol, a very important anti-cancer drug was found in Pacific Yew tree leaves and bark in a study designed to find bioactive molecules. Taxol is very difficult to synthesise in the laboratory. We still use Yew tree needles to create Taxol in a proces that combines natural and




UN Report on Biodiversity

Extinction Drivers

Pollinator Declines

Ecosystem functions and climate change

Brooke on biodiversity and climate

Is the Earth past the tipping point?

I have written plenty of posts about the causes and danger of climate change. My climate change posts can be found at this link.

There are many other environmental threats that are largely caused by human activities.

The University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment has listed these environmental threats as follows: Biodiversity loss; Land use; Freshwater use; Nitrogen and phosphorus cycles; Stratospheric ozone; Ocean acidification; Climate change; Chemical Pollution; and Aerosol loading in the atmosphere.

The video below notes a large range of human caused environmental threats:



Below is the introduction to a Scientific American article written by scientists at the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment.

* Although climate change gets ample attention, species loss and nitrogen pollution exceed safe limits by greater degrees. Other environmental processes are also headed toward dangerous levels.
* Promptly switching to low-carbon energy sources, curtailing land clearing and revolutionizing agricultural practices are crucial to making human life on Earth more sustainable.

For nearly 10,000 years—since the dawn of civilization and the Holocene era—our world seemed unimaginably large. Vast frontiers of land and ocean offered infinite resources. Humans could pollute freely, and they could avoid any local repercussions simply by moving elsewhere. People built entire empires and economic systems on their ability to exploit what seemed to be inexhaustible riches, never realizing that the privilege would come to an end.

But thanks to advances in public health, the industrial revolution and later the green revolution, population has surged from about one billion in 1800 to nearly seven billion today. In the past 50 years alone, our numbers have more than doubled. Fueled by affluence, our use of resources has also reached staggering levels; in 50 years the global consumption of food and freshwater has more than tripled, and fossil-fuel use has risen fourfold. We now co-opt between one third and one half of all the photosynthesis on the planet.

The article can be found here.

Here is another video by the same scientific group:



The Stockholm Resiliance Centre is also working on the issue of Planetary Boundaries.

Here are two videos of Johan Rockström explaining their approach to Planetary Boundaries:





UPDATE: 5/9/2010

Rockström also gave a talk at TED which can be found here

Tha aim of the research is to define boundaries within which humanity has the flexibility to choose pathways for our future development and well-being. This is a first map of the planet's safe operating zones.

The scientists first identified the Earth System processes and potential biophysical thresholds, which, if crossed, could generate unacceptable environmental change for humanity. They then proposed the boundaries that should be respected in order to reduce the risk of crossing these thresholds.

Nine boundaries identified were climate change, stratospheric ozone, land use change, freshwater use, biological diversity, ocean acidification, nitrogen and phosphorus inputs to the biosphere and oceans, aerosol loading and chemical pollution.

The study suggests that three of these boundaries (climate change, biological diversity and nitrogen input to the biosphere) may already have been transgressed. In addition, it emphasizes that the boundaries are strongly connected — crossing one boundary may seriously threaten the ability to stay within safe levels of the others

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Source: Stockholm Resiliance Centre

Note that both groups identify the same nine boundaries.

The boundaries are described in more detail here.

The group's article in Nature can be found here.