Signs From Earth

Pictures Before and During: Red Sky Over Sydney

Residents of Sydney, Australia awoke today Sept. 23 to orange skies filled with dust. This image pair from jujuly25 at flickr also shows a clear-sky view from the same angle on a Sydney balcony a day ago. What a dusty difference a day makes.

The BBC reported that the dust storm is the result of years of drought in eastern parts of Australia. National Geographic published an in-depth story and pictures in April on the region's Murray-Darling basin and the long term drying from climate change in parts of Australia. These changes are increasingly seen as part of a larger pattern of shifts in rainfall in several regions.

At Earth Observatory, NASA has also posted a satellite image of the big dust storm, link here. 

Severe Drought Across African Sahel

The green line at lower right shows the level of rainfall measured this year at Masinga Dam in in Kenya, which is less than half of the long term average. Kenya has closed down hydropower generation at the dam for lack of water. Source: NASA Earth Observatory

With drought comes famine and in the Sahel region of Africa the lack of rainfall has been particularly severe this year. NASA Earth Observatory has posted charts and maps showing how scant Sahel rains this year are affecting vegetation growth (below). Those who depend on rain for growing crops are vulnerable to famine as crops fail from lack of rainfall.

The BBC has reported that Masinga Dam in Kenya has stopped generating electric power because too little water is available to turn the dam's generating turbines, and some power blackouts are resulting. The Daily Nation reports that Kenya's cities are running short of water.

National Security Equals Natural Security

 

The New Security Beat reports on a conference, new blog, and paper out this week from the Center for a New American Security, highlighting the intertwined relationship between national security and natural resources security.

Abstract of Paper, Natural Security: "In the 21st century, the security of nations will increasingly depend on the security of natural resources, or “natural security.”  This concept paper outlines a new program of study at the Center for a New American Security to look at emerging natural resources challenges in six key areas of consumption and consequences – energy, minerals, water, land, climate change, and biodiversity – as well as the ways in which these challenges are linked together. Any solution to the country’s energy insecurity is likely to involve water, non-fuel minerals, and land-use issues; climate change and biodiversity cut across all concerns, with broad effects on resource vulnerability. Without an integrated, national-level approach that links together natural security challenges, the United States runs the risk of trading one dependency for another and exacerbating the consequences."

PDF of CNAS Working Paper: Natural Security

Water Shortages Threaten Food Supply

This map shows changes in river streamflow worldwide between 1948 and 2004. Bluish colors show more runoff, reddish colors show less. (Graphic courtesy of Journal of Climate, modified by UCAR.)

Several articles published recently discuss the potential impact of declining water supplies on food production as temperatures rise and rainfall declines. Agriculture uses far more freshwater than any other human endeavor, typically from 70 to 90 percent of freshwater supply. 

Irrigation water typically comes from rivers and lakes, but dependence on groundwater aquifers is increasing as surface water declines. Water tables in several places -- the Ogallala Aquifer in the U.S.,the Saudi aquifer and the China North Plain -- are all declining as groundwater pumping tries to compensate for loss or overuse of surface water in rivers and lakes.

This tight link between water supply and food supply becomes something to ponder in light of research results showing decline in runoff from several major river systems (graphic above), and a report published in April in PNAS on projected shrinkage of Colorado River water deliveries from decreased precipitation, rising temperatures, and more evaporation.

Lake Mead in March 2008 behind Hoover Dam on the Colorado River. Levels then were down about 100 feet from full pool. Levels are now at 44-year lows. Photo: Neil McIntosh/flickr

Lester Brown discusses implications in the May issue of Scientific American. He describes the potential for food supply collapse caused by falling water tables, disappearing soils, and rising temperatures. Brown says the biggest threat for disruption comes from poor countries with fragile or non-existent infrastructure and governments.

These reports follow on a paper published in Science earlier this year detailing projected declines in food production across large areas of the sub-tropical and tropical regions because of heat waves and drought.

That paper by Battisti and Naylor projected that hot summers and declining crop yields will become common over a broad area where nearly half of the world's population lives. Most of the farmers in this region are subsistence farmers and incomes of less than $2 a day. They largely depend on rainfall for growing crops and do not have the capital, technology, or know-how to store water and irrigate.

References:

Moving Geoengineering From the Shadows

 Mount Pinatubo's 1991 eruption in the Phillippines injected sulfates into the atmosphere and cooled the earth. One geoengineering scheme would potentially replicate the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions. Photo: D. Harlow, USGS.

Would massive crop failures from heat waves and drought in the grain-growing regions of the American midwest be a sufficient reason to intentionally manipulate the atmosphere and cool the earth?

That was the opening question posed by Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution and Stanford during a recent panel discussion on geoengineering at the Aspen Environment Forum. (Disclosure: I helped organize the session and event.)

This question of "geoengineering" -- whether, when, and how to intentionally change earth's atmosphere -- is poised for more attention as the carbon pollution we unintentionally produce by burning coal and oil keeps rising. As atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rise, they trap more of the sun's reflected radiant energy near the earth and drive up land and ocean temperatures.

And as temperatures go up, droughts already seen in Australia's Murray-Darling basin, or heatwaves that hit Europe in 2003 likely will become the norm, according to scientists such as David Battisti and Rosamond Naylor. Their study published in SCIENCE this year examines the likelihood and potential impact of future heatwaves on food supply as carbon emissions and temperatures rise.

Jamais Cascio, a founder of worldchanging.org and now writing at Open the Future published in early 2009 a very readable and insightful short book on this subject, "Hacking the Earth: Understanding the Consequences of Geoengineering." Cascio lays out the choices and ethical implications of "geoengineering" the atmosphere to control planetary heating.

In theory, several options exist: shoot sulfate particles or millions of light-reflecting disks high into the atmosphere to block the sun; fertilize the oceans with iron to encourage carbon-absorbing phytoplankton blooms; plant millions of trees to absorb carbon; spray seawater into the sky to create heat-reflecting white clouds; and somehow capture and bury carbon already in the sky.

So what to do as our rising carbon emissions heat the planet? Is there any realistic large-scale way to cool earth, or stem the heating? Volcanic eruptions have, and a recent example is the Phillippines' Mount Pinatubo. In 1991 the volcano cooled the earth when its eruptions injected massive amounts of sulfates into the atmosphere, partially blocking the sun. 

Earthman's Jammin' Climate Song

If the relentless media drumbeat of climate doom has you feeling low, check out this rockin', sockin', "Climate Crisis Jam" presentation from the Earthman Project. 

Uplifting, engaging, empowering, fun, great for the kids, and to the point. Thanks to Joe Romm at Climate Progress for the heads up. 

The Earthman Project is part of the Captain Planet Foundation.

Rebuilding America From City to Farm

 

Map from The Atlantic showing "Top 30" city population across the United States in 2007. A related article contemplates which cities and regions will benefit or wither once, if, the country pulls out of this current economic tailspin.

What will America's inhabited landscape look like, where and how will people live and move about, which cities and surrounding regions will thrive or wither after the clouds clear from our housing and economic collapse? (If they clear?)

Some ponder this post-crisis reshaped landscape, while others like small farmers already invent an emerging future that differs from the recent past.

In an Atlantic article How the Crash Will Reshape America, Richard Florida assesses regions and cities that will likely "win or lose." He thinks that some "mega-regions" with educated and creative classes will prosper, but old-line manufacturing and sunbelt regions that built false prosperity on debt-laden housing "booms" will implode. Suburbia and its housing bubble spawn, exurbia, likely will shrink.

An accompanying interactive map The Shaping of America examines trends in patent, income, and population across America to give a geographical sense of our stocks of past and current intellectual and human capital. In a related Q&A Florida ponders whether the recent "stimulus" package will just throw money after places doomed to collapse instead of focusing on building forward-looking infrastructure like intracity passenger railways that can create regional strength. 

Earlier this month the U.S. Department of Agriculture released the 2007 census of agriculture, and within the data are harbingers that the "get big or get out" conventional wisdom espoused by Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz in the 1970s is being challenged by new farmers on the ground.

The number of farms is up, and the face of farming grows diverse as the number of women running farms has risen about 30 percent. For sure very big farms dominate in terms of overall production, and mid-size farms are being sucked up by the very big. But within we see a boom in very small farms, where people also hold down a day job. 

Map from NYT, Farm Living 

People are moving back to the land and reclaiming a connection to the food in their lives. Perhaps what goes around comes around, and as the bloom is off suburbia we will see a reshaping of the suburban landscape and continued growth in "subfarmia," more small-scale farms near cities that grow the food city people eat. 

In the interim perhaps it is time to grow your own garden, if you have not already started.

The Whole Earth is Now Online

The Whole Earth Catalog and its spawn CoEvolution Quarterly and Whole Earth Review were among my favorite reads and inspirations in the decades when they were in print.

Long gone from the dead tree publishing landscape, my fading collection of several Catalogs and an almost complete set of Co-Evolution Quarterly/Whole Earth Review still graces my shelves.

The Whole Earth Catalog is now online. 

Transformed from paper to electrons, this wonderous archive marks a period in our recent history when the contemporary environmental movement was beginning to take shape.

Carrying motto "Access to Tools," Whole Earth was handbook and manual for those seeking instructions and tools to create a better world and self-sufficient life with their own initative, passion, and energy.

Edited by Stewart Brand and a host of smart people like Kevin Kelly, Whole Earth is where I first saw the work of agrarian poet and essayist Wendell Berry and ecological agriculturalist Wes Jackson, who started The Land Institute in Kansas.

Whole Earth led me to Berry's influential book The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, and to Jackson's New Roots for Agriculture.

I discovered the work of Donella Meadows here, a MacArthur Fellow and one of the authors of the 1970's book The Limits to Growth.

Meadows' essay Places to Intervene in a System is significant, along with her sequel essay Dancing With Systems.

"Places" is mandatory guide to understanding any type of system: an organization, economy, living body, ecosystem, or a city, and explains why a small shift in one thing can create a big shift in most everything. She explains why most change is misguided, misapplied, and mistimed because of a failure to recognize "leverage points."

The Catalog's influence was documented in a 2007 book by Andrew Kirk, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism.

The Whole Earth family of publications was the internet before there was an internet, blogs before blogs. The arrival of a new edition or issue was an event, everything else was set aside until a full perusal of the copy that had just shown up in the mailbox.

--DD

Links:

Farm Bill: Taking the Long View

Wes Jackson of The Land Institute and Kentucky essayist Wendell Berry propose a different approach to farm bills that transcends the commodity, lobbyist, and subsidy driven approach we have now. 

They propose an approach that addresses the problems of soil loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the destruction of rural communities.

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New York Times Op-Ed: A 50-Year Farm Bill

"The extraordinary rainstorms last June caused catastrophic soil erosion in the grain lands of Iowa, where there were gullies 200 feet wide. But even worse damage is done over the long term under normal rainfall — by the little rills and sheets of erosion on incompletely covered or denuded cropland, and by various degradations resulting from industrial procedures and technologies alien to both agriculture and nature.

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"Soil that is used and abused in this way is as nonrenewable as (and far more valuable than) oil. Unlike oil, it has no technological substitute — and no powerful friends in the halls of government...

Links:

Edge: World Question Center 2009

The Edge Annual Question — 2009

WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING?

"What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?"

ZIRP: Zero Interest Rate Policy

So when interest rates drop to zero, where do we go from there? 

We'll pay you to take out a loan? 

Paul Krugman: "Seriously we are in very deep trouble."

This affects everything.

John Robb ponders: Three bad outcomes

"ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) has arrived in the US. The Federal Reserve and the US Treasury are now in desperate straights to stabilize the US economic system (and by extension, the global economic system). From a systems perspective, it's also a formal indication that the US and the global economy is now operating far from equilibrium and the Fed/Treasury is using every control input they have to return the system to its previous equilibrium.

"Unfortunately, from a systems standpoint, that's VERY unlikely to happen....

Also See: Roubini: Hang Onto Your Hats

Impoverished Girls' Sad Lot in Life

A poignant story in The Washington Post with an elegant set of pictures by Nikki Kahn on the the life of poverty led by girls in south Asia who never go to school or are forced to drop out. Girls like like Jyotsna Patadia, who had to leave school at age 10 to help her parents work in the salt pans while her brothers stayed in school.

'This Is the Destiny of Girls'

Across Much of South Asia, a Daughter's Life Is Circumscribed By Tradition and Poverty. But for Some, the Dreams Die Slower.

By Mary Jordan - Little Ran of Kutch, India. In the soft light of dawn, the cracked, dry seabed stretched endlessly in every difrection. Jyotsna Patadia was alone - she is often alone in her family's grass hut, a speck of life in the emltimess, cooking potatoes and onions over an open fire..

Our Daily Needs, Not Always Met

More than a billion of us don't have access to clean water, water that won't make us sick when we drink it. Even more appalling, about 40 percent of us have no access to toilets. 

When there are no toilets and pipes to take away our own daily waste and keep it separate from our drinking and washing water, then we get sick. Witness the cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe. (NYT: Cholera is Raging, Despite Denial by Mugabe.)  

Rose George is angry about this and has written a book: The Big Necessity - The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why it Matters 

New York Times Review: 15 Minutes of Fame for Human Waste and Its Never-Ending Assembly Line ..."Ms. George’s book covers nearly every aspect — political, social, biological, moral — of how the world thinks about and copes with human excreta. Much of what she finds, especially in developing countries, appalls her. “Four in 10 people,” she writes, “have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket, or box. Nothing. Instead, they defecate by train tracks and in forests. They do it in plastic bags and fling them through the air in narrow slum alleyways.” She charts the human toll: “Children suffer most. Diarrhea — nearly 90 percent of which is caused by fecally contaminated food or water — kills a child every 15 seconds...”

Rose George Website

Photographs of Sewage Systems Around the World

NYT Slideshow: Cholera Spreads in Zimbabwe

Electric Cars: "Whatever can be done, will be done."

Tom Friedman: New York Times: ..."Whatever can be done, will be done. The only question is will it be done by you or to you...." "

...What business model am I talking about? It is Shai Agassi’s electric car network company, called Better Place. Just last week, the company, based in Palo Alto, Calif., announced a partnership with the state of Hawaii to road test its business plan there after already inking similar deals with Israel, Australia, the San Francisco Bay area and, yes, Denmark..."

Hang On to Your Hats

Nouriel Roubini in The Financial Times:

"...In the next few months, the flow of macroeconomic and earnings news will be much worse than expected. The credit crunch will get worse, with de leveraging continuing as hedge funds and other leveraged players are forced to sell assets into illiquid and distressed markets, leading to further cascading falls in prices, other insolvent financial institutions going bust and a few emerging market economies entering a full-blown financial crisis.

The worst is not behind us: 2009 will be a painful year of a global recession, deflation and bankruptcies. Only very aggressive and co-ordinated policy actions will ensure the global economy recovers in 2010 rather than facing protracted stagnation and deflation."